We move another step toward a society of design where all actors take part in the design of a society. –Steven Evans
Let us consider the role of Design given the zeitgeist of our time. I characterize this zeitgeist as the Future being oh-so “unevenly distributed” in a manner oh-so palpable to “the 99%” we’ve come to describe ourselves as.
Our prevailing societal models have consistently manifested their leprous flaws. As a Millennial, my earliest realizations of the dearth of legitimately viable integrity in the affairs of environment, politics, and corporate business were delivered by the Gulf War oil spill, the Lewinsky scandal, and the Enron scandal, respectively.
An April 2013 Harvard survey of Millennials ascertained a general discontent and in many cases distrust toward government. Reasons given by New York Times interviewees are not unfamiliar to members of preceding generations: namely a dilapidated domestic and global economy, and a lack of integrity evident in political and corporate affairs. Something is askew in the warp and woof of the moral fabric of our Western society.
So many citizens go about their days in a self-absorbed stupor, reacting to a smorgasbord of ego-feeding stimuli around them that they believe to have control over—but how often do they conscientiously exercise the bit of control they do have? The consequence of the momentum of our societal mechanisms—and the momentum of its consequences—is that we produce+consume too much, too fast, too wastefully for our planet to sustain the coming generations—perhaps even the Millennial generation—with any assurance of quality of life. If you’re not convinced of this, just watch late physicist Albert Bartlett‘s explain why in his famous lecture, “Arithmetic, Population, Energy“—perhaps aptly titled on Youtube, “The most IMPORTANT video you’ll ever see” (full lecture).
Those who recognize this coming reality have shifted their language and broadened their discussions of sustainable products and processes to calls for resilience of infrastructure and communities.
How can we prepare to adapt to the potentially dismal impending future if our best response to its present catalysts is merely to slow them down rather than reverse them? How can we respond when the generation that should be the most empassioned is instead duly disenchanted with and skeptical of current modes of governance and commerce that have little regard for the quality of our future or the preservation our natural world?
My thesis: We need new models. We are ready for new, resilient models. Design should be an adept, compelling force to usher in models for resiliency.
While there are models of social innovation that take the various organizational forms in various sectors, they are all incarnations of the same intent: Overcome the limitations of the current models by transcending organizational and sectoral boundaries.
Why must Government be the sole arbiter of the of public resource allocation? Why must corporations be the sole arbiters of commerce? Why must nonprofits be the sole providers of social services?
Our society places equal value on each of these outcomes in that if any one of them is arbited in an inefficient or ill-considered fashion, the deficiency compels us to (at the least) complain about it.
Inefficient and ill-considered outcomes invariably result from our human flaws. But when it comes to collective decisions generally affecting the masses and acutely affecting the marginalized, inefficient and ill-considered ought to be a rare occurrence. As my thesis advisor, Cameron posited three years ago, if the deficiency of human needs being met is a direct result of the greediness of markets and a scarcity of government resources, perhaps local community organizations are best suited to deliver services in service of society.
This is where Design comes in.
Design empathizes. Design articulates problems and identifies opportunities. Design finds out why and how, why not and how not. Design makes sense of what is and isn’t, what could be and should be—and shouldn’t be. Design gives voice to the needs and concerns of the generally affected and the acutely marginalized. And design materializes their present concern, gives shape to it in a way that we prefer. It transforms what we would rather not experience into experiences we value.
How can Design do this?
As part of my thesis work, I’ve been looking at the idea of Design acting as an empowering force for communities taking matters into their own hands in order to create solutions from the ground up. Examples of this are DESIS as well as Jegou & Manzini’s Design Plan and Collaborative Services (PDF).
These projects identify the role of Design as a streamlining scaffold that provides ways to validate, replicate, and scale community-led initiatives.
In the Solution Oriented Partnership framework, Manzini et al posit that the role of Design is to provide patterns for “result-oriented collaboration” that can ultimately result in “advanced industrialization” that is sustainable without sacrificing effectiveness for efficiency (p.5).
I want to ignore the notion of advanced industrialization for now and hone in on the actual partnership aspect of the Solution Oriented Partnership framework. Evans asserts, “Collaboration between organisations from different sectors (business, charity, government), of different scales (multi-national, local) often with different goals (profit, social improvement) is needed to deliver Partner Based Solutions.” He then states that the “methodology recognizes that we need many actors to work together to design a Partner Based Solution.”
Let’s pause right there and just think about the implications of orchestrating such a thing as well as the potential repercussions of such a collaboration being consistently executed successfully.
What if this in and of itself were the new model? That irrespective of organizational and sectoral boundaries, people who cared about problems and possessed relevant knowledge regularly convened to creatively problem solve—and used Design tools and methods to do it. What if every city, town and neighborhood operated in this way?
“But community-based collaboration is happening on a widespread basis,” you may be thinking. Sure, but to what degree of effectiveness and efficiency (as juxtaposed and then reconciled by Manzini). And to what degree of community validity, scaleability and replicability? In my research I’ve observed that the effort required for multiple stakeholders to paint a shared picture of reality and then create a shared vision of the future—that alone is an undertaking.
Where are the patterns for this kind of resilient collaboration?
The closest I’ve found so far to an extraction and assimilation of such patterns is Chiara Camponeschi’s Enabling City, a thorough survey of “place-based creative problem solving” that draws key insights into a framework for citizen participation.
There’s much room for exploration and prototyping to be done in this area.
How does the caliber of collaboration that Manzini et al describe take operational form? This is something I’m exploring in my thesis work (in the context of local food systems planning) and an area I feel is quintessentially relevant to the nexus of Design and Policy.
How can Design and Policy together usher in new models for resilience in communities? That is a question that remains to be answered. Let’s hope we can do it in the nick of the zeitgeist.
Design and Policy 
