Changing the change

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.

Changing the Change is an opportunity to visualize the opportunities and responsibilities of a better world. This is not the world of the past, a world to which we cannot return. That world was never perfect, and we cannot be what we once were. Neither is it an impossible future of utopian central planning. That future is also behind us.

Changing the Change is a chance to think our way through the different futures we can hope to inhabit, examining these futures designers.

Every human institution is embedded in an historically contingent ecology of societies and cultures. These influence every human institution, artifact, and agency.

“It’s impossible to change one thing,” John Collier once said, “without changing everything. But you can’t change everything all at once. You’ve got to start somewhere.”

Nevertheless, John didn’t believe that change is hopeless or impossible. He believed that we must learn more and do better, working with resolve and commitment to create the world we want to live in.

Genuine change involves each of us. Changing the Change is an opportunity to see how we can change ourselves to change the societies and cultures in which we live.

A remarkable work of art on the theme of change has been circulating around the world. It is drawn from the words of a political candidate, but it is not part of a political campaign. It is an unofficial campaign ad for hope, inviting citizens to be a voice and cast a vote. You can see the work for yourself at:

http://www.dipdive.com/

This could be the campaign ad for Changing the Change. It calls neither for utopia nor for business as usual.

Changing the Change is an opportunity to use design tools and design thinking to envision and shape a common future.

What I find so inspiring and realistic about Changing the Change is the understanding that we must reshape our cultures and ourselves to reshape our future. To bring change about, we must change the way we change.

Gandhi said, “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world … as in being able to remake ourselves.”

See you in Torino!

In Japan, academic, industrial, and government sectors have been working together to reduce environmental burdens since the Kyoto Protocol was enacted in 1997. After a decade of commitment, an environmental efficiency of industrial products excelled. This advancement includes home electric and electronic appliances, automobiles, and architectures, expanding its effort to a wide variety of products.

These eco-products are gaining their momentum and doing great on the market. It is true that we have seen the advancement. But the fact is, though the Kyoto Protocol had promised Japan to reduce the emission of CO2 by 6% from the 1990 figure by 2010, the figure has rather increased 8%. An effective energy consumption by the expansion of eco-products is not fast enough.

This fact proves that in order to make a society more sustainable, a sole reliance on technology is not enough. What we need to focus now is to change our mass consumption-based life structure and social behavior. Even the core of design needs to shift from eco-design, where an environmental efficiency is emphasized, to sustainable design, where its design alters a value of our society and culture.

In order to achieve this goal, a workshop, the Destination 2007-2025 was held in Shirakawago, a small village, registered as the World Cultural Heritage. The venue attracted over 100 visitors from 8 different countries and during 3 days of intense workshops, it gathered numerous amounts of ideas.

Most of the idea is oriented to create low-carbon society without expanding consumptions. It is to learn from the “pre-westernized” Japanese society. Hopefully, the seeds of idea will take an initiative to create a new sustainable social model in Asia, where the region is expanding faster than ever. From westernized modernization to oriental modernization – Can Asian countries change the course of their direction to the way it is supposed to be?

These resources are to be analyzed and edited, and to be presented as a proposal at the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit and at the Changing the Change Conference I Torino, in July 2008.

Design as we know it – “industrial” design – is a relatively young discipline, little more than two hundred years old. The industrial process of design developed to cope with the social and technological changes of the Industrial Revolution. Design as we know it is a corollary of industrial society, industrial technology and the industrial production system.

The question we face is how design can be transformed as society and technology transform from industrial to post-industrial forms.

There have been different interpretations of the concept of post-industrialism. The differences have tended to polarise between the “info-tech” vision and the “eco-tech” vision. In the former, post-industrialism means a form of hyper-industrial technology, based on the information revolution, automation and highly advanced technology. In the latter, it means a more small-scale, resource-conserving, “convivial” technology. In the former, technology is regarded as an autonomous, science-driven force; in the latter, technology is brought under the influence and control of people and communities.

The products and processes of a technology are linked with each other. Pre-industrial technology had its own particular types of products and processes, just as industrial technology can now be seen to have had its own particular types of products and processes. In turn, post-industrial technology will have its particularities which will affect its design processes and the products that stem from it. Perhaps a new paradigm of technology can emerge. Some features of the new technology will be continuations of the old; some will create discontinuities. Some features will be generated by the possibilities of technological development itself, whereas others will be responses to the problems created by that same technological development. Changing the Change can help to create the paradigm of a new technology.

Design as it might be – “post-industrial” design – is an issue for design research. Design research is an incredibly young discipline, only about forty years old, but nevertheless having significant influence on design practice and process and having great potential. Design research has a fundamental commitment to interdisciplinarity that will be essential to post-industrial design, and it is establishing a world-wide, international basis of cooperation that will be equally essential.

Design research is built around design thinking. Fundamental to design thinking is imagination: the abilities to imagine and to image. Changing the Change can help to develop the potential of design research. That’s why I am pleased that the Design Research Society endorses Changing the Change.