This coming Sunday, October 23th, Premsela and Volume magazine explore the relationship between trust, faith and design in a special edition of the Trust Design debates. The debate is the first in a series of three Design Breakfasts that Premsela organises in the Designhuis in Eindhoven during the Dutch Design Week. The debate also marks the launch of the third edition of Trust Design that Premsela and Volume publish this year.
Trust Design
Premsela's Tim Vermeulen will speak about trust and faith in realtion to design with with researcher and writer Scott Burnham, also project manager of the Trust Design research project; designer Mathieu Frossard, student at the Design Academy Eindhoven's IM Masters; Corien Pompe, Volvo’s chief colour and material designer; Matthijs van Dijk, professor of industrial design at the TU Delft and the author of Vision in Design.
In a recent survey by the research firm Edelman, 83 per cent of consumers ranked trust as the number-one factor they require of companies they do business with or whose products and services they use. In a similar survey in 2006, trust did not even appear in the top 10.
When the global financial crisis hit in 2009, trust catapulted from a personal feeling during a handshake to a defining ingredient of daily life and business. Addressing the Davos gathering that year, the then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged, “This is a crisis, not just of credit. It’s a crisis of trust.” Echoing his sentiment later in the United States, President Barack Obama declared in his State of the Union address, “We have to recognise that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now. We face a deficit of trust.”
This deficit has left people with a palpable desire for a greater sense of confidence in the services they use, the food they eat and the products they buy. In response, design must remember its noble history of meeting society’s needs. Its reaction to the new demand for trust should do just that.
Restoring confidence
Our relationship with design and its functionality used to be linear: did object x perform function y? If the answer was yes, we were content. But both our expectations of design and its impact have changed. When the iPod appeared, it was celebrated as a music player with a revolutionary design, but more than that, it changed how we purchased, navigated and interacted with audio entertainment. The iPhone and iPad have altered our relationship with communication, information and media even more significantly. In addition, the recent focus on sustainability has extended the definition of functionality from an object’s immediate role in our lives to include the impact it will have on the environment at the end of its life.
As the impact of design reaches further into new areas of our lives and environment, people look to design to operate with greater responsibility – to provide them with a greater sense of confidence.
Trust Design
The Trust Design research project was created to explore the relationship between design and trust, and how the discipline can respond to the current crisis of confidence. It is important that we perform a more complex, layered examination of the new expectations and the new functionality required of design. Vital questions must be answered: What are the ingredients of trust? Can you design trust? And conversely, can you trust design?
By drawing on knowledge gained from a diverse range of individuals and practices and conducting experiments, research and workshops, we aim to create a comprehensive, holistic response to some of the challenges facing design.
Trust Design also aims to be a catalyst for new experimentation, thought and production dedicated to connecting design and trust. We are therefore delighted to be working with the following partners:
Picnic Festival 2011
We’re pleased to announce our partnership with the Picnic Festival 2011. Each year, the three-day Picnic event blurs the lines between creativity, science, technology and business to explore new solutions in the spirit of co-creation. This year’s theme, Urban Futures, put the focus on sustainability, infrastructure and society as well as design and media. Picnic took place from 14 to 16 September at the NDSM Wharf in Amsterdam. 
This year, Trust Design is working with Volume on four special supplementary issues exploring the role of trust in design as it relates to various themes. Scott Burnham will act as guest editor. The first special issue looked at aspects of trust and design related to ageing, and the second focuses on the “Internet of things”.
Design Academy Eindhoven
A central goal of Trust Design is to engage with and function as a catalyst for new design research and creation. Design Academy Eindhoven is acting as our partner in the creation of new designs. First- and second-year master’s students are working on a trust-based approach to design, investigating new approaches to communication systems, means of production, publications, products and public space design.
VU University Amsterdam
VU University is assisting Trust Design by lending us a research intern. Esther Waardenburg of the Design Cultures master's programme will conduct research on existing projects, websites and materials exploring the relationship between design and trust.
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