Changing the change

How does Design Research communicate itself? Of course, design research has the responsibility to deal with the transformations of the world and society, in order to identify and declare the emerging trends. It also has the responsibility of communicate its objectives, to spread knowledge and make it diffuse, as popular as it can. Communicating means telling stories, sharing knowledge, building new aesthetics for complexity and making theorethical issues tangible and comprehensible problems.

Visualisations will be an exhibition at Changing the Change Conference. Video projections will show participants’ research results as solutions proposals, visions of possible worlds or tools to enhance them. All of them have to be proposed in a highly communicative way as animated storyboards (animatic) or short sequences of images (slideshow) (For more information, search for “Submission Guidelines” on the website).

Visualisations exhibition wants to offer the opportunity to look at design research as a communicative process with different audiences: users, peers, companies and institutions. Changing the Change is looking for new ways of expression and dialogue. Lets start from the scientific community: how can we talk each other? The exhibition at Changing the Change Conference is a step towards the building of a peer to peer communication strategy. We would like to collect and make accessible design research materials, a network of visions for communicating international design research.

To achieve this end, according to the policy of sharing knowledge, we encourage the liberalization of certain rights, as advocated by the Creative Commons licenses (www.creativecommons.org). Nothing will impair or restrict the author’s moral rights, but organizers of Changing the Change Conference and Exhibit will be legitimated to distribute and share Visualizations. Works will be accessible to peers, as it is a key principle underpinning social interaction. We guarantee the attribution of each work, both in the case of video projection and other publication and distribution artifacts (For more information, search for “Rights” on the website).

Of course, your works are dedicated to different themes and urgent issues. Communication rhetoric and languages seem various and interesting too. Some of them come from documentary and ethnography, others look like interfaces for service systems; some are visions, others tools. We think that video (even a slideshow) can help to represent complexity. Is that true for design research? In the era of bottom-up contents and diffuse creativity the ability of image production is widespread. Is there a designerly way of communicating? Could we identify a common ground? Are there different genres for different kind of design research?

One of the most acknowledged (and so far unquestioned) theories of business is that competition is based on distinctive capabilities: something that one organization has and others haven’t. For years this theory has been the basis for contending the value of design for business: design makes a difference. And this approach of justifying the value of design because of differentiation has succeeded indeed. The number of companies investing on design is soaring.
Good news? Definitely. Surely for students and professionals, with an increasing demand for design skills and services. But unfortunately there is a downside: as an asset diffuses to every company, it inevitably loses its differential power. It becomes mandatory, not distinctive. It happened 20 years ago with Total Quality Management. In the late ‘80s firms considered quality as a top priority; the best quality performers were succeeding, and other companies started to invest in quality improvements with similar models and approaches: each adopted the principles of Total Quality Management, each had a manager responsible for Quality, each adopted six sigma or control charts. Two decades later quality is not among the top corporate priorities anymore. It is mandatory of course, and there are still quality managers in each firm, but quality is not considered a strategic differentiator. Is design bound to a similar destiny in business: to be mandatory, but not strategic?

I know this claim could sound awkward and outlandish to many. No one would nowadays dare to claim that design is marginal for business and competition. But as all companies around the globe are investing in design, and as all are investing in a similar way (all adopting user centered processes and techniques such as ethnographic analysis, brainstorming, rapid experimentation cycles) design in the next future is at risk to be perceived by managers as something necessary, but not differential. Design researchers, who have the attitude and the duty to look forward, have something to think and worry about. What’s next?
The rationale of the CtC conference comes from observation of the challenges that are faced by society and its implications for design researchers. Our discussion above points out that there is an additional reason for changing the way we have been thinking about design. A reason that is pragmatically rooted in the dynamics of competition and of strategy. Also businesses will be shortly looking for a radical change in their processes of change. Design needs to propose a new paradigm if it wants to stay high in the agenda.

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.

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.

This article was co-written by Ezio Manzini and Jorge Frascara.

The Changing the Change Conference’s main aim is to present and discuss the design research contribution to the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society. That is, its capability to generate visions, proposals and tools to re-orient the emerging knowledge society towards more socially and environmentally sustainable directions.

This aim is based on some concepts that have to be clarified and discussed.

Knowledge society: it is the result of a large transformation that is taking place at a global scale. Its meaning overlaps the ones of service, information and network society: concepts that represent different expressions of the same on-going complex phenomenon.
In the Changing the Change conference we assume that the evolution towards the knowledge society, even if presents some positive characters, as it appears today, is not bringing us to a sustainable direction. It has to be well understood, but, at the same time it has to be re-orientated. In other words, the transition towards a knowledge society is the “big on-going change” that has to be changed.

Sustainability: in recent time the use of words “sustainability” (as a noun) and “sustainable” (as an adjective) has become quite common. This popularity can be seen as the positive expression of a growing concern for the environment. But, at the same time, it presents the risk of being mis-used. That is, used in superficial ways (little environmental improvements proposed as steps to sustainability) or even as “green washing” strategies (presenting some green initiatives to cover deeply un-sustainable ways of doing).
In the Changing the Change conference we use the term “sustainability” only in relation to deep and systemic changes in the ways of thinking, living and producing. In other words, systemic changes, in our view, are the pre-condition to generate visions or proposals that can be presented as “sustainable”.

Visions, proposals, tools: they summarise design’s main results. Visions are images of how a whole context could be like if new conditions where given (what if a new idea of wellbeing, of development, of production, of eating were disseminated?). Proposals are original combinations of products, services and communications capable to face specific issues (such as housing, mobility, health, food,…) in an original way. Tools are conceptual and practical instruments that permit the enhancing of these visions and proposals.
In the Changing the Change conference we assume that the social learning process that should bring us towards a sustainable society has to be fed by these visions and proposals. And supported by these design tools.

Design research: it is a research activity developed with design tools, skills and sensitivity; where “research” stands for the production of knowledge that can be shared and accumulated to become the starting point for new researches and specific projects; and where the expression “developed with design tools, skills and sensitivity“ stands for a research activity developed by designers who explore complex design issues and generate visions and solutions.
In the Changing the Change conference we assume that the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society is such a large and new challenge that individual design activities are only a good first step, but cannot be enough. They are a good first step because individuals can move with agility, explore possibilities and develop models, but design for sustainability calls for a community of designers working and debating with other actors to build a new design knowledge and a new set of visions and proposals.

If you are a designer and have done work in this direction, Changing the Change is the opportunity for you to share your experience and work toward the creation of the much needed change toward a sustainable society.

Here are four kinds of design. They form a hierarchy of contribution, with
Design Research at the highest level.

Let’s start at the bottom with General Design Awareness. Do you remember
what happened when desktop publishing emerged in the 1980s? All those
notices on pin boards at the office about the picnics and social events had
been written by hand before that, and then suddenly they were printed from
laser printers and composed on WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
screens. Everyone was suddenly a graphic designer, choosing fonts and
composing layouts. At first the tendency was to use lots of different fonts on
the same page, and to completely fill the surface with type. Over time these
amateur designers became more aware of the skills of graphic design; they
started to choose fewer and more appropriate fonts and leave some white
space around the text. The tools that democratized printing had the effect of
increasing the general design awareness of many people who had never thought
about fonts and layout before, and as a result they started to respect the
talents and skills of the professional graphic designer. A similar effect can be
expected as mass customization allows people without college level design
education to make design decisions about products.

Professional designers operate at a more sophisticated level, having mastered
Specialist Design Skills. They are expert at deciding how to do it, how to create
a elegant solution to the problem posed by the constraints, but they expect
the context that they operate in to be decided by someone else, probably
the boss or the client. This expectation wastes the value of design thinking,
and reduces the stature of the contribution made by designers. Why not
apply interdisciplinary design thinking to deciding what to do in the first place?
That change is overdue! Particularly with the challenging problems posed
by the complexity of design contexts in the world of digital technology and
global connectivity, the application of teams can help to set the brief for
development, to harness design thinking in order to decide what to do.

By developing interdisciplinary design thinking we can encompass the process
of planning and management, but we are still woefully immature when it
comes to knowing how to know. The whole area of Design Research is infantile
in scope. An important opportunity in the context of Changing the Change will
be to move design research forward faster and more effectively, so the we
discover more about how to know and how to communicate the results of that
knowledge.