An attractive challenge
Changing the Change is a working conference. It has a clear aim: to discuss the role of design in moving society toward making human life sustainable. We, however, do not know how to reach that aim. Finding ways to meet this goal is actually the purpose of the conference.
The organizers have resisted the notion of breaking interpreting the scope of the meeting beyond its heading. The conference itself will hopefully do that; the participants’ proposals and experience, their ideas and visions, will flesh out the territory of possibilities of responses to the challenges we face.
The conference is organized by designers and directed at designers. We believe that designers could play a role in changing the change, in re-directing the development of our world. Is it on the basis of our capacity to work systematically toward imagining and designing futures, our capacity to turn our ideas into images and then make them take form in the real world? Weren’t Jules Verne as an author and Flash Gordon as a character highly instrumental in shaping the future, just because they made it visible, and therefore desirable? How can sustainability become desirable? How can it enter the equation of quality, of what designers and clients place at the top of their lists?
Some initiatives are promising: some international corporations are looking at zero waste, while others have increased their allocation to research on alternative sources of energy, and on more efficient ways of generating energy. The City of New York is looking at turning all its taxicabs into hybrid cars. Too little too late? Not at all. Fifty years ago environmental conservation was totally absent from the big corporations’ agendas. Maybe these are the first steps toward sustainability. Including the notion in the agenda is useful, more than useful: important.
Other interesting things that involve more paradigmatic shifts are happening at the other end of the spectrum, like in the interior of Argentina, where I was last May. Cooperatives are developing interesting production and distribution systems, helping the locals, recovering cultural history, and using zero environmental impact technologies. All materials used are natural, renewable, and indigenous to the region.
Insights discover interstices that allow action in the most unimaginable places. We are looking for testimonies to this, we are looking for actual, factual experiences of implementing novel design approaches that find opportunities where everybody sees only challenges, and spaces, however narrow, that permit innovative action. The conference is looking for ideas to share. The scale is irrelevant. Large or small. The changes proposed could be paradigmatic or gradual. We need to explore and discuss models of intervention.
To sum up:
- How can a new direction be applied to the way things are, and change our culture into a sustainable one?
- How could design research contribute to this change?
- How could designers add the notion of sustainability to their list, affecting the way in which products, systems, and communications are designed?
- How could we put together a critical mass of successful case histories, that could serve as models to be adapted and followed?
- What other strategies could be useful to this end?
- What are the strategies that have been successfully implemented in different contexts to make products, systems, and services, more compatible with the idea of sustainability?
- What could be the role of communication design in this process?
We open this newsletter for contributions that could initiate the exploration of possibilities, and meet the challenge proposed by Changing the Change.
