Matter/Anti-Matter

Design is not the answer to everything, but it certainly has an important role to play in almost everything that holds a society together.

In light of the current economic crisis, several U.S. professional design organizations (AIGA, IDSA, and others), design education accreditation organizations, and Federal Government officials have seized the historic opportunity and joined forces to launch an initiative to shape a U.S. National Design Policy. In a moment of great global uncertainty and an erosion of national confidence, designers are perfectly positioned to take on a leadership role in "Re-designing America's Future," and the proposed policy is supposed to give them a more effective platform. "Design is the world remade in human form," the initiative's Web site states. And there's a lot of remaking to do these days. We know that "beautiful things work better." These days, however, only "meaningful" things make a real difference. And collective action is required.

As a result of a November 2008 meeting in Washington, the initiative has published "Redesigning America's Future: Ten design policy proposals for the United States of America's economic competitiveness and democratic governance." The document strives to demonstrate how design "improves policy success by making it relevant to the People." As stated in the document: "Design serves to advance the goals of the United State's economic competitiveness by saving time and money and simplifying the use, manufacturing, and maintenance of goods and services. It enhances democratic governance by improving the performance and delivery of government services."

More details can be found on the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative Web site, including a downloadable version of the "Redesigning America's Future" report.

National Congresspeople received the publication in their mail boxes January 20. If you support the initiative and want them to act upon it, you can write them directly.

In addition, you can take part in a viral video campaign that asks supporters to record a brief "I Pledge" endorsement to be uploaded to the initiative's YouTube page or the Facebook page.

Just a mirage? Rick Poynor, in a beautifully honest article for ID Magazine ("Down with Innovation"), takes the "design thinkers," the "innovators through design," or the "design-ovators," as he calls them, head on:

"Design thinkers set great store by business targets, by driving the enterprise forward, because it is exactly what their clients want to hear and it gets them work. Seen from outside the cozy bond of service provider and client, this is a severely limited way of viewing design, and the total domination of current design discussion by this kind of commercial rhetoric is a worrying trend."

And furthermore:

"It is hardly surprising that designers try to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the accusation that they are hung up on making things look pretty. Belittling language of this kind suggests that the visual is inherently trivial, easy to do, and beneath consideration, that form is not a powerful medium of expression and carries no meaning for the viewer. Design thinkers like to talk as though we have somehow passed beyond the stage where the way things look needs to be a primary concern, and designers, browbeaten and demoralized, half seem to believe them. They have been too ready to accept the caricature of themselves as airheaded stylists who care about insignificant niceties of no concern to anyone else."

"Yet the rhetorical reduction of design to frivolous prettification reveals a willful blindness to the power of expressive form-making, if not a deep, philistine ignorance of the history of design and visual culture. The scale of the oversight is so colossal, and frankly baffling, one hardly knows where to start. Are the great cathedrals of Europe--Rheims, Lincoln, Chartres--merely pretty? Are the gardens of Kyoto? Is Alvar Alto's Paimio armchair? Was Alexey Brodovitch's Portfolio magazine? How about Leica cameras? The patterns on Moorish ceramic tiles? Or the PowerBook and the iPod? There is surely no need to go on."

In the same article, Michael Bierut of Pentagram supports him: "The business use--the specific goal that motivated the client or sponsor to initially fund the work--often fades away, sometimes quickly," he says. "In some ways, you might argue that aesthetic value--for an enduring design, at least--is the only lasting value, since over time functional needs can change and business moves on to the next goal." Bierut goes so far as to modestly propose that "just making something look nicer" or "replacing something ugly with something not so ugly" is an admirable goal for designers.

That's quite a statement in a climate where proving the business value of design is the profession's Holy Grail (and complex), and "design thinkers" keep demanding designers should become CEOs. Can they? Yes, perhaps, but only if they can get over themselves. Leadership in business is about empowering others. Designers and particularly "design thinkers," however, are still busy yielding power for themselves.

At this point, it may be more aspirational to be humble. Rather than touting design as the ultimate problem solver in all aspects of social, professional, and political life, the (relative) power of design may lie in balancing the possibilities of convergence (media; devices; platforms; disciplines; processes) with the unleashed forces of divergence in a web 2.0 world -- design as the facilitator between software and hardware; mobile, web, and desktop; analysis and creativity; virtual and real; professional and consumer; individual and crowd; business and art; function and beauty.

Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog design, teaches design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The mission statement he has crafted for his students may provide some much needed clarity and guidance in this debate for practitioners:

"The holistic challenge for Design is to create physical and virtual objects which are useful art, and inspire spiritual values by as few atoms and bits as possible. Design is our modern-day continuation of 'technical' functionality converted into human-historic and metaphysical symbolism. When designers create a new and better object, a mechanism, a software application or a more inspiring, human-centric experience, this will become a 'branding symbol' in itself by meaningful innovation, good quality and ethical behaviors. People will recognize the resulting visual symbols as a cultural expression of humanized technology and subconsciously connect it with historically learned visual shapes and patterns that connect. Design cannot be just a fashionable statement, but must advance our industrial culture by providing sustainable innovation, cultural identity and consistency so it can create emotional and social belonging. Designers have a humanistic responsibility that connects and coordinates human needs and dreams with new opportunities and inspirations in science, technology and business in order to make the results and their usage culturally relevant, economically productive, politically beneficial and ecologically sustainable.

The accelerated globalization is posing both huge challenges and offering new opportunities which require designers that are both talented and competent to influence and define new trends in regards to mastering outsourcing to 'lower cost' economies and reversing the current excesses of overproducing generic and hard-to-use products. Designers also need to invent new concepts for 'homesourcing' by converting local and tribal cultures into beneficial concepts.

To succeed as competent and respected 'executive partners' in the rational world of business, designers must become creative entrepreneurs or creative executives themselves. However, ultimately, design must rise above all commercial-functional benchmarks and aspire to near-eternal cultural relevance and spirituality."

I am in Paris, attending the DMI (Design Management Institute) annual European Conference. Executives from design-centric brands, corporate design managers, agencies, academics, and students gather to discuss the power of design not only in bridging decision-makers in organizations with the needs of consumers but also in facilitating product, service, social, and political innovation processes. The attendee list is very international and includes representatives from Renault, eBay, SK Telekom, SAP, BBC, Microsoft, and Vodafone, as well as professors/PhDs from business schools ESADE and ESSEC. I will blog more soon.

Johanna Blakley, Deputy Director at the USC Norman Lear Center, will moderate one of the most provocative panel discussions at SXSW Interactive next weekend: "Will Tomorrow's World Still Need Designers?" Panelists include Alonzo Canada (Jump Associates), David Merkoski (frog design), and Helen Walters (BusinessWeek). In a blog post, Blakley has articulated some points that challenge the raison d'etre of a whole profession and will likely spark a heated debate:

"At Davos this year, four luminaries in the world of design were asked to predict what the future of design will be. The themes that arose from this discussion seemed to coalesce into two distinct categories that I'd venture to call 'internal' and 'external.' On the one hand, the speakers emphasized the importance of privacy and personal convenience -- a degree of customization we've not seen before, that will first be available, as usual, to the world's wealthiest 10%. Designers will create ingenious objects with hidden multi-functionality, devices that, for one reason or another, cloak what they can really do. We'll also see designers pressed to find ways to better protect trade secrets and the valued expertise of the genius creator -- in other words, designers will be designing objects that actually enhance their own professional lives and buttress their privileged position in society.

This vision of a rather elitist future of design was counterbalanced by a set of notions that implied a very different path for the world's creative future -- one that many designers with an instinct for self-preservation may treat with some dismay. On this end of the prediction spectrum I noticed a concentration on the external -- an emphasis on transparency and simplicity and social responsibility. A belief that design that communicates its utility to the poorest 90% of the world will take precedence, and that mass design collaborations will serve a vaster public than professional designers have ever reached. This future of design would be world-changing and would mark a new direction for the practice of design -- one that might not require designers.

Much has been made of the consequences of democratizing design. Already, the designer's responsibility has shifted from creating objects and experiences to creating the conditions for innovation -- putting into the hands of the masses the tools to make their own designs. However, the threat to the livelihood of designers may well go beyond packs of online amateurs.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that $1,000 worth of computation in the 2020s will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain. The result? By 2020, greatly extended human longevity (and a cure for the common cold, thank God); by 2030, nanobots that can repair our bodies on the fly; by 2040, machine back-ups of human memories. In the same time frame, we'll spend less time in front of computers and more time inside of them, working and playing in virtual worlds.

And what comes along with all this amazing progress? A fear that we won't be able to stay ahead of the game. As countless movies and sci-fi stories have told us, the terrorists could use this technology against us or the powerful computers that we've created could take over. While some critics have claimed that this is basically 'the Rapture for nerds,' Kurzweil -- whose fan club includes Bill Gates, Marvin Minsky, and folks at the National Institute of Health -- expects that by 2045, non-biological intelligence will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. Stanford's Paul Saffo has asked, will this super intelligence treat us like pets or like food?

This presents an obvious quandary to designers, who may be regarded as the agents of our salvation or our destruction when 'the Singularity' (or the nerdocalypse) arrives. As Mary Shelley so brilliantly depicted in Frankenstein, playing God can have tremendous costs. If we're the first species to take over our own evolution, will designers live like Gods or be chronically unemployed?"

In an article for In These Times magazine, Alix Rule injects some fresh thinking into the realm of "design thinking," which has traditionally been mainly affiliated with parties like Bruce Nussbaum, associate editor of BusinessWeek, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (also known as the d-school). Rule is skeptical about design thinkers' self-acclaimed world-changing mandate: "As we look beyond housing solutions to urban poverty, good design is enjoying a second coming as the cure for what ails us." She feels that designers overburden themselves with these universal goals, and she asks for realism rather than naive "progressivism:" "The revolution will not be designed." She explains why: "'Design thinking' describes a moment in the pursuit of social good that hardly ever arrives: when all the hearts are in the right place, all opinions have been brought into line and all that needs to happen is the change itself. If the model has intellectual benefits, it's doubtful they outweigh the deficiencies of ignoring the long process by which consensus is built -- a.k.a. politics."

That's quite a statement. From Apple to Target -- the understanding of design as holistic innovation driver and change agent has long become business mainstream. Notwithstanding the debate about whether designers should think like business people or business people should think like designers -- nowadays most business executives and designers will readily agree on the importance of design as an interdisciplinary vanguard that has the ability to address major societal and political problems: "Stop drunk-driving. Build better elementary schools. Develop environmentally sustainable offerings. (...) We use design thinking to tackle hard social problems," states the d-school's mission statement. And it seems as if there's a secret band between the school's founder, Hasso Plattner ("Design has to start with the user"), and Plato ("The good is the beautiful").

Now, of course you can have some valid reservations against "design thinking." The first one is semantic. As a marketer I understand the benefits of branding, but nonetheless I have always found the term "design thinking" somewhat unfortunate because it is essentially a pleonasm. If you define design as the "transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones," as Herbert Simon did, design is inherently an act of thinking. In other words: How can you design without thinking? Design is by definition transformational and has always been. But that's just a semantic reservation.

The second one is more substantial. The main pillars of design thinking -- systemic view; interdisciplinary approach; human-centric, ethnographic research; democratization of creativity; and a pragmatic can-do attitude -- can without doubt offer a valuable tool set for many businesses that want to ideate off the beaten path in their product and service innovations. But despite the high level of sophistication that many design firms (and corporations) have reached in employing these methodologies, jazzing up design as the world's foremost problem solver may indeed not do the discipline a favor. I, for my part, am the first to admit to feel a certain relief when the New York Times Magazine features design that is simply "good" (lower case) but, sorry, lacks the ambition to change the world.

All that being pointed out though, Alix Rule's article does have one major shortcoming: Her judgment itself lacks the very modesty that she finds missing in "design thinking." It disregards the impact of incrementalism, of those baby-steps and micro-innovations which may not quite fulfill the lofty ambitions of the most vocal design thinkers, but may, nonetheless, instigate change on a mundane, practical level. By improving product and service experiences through more participatory, human-centered, and integrated design (and business!) decisions, designers are playing a pivotal role in transforming individual and collective attitudes and behaviors. Whether it can be credited to the hype around a maybe overbearing "design thinking" or not, this brand of "good" design is already a de facto political force: and given its power to constantly evolve things and affect people in their daily lives -- isn't it ultimately a revolutionary one?

Thousands of representatives from international corporations, design firms, government entities, and institutions of higher education, spanning more than 35 countries around the world, attended the CONNECTING'07 World Design Congress last week in San Francisco, the largest and arguably most influential gathering of industrial designers to date.

Did it live up to its promise? The short answer is: yes and no. There were early warning signs for the "no": The opening ceremony was a long-winded and largely self-congratulatory celebration of the two organizing bodies, ICSID and IDSA. In his opening keynote, ICSID president Peter Zech set the tone for what the conference turned out to be: a celebration of industrial design's accomplishments as well as an ambitious overview of the richness of what's out there right now -- but not so much a departure towards (or at least a vision of) a new and exciting future of industrial design. No wonder then that after showing a promotional video that featured the dolce vita in next year's World Design Capital Torino, everyone rushed to the buffet (piles of sushi! I wonder how consternated the Japanese attendees who had just gotten off the airplane must have been).

The opening night's impression remained throughout the conference. It soon became clear that the main problem of the Congress was that it had a motto ("Connecting"), albeit very broad, but it lacked an agenda or a distinct purpose. No new paradigm was born, no overarching theme emerged, and no new star rose. No battles were fought, no heated debates were held. The conference was primarily designed as a forum for designers to reassure each other of the value of design. As for the debatable value proposition of industrial design in the 21st century, a consensus appeared to have been reached even before the first panel began: Yes, designers are committed to beauty. Yes, they are committed to connecting commerce, technology, and culture, and they provide a holistic, systemic perspective. Yes, they are humanists and environmentalists, acknowledging and acting upon their ecological and ethical responsibilities. Yes, they are, as Peter Zech described it in his keynote, "The most influential creative discipline because we shape the things of the everyday world." But the vehemence with which all of this was proclaimed inadvertently revealed how insecure designers still feel about their tangible and yet so inexplicable profession.

Despite the harmonious and leveling mood, the conference was not devoid of many outstanding moments. Some of the old icons, in particular, demonstrated that they're still on top of their game. The Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa took the audience on a riveting journey through the "core of awareness," illuminating how the shapes of things live in us. He presented product designs that respect our pre-conceived notions of how objects have to look. He argued that good design "notices the unnoticeable," providing a-ha moments rather than wow effects. Furthermore, some of the popular advocates of "design thinking" such as Tim Brown from IDEO or Roger Martin from the Rotman School of Management, who had been instrumental in transcending the traditional boundaries of design by embracing its innovative potential for social and economic change, reinforced their compelling cases. The idea behind design thinking is simple: Design is not just design. It is a way of thinking that tackles a problem at the input and not just the output level. With the words of Tim Brown, design thinking examines the desirability of a product or service (human factors), its economic viability (business), and its feasibility (technology). And based on these insights, it then develops design solutions for increasingly interdependent (eco)-systems of producers and consumers. All design thinking presentations were eye-opening for those unfamiliar with the matter; however, who really is? Brown et al can consider it a huge accomplishment that, thanks to them, design thinking is not such a radical novelty anymore; it is a widely accepted concept that designers may in fact mistrust more than business people do, as frog design founder Hartmut Esslinger knowingly said in his speech.

Speaking of business: Where was it? The perspective of corporations, except for presentations by HP and Tesla Motors, was greatly missing from all of the plenary sessions and would have added a lot of value to the discussions. The same holds true for web 2.0 phenomena (ironically, the Web 2.0 summit took place at the same time only a few miles away), particularly the convergence of software and hardware, virtual and real, online and offline: what about virtual communities like Second Life, 3D printing, or virtual displays; what about web 2.0, social media, and amateur culture and their implications for industrial design? These issues did not get the level of attention they deserved. You could have forgotten in all the talks about eco-design that Al Gore had not only fostered the green movement but also invented the Internet. Fortunately, there were speakers like Bruce Sterling, the self-acclaimed "design visionary," who ruminated on his notion of "spimes" in the upcoming "Internet of things" -- new types of products that are defined as ideas or memes that can be tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of an object in an ever-connected world (simply put). Or forecaster Paul Saffo, who depicted the notion of "design after the information revolution." In general, the best plenary sessions were those that served as a homage to the future rather than a homage to someone's lifetime achievement. Product designer Richard Seymour, for instance, gave a fascinating update on the Virgin Galactic space tourism project. Alex Steffen from Worldchanging.com offered some practical advice for navigating the future markets of green innovation.

For the most part, though, a certain nostalgia clouded the program, and the key for designing the future seemed to lie in the past. Consequently, most of the attempts to make sense of the conference theme were actually proposing a "re-connecting" rather than a "connecting." The wonderfully witty Sir Ken Robinson urged the audience to re-connect the ecology of human resources with the ecology of nature. Janine Benyus, in her fascinating study of biomimicry, suggested we re-connect industrial design and engineering with nature, understanding and mimicking its far more sustainable shapes and processes. The main lesson to learn here is that nature does not produce any waste. While we almost always build top-down -- starting with the larger material from which we deduct the eventual object -- nature does it better: it builds bottom up and grows organically.

Nostalgia may have also been the reason for revisiting some of the big industrial design truisms. One of them is the importance of emotions. Laura Richardson's attempt to rationalize emotion by quantifying its impact ("emotion engine") was interesting and unique, but other presenters were simply stating the obvious (and long established) link between understanding people's emotional needs and the design brief. Left-brain vs. right-brain, analytical vs. emotional thinking, form follows emotion etc. -- the conference treated these topics like museum exhibits. But as far as emotions go and creativity, advertising has long been outperforming design: The Clio award commercials that were shown during session breaks were more "out of the box" than many of the products shown in the PowerPoint slides before and after.

A much discussed example of emotional design is the one hundred dollar laptop. For Yves Behar "design must create values and value." Behar demoed the device and showed how easy it is to record music or to connect with others in the same area that are online with their laptops as well. On the way out to the lobby I overheard a conversation: "That's exactly the problem. Hundreds of these laptops in the Bay Area. But no one in Africa will buy them." But maybe that's exactly not the problem. Maybe the point is that the developed world needs a product that makes it feel better about the developing world. I don't mean this in a cynical way at all. What if this laptop, rather than connecting kids in Africa, is our emotional connection to these kids? That may not be the product's original purpose but that doesn't make it less legitimate. Maybe, in times of human and natural disasters, stripping off the negative association from the word "feel good" is a brave act.

If you recognize anxious times, that is. The Congress panels did not articulate any fear of future technology or a sense of paranoia or angst (with the notable exception of Fiona Ruby's and Anthony Dunne's session on "designs for fragile personalities in anxious times"). While the catastrophic consequences of climate change were widely discussed and were mostly embraced with profound optimism, nano-technology or bio-genetics were simply left out of the equation. I found that surprising. If "the future doesn't need us" (Bill Joy), tomorrow's design will certainly not need designers. As design pretends to provide the accessories for the ongoing illusion of human mastery, it is in fact already in a constant state of emergency. Given the radical progress in advanced nano-technologies, design may be nothing but proof that "something can be done even when there is nothing that can be done" (Peter Sloterdiijk). "Design thinking" is nice but it will become meaningless if (when) artificial intelligence will start doing the thinking (and the design) for us. Already, the designer's responsibility is shifting from designing things and experiences to designing the conditions for design (and thinking), creating human links between bits, atoms, neurons, and genes. What if the designer's major task in the 21st century is to be the devil's advocate, providing a (false) sense of personal safety in times of genetic engineering, personalized machines, and a new singularity? What if it is time to start designing for a time after design?

Those and other potentially disturbing questions remained unaddressed at the World Design Congress. At the end, after three days of digesting the over-scheduled and vastly divergent CONNECTING program, it had become almost impossible to somehow connect all the disparate dots. The Congress had lost itself in a diversity of topics, perspectives, and disciplines that came at the expense of one strong message. CONNECTING'07 was a great experience and certainly connected designers from all over the world. But was that enough? I'm not sure. It celebrated the history of industrial design, but it may have squandered an historic opportunity to inspire and prepare thousands of designers for the future. In this regard, Sir Ken Robinson's words aptly summarized the conference's shortcoming without intending to: "We don't fail because we aim too high and fail. We fail because we aim too low and succeed."