Changing the change

This post has been written by Ezio Manzini and Jorge Frascara

Changing the Change ended two weeks ago. Concluding it, we felt enthusiastic: our emotional impression was the one of having participated in a very meaningful event. Now we are two weeks later. We have had the time to recover, rethink and digest the many stimuli … And we are still enthusiastic and convinced that Changing the Change has been a very meaningful event.

Given this enthusiasm a question arises immediately (one that has been asked by may friends): what will the next steps be? Frankly speaking, we don’t know yet: we need some other weeks of rethinking, recovering and discussing. Nevertheless, something, some “next steps”, already appear clearly:

1. A conference is a conference. Paraphrasing Magritte, with this statement we intend to say that we don’t have to ask to a conference more than what a conference can do. And a conference is a mainly a place of exchanges: we say something to others, we listen to others’ thoughts and experiences, and, if it is a good conference, we bring back home something useful in terms of new relationships and ideas. Given that, the only next steps that a conference has to generate are the ones that every participant will take on the basis of the new ideas and relationships that he/she will have brought home.
   In the Changing the Change case, will this happen? Of course we hope so. But it is not up to the organizer to take these steps. It is up to you. The blog in the conference site will remain active (at least for some months): let us know if some of these steps have been taken.
2. A conference is also a book: a collection of papers that permits to those who had not had the opportunity to participate, to have an idea of what had been said at the conference, and get the address of who said it. And so, again, through its proceedings, a good conference may generate ideas and relationships.
   In our case, the conference proceedings have already been published and you can find them on line in the Changing the Change site. Everybody interested can read them and, if very interested, download all the papers.
3. In principle, what has be said in the two previous points could be true for every conference, both the virtual and traditional ones. But traditional conferences have a different potential in terms of community building. In fact, they are places where you bring not only your ideas, but also your body. And this is what, in a successful conference, can make the difference. As everybody knows, physical interactions help the creation of a sense of community.
   Changing the Change was a conference specifically dedicated to designer-researchers who think that sustainability should be the meta-objective of every design research. This large group of researchers has been until now rather weak and invisible. A very positive Changing the Change next step could be the empirical observation that this group has evolved towards a community. If this will be true or not, if this next step will be taken, it is now too early to be said. In this case too, we hope to see something on the Changing the Change Blog.
4. A conference may generate a final document: a text that captures the “conference spirit”. Changing the Change did it too. It produced a document where themes that appeared to the conference participants to be relevant (in the perspective of sustainability) and demanding (in terms design knowledge) are indicated. This document, the Design Research Agenda – Draft 1, clearly could be considered as another “next step” of the conference: the possibility to use the emerging issues that the conference has produced as “attractors,” capable of orienting a multiplicity of on-going and brand new design research programs.
   
   Maybe this document could be seen as the most evident next step of Changing the Change. But its meaning has to be attentively considered and its possible practical implications discussed.

   The Design Research Agenda has been presented in its first version, the Draft 1, as an open and collaborative research program. An open program, because it can be continuously integrated with other ideas and themes. And a collaborative program, because it is based on a p2p approach: each research team can bring its “contents” and consolidate a research line. That is, if it accepts some general visions and simple rules, each research team can bring its programs and its results into the system, contributing to consolidating and, possibly, reorienting some larger streams of research. The aim is moving from a multiplicity of researches in different directions (and incapable of interacting and of creating a clear image of what, as a whole, they are doing) to the possibility of mutually interacting and generating the design knowledge needed to produce larger and stronger visions and proposals.

   As a matter of fact, this same document (the Design Research Agenda - Draft 1) has been generated in a p2p spirit: a series of formalized and informal discussions that, during the three days of the conference, progressively defined the proposed “emerging issues”. In conclusion, we could say that the first next step has been taken during the same conference , and it has produced this draft. Now, the next step is to see if this idea could work. Please, read the Design Research Agenda for Sustainablity text and let us know what you think.

   Thank you!

Design research is an activity that aims to produce knowledge useful to those who design: design knowledge that designer and non-designer (individuals, communities, institutions, companies) can use in their processes of designing and co-designing.

Design knowledge is a collection of different cognitive artifacts with different purposes: visions to stimulate and steer strategic discussion; proposals to integrate into the development of numerous specific projects; tools to help understand the state of things and implement design ideas; reflections on the sense of what we are doing or could do. Moving form contents to form, the design knowledge we are talking about must be explicit, discussable, transferrable and accumulable: knowledge that can be clearly expressed (by whoever produces it), discussed (by many interested interlocutors), applied (by other designers) and become the starting point for producing further knowledge (by other researchers).

Research that produces conceptual and operational tools for designing and/or to help understand the nature of what we are designing (research for and on design) is usually carried out adopting methodologies, and adapting them to specific requirements, proper to disciplines endowed with a consolidated research tradition. Vice versa, research that produces visions and proposals usually adopts original methodologies, using tools and skills proper to designer culture and practice (research through design). In this case, clearly the research modes are, and must be, very different from those of traditional scientific research: research through design necessarily brings into play a level of subjectivity that would be inadmissible in scientific tradition. At the same time, this is not typical “artistic research”, totally guided by the subjective dimension. Design is a discipline that combines creativity and subjectivity with a dose of reflection and arguments on its own choices. The same is obviously true for research through design, with the added factor in this case that the knowledge produced cannot be implicit and integrated in the design but, as we said, it must be explicit, discussable, transferable and accumulable.
Exactly what the acceptable level of subjectivity is in design through research is an open question. We have discussed this and we can continue to do so, but I do not believe that a precise definition of this limit is of such great interest. I believe that what is really important is to discuss the results we have achieved case by case and the contribution they can bring to solving the problems we have to face.

The phrase, “Changing the Change,” which the organizers have chosen for the title of this conference on design research, has meaning on different levels. In its largest sense, it connotes a change in the way we do research. I suspect that this was the fundamental reason for its choice.

We need a new collective process for introducing a different model of design research. This we might call the level of purpose. What should we do? Another meaning of “Changing the Change” relates to strategy. How do we as a community of researchers organize ourselves in order to achieve this new purpose. We have to change the way we organize our research activities in order to achieve new ends. And third, “Changing the Change” refers to new products or outcomes that might be developed through research. If we join together the three terms: purpose, strategy, and product, we have an agenda that can guide us as researchers in a powerful new direction.

Many years ago, I studied anthropology with John Collier, Jr. John spent much of his life in two ethnic communities. He grew up with his family in the American Indian communities of New Mexico and Arizona. Later, he worked as an anthropologist in the fishing communities of Nova Scotia, where he helped to develop the research method of visual anthropology. John’s work was oriented toward creating positive change. He used to say that the problem of social change involves a simple paradox. We can’t change one aspect of an organization or society until we change everything, and we can never change everything — we’ve got to start with one thing.

This is true, yet it is not beyond solution. We can and must start somewhere by finding appropriate points for vital intervention. We create consensus through action, and we do so in part by making theory action.

Theory has at least two meanings for design research. One is a scientific theory of what things are and how things work. The other is an ethical or philosophical theory of desired states: a design outcome. A design research agenda for sustainability requires both.

I think that the Conference should produce, as final document, a design research agenda for sustainability: a short text where emerging themes are focalised and promising directions of research are indicated.

I know that saying this involves some risks: conference final documents are quite common and often they are nothing more than rhetorical declarations of good intentions. This is true. But I think that we have to take this risk: the meeting of a worldwide community of design researchers is, in my view, both a cultural and a political event. And an event like this should leave a trace (in the community’s culture) and give directions (about future steps to be taken). Not only: in a previous design conference (the Cumulus Design Conference in Kyoto of March 28, a declaration was signed – see Yrio Sotamaa in the Newsletter 5). I think that this Declaration, having been signed by a large number of design schools, is not only highly symbolic (having being signed in Kyoto) but also potentially relevant. Now, of course, something has to happen to implement it. The design research agenda for sustainability that I am proposing, in my view, should be considered as one of Kyoto Declaration possible implementations: a document that will have to give research directions in order to develop the necessary design knowledge to make it real. That is, for us, to Change the Change.

In this perspective, some organisational choices involving the Conference and its preparation have been taken to facilitate a process that, in a bottom-up and peer-to-peer spirit, should be able to generate shared ideas. In practical terms, during the first two and half days of the conference, listening to the presented papers, participating to the initial Round Table, talking in the bar or whatever else conference-related conversations take place, the participants will progressively focalise on the themes that, in the Changing the Change perspective, will appear as the most relevant and demanding in terms of design knowledge. In the Conference last session these themes will be discussed in different meetings and, finally, in the general assembly.

In conclusion, in parallel to the selected paper presentations, that is, the “academic stream” (that of course will be the core of the Conference), there will be also a “political stream”: an open space aimed at giving participants more possibilities to interact, to bring their own ideas and to collaborate on the preparation of a final document. This political stream will be a bottom-up process of theme definition oriented to build, in a participatory way, the design research agenda for sustainability” that will be the Conference final output and (hopefully) the first step of some post-conference actions.

In order to concretely move in this direction, this discussion should start now and should regard both the anticipation of some emerging themes and the proposal on how to facilitate, during the Conference, their definition process. These Newsletters and the blog on the CtC Website are places where this discussion could easily happen.

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.