Design Research and Education for Sustainability in Emerging Countries Lara Penin

Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

Lara Penin graduated in 1995 at the Architecture and Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where she worked as an architect and designer. Since April 2003 she is a PhD candidate at the Politecnico di Milano, at the Research Unit Design and Innovation for Sustainability. In November 2003 she took part in the organising committee of the international conference “Visions of possible worlds. Scenarios and proposals for sustainability. A new social role for designers and design schools.” held in Milan. Her PhD research, tutored by prof. Carlo Vezzoli, focuses on PSS as a strategy to foster sustainable development in emerging contexts. Email: [email protected]

Carlo Vezzoli

Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

Carlo Vezzoli works at the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano University, focusing his research on scenario, criteria, strategies and tools for the development of sustainable products, services and systems and for their education. He is professor of Life Cycle Design: the environmental requirement and Design of services for sustainability. He has been the co-ordinator of international and national researches in this field and is the co-ordinator of the Italian network of educational centres on sustainability (RAPI.rete). He is the director of the Design and Innovation for the Environmental Sustainability (section of DIS Research Unit); and the director of the RAPI.labo (laboratory on Environmental Requirement of Industrial Product). He has published books, articles and CD-roms in Italian, English and Portuguese. Email: [email protected]

The paper will explore the idea of the establishment of an agenda regarding education in design for sustainability in both industrialized and emerging contexts, taking as starting point the current potential but fragmentary local base. It will discuss the multi-polar network model as a means to contribute for the development of research and education in Design for Sustainability, triggering an international multi-lateral cooperation model, specially focused on radical innovation suggested by the concept of Product Service System. The multi-polar network model would contribute to strengthen local bases through the connection among different emerging contexts and industrialised contexts, a desirable but rarely explored kind of collaboration. Keywords: sustainability, multi-lateral education, network, emerging contexts, design 1

Sustainability and Education

The perception that the current model of economic development is not sustainable has already been largely acknowledged. The degradation of the environment and the enlarging of the gap between rich and poor areas in the world are the irrefutable visible proofs. We know that 20% of the world population consumes 80% of the available resources. If the group that currently consumes less resource were to achieve the consumption levels of the first, then we would need the amount of resources equivalent to at least 4 planets. In the top of it, we observe fast growing economies e.g. China, India, Brazil, rapidly increasing the consumption power of its populations. The necessity of a shift towards sustainability also creates new demands and opens new fronts for designer activity, including design education and research. In particular, we consider the establishment of an agenda regarding the design for sustainability in these fast-growing countries, or emerging countries, together with the industrialised ones to be of great relevance. Sustainable development requires a change of production and consumption patterns in both highly industrialised and newly industrialised contexts. It is important to keep in mind that innovative solutions must be highly contextualised, and rooted in the local economic, organisational and cultural codes. In the same way, the establishment of an agenda regarding education in design for sustainability in emerging countries born from a local articulation should interact with growing global visions of a new educational paradigm.

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In fact, the importance of the link between education and sustainability has been backed by the United Nations, which, through UNESCO, has established the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. The programme makes explicit the fact that “there is no universal model of education for sustainable development,” underlying the importance of the formation of localised agendas, highly focused on local “environmental, social and economic conditions in culturally appropriate ways” and has as one of the objectives to “facilitate links and networking, exchange and interaction among stakeholders in ESD.”1 But what is or could be the role of the designer in the radical shift required by sustainability? And what are the specific implications of working upon this issue within the emerging countries? Designers can help create and disseminate methodologies that propose new kinds of system organisation that contributes to sustainability within the industrial and service sectors. Furthermore, designers can offer society a unique contribution in the construction of possible visions that can help create a picture of a sustainable life. Institutions of design education and research focused on design for sustainability are the locus where this kind of innovation can be proposed and structured.

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The Design Discipline and Sustainability

Within a historical perspective, the design culture has been responding to sustainability debate and practice through an evolutionary path. We acknowledge that the debate around sustainability issues within design evolved from an end-of-the-pipe approach (focused on the last phases of the productive chain, recycling, disposal) to a broader systemic approach to the Life Cycle Design, and then to PSS (Product Service System) design. Life Cycle Design of Products In the second half of the 90s design of low environmental products began to be more clearly and exhaustively defined. There was better clarity about the environmental requirements of industrial products and the concept of Life Cycle Design was introduced. The leading concepts of Life Cycle Design are (1) an extended design horizon (systemic) from product design to the design of the product life cycle stages; and (2) a new design “reference” from product design to product “function” design. Within this framework the product has to be designed considering all the stages of the life cycle – production of the materials, the product, its distribution, use and, finally, display. The second criterion of Life Cycle Design is to design the function of the product rather than the physical product itself. In fact, it is in relation to this function (functional unit) that it is possible to assess whether the environmental impact has been reduced and how. The function, a fundamental theme in the historic culture and practice of design, acquires in this context a new meaning and a new vitality. Sustainability Asks for System Innovation In the last decade, we started to acknowledge that the entire production and consumption system would require a radical reorientation. Recently, it has become clear that such interventions must be more radical and must go beyond the re-designing of existing products in order to catalyse a transition towards a sustainable society. Aiming at radical sustainability improvements, higher level of innovation is required. And for higher level of innovation we have to move from product innovation to wider system innovation. From “Functional” to “Satisfaction” Unit To help achieving a wider system innovation, the conceptualisation design process has to move from a product function-based approach (typical of the Life Cycle Design of products) to a satisfactionbased approach. The term satisfaction is used to emphasise the enlargement of the design scope

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from a single product to the system of products and services that together fulfil a given demand of needs and wants. In other terms it is a shift from product design to what is being called ProductService System (PSS) design. Product-Service System Innovation “A Product-Service System (PSS) can be defined as the result of an innovation strategy, shifting the business focus from designing and selling physical products only, to selling a system of products and services which are jointly capable of fulfilling/satisfying specific client demands.”2 Thus PSS introduces a new interpretation of the concept of product, moving from the product as the physical result of an industrial process of production, to a new meaning in which the product of a company (or an alliance of companies) is an integrated whole of mutually dependent products and services, that focus on meeting some specific customer demand (of satisfaction). On the customer’s side, the underlying assumption is that users do not really want a product or service per se, but rather what these products and services enable a user to achieve: the “satisfaction.” On the provider’s side PSS requires the development of new relationships and forms of partnership. New interactions are mandated with the client, and innovative partnerships are needed with other producers/suppliers, public bodies or not for profit organisations. Thus with this approach, the producers or the service providers, extend their interests beyond their usual boundaries, in terms of both product life cycle phases (pre-production, production, distribution, use and end-of-life) and connections with other products and services, which, taken together, will result in an integrated solution for the customer satisfaction. The Design of Sustainable PSS In this framework, innovation has to be seen as a short-term strategic process, which has resulted in new forms of organisation – companies as flexible networks, new relationships between producers and users and innovative forms of co-production of value. In other terms, the uniqueness of their innovation does not lie in the area of technology (process or product), but in the way these more or less existing technologies can be systemised. A systemisation, which relies upon the different stakeholders involved in the value production system, in the innovative partnerships among producer/ suppliers, public bodies or volunteer association and finally the customers, whether other businesses or final consumers. Hence, introducing PSS is the fruit of a “strategic design” activity.3 This has been defined as the capability of promoting new forms of organisation based on new systems of values and able to create new market opportunities and develop an integrated system of products, services and communications, while at the same time, being economically feasible and socially appreciable. In our context the new criteria of quality and the new market opportunities are those coherent with the medium-long term perspective of sustainability. By this we mean a design capability of (a) promoting new forms of partnerships/organisations (new actors roles), based on new sustainable satisfaction-based criteria of value and (b) designing integrated system of products and services dematerialised on a multiple life cycle scale. In synthesis we could say that designing a sustainable PSS means to move from product Life Cycle Design to a strategic design approach to sustainability: a strategic design for sustainability. Sustainable Consumption and Patterns Another critical issue of sustainability that relates directly with design practice is consumption.4 The designer’s role in this matter can be established on two fronts. The first relies upon the designer’s capability of interpreting the context of use, as an antenna of societies trends. The second relates to designers visualisation competencies through which new kinds of consumption can be rendered more attractive, thus contributing to establish a new perception of well being.5

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Design for Sustainability in Emerging Contexts

Historically, a country like Brazil, has built up its own design culture somewhat divorced from the society’s broader necessities, reflecting society’s deep inequity. Since the formal implementation of the design discipline within Brazilian context 40 years ago, there have been intermittent attempts to define a broader design policy, fragmented according to political circumstances. In recent years, however, awareness about the strategic importance of the design discipline seems to have been amplified, through more undergraduate design courses and with efforts to establish postgraduate programmes in design in some institutions. Besides, the National Research Agency also provides incentives to designers to pursue a PhD degree in international design institutions (mainly in Europe and the US), so that a critical mass can be formed with highly skilled design teachers and researches to operate back in local universities and design schools.7 The critical issue is that though design activity has spread in Brazil, it is not corresponded by a critical disciplinary mass derived from design research. Only research activity allows in depth reflection, consolidation and expansion of any knowledge area. Focusing our attention on the Brazilian context, the first step would be establishing the discipline of Design for Sustainability in universities and design schools. At the moment, individual researchers and teachers carry out the theme through isolated research but there is not yet a formal didactic or research discipline that embraces all aspects of sustainability established in any design education institution in that country. There are also a few design centres working mostly with eco-design rather than design for sustainability.8 Those are eventually linked to universities, industries federation or governmental bodies. The picture is thus of a fragmented but potential base, lacking a network able to connect the isolated initiatives around a stronger disciplinary ground. The establishment of this disciplinary ground must combine a contextualised set of values and necessities enabling convergence of the fragmentary local expertise and at the same time take advantage of consolidated experiences and methodologies from the industrialised countries. In this sense, it is worthwhile exploring the hypothesis of a network model as an effective way to strengthen the process for reaching this goal.

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Multilateral Network: A Mature Experience

The DIS research unit at the Politecnico Milano University has been involved in developing an informal educational network of design schools with an experimental approach dealing with innovation through sustainable Product Service System design. It involves six universities from emerging countries: India, China, Brazil, Turkey and South Korea. Its way of networking reflects an explorative approach in which advanced research themes are studied and developed through experimental didactics. In 2002/2003, the building of this expert informal network (then named DECOS) of design high education and research institutes was started, through a didactic experience involving universities from emerging countries, i.e. designing sustainable Product-Service Systems concepts for their campuses. The aim was not only to have the universities/institutes as contexts for which sustainable ideas could be designed, but also to open an exchange of knowledge with those centres, focused on sustainable PSS. That year an educational pilot project was carried out involving the students of the Faculty of Design of the Politecnico di Milano together with the Industrial Design Program of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. In 2003/2004 the following universities joined Politecnico di Milano and Indian Institute of Technology opening the network: the School of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil); the Academy of Art and Design, Tsinghua University, (China); School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, (China); Dept. of Industrial Product Design, Istanbul Technical University, (Turkey). In

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2004 Ewha Womans University from South Korea became a new member. 9 During 2005 a couple of other universities are expected to take part to it.10 Generally speaking the DECOS’ scope is to work on novel research branches by networking with education/ research institutes of industrialised and emerging contexts, in a multi-lateral learning process linked to the curricula. In other terms, DECOS aims at linking newly open-front research issues directly to the didactics, throughout the design of proper courses, and an expert research community to work on it. The educational “curricula” has been re-designed introducing experimental courses “used” in order to explore the research area. This integration is aimed at producing a cross-fertilisation between research issues and didactic projects. If initially it is the research that gives the first input to the educational process, it is the didactics that provides other inputs and feedback to the research. This osmotic exchange creates a continuous flow that contributes to develop and verify the new hypothesis on design roles, methods and tools for sustainability.11 Furthermore, students are asked to design sustainable PSS concepts and ideas for other countries. This creates a multilateral and multicultural learning process because of the exchange and feedback guaranteed by the network. In the first phase teachers and assistants from the mentioned universities collect and send preliminary data. In an intermediate phase, the students develop their projects within Politecnico di Milano. In the third phase their projects are submitted to the international teachers and assistants who criticise and comment on them. In the last phase students then reelaborate their projects according to this input. This mechanism creates a dynamic debate among participants and helps creating a shared knowhow regarding sustainable design. Results so far have been encouraging and have incited us to consider possible further improvements of this experience.

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Evolution Towards a Multi-polar Platform for Exchange and Cross Fertilisation

So far, the structure has been a radial kind of network (Fig. 1), with the actual exercise being developed by the Politecnico di Milano students fed by the experts from the universities of the emerging contexts. However, it is believed that a positive evolution of this network radial model could be a multi-polar network (Fig. 2) in such a way that each participant can act as both provider of background data and evaluation and participant of the design phase. In this case the students from each of the seven or more universities could participate in parallel design exercises focused on sustainability. Figure 1: Current multilateral radial network

We believe, this improved multi-polar network could release a process of “positive design contamination” with each of the participants able to think sustainable solutions for a context different from its own. The idea is that each university would design a sustainable PSS concept for another campus. Innovative thinking can be triggered in many ways and perhaps a student from one university would bring into his/her project elements from his/her context, elements that are new to this diverse context, configuring a process that can bring rich fertilisation for all. A positive consequence of an operation of this sort would be the activation of “South-South” collaborations, through the connection of different emerging contexts. This is a desirable but rarely explored kind of collaboration that can be extremely fruitful due to both similarities (in terms of infrastructure and social demands and aspirations) and differences (in terms of tradition, culture or social practices) to be found among different emerging contexts. In this sense it is worthwhile to search for feasible “mechanisms” to make this new model of network operative. A promising path is that of taking advantage from the existing programmes for

Figure 2: Proposed multilateral multi-polar network

research of the European Commission that are of bi-regional nature. 12

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Conclusions

The proposed model of a multilateral multi-polar network can be a mechanism that contributes for the local disciplinary consolidation of Design for Sustainability in emerging contexts. While promoting a multi lateral kind of collaboration, innovative thinking can emerge, which is an imperative for the research on sustainable solutions. A major challenge to achieve this aim is the search for mechanisms that can make it operative, i.e. funding. Research programmes financed by the European Community can be a starting point. The EU offers programmes with a bi-regional nature that foresee cooperation between Europe and Latin America or between Europe and Asia. These existing programmes can offer a starting point that deserves to be further explored.

Notes 1 UNESCO Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.phpURL_ID=23279&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html 2 UNEP (2002) Free download at: http://www.uneptie.org/pc/sustain/reports/pss/pss-imp-7.pdf 3 UNEP (2002) 4 The UNEP has created in 2000 the unity of Sustainable Consumption. For details: http://www.uneptie.org/pc/sustain/ 5 An interesting example of this approach in the European context is the research EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions), supported by the EU. In this project, design schools have a clear role of observer of innovative sustainable behaviours in society that have a potential to be further developed and up-scaled. The final aim is to amplify these “promising signals” and re-propose them back to society, through a communication strategy. 6 Denis (2000), pp. 203 7 The referred agency is the CNPq Conselho Nacional de Desenvovimento Cientìfico e Tecnològico http://www.cnpq.br/ 8 See Nùcleo de Eco-Design of the Centro Sao Paulo Design and Design and Sustainability Research Centre of Federal University of Paranà, Department of Design, http://www.cspd.com.br/home.asp and http://www.design.ufpr.br/nucleo/ . 9 The programme coordinators in each university are as follows: IIT New Delhi: Prof. Dr Amrit Srinivasan, Prof. G.V. Soumitri, Prof. Parag Anand, USP University, Brazil: Prof. Dr. Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, André Luiz Teixeira dos Santos. Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, China: Prof. Cai Jun; Hong Kong Polytechnic University: Prof. Benny Ding Leong; Istanbul Technical University, Turkey: prof. H. Alpay Er, Ceyda Vatan; Ewha Womans University, South Korea: Prof. Cho Young-sik and Sooyun Ahn. 10 Some examples of the didactic results can be seen at http://pcsiwa12.rett.polimi.it/~rapirete/ 11 Vezzoli, Penin (2004) 12 The referred EU bi-regional research programmes are Asia Links (for Asia) http://europa.eu.int/comm/europeaid/projects/ asia-link/index_en.htm and Alfa Programme (for Latin America) http://europa.eu.int/comm/europeaid/projects/alfa/ information_en.htm

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Vezzoli C. Designing Systemic Innovation for Sustainability. Cumulus Working Papers Tallinn, University of Arts and Design, Helsinki, 2003. Vezzoli C. “A new generation of designers: perspectives for education and training in the field of sustainable design.” Experiences and projects at the Politecnico di Milano University Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 11, number 1, 2003, pp. 1-9. UNEP. Product-Service Systems and Sustainability. Opportunities for sustainable solutions, UNEP-DTIE United Nations Environment Programme-Division of Technology Industry and Economics, Paris, 2002.

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