Dott Cornwall think tank 'Inspired'

Last week Dott Cornwall and University College Falmouth hosted 'Inspired' a think tank to look at design in our times and discuss emerging design practice.


Present were designers, leading design thinkers, researchers, students and academics. We convened at the Bedruthan Steps Hotel sectioned across the hillside overlooking Mawgan Porth Beach. The views were amazing. Here's a taster.


Day 1
On Day 1 we heard presentations from two leading design thinkers, Nabeel Hamdi, Emeritus Professor of Housing and Urban Development at Oxford Brookes University.


And Ezio Manzini, Professor of Design at the Politechnico di Milano.


Both shared a broader and more international context for "Dott-like" (as Ezio called it) design. Following their presentations was a soapbox session. Each delegate got 3 minutes (and yes, it was timed with an hourglass) to say something about design that was on their mind. As you can see from the picture below, John Thackara was up first.


After a well-earned lunch we split into two groups to discuss either design practice or design education and research. I joined the latter and have to say it was a very interesting session. That's a brief overview of what happened on Day 1. Below are some soundbites I gathered from the various sessions.

The opening keynotes

• Dott recognises that it is top-down and bottom-up. It is top-down in responding to EU policy and bottom-up in responding to the local people and their issues;

• Nabeel began his presentation by saying that many students come to him to ask, "we like design but how do we make ourselves relevant?" Great question and certainly a very important one for design in our changing world today;
  
  
• Nabeel had a lovely sentiment to express how design could be more strategic. He said rather then just design a house, designers should think about what a house can do;
  

• I also liked Nabeel's comment that design (and designers) "disturb" situations. The slightly pessimistic notion of "disturb" reminds us that design and designers can disturb in positive and also negative ways;

• On the plane from London to Cornwall, Ezio asked us from an English language perspective how we understood the word "territorial." He uses the word in the Italian sense, to frame the nature of Dott-like projects. "Territorial" in Italian recognises the complexity of the physical, cultural, social etc. coming together. But in English we tend to think of "territorial" as being possessive and it generally has quite negative connotations. The interpretations from different languages is really fascinating. I remember buying a notebook in Italy with 'disegno' printed on the front. In Italian this mean 'to draw" a core tool for a designer. Since purchasing the notebook I often wonder what key insights language can reveal to help us uncover more about design (of course language is well discussed in design literature such as in Boland and Collopy's book, Managing as Designing);

• Ezio talked about Dott was as a "framework". That is Dott as a vision, as a way to connect people and host projects. Ezio showed some "Dott-like" projects from his network DESIS to frame an international context to Dott.
  

The soapbox session
Here are some themes I picked up:

• Design education needs to change: Especially as practices of design change. But it is education ready to? It needs to be more inter-disciplinary, but how do we 'walk the talk' in these unmovable institutions? In education let's also consider children today who are going through an education system deficient of creativity (Ken Robinson's TED talk argued for more creativity in education. Check it out here);
• What's missing from design practice at the moment? Mary Cook of Uscreates brought up ethics. How designers go about engaging with the public and dealing with situations appropriately? Let's also be more aware of the costs of designing, and the sustainability of projects. The financial, resource and time costs are high if a project ends and does not continue;
  
• Let’s not lose the link of design to economy: This tends to get lost when we look at design for social issues. It is challenging to build sustainable design businesses to do work only in this area (though I know many who have done so) and also challenging to measure and evaluate design's return on investment (ROI). That is ROI in its classical sense that business and organisations understand;
  
• Design’s contributions to social issues: include that of being able to engage people in issues and in policy. Furthermore, designers can bring better usability, sustainability and desirability to public services. Designers can integrate these aspects into the sector's concern for cost, scale and time;
  
• What are the roles of others that participate in design projects: such as the clients and project stakeholders? We take them on a journey which can often be challenging because it can be a different approach to what they are used to.
  

The academic and research breakout session
I feel like I need to write a bit more than soundbites for this one. It was a great session and many valuable things emerged for design education. Ezio early in the discussions said that to be interdisciplinary we need discipline and design is a weak discipline. Jeremy Myerson added that when design polytechnics gained university status they let go of practice but then forgot the theory.

We spoke about how we needed to understand the core of design. Ezio framed it well by saying that design thinking is broad and we agreed that it can be done by many others who aren’t trained as designers. But there is also design knowledge which is the core of the discipline ie. the USP of the designer, the toolkit the designer brings to the table etc.

Lucy Kimbell mentioned that other discipline don’t recognise a design paradigm. This made me think back to the design + businesses debates where designers lamented that they often didn't have a seat at the management table (See 'Are design schools the new B-schools?' at InterSections 07). That comment really frustrates me because we identify with the fact that we are a weak discipline with no recognizable paradigm for how we can be relevant to other disciplines. We also makes little attempt to learn the language of the other disciplines, and this not only divides us from within, but means we have difficulty talking to other disciplines. The challenge of language is not specific to design. Long ago playwright George Bernard Shaw claimed, "England and America are two countries divided by a common language."

When we understand the core of the discipline, designers might be better placed to respond to what Nabeel called “thematic organization” of the world’s "wicked problems" (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Wicked problems require an interdisciplinary approach, and interdisciplinary contributions due to their complexities. Nabeel described thematic organization as a way of framing problems around issues that become everyone’s problem. One could say that Dott 07 was thematically organised in emphasising five issues of health, energy, education, food and mobility. We have all been touched by these issues in some way, so they are our problem. Ivo of thinkpublic once said to me that by "allowing people to identify the problems [they] become part of the solution."

To sum up the point Nabeel and Ezio were making was that if we knew the core of design better, we'd be more likely to step up to bigger challenges as we'd understand what a designer's role could be ie. what a designer could bring the table.

The last part of the session, Jeremy asked what would our research agenda should look like. Some of the delegates mentioned that designers don’t do enough reflective practice or critical thinking. The divide between academia and industry also came up. I shared my experiences of doing this PhD to say that the role of academia and research could be to collaborate with designers to do more of what we all are not doing. A dynamic relationship between academia and practice, on a very practical level, could become a mutual learning experience and contribute to the discipline.

Day 2
On day 2 the delegate group was far bigger and Geoff Smith of UCF remarked that Dott Cornwall was “internationally distinctive and locally relevant.” It linked very much to Ezio’s presentation which showed us “Dott-like” projects happening around the world.

The highlight for me on Day 2 was a presentation by Mat Hunter, Chief Design Officer at the Design Council. Mat spoke about the narrative of emerging practice where the design ethos had moved from designer-centred to user-centred design to co-design to co-production. In short designers went from designing the next generation toaster or poster, but now designing the "next generation healthcare service journey system". The middle part of Mat’s presentation was framed by the notion that “the act of selling design alters it.” And he touched upon a key issue in my own PhD research which was about the articulation of design activity as process model. It’s great to simplify design activity for communication purposes with a client, it but it risks “corrupting” our understanding of design. A lot of what is done in designing Mat says, "is inexplicable" so we need to “watch how we talk about design.” Other interesting points Mat brought up were, where was the craft in all this? And we need designers to lead with a point of view, not just a portfolio and process.

After lunch, three parallel breakout sessions occurred. These were led by two designers and were around service design; community-inspired design; and collaborative design. I attended community-inspired design led by Mary Rose Cook co-founder of Uscreates and Justin Marshall a researcher at UCF. Mary spoke about design-led methods/tools for engaging people on two levels. First was the need to get them into the room (or sometimes go to them). And the second was the need to have people talk to us.

In the final part of the session, Justin spoke about an academic-led project called Bespoke. It aims to increase social inclusion through community journalism in an area called Preston. The project is still underway but many, many issues are arising ranging from ethics, to behaviour change, to policy, to the naming of the project etc.

Reflecting on my time at the think tank, I think it was very much about gathering floating sentiments and commentary as to what appears to be happening in design today. I spoke to a designer shortly after the think tank and he told me he thought design practice had already changed. I know many others believe that design is constantly changing (eg. John Heskett, 2003). But where pushing the boundaries of practice is concerned we'll not always be sure of what comes next. And that's what's absolutely fascinating about having the opportunity to look at Dott and the design community as it applies design in new and different situations. I thought Emily Thomas of Aequitas Consulting summed up quite nicely how we should recognise design in the future where she said, “some of it is a little about the faith, because it’s about the future.”

Design for development: Seeing beyond the world of wealth, 10 October 2009

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, a group of us gathered inside Oxo Tower's riverside warehouse, the Bargehouse, to discuss and debate issues in Design for development: Seeing beyond the world of wealth.


The discussion was hosted by the MA Design for Development class at Kingston University along with Anne Chick who leads this very first year of the course. Anne summaried the course as a, "pathway for design activists" exploring, "who they are, what they do, what their subject is..." The first ever DfD class just graduated, so coinciding with the discussion was a small exhibition of the seven graduating students this year.


The discussion was driven by the question: "How can the benefits of design be extended beyond the world's wealthy?" and after a small analysis of the question itself, discussions began among the 3-person panel which included John Thackara (author, founder of international network and conference Doors of Perception and former Programme Director of Dott 07), Ann Thorpe (author and PhD researcher) and Guy Robinson (Director of Sprout Design). The event was chaired by, Alistair Fuad-Luke (author and design facilitator).


The event was quite long (3.00-5.30pm) so I shall do a short summary of what each speaker said and also bullet points some of the following discussion. I had a few notes and questions of my own which I'll share with you at the end of the post.

Speaker summary
John raised four practical points in response to the question. He said that:

1. We need to start (in the location of) where we are and think about how to translate questions into design questions;
2. Designing for development is by and with people;
3. We need to empower people to do what we do (for sustainability in the project itself); and
4. We need to think about whole systems and the designer's role as facilitator in bringing people together to be the host or placeholder of conversations among groups of people.

Ann discussed some great issues, which I felt weren't adequately explored in the following discussion. She questioned the current professional design business model of client services. She says this model makes it challenging to set up a design studio to do work for the developing world. She asked a further question: who else is the client in the developing world? There are many stakeholders here. Ann identified a few existing professional design business models:

• Institutional ie. design companies such as IDEO who are working in this area
• Pro bono (of which I have seen many such initiatives as Architecture for Humanity use)
• Altruism ie. volunteering (such as Design 21: Social Design Network)
  
• Academia ie. involving students in live design projects (such as Rural Studio)
  

Of the institutional and pro bono models, we might group the work we do done under the umbrella of a social enterprise. After outlining this topology, Ann asked: So what economic models exist for designers in this area? Doing design work for development is well and good, but designers need to make a living too.

She also went on to ask: Is what designers do in the space of development, a political act? Ann thinks so. This led her to discuss design in the political sphere and the lack of experience designers have with engaging with politics directly. And designers can engage with politics on both on a national level (eg. the recent US national design policy initiative) and local level (and I am quite sure all the spaces inbetween).

Guy spoke about the role of the designer, reflecting that in his practice his role has ranged from that of a professional consultant, to facilitators, to researchers, to innovators and entrepreneurs (which provides nice support for my own research). Guy extended a bit on Ann's point on design business models saying that they needed to be more innovative if we are to spread and empower design ingenuity in others.

In the Q&A, a few questions/comments I noted down were:

• In the context of development, designers are seen as craft makers, and not enough on the more political or strategic end
• What are the skills and knowledge of designers in this context?
  
• What is special about designers?
  
• What is our IP?
  

My notes and reflections (or maybe I should call them my key questions)
In research, it's great to have loads of time to read and think about addressing questions which are raised in practice. I know as a designer, I just had to find a way to stop and reflect, because being in delivery-mode all the time just kept on raising new questions adding to the already long list I already had. The discussion on Saturday however raised more questions for me (but that's ok because they are actually questions I have been mulling over too):

• Is it a role for the designer to also be engaged with politics? I tend to think we do it already by default, communicating our message via design propositions and solutions because we are unhappy with the status quo. But if we did think of design as a political act, would that change the way we looked at and approached our work?
• Are there economic models out there to support designing for development? Or do we have to really work with the current context and think of creative new ways to make a living as well as work in areas we feel passionate about? I always think we just need to talk to an economist about this. Or maybe it's an entrepreneur, or venture capitalist, or someone doing research/working in economics and/or business.
• How do we make design relevant to the various contexts we are wanting to work within? For example, how do we go about making design relevant to development agencies if they currently understand designers as crafts people? The same kind of question parallels for design and business space as well, because most business people (like my friends in banking, finance, law, accounting etc) still mostly understand designers as only stylists, decorators etc.
  
• What is our role (skills, knowledge, IP, position in politics etc.) in these new contexts? I can kind of help answer that one in my PhD research, but Dott 07 was about development in the developed world. Nothing wrong with that, but I am interested in our role in other contexts too, such as those countries we might call transition economies or the developing world/global south.

So, those are some of my notes from the Design for Development panel discussion last Saturday. I really enjoyed the energy, the issues, the questions... I do have more extensive responses to the questions raised by the panel, audience and my own as listed, but a blog post is not quite the appropriate space to discuss this. So I tried to respond to some of these questions in a paper I just submitted last night for a conference happening next month. I'll let you how I progress with it. But the paper was more beginning the conversation (thanks to the word limit). When it's been reviewed/published etc. maybe I'll blog some of the uncut, unedited version here.

Design and social change- entrepreneurship, economic paradigms and movements waiting to happen

Today I read an article a good friend, and old colleague of mine, Natalie emailed me from Communications Arts magazine, titled Design ignites change: Design as social educator.

I have to admit, I have not read much from graphic or communications design of late. When it comes to discussing socially responsible graphic design, and as the article points out, I often find graphic design sees it a bit too narrowly in terms of working for not-for-profit clients and/or using environmentally friendly materials. Both of which are really important, but social responsibility goes deeper than that. The Design ignites change piece has actually made me reconsider my view on the discipline that I started out in as a designer. Mark, who authored the piece and also runs Worldstudio, a marketing and design agency, proposes some really interesting viewpoints which got me thinking about the viability of pursing socially responsible design.

The article brings up so many issues. I wish I could discuss them all here, but blog posting is not really for essays, and I am only blogging this because Communications Arts doesn't actually provide a platform for readers to discuss the article and provide their perspectives. In short, here are some interesting things I drew from the article.

The designer as social entrepreneur
Mark says:

"We designers have the ability to contribute so much more. As the definition of designer expands we should add social entrepreneur to the list."

Like this because it provides nice evidence for my own analysis on Dott 07, but I wanted to profile it here because it prefaced a simple, yet elegant explanation for what designers are doing as social entrepreneurs:

"Those designers in the forefront are using their design-thinking skills to develop and execute their own solutions to social problems-pushing the boundaries of what design can do."

The author gives the example of Rural Studio, which Mike told me about last week. Rural Studio gets architecture students out of the university studio and into the real world of designing and making/implementing community housing and social projects. These projects are undertaken in some of the most deprived areas of the USA, and designers also grapple with the reality of those less fortune than themselves.

Image from Rural Studio website

Economic paradigms for design
The article also brings up channels for showcasing design work as exemplars of design that ignites social change, and I have to say that as I was reading, I was expecting to be a bit disappointed as I thought the article would launch into something about how we should promote the social work and good, designers do. While it is great to provide evidence of what designers can do, it also begins to turn the attention of non-design audiences toward sentiments such as, "gee, look how pretty that piece of communication is" and reverts design back to its widely held perception of just making things look pretty.

But, Mark spends the rest of his article addressing critical issues that often don't have as much to do with designing per say, but other challenges designers must contend with in order to work in socially responsible design. Now this is the interesting bit.

Mark says:

"How do we create space for designers to do this type of work at the professional level where concern about the bottom line is often the driving force. All too often the professional design community generates a flurry of activity around social issues in the form of a manifesto, a symposium or conference without much follow-through. The road is paved with good intentions, but in comparison to all of the discussion, there rarely seem to be enough tangible results."

This is a question my supervisor, Bob and I have been discussing since we attended the Changing the Change Conference (CtC) in Turin over a year ago. The conference addressed broad issues in design and sustainability, and mostly from a design research point of view, so there were many, many academics, and a few designers, presenting on the potential good, design could do for society and the environment. Bob and I felt one key thing was not being addressed with enough weight at CtC, and that is what Bob calls the "economic paradigm" of designers working in these areas. ie. How do designers make a living while doing this kind of work?

I have to say though, I did see one presentation by Work Worth Doing (WWD) on this issue. WWD founder, Alex, talked about one of their projects, Now House, a demonstration of a low energy home.

Image from Now House Project website

It was in fact a R&D type project funded by one of their clients to explore the possibilities of low energy homes. At the end of his presentation, Alex, spoke of the difficulty in doing this kind of work where at the end of the day, he has to run a business and make a living.

So the question, as discussed with Bob and asked by designers Alex and Mark, burns in my mind. And it's also been interesting to see that this question seems to only be be asked by designers, and not addressed by those studying design in an academic sense. Having come from a business background as well, I have been quite interested in the business models of design, and the viability of projects such Now House and those run by Dott 07. Dott 07 was special, like Now House, because it guaranteed flexibility for designers to explore uncharted territories without the risk of losing funding to do so. But these opportunities are rare and don't come around often, so how does a designer make a living out of doing such projects? Mark says that attitudes need to change:

"... in order to create a sustainable model that not only promotes this type of work, but also encourages it in the marketplace."

Though I think Mark refers to attitudes of designers, but what about clients and commissioners of design? Is it a designer's responsibility to change that too? How far can designers go in doing this? Wouldn't it be great if someone could look at economic models for design to function in this space? The first step, might be to look at the design companies whom I listed in my post Design and social the social sector, who run businesses doing great design work on social issues.

Movements as motion or change in position
The final thing I want to say about Mark's article is that he critiques the fact that "movements" can be well-intentioned but not actually go further than that. He asks of movements such as the Designers Accord (DA) "a global coalition of designers, educators, and corporate leaders, working together to create positive environmental and social impact":

"Will the Designers Accord be yet another well-meaning but ineffective movement in design history?"

Logo from Designers Accord

Wikipedia says a movement is, "a motion, a change in position." I guess depending on your view of what a movement is, it can be a motion ie. a move forward in which DA is when one looks at its widespread support. And/or a movement can be a change in position, which the raises the fundamental ideological question of does it mean to be a designer today?

I think the discipline is really grappling with this now. When design students enter uni with an intention that they are about to spend 3 or 4 years making beautiful objects, this contrasts starkly against the journey of some, who get a little disenchanted with this because in the journey of discovering design, we see that the potential for design is that there is so much more to design (than just pretty objects. Though I agree with the fact we still need designers for this too).

And when this happens, we find ourselves in this fog... asking what exactly are we doing? Do we even call it design? And then when it comes to finding a job, do we take the traditional road which gives us job security and finance OR do we find/create our own thing/business to explore design + make a living + do what we want to do OR do we set up a community with intentions of adding to this movement OR do we take time out to try and figure out what this all means for design, designers and our own identity....

("..." is purposely added to indicate that there are probably many other avenues others might have taken)

On a final, final note Worldstudio is a partner in setting up a programme called Design Ignites Change which "promotes and encourages talented high school and college students across the country to use design thinking and innovation to create messages for, and solutions to, pressing social problems."