New Directions in Design

NEW DIRECTIONS IN DESIGN: SUSTAINABILITY BY SOCIAL INNOVATION A CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World

by John Thackara & Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design for Sustainability

by Ezio Manzini

Written by Ebru Boyac覺 Politecnico di Milano, April 2011 Course: Network and Services Professors: Ezio Manzini, Anna Meroni Tutors: Liat Rogel, Francesca Rizzo, Eunji Cho

CHAPTER I Thackara’s Complex World

In his 2005 dated book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World, John Thackara who is described as “a global design thinker, a design guru, a critic and a business provocateur” by Fast Company (Fast Company), points out the world we filled with technology and devices and the questions that we started to ignore asking while we are doing this: “What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives?”

John Thackara is founder and Director of The Doors of Perception, shortly Doors, an Amsterdam-based agency which sets new agendas for design, in particular for information and communication technologies, organizes conferences and maintains an international knowledge network. Two related questions: “we know what new technology can do, but what is it for?” and, “how do we want to live?” that Thackara inspired while he is creating that platform (Wikipedia) are also elaborated in the book deeply, from beginning until the end.

The author explains the phrase “in the bubble” as a term that air trraffic controllers use for the situations “when they are in the flow and in control” and he states how difficult it looks to understand and keep under control this complex world that we built on things. According to him, “we’ve built a technology-focused society that is remarkable on means, but hazy about ends.

It’s no longer clear to which question all this stuff—tech—is an answer, or what value it adds to our lives.” Things may seem out of control” says Thackara “they are not out of our hands.” and he establishes the book on designing “a world based less on stuff, and more on people.”

In the Bubble is divided into ten chapters titled with ten principles that Thackara refers in Doors of Perception platform: Lightness, which is also the fundamental theme throughout the book, Speed, Mobility, Locality, Situation, Conviviality, Learning, Literacy, Smartness and Flow. In each chapter, he mainly details problems of sustainability, environment, population, and sprawl as problems of design from different point of views related to these principles.

He supports his ideas with readable statistics and facts and makes some offers, which are grounded on those context and tries to make the complexity of the world more clear for us to see by expanding the main problems such as decrease in lightness, excessive increase in speed, unsustainable form of mobility and so on.

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Thackara promotes a change from the “product” perspective, which has the physical artifact in mind, to the “services” perspective, which focuses on people and the ways they use products and services. He also takes attention into “the hidden history” of products which is described “an undocumented inventory of wasted or lost materials used in its production, transport, use, and disposal”. In this context a product needs to be considered within a system where it is produced, packaged, distributed, and consumed. According to him, the roles in this complex world design is understood to be more about process than product, more about systems and services than about surfaces and packages, more about work to do than things to buy.

Thackara draws readers attention to the excessiveness of the space that technology occupies in their lives, again and again, by using many different examples showing the amount of the cars in traffic, the computers produced in one year, the hard drivers thrown away, the answering machines waiting for repairing and so on. On the other hand, he does not stand in a position like an enemy of technology. He is realistic enough to state it is not possible to quit technology, he just emphasizes the importance of questioning the facts and purposes behind technological steps.

In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World might seem to be like another book concerned about sustainable design, but it differentiates from many of them with its realistic approach. It does not focus on how to practice sustainable design by repeating the most common concepts related to it such as eco-friendly materials, natural energy, reusability; it focuses on the idea behind it. While Thackara make an emphasis on the necessity of change in a more sustainable way instead of addressing the terrifying facts of our time like decreasing natural sources, population growth or global warming and drawing us into a panic atmosphere he prefers to use a less dramatic way of expression. Where all the medium is telling us how close the “the end” is, choosing that path is quite intelligent and really important, especially for the ones who have a pessimistic nature, already scared and decided to quit even before starting because they could not see the point to try under these pushing circumstances. He does more than stating the bad situation of the world in a considering way, and shows the exit with designing a world which is based more on people rather than things.

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From time to time, the book looks like one of the books which are a collection of interesting facts. It is full with a huge variety of information related with many different articles from cars to sonic signals, from car sharing services to wearable technologies; a mix of statics; anecdotes and analysis. During the whole book Thackara supports his points with many evidences collected from reputable sources and he presents even his complex scientific examples in a clear and readable way that is not so difficult to understand also for the readers who are not familiar with the subject. He supports his ideas mostly via works of many Doors participants consisting of biologists, community activists, designers, architects, artists, musicians, writers, economists, businesspeople, politicians legislators, and while he gives place to some parts of their live talks from the Doors of Perception conferences in many places of the book. This broad diversity of the sources provides the reader a sense of trust with the credibility of the mentioned names but more importantly, it presents different points of view with their multidisciplinarity.

CHAPTER II Manzini’s Collaborative Services

The Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design For Sustainability is the second of two books resulting from the programme of activities EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) in which Ezio Manzini attempts to find answers for the questions about the sustainable lifestyle, the affects of changing some daily routines in a more sustainable way in our daily lives and the ways of reducing our impact on the environment with no loss in our living standards, and he proposes a scenario which looks at how some of daily life activities could be performed by structured services that rely on a greater collaboration of individuals amongst themselves: “the scenario of collaborative services”.

Ezio Manzini is designer, engineer, architect, educator and author and described as “one of the most important thinkers in design today”. He is currently professor of Industrial Design at the Milan Polytechnic and Chair Professor of Design under the Distinguished Scholars Scheme at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. “His works are based on strategic design and design for sustainability, with a focus on scenario building and solution development. He acknowledges the influential role design can play in changing our ways of thinking and living.

Manzini challenges designers to re-orient creativity towards sustainable solutions.” (Rethink).

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Under the light of his in-depth research on the field and findings about many cases developed by “creative communities” who are described as “groups of individual citizens thinking out of the box” and “exploring new structures of civil society” (Meroni 5), Ezio Manzini points out the tendency of social innovation is towards sustainability in the last years. This social innovation, focused on sustainable development, as observed within the creative communities suggests a different organization of our everyday lives. On the other hand, he talks about the appealing face of these new suggestions for an “increasing number of people who are fed up with over-consumption, who fear rampant individualism and who question the so-called ‘quality’ of life in our modern societies”. However according to him, “Collaborative Services stands for a considerable change in our lives” and activities of “sharing, exchanging, pooling together goods and services require time, organization and flexibility”. Keeping this attraction permanent and spreading these services ask for more; the need of making them quality, practical, within reach and malleable according to user imperatives and the different contexts in which they arise. At that point, the Scenario of Collaborative Services has built upon the hypothesis of increasing the possibility of consolidation and spreading of the suggestions thought up by the pioneering creative communities, with an improvement in terms of access and effectiveness.

In the book, there are twenty-four different scenarios developed under six different subtitles: family like service, community housing, extended home, elective communities, service club, direct network access. All of the suggested scenarios in the book, described as “an effort to offer a vision of what our daily lives could look like if such initiatives were to spread to a point of common practice or at least if they began to feature in the lifestyles of a larger part of the population.” are scenarios are based on the existing collaborative activities and presented visually. Then Manzini goes deeply on some scenarios one by one, he also provides some information and explains necessary steps to enhance the scenarios. He also proposes some tools to accelerate the diffusion of the services on which it is based in case of this scenario were to bear the promise of new and more sustainable lifestyles.

According to Manzini, “the Scenario of Collaborative Services indicates how, through local collaboration, mutual assistance, shared use we can reduce significantly each individual’s needs in terms of products and living space and optimize the use of equipment, reduce travel distances and, finally, lessen the impact of our daily lives on the environment”. In the light of 4

this information the Scenario of Collaborative Services can be described as a strategy which aims to make the local services created by some active individuals applicable for bigger scales. Indications of The Scenario of Collaborative Services are not limited to the application of the services. The scenario also gives an idea of how the diffusion of organizations based on sharing, exchange, and participation on a neighborhood scale can also regenerate the social fabric, restore relations of proximity and create meaningful bonds between individuals.

While the book is an essay about “a new design field, which lies at the crossroads of social innovation and design for sustainable development”, Manzini mentions about a new and different role for the designer emerges from that field. A role that does not take the place of the traditional one, but that “works alongside it opening up new fields of activity, not previously thought of.” In this new context designer is more like an expert who has to be able to collaborate with a variety of interlocutors, but making interactions with them in a “peer-to-peer designing networks: the emerging, interwoven networks of individual people, enterprises, non-profit organizations, local and global institutions that are using their creativity and entrepreneurship to take some concrete steps towards sustainability.”

Within the scope of the research aiming to explore the potential of social innovation as a driver for technological and production innovation, in view of sustainability, the book focuses on the possibility of the “creative communities”, supported by different enabling systems, to become the drivers of new welfare and a new model of local development. While Manzini proposing a possibility with some fictional settings, orienting from real cases that are originated by a reliable source, EMUDE which was promoted and developed by a Consortium of European universities and research centres makes these concepts more realistic, easier to believe and maybe even apply for the readers.

In Collaborative Services, Manzini attempts to create some patterns by reconstruction of the chosen cases among the existed cases, developed by creative communities and designing new setting with the data provided; and while doing this uses the ”scenario of collaborative services”. Even the system is not simple to comprehend easily, the writer makes it clear by his detailed explanations about the main idea behind this method, scenario building process, how to read the chart, how to examine the scenarios and finally how to use the results and supports the scenarios with clear images for both personas and the services to ease the understanding.

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CHAPTER III Comparing Two Works

Both of the writers have similar approaches to the new directions in the design world, towards sustainability by social innovation, and time to time, they address each other in their works. Collaborative Services, as befits the name, is a book in which the focus is on the design as a collaborative activity. On the other hand, while In the Bubble has a wider range of varied topics inside, Thackara quotes from Herb Simon in his book and explains his idea about a design which is not just for the designers by saying “everyone can design”. Later in the book he also gives some examples from Manzoni’s case studies and promotes innovative design by local communities.

While In the Collaborative Services it is possible to find many scenarios suggested for sharing of places, properties, time and works, Thackara also mentions about that sharing activity in the chapter Lightness, by saying “use, not own”.

The authors who describe design as a collaborative activity in their books, do not exclude the designer in this new context. On the one hand, Thackara expresses that the knowledge and the expertise that the designers have are still needed, there is also still a need for products in product-service systems but he offers them to widen their perspectives towards to see beyond the product: the service and system design and also consider about the whole picture to see the hidden history behind their designs. On the other hand, Manzini also talks about a new field of design which “lies at the crossroads of social innovation and design for sustainable development”. Here again Manzini gives a role to the designer as someone to use his expertise and also works collaboratively with a variety of interlocutors.

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Politecnico di Milano April 2011