Changing the change

At the Institute without Boundaries, changing the change has meant tackling local problems that have global repercussions, while also speculating on global issues to devise frameworks within which local agents can contribute solutions to those issues. Walking on both sides of the line, from systems theory to generating examples and embodiments of design innovation, the faculty and students fluidly interact with experts to exchange knowledge, build ideas, test prototypes, and formulate systems. Over the past number of years, this process of experimentation has generated a number of insights on change that are worth consideration, especially in the context of a world where global forces connect and impact communities in the most unpredictable ways. Here are some of our insights:

Sometimes, the world is good as it is and we don’t have to change it as designers. Sometimes we need to stop trying to change the world and let it be.

Other times, the rapid pace of change demands that designers mitigate change, acclimatizing people so it becomes bearable, channeling it into a direction that is evidently beneficial all.

When inexorable change becomes dehumanizing, degrading, alienating or brings about conditions of injustice or inequity, designers can work with civil society to postulate alternatives, to dream alternative realities that society can adopt. Designers can change the change as they control the embodiments of change.

When rapid or massive change is needed to avert crisis or imminent extinction, the redesign and reinvention required may be too critical to leave to designers alone. In these instances, design needs to interact with science, sociology, economy, and politics to generate possibilities that ensure survival and open avenues of opportunity.

Working with students from diverse backgrounds in arts, design, business, science, economics, sociology and informatics in an environment without professional boundaries, where students, faculty, and visiting experts embrace challenges together has made clear to me the complex readjustments required of design methodology. This past year, we have been working on design solutions for sustainable housing for Guanacaste, a region in Costa Rica. How could we help from such a great distance? How could our inter-professional team generate relevant solutions? To address these challenges, we experimented widely, conducting extensive research, showing up in person to charrette, collaborating with other academic institutions, finding on-the-ground NGOs to stimulate, roping in experts local, national, and international, and even working with elementary school children. We learned that their problems were ours.

Experimentation, while not always successful, taught us how varied methods generate different design results. Knowing which approach may generate a particular result can empower communities, designers, and clients and if not to change their change, at least to guide it positively.

Well known for their iconoclastic power, they were recognized as major driver of linguistic change in the arts and in architecture.
They also had the stronger, although less direct, role of anticipating and catalyzing major socio-cultural and political change.
In design and architecture, it was their ability to “give shape” to change that allowed them to have a revolutionary role comparable, if not larger, to the one of “true” politicians.

At the end of the last century, the independent exploration of designers grew inside large companies, and took a different format, combining the scenarios of a future life with a potential vision for the whole company and its strategy. In this case, the culture that designers try to change is both the external one, the user culture, and the internal one, the one of the company.

Today, the role of Design Research, or Strategic Design, is giving to designers in a company the responsibility to represent the transformation of the world “Out There” and bringing it inside the company. Among the many ‘sensors’ that a company tries to develop to get in touch with its users, Strategic Design is the one that has the most visionary role: rather than asking users what they may like in the future, Strategic Design needs to imagine the future before taking it in front of users. Designers in this case need to be involved in a sort of mutual ‘seduction’ with their audience: designers need to be ‘seduced’ by the desire for change that people is about to express, but they also need at the same time to create visions that are so exciting, tangible and plausible that can catalyze this desire for change and spin it into demand for new products and services.
To be so concrete and credible, designers cannot just rely on ideas or concepts. They need to develop a new aesthetic, an innovative language that can at a time render anything past obsolete and uninteresting, and open new iconic references for the future.
In this sense, visionary designers today wouldn’t be much different from the ‘constructive iconoclasts’ of the original avant-gardes. They just work in an environment much more integrated in their company.
But there is another dimension that makes this job today way more complex that in the past: the eco-system dimension. Eco-systematic approaches are not only limited to environmental eco-systems: it seems that any major innovation today needs to face the complexity of large systems that no designer, or even no single company, can control. Any innovation in digital communication, for example, such as social networking or mobile communication, touches multiple points of contact with the user and multiple networked systems that support them. In the same way, an innovation in manufacturing, like a new material or manufacturing cycle, touches many globally sparse components and suppliers.
Under these circumstances, any design vision needs to be supported by a certain degree of feasibility that spans across the whole ecosystem, which translates in the opportunity to steer the whole ecosystem toward a better balance.
And this is what makes visionary design today so exciting and important: never before the culture of design has been so strategically necessary (for companies), so socially relevant (for the users), so impactful (for entire ecosystems) and so communicative (of new aesthetics).
It has also probably never been as difficult before, but this challenge is what makes it even more interesting.

Change is the one constant; the human race has throughout history been trying to understand change, contribute to it or change the direction of change. The design profession has of course been a major contributor to the change of products, places and systems, and design education has been predominantly concerned with providing students of design with the skills to analyze, design and develop new (changed) outcomes, concentrating on the change rather than reflecting on the action. This is not to say there has not been any concern or reflection on the role of the designer in a changing world.

Designs leadership in social issues and social responsibility, like business’s response, has mirrored the great activist movements. Indeed, it has been a recurring theme, with designers addressing a range of quality-of-life issues. In the 1960s, designers began to actively consider design’s wider implications for society. Several approaches emerged, including green design, consumerism, responsible design, ethical consuming, ecodesign, sustainability and feminist design. Accessibility and inclusively have also received a great deal of design interest and activity.

It seems now that the scale and complexity of change and its impact globally requires a different kind of action and reflection, locally and globally. The science of climate change has led us to consider the future with urgency, to try to imagine what ‘change’, or ‘no change’ will bring to the earth and to future generations. In order to do this we need to draw on all our knowledge, science and engineering, social science, arts and humanities, and here lies a role for design research.

Design thinking and design processes appropriate knowledge from anywhere in an endeavour to create solutions and alternative approaches to problems. Designing often has a catalytic effect on a situation or a group. Designers feel comfortable working in teams. Designers often offer alternative insights into the future, designers can help us imagine. It is this facility that offers alternative approaches to research.

Design researchers are able to contribute to research teams addressing multitude of problems. In the UK the research funding councils have been funding some research through what is called ‘Ideas Factories’. These Ideas Factories bring together academics (around 25); from across the disciplinary spread to addresses an issue alongside interested stakeholders. I have been involved with three; Mobile Health, Countering Terrorism, and Nutrition and Aging. They work together through a week to define current problems and offer research projects to address them, at the end of the week the best projects are funded. In each of these Ideas Factories there has been three or four design academics, and in each case they have been critical in the development of the research thinking and method.

There are now opportunities for designers to be in the centre of the problem or the issue and to lead the research. Much research being funded in the UK and in the EU is for collaborative multidisciplinary teams. My last project ‘Vivacity2020, Urban Sustainability for the 24 hour city’ included 32 researchers, scientist, social scientists and designers and 42 companies. The design aspect was very important we were able through graphics to model, complex issues and to illustrate the relationship between the science and the experience of city living and the design decisions that led to the built environment.

This later aspect illustrates yet another design competency which is crucial to academic research, that of completion and communication. Whilst most designers are trained to be divergent in their thinking at the onset of a problem, they need convergent thinking and verbal and visual communication skills to explain and communicate clearly the ideas they have. This is essential if we are to transfer the knowledge we gain through research to a wider community. Often designers can create visualizations of complex models, systems or prototypes that enable society to understand and apply them in practice.

At Lancaster University we have created ImginationatLancaster, an Imagination Lab comprised, in the main, of designers who work across the university with all faculty to address research problems in areas such as healthcare, education, open innovation, and sustainability and wellbeing. We will use our lab not only to collaborate across the university but with other academics worldwide and with other interested institutions and enterprises. We are not alone many other universities are capitalising on the strengths of design thinking in research.

Changing the Change offers the opportunity to consider the way in which we can continue to drive research through design in new directions.

Cumulus, the International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media representing 124 first class institutions from all continents, is making a commitment to building sustainable, human centered, creative societies. The Design Declaration will be signed on March 28th in the same venue where the Kyoto Treaty was signed. This event, we hope, will be an important step towards a new role of design in the transition towards a sustainable society. The Changing the Change design research conference, in July, in Torino, will be a second one. Here below, the declaration that will be singed in Kyoto is reported.

PROPOSING NEW VALUES AND NEW WAYS OF THINKING

All the people of the world now live in global and interdependent systems for living. We continue to enhance the quality of our lives by creating environments, products and services utilizing design. Design is a means of creating social, cultural, industrial and economic values by merging humanities, science, technology and the arts. It is a human-centered process of innovation that contributes to our development by proposing new values, new ways of thinking, of living, and adapting to change.

AN ERA OF HUMAN CENTERED DEVELOPMENT

A paradigm shift from technology driven development to human centered development is under way. The focus is shifting from materialistic and visible values to those, which are mental, intellectual and, possibly, less material. An era of “cultural productivity” has commenced, where the importance attributed to modes of life, values and symbols may be greater than that attributed to physical products. Design thinking stands steadfastly at the centre of this continuum. Simultaneously, this development highlights the importance of cultural traditions and the need to extend and revitalize them.

THE IMPERATIVE FOR DESIGNERS TO ASSUME NEW ROLES

Global development, and an awareness of the growth of related ecological and social problems are posing new demands and offering new opportunities for design, design education and design research. Design is challenged to redefine itself and designers must assume new roles and commit themselves to developing solutions leading to a sustainable future.

SEEKING COLLABORATION IN FORWARDING THE IDEALS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The members of Cumulus, representing a global community of design educators and researchers, undertake the initiative, outlined in “THE KYOTO DESIGN DECLARATION”, to commit themselves to the ideals of sustainable development. Furthermore, the members of Cumulus, have agreed to seek collaboration with educational and cultural institutions, companies, governments and government agencies, design and other professional associations and NGOs to promote the ideals of, and share their knowledge about, sustainable development.

THE POWER TO MAKE FUNDAMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS TO OUR WORLD

Human-centered design thinking, when rooted in universal and sustainable principles, has the power to fundamentally improve our world. It can deliver economic, ecological, social and cultural benefits to all people, improve our quality of life, and create optimism about the future and individual and shared happiness.

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.