I love the question visionary designer Bruce Mau puts to us: if we can design anything, do anything, what should we do?
Over the last 200 years or so we’ve learned how to do just about everything. In the same period we did a lot of damage too. And now there is a growing consensus amongst sensible, effective people that we can, and should, make a bunch of changes to the way we go about things, and the things we go about.
The challenges ahead do seem massive. So how do we catalyze massive change?
Design offers us some hope on this count, by way of providing us a methodology.
Massive change is hard to get your arms around. It’s hard to sort out how one person, or a small group of people, can really make a difference. Developing design methodologies, and the values and ethos taking shape in the design world is giving us a body of knowledge to work from to address the task.
Entrepreneurs, political and spiritual leaders have been innovating for a long time, each in their own way. Innovation seems though to be more a talent than a profession. More a gift than something we can understand. It would appear that the design world is working at making that knowledge explicit. It could help us jump the innovation gap.
When I first encountered this idea of design at WorldBlu LIVE in September 2008, in the shape of Boston-based design firm Continuum, I didn’t really get what was meant by ‘design.’ Then, last summer in Cleveland, at the Business as an Agent of World Benefit Global Forum the whole program worked us through an education on Design. While I worked through my notes to get my head around it for a while I was quite pleased to come across Glimmer by Warren Berger.
Glimmer is a great way in to understanding what is meant by design.
So, if we can design (do) anything, what should we design?
We know we need massive change. It could be quite a gifts-liberating movement if we accept that we can create a different future than the one we seem headed for and get immediately to work.
The exciting possibilities seem endless. We could design new approaches to: schooling; food cultivation and distribution; city design; product design – cars, computers, clothes, energy, buildings; practical faith; intimate investing and localized finance; equal exchange economics; healthy living; meaningful work; and our workplaces, to name the ones that come to the top of my mind.
In Cleveland, IDEO’s Peter Coughlan spoke about designing the interactions people have in organizations in such a way that encourages good things to emerge.
That struck a chord. For a few years at Axiom News we’ve focused our news inquiry on learning about how to build better organizations (I’m looking forward to diving into Roger Martin’s The Design of Business next). We’ve had the opportunity to talk to some amazing people working on some practical new ways of going about things. Among them we’ve covered:
- Social Mission & Social Business
- Democratic Workplaces & Governance
- Strength-based Organizational Development
- Employee Ownership: Both the Ethos and the Structures available
- Social Banking
Taken as a collection of ideas, assets, and movements they very quickly add up to something. We would love to see more of all of these activities. We would love to see more of them configured together.
In the next few entries I’ll unpack some of the dialogue we’ve had with sources and in the newsroom. There are some interesting ideas to consider and some questions we’ve only just begun to wrestle with. Please join us by sharing your stories and thoughts with us as we continue our discovery path.
To a great degree design is about reconfiguring elements that are already working out there. That’s a strengths-based approach all in itself. My hope is that if we play around enough we can come up with some neat new ways to configure organizations so they are better able to engage strengths and catalyze change.
Next: Social Mission Matters
