I thought this was a pretty good article and insights on “design” from an important, broader perceptive., and am pleased to share it with you.  

 

And in the case of our common interests – above all sustainable development and social justice --  it beings up I believe some important points that are worth reflecting on.

 

We in this group are, in fact, “designers” of a sort, many of us at least. We have a vision of something that we think is important, something that is missing in many places and that we would like to see better perceived and perhaps even used.  

 

And, since the world is not yet following our designs, it is clear that we have to get better at it.

 

Let me see what I can do from this end.

 

Eric Britton

 

 

 

Alice Rawsthorn: Four speakers debate the future of design

By Alice Rawsthorn

Sunday, January 27, 2008

DAVOS, Switzerland: The brief was simple. Identify three themes that, you believe, will define design in the future. That was the challenge to the four speakers in the Future Design debate at the World Economic Forum here last week.

Joining me in the debate were: Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Hilary Cottam, who develops design solutions to problems in education, health care and other public services as co-founder of the London-based agency Participle; and, the digital design star and newly appointed president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), John Maeda. What did we all choose?

I'll skip through my themes briefly, given that you've already had the chance to read about them in these weekly columns. One was that designers will devote more time and energy to the underprivileged majority, the 90 percent of the world's population who can't afford basic products and services. Until now, they've designed mostly for the wealthy minority, the richest 10 percent, who arguably need their innovations the least.

Another theme was dematerialization. Rather than creating new things, designers will also strive to make existing products disappear, often by integrating them into digital devices. You can see this happening already in multifunctional devices like Apple's iPhone. If you own one, do you really need a watch, clock, diary, notebook, sat nav system, pager, calendar, barometer and phone too?

My final theme was guiltless consumption. At a time when none of us can ignore the environmental and ethical consequences of the things we buy, an essential element of "good design" is feeling free from guilt about how they were designed, made, sold and will eventually be disposed of.

Paola Antonelli of MoMA focused on design's relationship with science and technology. Her first theme was 3D printing, the extraordinarily precise rapid manufacturing processes now being developed by companies like Materialise in Belgium. These processes will eventually enable us to order objects, like furniture, to be custom-made by computer. No material will be wasted during production, and neither the factory nor the retailer will need to hold stocks. "There will be no waste of resources or space," predicted Antonelli, "but unfortunately fewer end-of-season sales."

She also believes that the yearning for privacy - or Existenzmaximum, as she calls it - will be an increasingly important issue for designers in the future. This phenomenon began in the early 1980s with the launch of portable devices, like the Sony Walkman, and has since accelerated with the development of iPods, noise-canceling headsets and other digital products that enable us to create "private" spaces for ourselves even in the busiest public places.

Antonelli's final theme was the potential for design to translate advances in science and technology into things we need or want. Recent developments in bioengineering and the cognitive sciences have tremendous potential, but need to be applied intelligently. "Because of their role as intermediaries in research and production, designers often act as the main interpreters in interdisciplinary teams," said Antonelli, who sees designers as "society's new pragmatic intellectuals." She is exploring this theme in "Design and the Elastic Mind," an exhibition opening at MoMA next month.

Hilary Cottam presented "design as a political force - the ways in which a design approach has real power to address the big social issues of our time." She advocated using design to encourage people to change their behavior. An example is Activmobs, a program she helped to develop when working for Britain's Design Council in which designers collaborated with health workers to find ways of helping groups of friends to work together to ease common problems, such as backache, heart disease and being overweight. The friends were given access to a trainer, and encouraged to monitor each other's health with positive results.

Another role for design is to develop new ways of tackling social problems through mass collaboration. This approach is being applied successfully in another Design Council health project, whereby people with diabetes in Bolton, Lancashire, are given packs of cards, each noting an issue relating to their condition and its treatment. The cards help patients, especially those with language and reading difficulties, to feel more confident when talking to nurses and doctors, and help them to remember to raise important issues. They also act as prompts to remind them about aspects of their treatment, and to communicate with people looking after them at home.

Cottam also addressed the role of design in policy making, arguing that designers are better equipped than politicians to understand the ambiguities and contradictions of daily life. She suggested that since "designers understand the power of story telling," they should be more adept at explaining political issues to the public, and that every parliament should include at least one designer.

John Maeda addressed the moral responsibility of designers. He stressed the importance of transparency in design, and of extending the participatory "open source" development process now popular in software design to other sectors. He maintained that although keeping secrets creates the illusion of power, if nobody knows you have a secret, its value is worthless. On the day he was named as president of RISD, Maeda launched an internal blog on which everyone there can talk openly to him about the school.

His second theme was simplicity, and its importance at a time when our lives are increasingly complicated, often unnecessarily so. One of the chief culprits, according to Maeda, is technology, which has tremendous potential to simplify our lives, but frequently has the opposite effect. A priority for designers in the future, he said, will be to ensure that we can use it simply and intuitively.

Maeda ended by stressing the importance of appreciating the beauty of the everyday objects and places that are often taken for granted. He makes a point of seeking out examples of unexpected beauty wherever he goes, such as quirky signs and stones in intriguing shapes. He suggested that the rest of us should do the same.

 

 

Technology. Economy. Society. Francis Eric Knight Britton Collaborative problem solving The New Mobility Agenda The Commons (Association 1901) 8/10, rue Joseph Bara 75006 Paris, France eric.britton@... fekbritton@... IM: Skype: newmobility www.newmobility.org tel: tel2: mobile: Skype ID: +331 4326 1323 +1 (310) 601-8468 +336 7321 5868 ericbritton