Changing the change

I agree with Victor Margolin that the word innovation has lost its power and its purpose. Innovation has become the latest buzz word and hype and has become increasingly meaningless and empty. It is not innovation in itself, but what we innovate, how we innovate and who innovates that is the issue, after all Hitler innovated! When, however, social is used in connection with innovation then, as Ezio comments, things change. I believe the amount to which things change depends on how narrowly or broadly we define the concept. A strict definition of social innovation refers to new ideas (products, services, models) developed to fulfil unmet social needs. But then in this changing world what is a social need? Is a better relationship between what is produced and what is consumed a social need? Is more community a social need? Is a richer relationship with the biosphere a social need? Like innovation, sustainability has lost much of its more transformative potential given that it is also a buzzed and hyped word. Also, as we know, it is too often commonly understood in its more limited definition of the environment.

But let’s forget semantics for a moment and actually look at what needs doing. Most of us would agree that society needs to re-address and re-invent much of its industrial legacy, including new patterns of production and consumption, new social ‘industries’ such as health, care, education, new individual and collective lifestyles, new relationships with nature and new organizational and cultural models. Furthermore it needs to do this through a greater individual and collective empowerment and responsibility. Is this about social innovation, is it about sustainability, does it matter?

Rather what is important is not what separates or distinguishes them (always inherent in labels and definitions) but what unites them, and what they have in common. I believe that what unites all three concepts is firstly the vision and purpose to improve the quality of life and to be ‘accountable for positive social results’ (Victor Margolin). In this purpose they also share the same territory, namely the need to re-address and re-invent much of our industrial legacy and to shift the emphasis from the economic and the market to the social and people, which leads me to the subject of social design. In all honesty, I did not know, until reading Victor’s pieces, the accepted definition of social design, related to a more social work and social workers reference. Rather for me design was suffering from the same fate as innovation and that just as innovation has lost meaning so has design.

Yet what to use? Design on its own is too broad and can be too easily co-opted to the old, and Industrial Design reflects the past not the future. By putting social before design things change, things open up. Social Design offers vistas of social change and transformation and emphasizes its relevancy and meaningfulness for the 21st century. Put simply a broader meaning to social innovation/sustainability equals and is complimented by the broader meaning of social design. A design for the next era.

I believe that the theme of the conference Round Table on Design, Social Innovation and Sustainability is increasingly associated in the collective imaginary with a more structural and systemic change and transformation. To limit them or to spend too much time on semantics and definitions will only play to the old game and will reduce their transformative qualities. At a time when everything is negotiable and everything can be changed I believe it is counter productive to narrow down definitions too precisely. I am looking forward to understand the synergies, where and how they fit together and most importantly the role of design and the implications for design in terms of design research, new design competencies and capabilites and new design frontiers.

I would like to add a few words to the discussion about what terms might be most appropriate to express the social orientation that we would like Changing the Change to address. I have been using the term “social design” quite a lot and am more or less satisfied with it. In English, it has a reference to the profession of social work and suggests design with an explicit social agenda. It also relates to the term “social action,” which in the United States suggests social concern. On the other hand, it is evident that from a semantic view, all design is social, a point that should not be overlooked.

I have problems with the term “innovation,” which has now been adopted as a corporate buzzword and some folks are even interested in substituting it for the word “design.” “Innovation” is also related to the industrialized cultures and with its corporate connotations may not be appropriate for discussing design in developing country situations or design for a small scale. As many know, there is a movement which argues that bringing capitalism and entrepreneurship to poor people is the best way to lift them out of poverty. I don’t disagree with that possibility but am against making it the principal model of development as some wish to do. In a paper on social design that I wrote with my wife, we distinguished the terms “market design” and “social design,” saying that social design could be design for the means.

We also wrote about design for special needs such as old age, disabled people, and really poor people. but that is too limited in the sense we are considering Changing the Change. I think we do need to indicate that the kind of design that will be discussed at the Changing the Change conference is design directed specifically at improving the quality of life. It is accountable to social results and not simply to successful market exchange. We should understand these results to be environmental, economic, and cultural.
I am still satisfied with the term “social design” which is growing in use and interest. If we choose another term, it should have the same connotation of “improving social welfare”.

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.

We can say that a social innovation is an implementation of new element arrangements. The combination modes of these constitutive elements can be varied.

They include diverse associative ways and diverse operative procedures of social interest technologies (either by making current use technologies available for new purposes, or by inventing new technologies). The distribution processes are not external elements that are simply aggregated, inasmuch as they can be compatible or incompatible with the base of values that underpin the social innovation as such.

The social innovation results concern their very own characteristic: the implementation (meaning reinforcement or restoration) of relational patterns. Social innovations are always situated in a given context and subject to a process of “charisma routinization”. They promote social change through the birth and death of institutional forms. Yesterday’s social innovation may be tomorrow’s institutional form.

The study and evaluation of social innovation processes demand the assessment and the analysis of the relational patterns’ characteristics. For this purpose, a multi-criteria matrix is necessary. Its components can be defined based on the attribute binary polarities of the relation modes, such as: dialogical/instrumental, direct/mediated, near/distant, accessible/restrict. To learn with the study of social innovations in the contemporary world means more than identifying typologies. It has also to do with facilitating the access to this specific kind of information and so contributing to interconnect several (worldwide) initiatives and practices.

I see the Conference Changing the Change as an opportunity to discuss far beyond the limits of social inclusion technologies.

I address the following questions to the Conference:

The first one is: “can conceiving relational patterns be considered a design problem?”

The National Academy of Engineering in the United States of America recognizes that engineering is, since its origins, a profoundly creative process, and says: “a most elegant description is that engineering is about design under constraint” (The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century, Washington: National Academy Press, 2004, pp. 7 – 25, pdf available at http://www.nap.edu).

My second question is: “what are the specific constraints of designers’ activities? How different are they from the constraints of engineers’?”

Angelus Silesius’ verses (“Aus dem cherubinischen Wandersmann”) say that the soul has two eyes: one gazes time, and the other gazes far away towards eternity.

My third question is: “does the designers’ aesthetic commitment represent the possibility of perfectioning the gaze that perceives eternity?”

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.