Changing the change

This article was co-written by Ezio Manzini and Jorge Frascara.

The Changing the Change Conference’s main aim is to present and discuss the design research contribution to the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society. That is, its capability to generate visions, proposals and tools to re-orient the emerging knowledge society towards more socially and environmentally sustainable directions.

This aim is based on some concepts that have to be clarified and discussed.

Knowledge society: it is the result of a large transformation that is taking place at a global scale. Its meaning overlaps the ones of service, information and network society: concepts that represent different expressions of the same on-going complex phenomenon.
In the Changing the Change conference we assume that the evolution towards the knowledge society, even if presents some positive characters, as it appears today, is not bringing us to a sustainable direction. It has to be well understood, but, at the same time it has to be re-orientated. In other words, the transition towards a knowledge society is the “big on-going change” that has to be changed.

Sustainability: in recent time the use of words “sustainability” (as a noun) and “sustainable” (as an adjective) has become quite common. This popularity can be seen as the positive expression of a growing concern for the environment. But, at the same time, it presents the risk of being mis-used. That is, used in superficial ways (little environmental improvements proposed as steps to sustainability) or even as “green washing” strategies (presenting some green initiatives to cover deeply un-sustainable ways of doing).
In the Changing the Change conference we use the term “sustainability” only in relation to deep and systemic changes in the ways of thinking, living and producing. In other words, systemic changes, in our view, are the pre-condition to generate visions or proposals that can be presented as “sustainable”.

Visions, proposals, tools: they summarise design’s main results. Visions are images of how a whole context could be like if new conditions where given (what if a new idea of wellbeing, of development, of production, of eating were disseminated?). Proposals are original combinations of products, services and communications capable to face specific issues (such as housing, mobility, health, food,…) in an original way. Tools are conceptual and practical instruments that permit the enhancing of these visions and proposals.
In the Changing the Change conference we assume that the social learning process that should bring us towards a sustainable society has to be fed by these visions and proposals. And supported by these design tools.

Design research: it is a research activity developed with design tools, skills and sensitivity; where “research” stands for the production of knowledge that can be shared and accumulated to become the starting point for new researches and specific projects; and where the expression “developed with design tools, skills and sensitivity“ stands for a research activity developed by designers who explore complex design issues and generate visions and solutions.
In the Changing the Change conference we assume that the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society is such a large and new challenge that individual design activities are only a good first step, but cannot be enough. They are a good first step because individuals can move with agility, explore possibilities and develop models, but design for sustainability calls for a community of designers working and debating with other actors to build a new design knowledge and a new set of visions and proposals.

If you are a designer and have done work in this direction, Changing the Change is the opportunity for you to share your experience and work toward the creation of the much needed change toward a sustainable society.

As Saki Mafundikwa aptly stated, “Africa is not poor, it just doesn’t have a lot of money!” The principal question that perspectives from the continent at the Change the Change conference need to address is: “If Africa does not have a lot of money, what then does it have?” Additionally, and more specifically, “How can design help accelerate and perpetuate enabling conditions that will help secure a truly sustainable future for all its denizens?”…

Africa has a predominantly youthful demographic with a population that is expected to rise to a billion within the next eight years. Failing infrastructure, material deprivation, epidemics, civil war, and pervasive political dysfunctionalism have failed to dampen the continent’s sense of optimism. This historic and diverse continent is incredibly wealthy in natural resources, and richer still in human capital- if one looks beyond popular projections coloured by cynicism and skepticism, a picture begins to emerge- one of a vibrant, engaging and resilient people making the most of their common lot. The robust anthropocentric philosophy of ubuntu (whereby an individual’s humanity is reaffirmed by their community) is increasingly being invoked. Ubuntu finds practical expression in the continental zeitgeist of the African Renaissance to rally the people of Africa in proactive response to the challenges facing the continent, as well as through the agency of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

Across the continent, examplars of home-grown/grassroots sustainability are emerging. In eastern Africa, for example, the Jua Kali informal manufacturing sector offers gainful employment opportunities that far supersede those of the formal economic sector. Indeed this phenomenon is integral in Kenya’s vision of becoming an industrialized country by the year 2020! Entrepreneurship via small and micro-enterprises is constantly growing covering a vast number of business sectors with promising potential role for self-sustaining distributed economies. Similarly, a highly empowering sustainable rural transportation project was facilitated by the SABS Design Institute in South Africa. Other initiatives include an eco-village project by the Sustainability Institute in South Africa. Proactive engagement with international partners has created practical models for local designers to emulate. These include the innovative communication design project in Uganda by Designers Without Borders, as well as cost-effective eco-design projects in Kenya and Namibia by the Design for Development Society.

Africa needs to tell the rest of the world its own success stories- and this forum could well be the catalyst for Africa to respond to Ezio Manzini’s challenge to ‘leap-frog’ into an advanced multi-local society wherein the continent’s spirit of resilience informs humanity’s collective vision of sustainability…

Here are four kinds of design. They form a hierarchy of contribution, with
Design Research at the highest level.

Let’s start at the bottom with General Design Awareness. Do you remember
what happened when desktop publishing emerged in the 1980s? All those
notices on pin boards at the office about the picnics and social events had
been written by hand before that, and then suddenly they were printed from
laser printers and composed on WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
screens. Everyone was suddenly a graphic designer, choosing fonts and
composing layouts. At first the tendency was to use lots of different fonts on
the same page, and to completely fill the surface with type. Over time these
amateur designers became more aware of the skills of graphic design; they
started to choose fewer and more appropriate fonts and leave some white
space around the text. The tools that democratized printing had the effect of
increasing the general design awareness of many people who had never thought
about fonts and layout before, and as a result they started to respect the
talents and skills of the professional graphic designer. A similar effect can be
expected as mass customization allows people without college level design
education to make design decisions about products.

Professional designers operate at a more sophisticated level, having mastered
Specialist Design Skills. They are expert at deciding how to do it, how to create
a elegant solution to the problem posed by the constraints, but they expect
the context that they operate in to be decided by someone else, probably
the boss or the client. This expectation wastes the value of design thinking,
and reduces the stature of the contribution made by designers. Why not
apply interdisciplinary design thinking to deciding what to do in the first place?
That change is overdue! Particularly with the challenging problems posed
by the complexity of design contexts in the world of digital technology and
global connectivity, the application of teams can help to set the brief for
development, to harness design thinking in order to decide what to do.

By developing interdisciplinary design thinking we can encompass the process
of planning and management, but we are still woefully immature when it
comes to knowing how to know. The whole area of Design Research is infantile
in scope. An important opportunity in the context of Changing the Change will
be to move design research forward faster and more effectively, so the we
discover more about how to know and how to communicate the results of that
knowledge.

The largest furniture industry in Japan has inaugurated, with Enzo Mari, a program called “Un milione di alberi di Sugi – One million Sugi trees”, a type of wood that grows widely and easily in Japan, used to re-propose furniture of the Japanese rural tradition. Alessi promotes Twergi series, small objects for the kitchen and table, manufactured by communities of craftsmen from some of the Alpine valleys in Piedmont and distributed with success worldwide. These examples, chosen among so many, stress the importance of the bond between industry and craftsmanship, tradition and local materials.

In this direction, in our Region we have attempted to work not with individual craftsmen but with a number of communities. We have established networks for knowledge and promotion, provided technological and business assistance to the enterprises. Rather than closed projects, because we know how much craftsmen value their independence, we provided “guidelines”, open to freedom of interpretation of the craft community in respect of certain shared rules. We have defined sustainable protocols for production, and outlined scenarios of consumption that configure products not exclusively for connoisseurs or nostalgics, but for everyone is able to appreciate quality. The territory, in this sense, becomes the first client of the typical craft product: the bars and restaurants, the offices of the institutional communities, the shops selling typical products like foods, are filled with new products, becoming the site of the promotion.
For this reason, “Artigianato Comunità Design” is the subtitle of the exhibition entitled MANUfatto that, if you come to Turin for the conference, we can visit together in the splendid framework of a historic but out-of-the-way location that, like typical craftsmanship, has the same problems of visibility, communication and survival.

Welcome!