Changing the change

This article was co-written by Ezio Manzini and Claudio Germak.

The issues Changing the Change deals with, regard several aspects of peoples’ lives: from food, to health, from residence to mobility, from work to tourism. General visions (the way these activities could be rearranged in terms of sustainability) and specific solutions (the way specific problems could be solved) will be presented for each of them.

This core of visions and proposals provides the material for discussing the meaning of design research. But not only this. It gives an immediate and constructive contribution to the way to sustainability and to what can be done to direct accelerate it. This is the main aim of the Conference, not just thought for the researchers’ community that is currently working on these topics, but also for enterprises and social actors who promote, or should do so, this transition.

In facts, nowadays everybody is discussing about the great and fast changes of our time. Many (at last!) talk about the need to move towards sustainable lifestyles and manufacture processes. But few elaborates visions and proposals about possible practices, starting from today. This is the concrete and constructive stage where design research can provide and effective contribution, by developing a sharable, increasing design knowledge which is focused on possible solutions. A kind of knowledge which can support specific design activities involving many different actors, as it should be every sustainable solution.

Unfortunately, not everybody agrees with the last statement. As it has been said before, enterprises, associations and public bodies are starting to realise that the transition to sustainability concerns the future, but it must be based on effective current actions as well. On the other hand, it is not yet so clear for them what design research could offer in this field. We think we shall raise this issue and focus many actors’ attention on it. And this is what Changing the Change is meant to do.

Visualisation is an important part of design activities helping to anticipate the future developments of a project and stimulate discussion between the different players involved. So, within design research too, and especially design research for sustainability, visualisations should play an important role in stimulating social conversation among a large number of different actors, on possible alternatives to the mainstream model.
In the Sustainable Everyday project below, visualisations in the form of short films have been made showing different “life bites” from possible new and more sustainable lifestyles. Each focuses on one particular character and shows how they organise themselves in everyday life, be it through a workshop offering equipment to maintain and repair products, a service to customise different alternative mobility solutions or a training initiative to foster energy saving and local production.

The movies are short clips based on real characters interacting against a patchwork background picturing the mix of resources available in each place. The video writing is deliberately rough and imperfect: it belongs to the category of quick ‘Video sketches’ promptly made during the reflection stage. They are realistic enough visualisations to enable users to project themselves into the scene, but at the same time have the unfinished status of a draft to allow for interpretation and adaptation of the proposition.
Eighteen such Video sketches have been developed to produce a wider range of visions of possible alternative sustainable lifestyles. As shown in the matrix below the visions can be read from different points of view.

Vertically, it starts from main everyday life functions (How to do the shopping? How to maintain objects? How to move around in the city? etc…) to introduce six multi-services centres (the Food Atelier, the handyman Shop, the Mobility Agency, etc…) each one offering a range of more sustainable solutions around a domestic function.

Horizontally, it shows three different types of more sustainable lifestyles and related strategic design approaches to develop sustainable solutions (a Quick mode based on standard, efficient solutions; a Slow mode, enhancing personal involvement in the search of quality; a Co-op mode based on collaboration and sharing).

Finally, across the matrix, three different characters act in the different scenes and demonstrate how they fit together in coherent lifestyles.
Taking this last approach one step further, the eighteen movies have been used in different interactive exhibitions around the world, where visitors were able to take the role of one of the three actors in the movies and compose their own lifestyle, both satisfying their own needs and improving their average sustainability. The visualisations were used as ‘lifestyle building blocks’, showing everyday solutions, to facilitate dialogue about possible, desirable and more sustainable futures with a wider public. The visualisation of scenes of everyday life enabled people from different backgrounds and cultures to picture a possible implementation of these solutions, in their own day to day. They were able to grasp complex strategies for sustainability by seeing them from the user point of view, discuss advantages and inconveniences, and finally project themselves into a vision.

In Japan, academic, industrial, and government sectors have been working together to reduce environmental burdens since the Kyoto Protocol was enacted in 1997. After a decade of commitment, an environmental efficiency of industrial products excelled. This advancement includes home electric and electronic appliances, automobiles, and architectures, expanding its effort to a wide variety of products.

These eco-products are gaining their momentum and doing great on the market. It is true that we have seen the advancement. But the fact is, though the Kyoto Protocol had promised Japan to reduce the emission of CO2 by 6% from the 1990 figure by 2010, the figure has rather increased 8%. An effective energy consumption by the expansion of eco-products is not fast enough.

This fact proves that in order to make a society more sustainable, a sole reliance on technology is not enough. What we need to focus now is to change our mass consumption-based life structure and social behavior. Even the core of design needs to shift from eco-design, where an environmental efficiency is emphasized, to sustainable design, where its design alters a value of our society and culture.

In order to achieve this goal, a workshop, the Destination 2007-2025 was held in Shirakawago, a small village, registered as the World Cultural Heritage. The venue attracted over 100 visitors from 8 different countries and during 3 days of intense workshops, it gathered numerous amounts of ideas.

Most of the idea is oriented to create low-carbon society without expanding consumptions. It is to learn from the “pre-westernized” Japanese society. Hopefully, the seeds of idea will take an initiative to create a new sustainable social model in Asia, where the region is expanding faster than ever. From westernized modernization to oriental modernization – Can Asian countries change the course of their direction to the way it is supposed to be?

These resources are to be analyzed and edited, and to be presented as a proposal at the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit and at the Changing the Change Conference I Torino, in July 2008.

We all contribute to global warming producing carbon dioxide (CO2), methane gas and nitrous dioxide. In particular, as we well know, the emissions of CO2 are caused by almost everything we do, such as cooking, using our laptop, driving to work, flying to a symposium.

Starting just from the occasion given by this conference we have the opportunity to fight global warming by neutralizing that part of CO2 emissions coming from the event that will take to Torino over 300 researchers, most of them from foreign countries.

In fact, we believe that facing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of this temporary event will be the first minimum objective of the Changing the Change conference, hoping to give a positive signal for a concrete containment of emissions.

Of course it has to be part of a multilevel strategy to tackle climate change proactively and it will regard many matters related to the location of the conference: from the field of the energy consumption to the one of the energy efficiency of the buildings. Anyway the organizers are working at a domestic project in order to offset our emissions through the carbon capacity capture of trees. In collaboration with AzzeroCO2, an energy service company founded in 2004 by Legambiente, Ambiente Italia and Kyoto Club they developed a project to naturally absorbe CO2 in a specific area, chosen among different national and international offsetting projects submitted by the company.

The site is a river park (Parco del Po e dell’Orba) located in the North-West of Italy close to the city of Turin where 475 local species of trees will be planted in order to counterbalance 371 tons of carbon needed for all the activities of the conference.

This is part of a larger forestry project launched by AzzeroCo2 in collaboration with the Federation of the Italian national and regional parks and with Kyoto Club. More than 10 ha will be planted in this area generating more than 500,000 t of CO2 emissions reductions in the next years. This will be monitored and verified by a certification company.