The global climate challenges call for innovative solutions. This is an area where design and design research can play a crucial role. In a special issue of the design research journal Artifact, international design researchers discuss how design research might enhance and qualify the debate about future solutions. Guest editor Ezio Manzini, who is a professor at Politecnico di Milano, highlights the potential in developing possible and feasible scenarios.
By Mads Nygaard Folkmann
What is the future of our planet? The various answers to this question can hold the raw material for future developments and solutions. This means that design and design research can play a crucial role in our efforts to find a way out of the current economic and ecological crisis, says Professor Ezio Manzini, who is also the coordinator for the research initiative Design and Innovation for Sustainability.
Visions Point the Way
Ezio Manzini says that it is crucial to invent new approaches in response to the crisis.
"The only sustainable way out of the current global financial and ecological crisis is to promote new economic models, new production systems and new ideas of well-being," he explains. Here, design and design research are essential, according to Ezio Manzini, because they are capable of producing new visions and proposals.
Thus, the exploration of possible scenarios is important. The main purpose is to produce specific scenarios for specific situations; furthermore the approach can also be useful for developing a general methodology for the use of scenarios. Among other things, scenarios can help indicate the direction of ongoing development efforts.
In this connection, it is important to maintain the feasibility of the scenarios.
"The idea is to focus on practical working prototypes of new ways of living and doing. The challenge, therefore, is to transform the potentiality of the prototypes into mainstream reality," says Ezio Manzini.
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| The first step in Yongqi Lou and Clarisa Diaz’s research project in the village of Xianqiao on Chongming Island by Shanghai was to chart the project elements and identify connections and challenges. Illustration: Yongqi Lou and Clarisa Diaz |
Small, Open, Local, Connected
The key term for Ezio Manzini’s approach to design and sustainability as well as the editorial mantra for the special issue of Artifact is SLOC, which stands for small , local , open , connected . The idea is that the sustainable solutions of the future will grow out of small and locally anchored initiatives.
"If small and local systems are concerned, nothing can happen without the creative participation of the people who are directly involved," says Ezio Manzini.
At the same time it is crucial that these small and local solutions remain open to the global aspect. The global aspect is an essential perspective for the overall development, but the idea is that the global consists of networks of local initiatives. It is in the local setting that everything begins.
"Sustainable solutions refer to the local, to the community and to the small and its possibilities in terms of relationships, participation and democracy that the human scale makes possible," says Ezio Manzini. "At the same time, it tells us that to implement solutions we have to consider these small entities and these localities in the framework of the global network society where the local and the small are both open and connected."
Most importantly, the link between the local and the global is used to explore types of scenarios for future sustainability; local participants also play a key role.
"The SLOC Scenario is useful because it gives a clear direction of where to look for sustainable solutions," says Ezio Manzini. "The best cases have been conceived and implemented mainly by the involved actors, using their personal capabilities, their direct knowledge of the problems to be solved and applying at best existing technologies, often in an unforeseen way. The SLOC Scenario is based on real and often successful innovative cases, but it still has to be consolidated, communicated and implemented."
Scenarios for Sustainability in China
Several of the articles in the special issue address hands-on applications of design and design methods to promote sustainability in relation to production methods and, especially, to ways of living. In the article "Design for the Network in China’s Rural Lifeworld" Yongqi Lou and Clarisa Diaz take a close look at the imbalance between urban and rural areas in modern China.
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| Prototypes as idea generators. Design is capable of rendering the vision of a more sustainable future tangible. This capability is evident in the process of developing prototypes for new ways of integrating urban and rural activities in China – as in the example of proposing models for exercising in urban and rural settings. Illustration: Yongqi Lou and Clarisa Diaz |
The authors demonstrate how design tools let them develop scenarios for future developments in the relationship between city and countryside. These scenarios can be a means of determining the actual potential in the given situation and thus take development in the right direction.
Yongqi Lou and Clarisa Diaz write, "Usually the potentials are there but invisible, either due to a lack of communication or the absence of a systemic and strategic vision to link them together and generate a new socioeconomic paradigm. It is up to designers to enlarge the potential possibilities and to promote them as characteristics identifying the locality that can then form a bigger map of an urban-rural interaction system."
Strengthening Networks
One of the specific proposals is an increase in organic production, which points back to China’s thousand-year-old tradition for sustainable farming while also pointing to the future with new product development and eco-tourism. Yongqi Lou and Clarisa Diaz point out that many rural areas close to the cities can be used for recreational purposes.
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| Sites for possible social innovation. As part of the effort to develop new solutions for the social arena in New York City, 35 cases were identified and organised into groups: Neighborhood Care, Transportation, Healthcare, Collaborative Networks, Housing, Working, Socializing, Local Economy Trade Systems, and Food. The process of locating and systematising cases helps generate knowledge that can be used to identify key factors and parameters. Illustration: Lara Penin, Eduardo Staszowski and Cameron Tonkinwise |
Furthermore, the relations between urban and rural areas need to be strengthened. Urban residents should use the countryside more, and the rural regions should maintain their identity while also embracing a wider network, for example for exchanging products with the cities. One possibility would be to develop new models for exercising in the city and in nature.
"The result could be that new networks and opportunities can be facilitated by design to shift development in China towards a sustainable direction," Yongqi Lou and Clarisa Diaz point out.
Social Innovation in New York
In the article "Design and Social Innovation in the US. New York City as a Laboratory" Lara Penin, Eduardo Staszowski and Cameron Tonkinwise discuss how design methods may contribute to generating innovation to address social needs. They describe a concept where New York City functions as a social innovation lab. A number of initiatives have been launched, focusing for example on reducing the demand for products and the negative environmental consequences of a high degree of mobility.
These initiatives are to function as a sort of "prototypes of future lifestyles". The next – and future – phase is studying what specific conditions have to be in place to realise a more sustainable lifestyle.
Our Glocal Future
All the articles in this special issue of Artifact emphasise the closely interwoven nature of local and global as well as the local origins of a sustainable global future. The future is glocal .
It is exactly in relation to this link between local and global that design can be a key tool, and this is where design research is needed for studying and demonstrating how design can become this tool.
DESISBoth the Artifact articles mentioned above make reference to DESIS, The International Network on Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability. DESIS was established in 2009 with the involvement of a number of design schools and other institutions as well as companies and not-for-profit organisations in Italy, China, Brazil and the USA. DESIS aims at "reinforcing the design community’s role in the social innovation processes, operating in the design community (developing dedicated design knowledge) and outside it (redefining the perceived design role and capabilities)." |
Cover illustration: Map over the first four local DESIS groups.
Mind Design #23, 2009
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