Bridging Mindfulness and Design

Design literature regards mindfulness as a new competency that should be taught explicitly in design educational settings. This is associated to points of view that consider such skills relevant to ethics, uncertainty, and to evolving multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder co-creative applications of design thinking. This document is part of a developing PhD programme that aims to describe and apply it explicitly to pertinent design academic situations. Extensive literature in diverse fields of research describes mindfulness in a number of ways that are said to sometimes cause misunderstanding. This conceptual paper aims to bridge mindfulness and design, and posits the concept of openness as a shared attribute within theories complementary to both. Openness, understood as receptivity to dynamic multiple perspectives, is then associated to the systems experience of interconnectedness as an alternate focus to the discussion of moral awareness in design. Furthermore, interpersonal attributes of mindfulness, relevant to the relational aspects of design, will be discussed. This analysis seeks to serve as a conceptual base to a doctoral study that explores reflective ways to make mindfulness explicit in design education.