Changing the change

A long time ago someone has said “you shall love your neighbor as yourself”. It is a challenging principle in a time where happiness often is achieved by ignoring your neighbor rights and needs. However, searching for sustainable ways of living requires from us the adoption of a principle far more challenging: “you shall love people of future generations that you don´t even know that will exist and that are not even necessarily related to you”. If the previous principle has already proved to be difficult to implement, if not impossible in many regions of the globe, what could be said about this late enlarged principle?

Hence, I understand that the most fundamental (radical) improvement that could lead the all society towards sustainability lies on the human spirit. Using the words of our colleague Geetha Narayanan (Newsletter 07): that is what makes each of us humans, that which endures beyond matter.

Yes, induction of market forces can drive sustainability forward faster. Yes, speeding up changes in consumption patterns can be achieved through education. And, yes, we should work to include sustainability on the main agenda of every world leader. However, it is the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated are determinants on the future we are shaping today and that is beyond conventional design.

Some people could say that improvements on the human spirit are outside of the scope of design. Contrary to this opinion I believe that Design as well as any other profession can make a direct contribution to changes or improvements in the society values and aspirations and that does not mean transforming design into a religion. Improving the transparency on the ethics of production of a given product or implementing processes that enable consumer´s co-responsibility for a product life cycle are examples of how designers can operate as channels for positive change.

In South America design clearly is far from delivering the changes that it potentially could provide or induce. The good news is that emergent changes on the direction of sustainability are expanding in numbers, involving since large corporations until self-employed workers operating in their own home.
On many of these cases the change is so positive that theme for design could be more “supporting-the-change” or “disseminating-the-change” than actually change the change. At the same time, the continent currently presents large economical and social changes that in many instances replicate environmental or social mistakes that have already being made by developed nations in the past. Here is an opportunity to change the change.

Até a Conferência!

Society has been served well by the pursuit of deep knowledge (the cornerstone of any self respecting academic institution) but more and more the nature of today’s “big picture” problems resides at the intersection of what we know. What is – for example - healthcare? It’s not medicine, law, buildings, therapies, doctors, processes, ethics, or business but rather the convergence of all of them in a complex system. We need to first see the nature of these system problems to define the path towards more complete solutions. Not reductively, not as fragments, but in the complex, integrated and synthetic ways that drive them. These are the cornerstones of design, yet its not design as defined by our professions, rather design as defines by our needs.

But what does this call for “system design” have to do with Changing the Change? A lot when examined from two simple perspectives.

First, it captures many of the threads that seek to rethink design found within the conference Newsletter. Here alone there is much evidence for a call for design to sustain better solutions: Mugendi M’Rithaa places the question of Design in context of Africa’s future. The call, by Lou Yongqi, to “pause” and think strategically and systemically is apt not only in China, but throughout our geographies; Stefano Marzano places design in the context of economic systems. All seek more effective design, but discuss them within a broader context of systems.

Secondly, one could argue that the hallmark of a discipline is in the research that it pursues: as such the question of what kind of research is central to academia. At Harvard, President Drew Faust has spoken at great lengths about the challenge to work more effectively across disciplines. In this context design has a unique leadership opportunity across the university, but it’s the kind of opportunity that will only come if we are able see beyond the professions we serve to the value of our discipline.

To meet this opportunity, academia is going to have to challenge itself to define the right frameworks, incentivizing students and faculty to work in ways that may inherently contradict the established structures of success. The institutional dilemma is that with success comes rigidity towards change. The future will be in the hands of those whose past success won’t create an insurmountable barrier towards rethinking how they operate in this design driven age.

The industrial age is over, really is over, it once made sense, but it doesn’t make sense now. We just have to look around us. Many of the positive creations of the industrial era are now less and less relevant and no longer fit for purpose: our schools and education system, our hospitals and health system, our production and consumption system and our very lifestyles. Where does this leave Design? Is Design, also primarily an industrial construct, less and less fit for purpose?

There is a risk that in the industrial sunset design becomes a parody of itself or becomes increasingly commoditized, as it is taken ever more for granted by its industrial masters. (Roberto Verganti, Newsletter 07). There are risks, but if the industrial era is over, there are also great opportunities. This is a time when we have to re-invent just about everything and such times urgently need the specific thinking, skills and capabilities of design. But society needs a different design, not industrial but social, a design that is part of the solution and not part of the problem. If this is so, then it interesting to ask the questions: what is holding us back and what is pushing us forwards?

So what holds us back? In part the impression that the 21st century still feels very much like the 20th. We still live by an economic ideology that believes growth is based on ever more productivity and consumption and so we still buy lots and we still consume lots. At the same time we are all children of the 20th century. We have 20th century mindsets and 20th century training and perhaps this is why, even if the industrial age has had its day, we keep on looking backwards and all too often doing what we have always done? And anyway real change isn’t easy. There is no rule book, no instructions of use for the next age. What is easier is to pull the future back to the past. This means that instead of systemic structural change, change that facilitates the new socio-techno-economic conditions to flourish and take us to a new era of prosperity and wellbeing, we co-opt the future back to the past. We colonize the future driven by habit, interests and fear.

So what pushes us forward? In short, the desire to grow, to explore, to create and need. In a change of age we face many social challenges whereby society, both in the developed and developing world, needs to invent or re-invent just about everything for an ecological age, including health, education, mobility, etc. Such a re-invention and re-design of systems, however, is about social innovation rather than market innovation. It places the emphasis away from the consumer and his/her needs towards the society and its needs. It gives attention less to the individual and more to the collective, less to a need and more to the activity and the context, , less to the product and more to an ecosystem of information, service and experience. If this is what society needs and where society is going then companies will surely follow, as the big industrial corporations also have to re-invent themselves. And this is the necessity and an opportunity for Design to free itself from becoming a commodity to becoming a strategic differentiator. Who better to help design new social systems than Design? If Design does this, and as the social industries supersede the industrial industries, then Design could certainly be to the 21st century what Marketing was to the 20th.
What does this mean for Design? A large part of the answer must lie in the increasingly strategic role of Design Research. Design research is the instrument at the service of Design, exploring and building Design’s role and contribution in the field of social innovation and re-design of critical social areas. Addressing social innovation as a set of design challenges is the means. What are the challenges? What new competencies must we grow in social research, social design, systems design, context design, and service design? Which approaches, methods and tools do we need to develop? How do we facilitate the participatory networks and co-creative practices? How do we imagine new value for a new age?

Such questions and such research are deeply meaningful in relation to the concept of Changing the Change. Ezio Manzini in the first newsletter emphasized that Changing the Change wants to be a research conference with a strong and ambitious political focus on the design research potentialities in the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society. Design on its own cannot change the change but, as I am sure the Change the Change event will show us, it is beginning to gain more self awareness, to challenge its past and to ask different questions about its discipline and its purpose. For as we journey from one way of being and doing to another we have to ask ourselves individually and collectively why we do things, what we do, how we do them and who does them.

Any economy that intends to maintain its sustainability in time needs to explore, on a continuous base, scenarios and hypotheses for constant improvements and advance.
All stakeholders of an economic system need to devote attention and resources to innovate and create the conditions for their sustainable profitability while creating recurrent improvement of the quality of life.

This challenge is common to all type of economies in all geographical location. Micro and macro economies, all together concur to form an interdependent global economic system always in search of balance and sustainability.

In this environment “innovation” is an imperative, and all the stakeholders in the economic system are in search and in demand of innovation.

The challenge is the one to qualify innovation and rank it on a model that indicate it social nature and its social economic impact. This new model is relevant to redefine long term strategies and frame short term investment roadmaps.

To support the strategic process of testing options that optimize the balance and the coherent fit between short term innovative solutions and long term vision and direction it is relevant to develop and adopt new methods of research for innovation that fast, effective and economic.

Design research methods represents to day one of the new answers to this need. Influential Business magazines such as Fortune, Time, Business Week, Fast Company devote more attention to it disseminating the experiences and promoting its adoption.
Philips Design has pioneered in this field during the last two decades and has demonstrated , with the support of business consulting companies such as Mc Kinsey and Kaiser, how Design Research provide speed and focused effectiveness.

Design has it foundation in a techno-humanistic culture and performs its creativity interfacing connecting and integrating society, end user, technology and economy.
Autonomous fields of research such as societal foresight, Business spaces, Industry development and technology development and innovation are taken therefore in an accelerated integration by Design Research maximizing time and investments effectiveness. But even more important than this, Design Research builds on the core competence of the Design Culture providing tangible options for solutions and innovation that maximize end user, societal and customer centric effectiveness and are easier to be validated because of their articulated, visual and understandable representation.