Design and the Creative Society: New Roles and Competencies Ezio Manzini

Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

The author is professor of Industrial Design at the Milan Polytechnic, and Director of Unit of Research Design and Innovation for Sustainability and coordinator of the Master in Strategic Design. His works are based on strategic design and design for sustainability, with a focus on scenario building and solution development. He has been involved in several international commissions, expert panels and working groups. At the moment he is the scientific coordinator of a EC-financed Specific Support Action named EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions). Email: [email protected]

Annamaria Formentini

Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

The author is currently developing a PhD research in Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication within the Faculty of Design at Politecnico di Milano. She has been contributing to projects and researches as a member of DIS (Design and Innovation for Sustainability) and spent a period as a PhD visiting student at UNEP and UNESCO working on projects related to sustainable consumption and youth. Email: [email protected]

Two assumptions represent the background of the paper: the existence of a knowledge-based economy and the rise of creativity in our economy. How these two issues are linked to the growing role of designers is briefly summarised below and will be the focus of the paper. The contemporary global scenario implies, and calls for, renewed professional roles and competencies that are able to adapt to the new economic paradigm, in which the generation of knowledge is one of the most important tools to compete among companies, organisations and countries. The shift to the ‘knowledge’ economy, and shift occurring in the realm of society at large, where a new class of creative individuals is considered the new key factor for innovation and change. The rise of this ‘creative class’ has significant effects both at the workplace and in society and has become a decisive source of competitive advantage by adding economic value through. Though, ‘way to create meaningful new forms’ within the reach of a growing number of individuals, designers have to acquire a renewed role as ‘professionals of design’. Designers have the knowledge and the tools to transform visions into real solutions and to orient the system of production and consumption. The paper will present these specificities of the design by also referring to a Specific Support Action funded by the European Commission and developed by a consortium of 10 European and 8 European Schools of Design. The name of this ongoing programme of activities is EMUDE and it is based on the work of the schools of design considered as Antennas, or detectors, of promising cases of social innovation. In this framework, designers will work to give visibility to the promising cases, to interpret the changes in the demand, to make scenarios of possible futures and to conceive more efficient systems of products and services. Keywords: knowledge economy, creative class, professionals of design, sustainable solutions, social innovations Introduction 1

Knowledge and creativity: two sources of productivity and competitiveness

The new paradigm of our times has been described as the knowledge-based economy, where one of the major sources of productivity and growth is represented by the capability of companies, institutions and countries to produce knowledge. Today many key authors identify knowledge, education and intellectual capital as the most important factors of production for the creation of wealth and for the development of our economies. Hence human capital plays a key role and represents a high source of competitive advantage among

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nations. From the perspective of Manuel Castells, competitiveness in the Information Age is given by the generation and the exploitation of information, shaped on knowledge (Castells M., 2000). The existence of such a knowledge-driven economy constitutes an important background for the understanding of the renewed role that designers have to acquire and for any discussion on design education. In fact, to cope with the new structure of actual economies and societies, the competencies, the methods and the tools of design have to be adapted to this intrinsic change. A new generation of designers needs to be trained to read the complexity of our society and to interact with the technical and productive systems in order to orient them according to the most urgent and pressing problems. Another significantly important factor in modern economies is creativity, which is very much linked to the rise in the importance of knowledge and human capital. What Richard Florida calls the ‘Creative Class’ has become a key factor of innovation and change. According to Florida, the choices of this leading class are reshaping our way of living, working and producing, by acting on many frontlines and by “producing transferable, widely usable new forms” (Florida R., 2002). Considering the two pivotal shifts resulting in knowledge and creativity, we can advance the idea that designers will be more and more consistently part of such a people-driven system, where the capacity to “create meaningful new forms” is fundamental for the change that our society needs to face. 2

Creativity and sustainability: fostering change for the transition

Among the many urgent issues that are currently part of the global agenda, the transition towards more sustainable patterns of consumption is one of the most debated. Innovative solutions can persuade people to change their consumption habits and to turn their lifestyles into more sustainable ones. Together with this process from the top, a social learning process has to begin from the bottom and has to originate from the society itself. These two aspects of the transition - providing innovative sustainable solutions on one side, and learning how to change the consumption habits on the other - are very much linked to the role of designers and to their intervention in this sphere. In fact, designers can contribute to both the processes, not only by working out strategies for ‘how it can happen’ but also by producing visions of ‘what it could be.’ Such an effort is part of the overall creative process that is already going on in our society and has to be further developed and enhanced. For this reason, as part of the ‘creative class’ that Florida delineates, the design community is called upon to facilitate the global shift and to orient the change that is taking place more and more rapidly. It is inside such a complex scenario of our socio-technical systems that designers are called to operate, with the purpose of promoting innovation (notably the innovation towards sustainability), which appears to be social instead of technological, bottom-up instead of top-down and driven by a network of actors instead of one single institution (Manzini E., 2004).

Discussion 3

The ‘creative society’ and the designers

All over the world there are examples of social innovations carried out by individuals or communities to improve their conditions of life or in response to the call for more sustainable patterns of consumption. Such actions are performed independently by individuals, who aim at finding new solutions to everyday life needs related to daily functions such as eating, commuting, working, shopping, house holding, etc. These people are not necessarily engaged in sustainable consumption but the solutions they produce can be potentially sustainable. It is at that point that design might legitimately enter, contribute with its methods and tools and deliver its specific knowledge. In fact, as creativity has become one of the driving forces of our time and is increasingly shaping economy, especially the global informal economy, designers have to

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strengthen the creative process that is now within the reach of a growing number of individuals. Moreover, taking into consideration this wave of creativity that is shaping our society, designers are called upon to renew their role as ‘professionals of design’ and to rethink how they contribute to the shift. We can classify as creative society those segments in the society that stimulate the learning process towards sustainability by doing it in a self-organised way, with a bottom-up approach and on a context/community base. Examples are represented by the following few cases:

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mutual purchase communities (groups of people that organise themselves to shop in turn in order to reduce costs by buying at wholesale);

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local exchange trade systems (LETS) (groups of people that exchange services instead of money);

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walking buses to school (groups of parents who walk to school their children, in turns); home micro-nurseries (mothers who take care of a number of children in their own homes together with their own children).

We call the above examples ‘forms of social innovations’ and we wish to point out that they are springing up, in many different forms, throughout the world 1 as an evidence of the global creative process that is moving society from the bottom-line. 4

Facilitating the ‘virtuous cycle of social innovation’ How design can enter this global creative process is explained in the following scheme, which represents the ‘virtuous cycle of social innovation.’ The above scheme represents the model through which positive signals emitted by the society are detected, reinforced and then communicated to the society to trigger a change. The contribution of design appears in all the operative steps of the cycle as explained hereafter:

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Step 2: due to their specific training, designers are able to

look at the phenomena that are occurring in the society (and, those that are not within everybody’s reach). They are able to filter them and extract the most interesting to be further developed Fig. 1 Scheme of social innovation virtuous cycle

into solutions;

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Step 3: thanks to some specific design tools, such as the design oriented scenarios methodology,

the positive phenomena are analysed and, when possible, expanded into potentially interesting solutions;

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Step 4: scenarios of innovative solutions are conveyed to the society in a visual and synthetic form.

Such a process starts from the forms of social innovation that originate from some groups of the creative society and it is boosted by the action of design. In other words, the designer acts as a system facilitator and his strategic role creates a platform of common knowledge, tools and partnerships to develop a given solution. The renewed role of ‘professionals of design’ is closely linked with the above-described rise of creativity and with the new structure of society that comes from it: a structure that is, first of all, based on the new social and productive networks that are being created. It is to those networks that a designer can relate in order to:

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•

develop non-conventional solutions on the base of real cases emerging from the signals that the society emits;

• •

realise prototypes or propose ideas that can be further implemented; collaborate on the construction of scenarios, by generating visions of possible worlds (Manzini E., Jegou F., 2004).

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EMUDE: a new role for design schools and for young designers

From the above discussion, the society appears as a big laboratory of ideas to which designers should refer. The forms of social innovations express the willingness of the people to get solutions to their needs. In other words, they represent the users demands, on which designers could work. On the basis of this assumption, EMUDE (Emerging Users Demands for Sustainable Solutions) started in June 2004 within the 6th Framework Programme as a Specific Support Action. The theoretical background of EMUDE takes origin from the ‘virtuous cycle of social innovation’, which also represent the EMUDE project outline. Two groups of actors are involved in it: a consortium of 10 European partners and a network of the so-called Antennas. The Antennas are the innovative side of the project and they include a number of design schools (so far 8 schools have been assigned), disseminated all over Europe and engaged in the ‘info hunting’ activities. The ‘info hunting’ is a detection process of promising cases of social innovation, from which a catalogue will be produced and will be the working base for the other steps of the ‘virtuous cycle.’ All the work of the Antennas corresponds to the first step and is based on a field activity operated by the young designers of the schools. The designers are trained to explore society and to root out the most promising cases. Such a methodology represents an innovative way to look at the society with a privileged eye, as designers are potentially able to recognise what is more interesting to be developed, what is more feasible and reproducible on a larger scale.

Conclusions The final intention of the EMUDE activities is to search for isolated cases and to make them mainstream in order to give consistence and support to the transition towards sustainability, which so far has been happening slowly but which actually requires a radical discontinuity. And this radical discontinuity can be promoted and prompted by the new generation of designers, who will be able to work with the new conditions that the knowledge economy produced and with the new emerging value of widespread creativity.

Note 1 For many other examples, see Manzini E., Jegou F. (2003). Sustainable Everyday. Scenarios of Urban Life and www.indaco.polimi.it/emude

References Castells M. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. EMUDE, Emerging Users Demands for Sustainable Solutions, 6 th Framework Programme (priority 3-NMP), European Community, DoW, internal document, 2004. Florida R. The Rise of the Creative Class And How it is Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002 Manzini E., Jegou F. Sustainable Everyday. Scenarios of Urban Life. Milan: Edizioni Ambiente, 2003. Manzini E., Jegou F. “Creative Communities: Design for Sustainability and Network Society.” Unpublished paper, 2004. Ray P.H., Anderson S.R. The Cultural Creatives. How 50 Million People are Changing the World. New York: Three River Press, 2000.

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