Design for Resilience
Design Futures/Fiction
Designing products, systems, and environments with the capacity to adapt and thrive in the face of uncertainty and changing conditions. Design for resilience is essential in anticipating and preparing for unforeseen challenges.
In practice
Throughout the design process, design for resilience focuses on creating products, systems, and environments that can adapt and recover from unforeseen challenges, disruptions, or crises. Designers incorporate features and strategies that enhance resilience, considering factors such as flexibility, redundancy, and adaptability to ensure that designs can withstand and recover from unexpected events, contributing to sustainability and longevity in the face of changing conditions.
Questions
What is Design for Resilience?
Design for resilience is designing a system to keep functioning, in some reduced form, when parts of it fail or conditions change unexpectedly.
Why do you use Design for Resilience?
Everything fails eventually. The question a resilient design answers is what happens next.
How do you use/apply Design for Resilience?
Identify the failure modes, remove single points of failure where the cost justifies it, and design graceful degradation rather than a binary between working and dead.
When do you use Design for Resilience?
In infrastructure, safety-critical and service design, and increasingly in ordinary software.
Who uses Design for Resilience?
Systems and service designers, with engineering.
