Making a Design Culture

About

Knowledge of Design

Knowledge of Design is a futures-led think tank that works across science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics.

KoD publishes original research, papers, and strategic frameworks that investigate emerging questions, identify gaps, and establish new reference points across the STEAM fields.

This includes an annual edition led by senior Saudi-based voices, global workshops and online sessions with leading international practitioners and institutions, educational programming, cultural events, social gatherings, collaborative projects, partnerships, and public research activity.

Abstract

A design culture gains depth when people can direct ideas, investigate possibilities, translate knowledge into material form, engage the public, and build expertise over time.

This paper presents a curated critical dialogue between Brandie Janow, Harry Dobbs, and Paulo Pimentel, convened in May 2026 in preparation for Knowledge of Design’s first international session. The discussion examines agency, provenance, experimentation, making, public value, and the pace of cultural and industrial development.

A thematic review identified five connected conditions: agency, original practice, experimentation, material capacity, and public life over time.

Grounded in Saudi Arabia’s current period of cultural and industrial development, the dialogue considers questions that extend beyond one geography: how emerging fields establish their own standards, how international expertise can deepen local authorship, and how technical confidence develops through material experience over time.

A design culture begins when people can develop a practice, investigate questions, test approaches, create things, and apply what they learn to environments, products, services, and experiences.

Education, experimentation, production, critique, public engagement, and material understanding give this activity continuity. They strengthen judgment, skill, and confidence. They enable practitioners to build on each other’s efforts and establish a shared vocabulary for quality.

Knowledge of Design was created around this wider understanding of design. It connects disciplines, creates room for inquiry, and offers people material for their own practice.

“I want people to leave like I actually learned something. I want to ask these people questions. I want to take what I learned today and implement it into my firm or what I’m doing.”
Brandie Janow

Periods of rapid transformation can open new routes through institutions, commissions, facilities, technology and international relationships. Their value becomes clear through the people who use, question, adapt, and extend them over time.

Saudi Arabia is experiencing an active period of cultural and industrial development across design, heritage, entertainment, media, architecture, technology, and related fields. This moment raises an important question:

What enables a design culture to develop through original practice, material capacity, public relevance, and ongoing growth?

The dialogue addresses four connected areas: who determines the direction, how original practice takes root, why making matters, and how public life and time establish shared standards.

Who Defines the Direction?

Direction is established before a formal brief. It begins with who recognizes an issue, how a question is framed, whose experience informs priorities, and who can determine what counts as quality.

During periods of rapid development, many forms of expertise enter the same space. International practitioners, technical specialists, researchers, producers, educators, institutions, and local professionals can expand the range of tools, methods, and perspectives available for a project. The lasting value of these encounters lies in their ability to strengthen local authority: the ability to establish priorities, assess outcomes, challenge assumptions, and lead future efforts.

“Agency is sort of part of provenance and the ownership of something.”
Harry Dobbs

In this sense, provenance concerns more than visual reference. It appears in the decisions through which a project is conceived, framed, tested and developed. Language, material, form, and image may all reflect a place. Greater depth comes from the people who identified the issue, developed the brief, guided key choices, and remained connected to the result.

Collaboration has its fullest value when those involved leave better equipped to apply, question, adapt, and develop what they have learned.

“But are we exchanging knowledge?”
Brandie Janow

Knowledge develops through observation, trust, shared practice, and continued engagement. It becomes part of a field when it informs future decisions with confidence.

Questions of design gain rigor when scientific, technical, material, artistic, and social knowledge enters early enough to alter the project’s direction. Agency is the ability to participate in framing a question and to maintain influence as the work moves into form.

As more people become informed authors, design becomes part of a place’s capacity to imagine, decide, build, and learn.

Original Practice

Original practice begins with attention to current conditions: how people observe their surroundings, interpret experiences, use materials, engage with technology, and establish standards of quality.

Familiar symbols can evoke memory, recognition, and meaning. A field narrows when a small set of motifs becomes the principal route to recognition across objects, garments, campaigns, interiors, and public settings. This repetition can quickly establish a surface identity while reducing the range of forms, methods, and points of view available to practitioners.

“Everything’s starting to look the same for me. And this is very dangerous for a budding design industry.”
Brandie Janow

Her concern is about range. Heritage, local references, and cultural memories offer rich material for contemporary practices. The larger question is how practitioners move from recognition to original contribution.

This process is present in everyday activity as much as in major projects. Packaging, food brands, fashion, digital communication, furniture, film, games, public environments, and new forms of production reveal how people respond to audiences, language, technology, place, and changing habits.

“The way that content creators, Saudi content creators start to communicate, it’s really interesting. It’s really creative.”
Paulo Pimentel

For that energy to develop further, practitioners need opportunities for research, critique, technical skill, material exploration, and testing beyond a first recognizable idea.

Provenance becomes active through a point of view. It is present in outcomes that emerge from a particular combination of people, place, questions, technology, and time.

Experimentation, Testing, and Critique

Experimentation gives people permission to investigate an idea before its outcome is predetermined. It allows assumptions to be tested through prototypes, material trials, simulations, critique, and repeated revision.

In emerging fields, experimentation is especially important because established answers may have been inherited from different markets, institutions, climates, or cultural settings. Testing provides evidence about what can be adapted, what should be rejected, and what requires an original response.

Critique strengthens this process. It gives practitioners a language for examining decisions before those decisions become fixed in a finished object, service, environment, or system. Experimentation therefore connects agency with material capacity: people can direct questions, test possible responses, and develop the technical judgment needed to decide what should continue.

Making and Material Capacity

Making brings ideas into contact with evidence. Material, process, scale, use, maintenance, and cost all influence a proposal once it moves beyond an image or a presentation. A prototype can expose technical limitations. A material can introduce opportunities that were not visible at the outset. Production provides practitioners with direct contact with the realities that determine whether an outcome can function, endure, and be repeated.

Material capacity includes fabrication spaces, specialist suppliers, technical training, digital tools, small-batch production, and relationships with people who build, assemble, test, repair, and distribute what is produced. These resources connect the imagination with technical judgment.

For emerging industries, smaller production systems can widen the route between prototypes and markets. Digital fabrication, additive manufacturing, and workshop-scale methods make it possible to test and refine ideas before larger investments are required.

“There’s now a middle ground that is scalable.”
Harry Dobbs

This middle ground provides people with the opportunity to learn through direct practice. It allows a designer to move from concept to prototype, from prototype to a small production run, and then toward a more informed decision about the scale, value, and future development.

Material capacity strengthens original practice because practitioners who understand a process can identify possibilities that are unavailable through reference alone. Technical knowledge and creative judgment meet in the details of making.

Closer relationships among those who imagine, research, design, engineer, fabricate, and use what is produced support better questions, stronger judgment, and a deeper relationship between design and the world it enters.

Time, Public Life, and Shared Standards

A design culture accumulates in public. It develops through repeated contact between practitioners, educators, producers, institutions, clients, critics, and audiences. These encounters establish reference points for quality, usefulness, originality and care.

Public life is where people encounter design, develop preferences, and decide what they value. This occurs through objects, spaces, exhibitions, retail, media, workshops, publications, digital formats, and details that affect daily experience.

Recognition has a role. Depth grows when people can distinguish among novelty, quality, care, and relevance. Public participation provides practitioners with feedback on what is used, understood, returned to, questioned, and supported.

Rapid transformation creates momentum. Time allows technical fluency, public confidence, critical vocabulary, production networks, professional standards, and institutional memory to develop through use, evaluation, revision, and repeated effort.

Shared standards develop when a field can evaluate its own output. It establishes reference points for quality and sufficient confidence to question familiar answers. It can identify where work needs development and which new directions merit attention.

Professional development and public participation belong to the same system. Practitioners require opportunities to refine their approaches. Audiences need ways to encounter, understand, and respond to what they create. The relationship between them strengthens both.

A design culture becomes durable when each generation learns from earlier efforts, adds its own contribution, and leaves future practitioners with a stronger foundation.

A Framework for Making a Design Culture

Our research for this paper identifies five connected conditions for developing a design culture.

Agency

Agency is the ability to frame questions, exercise judgment, and influence direction.

Original Practice

Original Practice grows through inquiry, observation, and the confidence to create beyond familiar references.

Experimentation

Experimentation gives practitioners room to test possibilities, learn through process, and refine their judgment.

Material Capacity

Material Capacity connects ideas with the tools, skills, and production knowledge required to bring them into use.

Public Life Over Time

Public Life Over Time gives design the opportunity to be encountered, evaluated, supported, and revised across generations.

These conditions are interdependent. Agency gains force through expertise. Experimentation requires time, critique, materials, and technical support. Material capacity grows through repeated making. Public life creates feedback and a broader language for judgment.

For Knowledge of Design, this framework can guide future research, programming, workshops, publications, and partnerships. It offers a way to examine how fields build confidence, develop original practice, and establish the material and public foundations required for continued growth.

Making a design culture is an ongoing public undertaking. It asks people to build knowledge, examine possibilities, make with care, and establish standards through which future contributions can be recognized and developed.

The Five Conditions of a Design Culture

Agency
Defining questions and influencing direction

Original Practice
Inquiry, observation, and a distinct point of view

Experimentation
Testing, critique, and refinement

Material Capacity
Tools, skills, production knowledge, and use

Public Life Over Time
Encounter, evaluation, shared standards, and continued development

AGENCY gains force through expertise · ORIGINAL PRACTICE grows through inquiry and observation · EXPERIMENTATION requires critique and technical support · MATERIAL CAPACITY grows through repeated making · PUBLIC LIFE OVER TIME creates feedback for judgment

The conditions are interdependent. Each strengthens the others.

Contributors

Brandie Janow ↗

Founder, Knowledge of Design · Lead Researcher and Author

Founder of Knowledge of Design and author of this paper. Her practice focuses on strategy, cultural analysis, futures, and the development of design and cultural fields in Saudi Arabia. She examines how sectors form, how knowledge moves across disciplines, and how institutional decisions affect continuity.

Harry Dobbs ↗

Contributor to the dialogue

Architect, urban designer, and founder of Harry Dobbs Design, a London-based creative office focused on place, provenance, and destination. His practice spans urban design, architecture, and product design across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America.

Paulo Pimentel ↗

Contributor to the dialogue

Architect and experience design specialist with more than 25 years of international experience across architecture, exhibitions, museums, visitor attractions, immersive environments, and experience design.

Research Approach

The conversation was recorded, transcribed, reviewed, and thematically coded to identify recurring concepts, tensions, and relationships. This review informed the five-part framework presented in this paper: agency, original practice, experimentation, material capacity, and public life over time. The framework is a dialogue-led proposition designed to guide further inquiry.

This publication uses a curated dialogue format, retaining the contributors’ perspectives within a broader research argument. All quotations are direct excerpts from the recorded conversation.

Selected References

Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide (SAGE, 2022).
Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.
Julier, Guy. The Culture of Design. 3rd ed. SAGE, 2013.
Manzini, Ezio. Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. Translated by Rachel Coad. MIT Press, 2015.