Changing the change

This article was co-written by Carla Cipolla and Ezio Manzini.

The first main step in the Changing the Change process is (successfully) over: the 18th of February was the deadline for submitting abstracts. We have received more than 300 of them. It seems to us a good result. Of course, the quality of the presented abstracts will be evaluated one by one by the International Review Committee. But something can be said just now: a new design research community is starting to exist around the topics of design research and of its possible contribution to the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society.

In fact, even considering that some of the presented abstracts where clearly outside the Changing the Change spirit or simply un-acceptable for technical reasons, profile is emerging of a wide group of design researchers who show a concrete interest (and often solid research activities) in the proposed direction. And this, as we said, is a first good results that in the next weeks will be better evaluated.

In these days the review process has been started, preparing the abstracts for the blind review process. The abstracts to be selected are expected to present design research results, clearly referring the on-going double transition towards a sustainable knowledge society.

What we can add here is that we know very well that both the terms “sustainable knowledge society” and “design research” can be interpreted, and are interpreted, in different ways. For this reason, we think that we have to be very open in the way we interpret them. In particular, for what regards the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society, we think that the papers can obviously refer to its environmental dimension but also to its social one. The important point for us is that they have to present real changes in the ways of thinking, being and doing. For what regards the kind of research where the presented results come from, we think that papers should be based on both formal and informal research activities (i.e. activities that can be carried out by individuals and groups for their personal interest, ouside the formal research structures). What for us is relevant here are the results: they have to be activities that really present an original, interesting and communicable improvement in design knowledge.

Finally, we think that the Changing the Change preparation process, as a whole, i.e. included the peer review evaluations and suggestions, should become an opportunity of discussion between peers and an improvement of the overall design research community activities in this field.

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.

Is it possible to organise an exhibition from design research results? Could this be useful in promoting the transition towards sustainability? In principle the answer should be yes: design research in general, and design research for sustainability, in particular, should generate visions and proposals in a highly communicative way. That is, it should produce high quality visual contents easily presentable in an exhibition. In practice, things are not exactly like that: for many years design research has been mostly oriented in other directions, i.e. towards theoretical and methodological studies. This kind of research is good and necessary, of course, but the result is that today, even though the number of design research conferences, journals and papers is growing, few proposals of new solutions and even fewer visions of possible futures are emerging as design research results. On the other hand, some designers who are developing visions and proposals very rarely consider themselves as researchers and their work as design research.

The Changing the Change initiative aims to promote and give higher visibility to the results of these formal and informal research projects. Therefore, in the process of selecting papers, a special consideration will be given to abstracts and papers presenting highly communicative visual contents.

However, this is only the first step. What we want to do is to organise, in parallel to the Conference, a design research exhibition, Changing the Change: visions and solutions, to make these visions and solutions more accessible, i.e. visible and understandable, to a wider public. For this reason, we are also calling for ad hoc visualisations to be used in the original exhibition we intend to organise. Similarly to the related papers, they may refer to different fields of application: from health, to food; from mobility to fashion; from caring for children to social services, but they must present a clear common denominator: they must show what it could be like to live and to produce in a more sustainable way.

For those who are familiar with traditional research conferences, it has to be underlined that the visualisations we are calling for here are not traditional scientific posters. Such posters are presentations on paper of the same contents as could otherwise have been presented orally at the conference. Here we are referring to visualisations that must be self-standing, highly communicative visions and proposals that must be accessible to the exhibition public at large. (for practical indications on how to submit a visualisation, see in the News and Notes section of this Newsletter and in the Changing the Change website).

The Changing the Change conference will take place in a maison de plaisance (house of pleasure). Of course one more chance to get and boost inspiring results from the three days meeting. In fact, the conference will be housed in an ancient castle, located inside a 19th-century park. It is an amazing historic site by the Po river, something maybe unusal for meetings, rich of history, dipped in the green and really close to the downtown of the city. In short, something really special.

The arrangement of the conference rooms and spaces inside and outside the building has been designed in order to minimise the impact of the conference and try to offset the carbon emissions produced by the meeting in Torino. The stiff architectural structure of the castle was mainly considered as an added value to the new concept of the spaces. At the ground floor there will be the “knowledge platform”, an area with four networked conference-rooms ideally and phisically connected with the wi-fi “design square”. This is a temporary light structure, in the middle of the courtyard, intended as a social space, made for receiving people and facilitating exchange of experiences, knowledge, information and talks …and agreeable catering too. On the first floor there will be spaces for welcoming, relax, reading, an exhibition of the design researches and internet points.

The Valentino Castle (Velentino is the name of a settlement in that region even back in Roman times), is a building based on the French pavillon-systeme model constructed and restructured in several phases since the second half of the 16th century. This residence, because of its excellence and role, in 17th century became the maison de plaisance of Princess Marie Christine of France who married Vittorio Amedeo I of Savoy. Of course during the conference you will have enough time to visit the Valentino Castle and the other royal residences in Torino and surroundings. They are all sites declared “Heritage of Humankind” by Unesco in 1997. The Valentino Castle is today home to two architecture and design faculties (Politecnico di Torino).

The Valentino castle is located in the homonymous park, an immense green area dotted with installations, paths for cycling and jogging, play areas and some considerable architectural traces left by Italian and International exhibitions held in 1884,1898, 1902 and 1911. You will not have to miss a visit to the botanical garden, a canoe trip on the Po river or a lunch in one of the prestigious rowing clubs by the river.

This newsletter intends to facilitate the Changing the Change conference preparation. It will anticipate programmes, abstracts and speakers profiles. And it will give information on different kinds of Conference-related news. But not only. It also intends to be the platform for a discussion that will start with short interventions of different authors and will continue on the newsletter-related blog (the CtC Blog). This discussion will , I hope, continue beyond the conference itself.

In particular, in the next months, from now to January 2008, the newsletter main goal is to trigger design researchers to submit paper proposals coherent with the conference aims. This is not an easy task: Changing the Change wants to be a research conference with a strong and ambitious political goal: to focus on the design research potentialities in the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society. And to present them to the same design community (to make it more confident in its possibilities) and to other social actors (to contribute to the social conversations on the future and/or to solve some specific problems).

This conference, in the organisers’ intentions, should show that these design research potentialities exist. That they can be found in all the design application fields (form products to communication, from interiors to services, from ITC to crafts, from medical devices to fashion) and in all the regions of the world (from the most mature industrial societies to the emerging ones). Finally, it wants to state that the possibility to play a positive role in the transition towards sustainability is not only an issue for those designers who, in the past years, have taken the first steps in this direction, but it is a challenge for every designer and every design researcher.

To do all that, Changing the Change has to receive papers presenting and discussing stimulating design research results: visions, proposals and tools developed by design researchers (or better: by interdisciplinary teams where designers played an important role), using specific design skills and presented in an highly communicative way (i.e. with good visualization materials in order to create a parallel exhibition: visions and proposals from design research world wide).

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.

Flexibility will be the slogan of the Torino World Design Capital events. Modern society requires flexible responses. Industrial enterprises and other social actors have to be capable of remodelling themselves and designing new products, services and systems to react to on-going change. But not only: they also have to do so to re-orient themselves towards a sustainable perspective. That is, as we say in this conference, to change the change.

Design must play a part in this innovation towards flexibility and sustainability, making the human factor central to the process, especially human values: ethical (sustainable development, care for the quality of the environment, energy reduction); social (relational systems); perceptive (cognitive sciences, not only ergonomics as ‘adaptation of work to man’); functional (functional and symbolic factors); cultural (areas such as cultural heritage). In fact, innovation does not lie in continual technological updating, but in the way in which we look at a particular problem. And here is where design can play a major role.

Facing the issue of flexibility and sustainability, designers are seen more and more as antennas capable of picking up on changes before they are apparent. Their success in doing this is confirmed by the appeal of design schools and the numerous professions they feed: a whole range of activities, not just in industrial production, but also in ergonomics, virtuality, ecology, advertising and the web.

This kind of flexibility, which students learn in schools, becomes a fundamental tool for managing projects in diverse work settings. And the crucial point here is their capacity to relate and calibrate connections between function, seduction, innovation and adaptation to the context, i.e. of the diverse dimensions that are essential to good design. This approach is not easy, since market pressure tends to push for one of these variables at the expense of others, thereby influencing the quality of the final project. Vice versa, this complex sphere of human relationships should be the basis of all design activities aiming at realising products, services and systems (considering them in all their life cycle, from production to the end of their life).

In conclusion, the need for renewed attention to the centrality of human values in research into innovation for flexibility and sustainability leads us to consider the strategic role that these values can play within the whole process and to investigate all the interdisciplinary aspects of human factors today. That is, in view of the challenge of changing the change.