I've realized that I can't stand conferences. To me, conferences are akin to watching television without Tivo, or going to AAA to get a triptik instead of mapping a journey on Google. Conferences are an old workhorse model--a mix of passive consumption and fluorescent lighting--that is at odds with the seeds of inspiration they are supposed to inspire.
Almost without exception, after each conference I attend, I swear I'll never go again.
But we do need them, or something like them. We need to get together face-to-face and talk about challenges, successes, and failures. We need to learn from each other--not through PowerPoints but facial expressions.
I promised that I would never hold a Designers Accord conference (because of the sheer numbers of design conferences, but especially because of the ever-promiscuous green conferences). However, it has become obvious that a significant part of the discussion about incorporating sustainability as a critical lens in design is missing. We spend so much time reworking our professional practice (or at least the rhetoric around it), but another major opportunity lies in shaping the value systems of the next generation of designers. What if the leading thinkers in design education came together to craft a new proposal for the future of the design?
Last week, the Designers Accord invited 100 design educators and activists to a two-day workshop in San Francisco to make an actionable plan for integrating sustainability into undergrad and grad design programs around the world. While I don't know if this is the ultimate post-conference model, I felt there were six takeaways that made it valuable.
Social media is the enemy of time-based productivity. I love Twitter. I hate Twitter. At conferences, Twitter reduces complex ideas to pithy one-liners. The tyranny of the hash tag! We had a Twitter-free event so that we could have an off-the-record conversation. Attendees were more engaged and present; conversations were more authentic. We didn't ban phones or laptops, but no one seemed to use them.
All problems are systems challenges. The prevailing wisdom in systems design is that challenges that are treated separately from their relevant political, financial, cultural systems are unsolvable. To remind ourselves of that (and to abate the inevitable high-five, self-congratulatory tone that can happen at conferences), we had a series of interstitial speakers who roused us into keeping a few key points at the forefront: design education is only as good as it directly plays out in the real world; design work that has a social value cannot exist outside our regular work stream (we need to unapologetically design new business models); we've gotten away with our seeming entitlement to "cheap" for far too long--we need to understand the true price of the things we create; and finally, forgiving modalities like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs rarely if ever promote systemic change (ghettoizing these programs doesn't work--think about it: every big bank that failed over the last 2 years had award-winning CSRs).
Big thinking loves tight parameters. The concept of the Summit was to gather 100 thought-leaders to create a toolkit that design educators all over the world can use to integrate sustainability into their schools and programs. We had pre-Summit meetings to select eight of the most pressing topics to design educators (not surprisingly, most had to do with communication and administration, not curricula). Because we wanted each attendee to contribute to the development of each topic, we structured the Summit as a highly choreographed, iterative series of eight rotating brainstorm sessions, each employing a different "lens." We were able to rapidly orchestrate convergent and divergent thinking, and more importantly, synthesize in real time, so that the content could be ported easily into the toolkit.
Ask for what you want. I regularly speak about collaboration, and almost all of my design practice revolves around employing various protocols to problem-solve with groups in new ways. But personally, I am terrible at asking for help. How eye-opening to realize that corporations, designers, educators, students all want to give of their precious little time to actually role their sleeves up and work together. There is no halo effect from an unpublicized event--every sponsor (including Adobe, Autodesk, Sustainable Minds, KODA) and attendee was there because they wanted to be part of the dialogue. Perhaps relegating partners and sponsors to exhibition spaces and NASCAR-like thank you slides might not be the best use of their brainpower and reach.
Meeting in-person is powerful. Recently, I had a very public exchange with designer David Stairs on Design Observer after he wrote a piece criticizing the Designers Accord, among other initiatives. I invited David to the Summit and he not only attended, he was a vital contributor to the weekend's dialogue. We're all plagued with the ubiquitous email introduction from friends and colleagues, and yes, weak connections often have longer ties. But when it comes to having the permission to ask questions, or express strong points of view, face to face is always best (and lucky for me, David was much less scary in person than he was in writing!).
Action is harder than rhetoric.
Stories about design process are like other people's children--they are
most interesting to those who created them. And yet as designers, we
are storytellers. Our products are as much form as they are narrative,
and our social currency is the case study. But the overarching
narrative of the do-gooder design movement is short-termism. Having a
sense of urgency doesn't mean we are short sighted, but it does mean
that we have to start making not just reflecting. The free toolkit that
will be developed from the Summit will be a (hopefully successful) test
of what moving in this direction can yield.
If you have a design and sustainability story to share, let us know about it! And follow us on Twitter @designersaccord to hear what the Designers Accord community is thinking about.
Valerie Casey is a globally recognized designer and innovator. She works with start-ups, governments, and companies all over the world on challenges ranging from creating new products and services, to transforming organizational processes and behaviors. Valerie is the founder of the Designers Accord, the global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create positive environmental and social impact. Valerie's work has been highlighted in multiple publications, and she has been named a "Guru" of the year by Fortune, a "Hero of the Environment" by Time, and a "Master of Design" by Fast Company. Valerie lectures on design throughout the international community, and is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She holds a master's degree in cultural theory and design from Yale University and a BA from Swarthmore College
"Cocksure: The Psychology of Overconfidence" is the title of Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece in the New Yorker, where he investigates the mental-space of decision-making. Gladwell analyzes financial collapse and war, arguing that beyond the conventional explanations of those predicaments (structural mishap and cognitive deficit), there is a psychological dimension at play. In high-stakes situations, we suffer from a more deeply rooted conundrum: a crisis of overconfidence.
Gladwell's tales of a brazen Bear Sterns' CEO and a feckless British officer deftly illustrate how confidence misapplied can lead to dire situations. However, it is not overconfidence alone that creates a global financial collapse or failed military operation. Gladwell contends that leaders of all stripes and industries, in war and peace, recessions and booms, base their future behavior on what created past successes. Instead of understanding current situations as ones requiring different and new thinking, leaders often fail to adapt.
In many ways design is the ultimate practice of adaptation. Designers modify their environments by creating objects and systems to promote better behaviors and experiences. But are there times when we resist adaptation? In design, as in business, don't clients or partners deliberately select us because of our track records of past successes? Because our portfolios give an indicator of future success, are we really encouraged to drift away from what we know? I would answer yes, and yes.
Designers are confident in greeting new situations with agility. We meet challenges with freshness, optimism, and creativity. I believe that. I say it every day. I am a professional designer.
I was one of what award-sponsor BusinessWeek dubbed the "20 world's top designers," who had the privilege of judging the 1,600+ entries. It was an extremely rewarding experience, and I was engaged and delighted by the caliber of conversations in the judging, and of course in the excellent entries.
In fact, it was such a positive experience that I started to poke around in the archives of IDEA winners to get a richer sense of the history of which now I was a part. I started in 2000. And I found something surprising:
2000 Phantom Desktop and 2009 Karbon
These two winners shared a surprisingly similar look and feel. I wanted to find out if this was an anomaly, so I pulled some more winners.
2000 View-Master Virtual Viewer and 2009 Argus Bean Children's Digital Camera
2000 LabSpec Pro® Spectrophotometer and 2009 HP FIREBIRD
2000 Stanley IntelliSensor Digi Scan and 2009 All Area male body shaver concept
2000 Herman Miller Caper Seating and 2009 Steelcase Cobi Chair
Perhaps the similarity of these highlighted designs suggests a continuum of aesthetics in our field, or a consistent ethos in the creative community. But maybe it's something different--perhaps it also indicates our lack of adaptation.
Consider how the world has radically, unalterably, unyieldingly transformed in the last decade. In the year 2000, we didn't have Google, 9/11, the iPod (or the iPhone!), the war on terror. Wal-Mart was a chain store, not the global monarch of retail. At that time, our most serious financial concerns involved the failure of Pets.com. Enron and AIG were icons of performance.
Fast-forward to 2009: with all of the change in this decade alone, shouldn't design look different?
If designers are truly cultural shape-makers, why are we awarding the same thing we awarded almost ten years ago? Gladwell might suggest that we are suffering from an "illusion of control" where be believe so stridently in our past decisions, that "we overestimate the accuracy of our judgments." It's natural that based on our experiences, we select what we believe to be good. But maybe in this new world order, it's not good enough.
Design is increasingly recognized as a critical factor in business. Designers regularly work with corporate leaders, leading foundations, and governments around the world to solve the most complex problems of our time. We ask industry for higher-order challenges, we are requesting that design students graduate with more nuanced strategic and holistic skills, but still measure our successes with a beauty shot and a 200 word description. We remove context to look at the artifact, instead of understanding the system at work. We evolve competitions by cleaving on new categories of relevance (I've recently been an eco-design judge, a do-gooder judge, a social justice judge), instead of reconceiving the entire platform.
Design is at an inflection point. We are playing a more significant role in industry and policy. Now our challenge is how to describe our value. We need to adapt to our current role in the world, as problem-solvers not stylists, as collaborators not lone inventors. We need to represent and celebrate what design actually does, not the way it used to look.
Saul Bass said, "Design is thinking made visual." What does design thinking look like? More importantly, what does it look like now?
Valerie Casey is a leading thinker and practitioner in the areas of
design and open innovation. She specializes in helping
organizations--from Fortune 100 companies to start-ups--develop their
internal and external networks to address cultural, economic, and
environmental challenges with greater agility. Valerie is the founder
of the Designers Accord, the global coalition of designers, corporate
leaders, and educational institutions focused on creating positive
impact.
Valerie currently leads the digital experience practice at IDEO.
Prior to IDEO, Valerie was Executive Creative Director at frog design,
an Associate Partner at Pentagram Design, and Associate Creative
Director at vivid studios. Her work has been highlighted in multiple
publications, and in 2008, she was named a "Guru You Show Know" by Fortune magazine and a "Master of Design" by Fast Company.
Valerie lectures on design throughout the international community, and
is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She holds a
master's degree in cultural theory and design from Yale University and
a BA from Swarthmore College.
In July 2007, with a call-to-action dubbed the Kyoto Treaty for design, the Designers Accord was founded as a global coalition of designers, educators, and corporate leaders, working together to create positive environmental and social impact.
Since then, the Designers Accord has become one of the fastest moving and most influential organizations within the creative community: It has been adopted by over 170,000 members, representing each design discipline. In 2008, Fast Company wrote that it is "on a path to change the culture of the creative community from bottom to top, and with it, the way everything is made, from toothbrushes to airplanes."
Our creatives from all over the globe--designing everything from toothbrushes to airplanes--are working to integrate the principles of sustainability into all aspects of design: from education, to practice and production, and ultimately consumption. We are catalyzing new thinking by collectively building our intelligence around issues of climate change and social justice, and tackling those challenges with optimism and creativity.
For example, frog design's color changing, lichen-based wall art is used to detect carbon monoxide or other pollutants in the home.
IDEO's hourglass-inspired interface that visually controls electricity usage at home. When the hourglass empties, the electricity that runs through the house turns off automatically.
Adopters of the Designers Accord commit to five guidelines that provide ways to take action. Becoming a member of the Designers Accord provides access to a community of peers that shares methodologies, resources, and experiences around environmental and social issues in design. And that encapsulates the unifying philosophy of the Designers Accord: open source. We advocate inverting the traditional model of competition, and encourage sharing best practices so we can innovate more efficiently and quickly.
Fast Company was a leading adopter of the Designers Accord, and with us, champions the belief that sustainability is good for the triple bottom line. So we're excited to announce that right here on FastCompany.com is where we will be sharing the brightest and boldest game-changing case studies from our community to show how design thinking and knowledge sharing can change the world.
If you have a design and sustainability story to share, let us know about it! And follow us on Twitter @designersaccord to hear what the Designers Accord community is thinking about.
Valerie Casey is a leading thinker and practitioner in the areas of design and open innovation. She specializes in helping organizations--from Fortune 100 companies to start-ups--develop their internal and external networks to address cultural, economic, and environmental challenges with greater agility. Valerie is the founder of the Designers Accord, the global coalition of designers, corporate leaders, and educational institutions focused on creating positive impact.
Valerie currently leads the digital experience practice at IDEO. Prior to IDEO, Valerie was Executive Creative Director at frog design, an Associate Partner at Pentagram Design, and Associate Creative Director at vivid studios. Her work has been highlighted in multiple publications, and in 2008, she was named a "Guru You Show Know" by Fortune magazine and a "Master of Design" by Fast Company. Valerie lectures on design throughout the international community, and is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She holds a master’s degree in cultural theory and design from Yale University and a BA from Swarthmore College.
