The business of design is in a state of flux. The roles, the tasks and the personae of designers are changing.

No longer the technical expert, the heroic aesthete or the inspired individual of our earlier modern past, the contemporary designer draws upon dispersed sources of creativity and innovation. Collaboration, today, is key. For design practitioners, a central paradox of our times is the increasing specialization, on the one hand, but on the other, the need for more broad-ranging and holistic integration of design tasks, working between and across design disciplines. Design is becoming an ever-more social, indeed sociable, process

Designers need to able to ‘do’ a multimodal professional design discourse. They must speak and write their way through complex collaborations with co-designers and interactions with users. They need to be able to ‘do’ visualization as they explore design alternatives through mental images and picture their visions into reality. They need to be able to represent spatial realities, prefiguring the three dimensional through the two dimensional and turning plans into tactile artifacts, manipulable objects, architectural spaces and navigable landscapes. The new, digital media provide newly flexible and accessible tools for multimodal and synaesthetic thinking.