‘The real JOY of design is to deliver fresh perspectives, improved well-being and an intuitive sense of balance with the wider world. The real SPIRIT of design elicits some higher meaning. The real POWER of design is that professionals and laypeople can co-design in amazingly creative ways. The real BEAUTY of design is its potential for secular, pluralistic expression. The real STRENGTH of design is this healthy variance of expression. The real RELEVANCE of design is its ability to be proactive. The real PASSION of design is in its philosophical, ethical and practical debate.’
Alastair Fuad-Luke1
Design is a key agency in materializing, and designing, our lives. For, as many observers have noted, what is already designed exerts a huge influence over the design of our lives, and what comes next. Design converts nature’s capital and man’s (human and financial) capital into ‘man-made’ capital by giving it form, by embedding meaning (by vesting the form with symbolic capital), by defining societal values and, ultimately, by designing our perception of reality. Design contributes to the evolution of individual human capital and defines our collectively held social capital. Design is the medium through which these capitals are transformed into materialized and symbolic languages. For the past 250 years design has endorsed the notion of economic progress by making the newly materialized forms ‘culturally acceptable’, in symbolic, aesthetic and functional terms.2
Today, the vast majority of the world’s nations endorse the universal mantra of capitalism. It has become the default model for economic and material progress. This model is founded on the doctrine of free trade espoused by Adam Smith in his famous treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published in 1776.3 His basic thesis was that trade should not be restricted, that the betterment of the self is achieved by hard work, that this work accrues financial and man-made capital, and that this self-achievement automatically betters everyone in society. His writings were influential and struck a favourable note with a British society undergoing a radical transformation at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, a shift accompanied by massive migration from the countryside to the emerging industrializing cities. Smith’s philosophy and premises still underpin economic theory and practice today. Yet, Smith’s world was very different with a world population of 0.79–0.98 billion, compared with today’s current total of 6.721 billion.4 Nature looked fecund and boundless in the late 18th century, ripe for exploitation, available for capitalizing man’s purpose. Nature could easily support the population growth needed to keep growing the industrial economy. The game plan has not changed. Yet today, the plan looks a little shaky. Nature’s ability to sustain this exploitative onslaught, and sustain humankind’s vision of economic progress, is in serious doubt. Nature is dying. Parts of the global society of humankind are also dying. Ethnic groups and languages are disappearing, and the poor become invisible. Economic disparity between rich and poor has steadily risen since the 1950s and the emergence of the consumer economy,5 and more than a third of the world’s population (over 2 billion people) still live in abject poverty, earning less than US$2 per day.6 This world of inequality is facing unprecedented economic, ecological and sociological crises.
According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Overview conducted by the United Nations, the capacity of the world’s great ecosystems (agricultural, coastal, forest, freshwater and grasslands) to provide certain essential services (ranging from food and fibre production to water quality and quantity, biodiversity and carbon storage) that support life, is declining.7 Coupled with an increase in world population and a rise in global temperature, this is creating the most serious threat to global ecological stability ever known to humankind. Urgent attention is needed to restore the capacity of these ecosystems to keep delivering the services humans demand to sustain the quality of their lives. There is a growing realization that the call for ‘sustainable development’ (SD), which stills sees economic growth as part of developing human progress, has done little to avert recent negative environmental or social trends. SD is now being challenged by a new vision of ‘positive development’, a more holistic approach to restore ecosystem services.8 This demands a transition of societies that is equally as profound as the one experienced in the late 18th century at the emergence of the Industrial Economy, itself a result of earlier transformations in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It demands that we reflect on our current notions of economically endorsed forms of beauty (and their implicit symbolic and exchange values) because these forms actually threaten our lifeworld. This threat is raised by dissenting voices who gently or vigorously contest the dominant (unsustainable) paradigm, reminding those who care to listen that all is not well; that an urgent conversation is needed about our global environments, about unequal distribution of money, food and hope; that the powerful’s vision of capitalist economic progress is flawed; that multiple realities tell ‘divergent’, and sometimes negative stories about ‘progress’; that the consumer end-game is near; that post-peak oil is a reality now; that life as we know it is about to change significantly or, perhaps, irrevocably. These are the voices of the activists –and they are growing globally.
Are there many designers among the activists? There are indeed some that articulate their thoughts and convert them into positive societal and environmental change. But they are few, just at a time when many are needed. Designers are, after all, licensed to imagine, to realize what John Wood calls ‘attainable micro-utopias’, to make the unthinkable possible.9 Design is a motive force in suggesting and realizing new materializations for our world. Design can reconnect the disconnected and make new connections. Design can challenge the underlying, implicit ethics of the explicit forms we create. Design can create new memes (units of cultural transmission that elicit new behaviour). Design can find the best fit between economic viability, ethical and cultural acceptability and ecological truth. Design can seek genuine mutual benefits to humankind and nature. Design can breathe new life into the everyday by reconnecting the conceptual with the natural and the natural with the artificial. Design can ask ‘what now?’ and ‘what next?’. Design can disturb current narratives. Design can rupture the present with counter-narratives. Design can contribute to reformist approaches. It has the ability to catalyse societal transformations. Design is critical imagining. Design generates considered possibilities for a new, ‘beautiful strangeness’ (with new values embedded or implicit). Design can readjust our notion of beauty to embrace a multitude of truths –economic, political, social, ecological, ethical, technical, symbolic, institutional, philosophical and cultural. To rise to this challenge, design must set its own agenda for positive change.
This book charts the territory of the design activist – a person who uses the power of design for the greater good for humankind and nature. A person who is a free agent; a non-aligned social broker and catalyst; a facilitator; an author; a creator; a co-author; a co-creator; and a happener (someone who makes things happen). Most of all, this book is for everyone who believes that design (especially when we design together) is an essential human expression that will help us all to move towards more sustainable futures. This text is also contesting the future of design, because design’s current vision is not telling the ecological or sociological truth, nor is it a truly representative democratic tool for society. So, the design activist also contests who contributes, who designs and who decides ‘what now’ and ‘what next’.
Notes
1 Alastair Fuad-Luke (2006) from the opening review of Positive Alarm, Platform 21, a project of Premsela, the Dutch design foundation, www.platform21.com
2 Findeli, A. (2001) ‘Rethinking design education for the 21st century: Theoretical, methodological and ethical discussion’, Design Issues, vol 17, no 1, Winter, pp5–17.
3 Smith, A. (1776, 2001) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Institute, London, www.adamsmith.org/smith/won-intro.htm, accessed 15 September 2008.
4 Wikipedia (2008) ‘World population’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population, accessed 15 September 2008.
5 On 12 November 2003 the Worldwatch Institute issued a Vital Signs Facts report on the widening of the rich–poor gap, stating that, while the global economy expanded sevenfold since 1950, between 1960 and 1995 the disparity between rich and poor in the 20 richest and 20 poorest nations more than doubled (‘Rich-Poor Gap Widening’, www.worldwatch.org/node/82, accessed 15 September 2008). UK income distribution between 1977 and 2006 shows a long-term trend of the income inequality between the highest and lowest income earners (‘Income Inequality’, www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=332, accessed 15 January 2009).
6 World Development Bank data on absolute poverty.
7 UN (2003, 2005) Millennium Assessment Reports.
8 See, for example, Birkeland, J. (2008) Positive Development: From Vicious Circles to Virtuous Cycles through Built Environment Design, Earthscan, London.
9 Wood, J. (2007) Design for Micro-Utopias: Making the Unthinkable Possible (Design for Social Responsibility), Ashgate, Farnham.