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!

The Zebra Question is a poem by Shel Silverstein in which he poses the conundrum of order and causality embedded in our contemporary view or perspective of life. Is a zebra black with white stripes he asks or is it white with black stripes? and so on!

Perhaps we might ask, in a similar vein, if it is design and design thinking that will allow us to build a sustainable and fair world beyond 2020, or will it be that dominant visions of the world of 2020 will determine the scope, nature and field of what design is today in the year 2008?

Or perhaps we need to move beyond such simplistic and reductionist conundrums to some essential and core realizations that must underpin substantive dialogue on change.

A beginning might be to realize and accept, as David Orr and others put it, that all education, including design education must pivot around the human condition, the human prospect and the human spirit.

An addition to this would be the realization that the human condition, prospect and spirit is linked closely to our home –our mother ship, our Gaia, our earth. The earth defines the material, the matter that forms the fundamental core of our existence. It plays a big role in defining both the human condition and the human prospect.

A third realization could be centered around the understanding that contemporary discourses on matter such as the ones on sustainability, slowness or on change omit a vital part of what makes each of us human- our spirit-that which endures beyond matter and is what defines each of us as living beings on this planet- described by Carl Sagan as “the pale blue dot”

All of us, who are engaged in being critical about our societies and our futures, must learn to pose serious and challenging conundrums around these and other similar critical realizations. Using the power of the conundrum to generate genuine, equitable and critical dialogues, ones that do not focus on the generation of a series of reassuring lies but which deals with “impossible things” and ‘inconvenient truths” would result in powerful conversations on change. It will play a vital and informative role, at conferences such as Changing the Change in generating both the skeptical and the critical view of design enabled futures.

The Changing the Change conference offers an opportunity to question dominant paradigms in design, including contemporary paradigms such as sustainability thinking and green design. There is a real need today for designers, educators and thinkers to question the idea of development, not in isolation but together with notions of equity, of social and environmental justice and in doing this consider carefully the needs of both the people and the planet.

To me that would imply 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.