Introduction
Consumer trafficking
The noise isn’t just auditory, it’s visual, it’s cerebral, and it’s unavoidable. Today, in urban centres around the world, we are immersed in it, we are inundated by it. Down 5th Avenue, across to Königsallee, over to Roppongi Hills, and across the Pacific to Robson Street in Vancouver, the din grows ever louder. There’s an almost chaotic amplification of sights, sounds, and signals all vying for our attention and the more we try to ignore it, the louder it gets. A word becomes a brand and a sentence in turn becomes a slogan. Soon the conversation of the streets is mediated by banners, billboards, broadcasts and a seemingly endless bombardment of every form of communication and persuasion imaginable. It is the modern consumer society, a kind of social and economic insanity.
Yet walk just a little further along Robson Street and you’ll come to a quiet spot, on a pristine beach, that overlooks the ocean and the mountains in one spectacular sweeping vista. Sometimes it’s wet here, usually in fact, and the soft sound of rain collapsing into the water is peaceful. In the spring, from this very spot, you can literally smell the mountains thaw under May’s warming sun—it’s easy to forget what’s behind you just a few blocks away.
This is the frontier between the natural world and the designed world, but it doesn’t have to be a battleground. This semiotic pollution isn’t really design—it’s an aberration—it’s a transformation of design resulting from a capitalism that is uncontrolled and largely gone awry. Design has provided the vast majority of this commercial noise in response to capitalism’s growing demand for consumer persuasion, and yet design is much more than this very large part of its whole.
Design is precisely not surface design or the production of visual stimuli. [This] Post-Modernism with its borrowings from art and fashion is a regression into randomness and waste. Its formalism follows the cult of the superfluous and it is not for nothing that it reaches its peak in the “useful object that can no longer be used.” (Stock qtd in Aicher 13)
Instead design is about the product as a whole not just about its outward form. It can be evaluated by both its social and ecological impact, and as a result, the domain of Design carries with it great responsibility. Otl Aicher wrote that “the modern world is defined by its design condition. Modern civilization is one that is made by man, and therefore designed. The quality of the designs is the quality of the world.”
About 3 years ago, after leaving a job interview with a Vancouver design company, I found myself walking that same Robson Street, flush with confidence and the prospect of a nice salary. Moments after leaving the interview I was checking out expensive furniture, electronics, and the latest fashions. It seemed I was no less immune than any other to obsessive consumerism, I just needed to let down my defences for a moment and I was infected.
Passing all the big brand stores with their elaborate merchandising, slick graphics and emotional messaging, I was confounded by my situation. Soon, I began reflecting upon some of the open criticisms of design that were circulating in the media at the time. Recent Canadian publications such as NO LOGO and The Corporation were bringing to light issues of globalisation and social injustices. Design’s practices, particularly in the area of advertising and communication, were being painted with a wide brush of impropriety. I was having a crisis of conscience, both as a designer and as an individual. It had been 20 years since my time on the coffee farm in Nicaragua, an idealistic young man who wanted to contribute to a better world. There on Robson Street I asked the question—what’s happened to me.
Design of a different kind
Fortunately, at this time I was also taking a course in Contemporary Design Issues at Emily Carr Institute. I enrolled in the course ostensibly for the purpose of extending my credentials in design, but significantly, the course instead extended the credentials of design. After a few months of reading and discussing the thoughts of people such as Gui Bonsiepe, Richard Buchanan and Luz María Jiménez Narváez, I had developed a renewed enthusiasm for design and an optimism that was fuelled by new ideas in design thinking, ideas that offered exciting possibilities for the future of design.
This movement in design thinking is often said to have started in 1969 with Victor Papanek’s “Design for the real world” yet there is a much earlier precedence for this type of design praxis. In 1936 Nikolaus Pevsner wrote a “seminal text” titled “Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius”, a paper that emphasised notions of honesty, fitness for purpose and humanistic values. An introduction to the paper suggested that “the best that surrounds us today was laid then by men who thought and taught as well as designed.”(Woodham 7) In Britain, notions of design for social progress prevailed as early as the late 19th century under the influence of designers such as William Morris and John Ruskin. Along with other followers of Arts and Crafts movement and early modern design, they were a response to rampant industrialisation and its negative influence on culture and social well being. Later, on the continent, design praxis would find its voice in the emancipatory and egalitarian ideals of a new modernist period. This internationalist style, named so for its impact in many countries around the world, was informed and influenced by the leading European designers such as Walter Gropius in Germany, and Le Corbusier in France.
This social utopian commitment was potently expressed in the housing and design programmes implemented by progressive municipalities in Holland and Germany and, with considerable variation […] in a wide range of other countries including France, Italy, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Britain, the United States, and Japan. At its heart modernism was committed to a social and cultural agenda which was not constrained by national boundaries.(Woodham 34)
There is extensive documentation of the implementation of these efforts to bring about social change, with varying degrees of success and failure, all of which offers lessons and contributes to design’s larger body of knowledge and more specifically to knowledge within the domain of design praxis.
Design thinking
Recent developments in design thinking do not have the same depth of exemplars as it’s relatively new and the opportunities to apply these developing concepts have been fewer. There are however a few examples of design thinking and action being applied as praxis and they shine light upon not just what is happening now but what might be achieved in the future. For example, designers in England used co-creative approaches, working with the community in Kent to develop Activmobs, a project that discovered new ways to encourage and maintain healthy living choices. Over in Lewisham another group of designers lived out, experientially, a series of unique and intriguing energy efficiency solutions that are now being put into practice in a 5,000 home trial in London. These new notions of design have taken such root in the UK that a project titled dott07, or Design of the time, last year kicked off a decade long design based enterprise. In the first year alone saw significant community based projects that ranged from urban farming and public education to working happiness and design centred approaches to sexual health. And it’s not just happening in the UK, at Stanford University’s Institute of Design, or d.school, there are exciting things happening in design pedagogy. Headed by IDEO founder, David Kelley, d.school is bringing together leaders from diverse domains of knowledge and experience such as sociology, business and economics, philosophy, engineering, and design. Through an emphasis on collaboration, co-creation and design thinking, the d.school is educating a new generation of designers, encouraging social centred practice, and enabling them with knowledge and opportunities for change. These are a few examples of design thinking in action, examples that expand the domain of design activity and its significance as a contributor to social progress.
A Scenario for designing social progress
Gui Bonsiepe recently wrote that “it is no longer feasible to limit the notion of design to disciplines such as architecture, industrial design, or communication design”—this paper reflects such a belief. It is informed by recent ideas in design thinking and progressive approaches to design practice, and it seeks to reveal another space where design can make valuable contributions to society.
These examples of design thinking and practice, along with the wider body of design knowledge, will be used to outline an approach to achieving greater social progress and justice in large scale and deeply complex environments. It will specifically address the role of co-creation and collaboration in the process of facilitating interactions between the various stakeholders including, but not limited to, the local population, governments, social movement organisations, and interest groups.
As an exemplar upon which to apply these principles and approaches, I will use the ongoing social struggle in Chiapas, Mexico, addressing the concerns and exigencies of that problem as a way of showing design’s possible contribution. This project, not as yet implemented, can’t really be considered a case study. It’s better to think of this as something of an action plan—it’s a place to start and a possible expression of a way forward.
This paper illustrates a framework, or scenario, that is comprised of three main components; understanding, implementation, and communication. Understanding reflects a phenomenological approach to researching the problem in order to better understand the concerns and exigencies of the situation. With a clearer understanding, an implementation model can be developed to address these issues and find viable solutions that will bring about improvements for the various stakeholders involved. Finally, recognising that the implementation of such a highly complex and large-scale project will require the support of the larger national and international community, a communication approach must be developed that both creates awareness and encourages support for the project.