Social shapeshifting: fat suits, blind cows and headteachers for the day
Matthew Taylor and I have been committing the RSA to the idea that the value of design to social progress is about resourcefulness. Here’s how the argument goes: As citizens, we need to be more resourceful; more engaged, self-reliant and collective in our striving, more able to do for ourselves what we might previously have paid or waited for someone else to do. Designers, being highly resourceful people – ready to improvise and prototype, brave in the face of disorder and complexity, practised manipulators of part and whole, cheerful mediators between user and product or service – can help other people to be more resourceful by sharing some of their tools.
This argument of course begs a great How? which is the substance of the RSA Design & Society programme. It also explains why this blog is becoming a bit of a parade of such tools: examplars of designers and architects handing over the “how-to” – see posts on Cameron Sinclair, Pascal Anson, et al.
Here’s a nice example from Uscreates, e.k.a. Mary Rose Cook and Zoe Stanton, thoughtful scions of Goldsmiths and the NESTA Creative Pioneer programme. They keep a little blog called Comfort Zones and encourage all comers to upload “briefs”. A brief is a commitment to challenge oneself by doing things that one usually would not, in the name of understanding the motivations for behaviour change. The example on top is religiously sticking to the Recommended Dietary Allowance to understand the gap between common habits and Health Department counsel. Of course UsCreate didn’t invent the displacement theory of learning by inhabiting the environment and consciousness of someone else – you can understand obesity by wearing a fat suit, eat in the pitch dark at restaurants run by blind people and be headteacher for the day if you want.
But these designers made the rationale so simple – “to get an understanding of what it is like to live like some of the people and communities we design for” – that it has the effect of making it look easy, useful and fun. More than professionally expedient for a designer, more than a research methodology applied by wonks, Comfort Zones needs a few more briefs (anyone?) but has the makings of a practical tool for the social shapeshifting by which we could all second-guess ourselves and see how things might be different.
Design: thrill-seeking or slow-burning?
I had been wondering recently what you could exchange design for in a “time-bank” system of skills bartering. A conversation with Deborah Dawton of the Design Business Association at a dinner on Tuesday to mark the 20th Anniversary of Central St Martins put the question in vivid relief. We agreed on one obvious problem: you probably need your plumbing fixed more urgently than your plumber needs a logo. Deborah speculated on what she could offer the roofing contractor in exchange for restoring her shelter from the elements. Some storytelling perhaps; a visualisation of his narrative? A tool that will take two years to prototype, test and produce? I wobbled for a moment. Can it be that our need for design is not immediate, practical and universal? Compared to plumbing, I guess not. And yet, when you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you want to put design only one level up from the physiological. Maybe the crux of this is speed. Is our need for design in fact strategic rather than practical, distributed rather than universal, and above all, not immediate but slow. Many have said so, especially Ezio Manzini, and I’m mostly with them except that I think this limits our ambitions for bold improvisation and lacks the thrill of the practical, immediate and universal gauntlet. I throw it down – examples, anyone?
Culture and the spirit of community erection
Knights of the Realm have jousted in my mind on the subject of manufacturing this week. At the ERA Foundation lecture on Wednesay Sir Alan Rudge gave a rousing speech about the renaissance of a UK productive industry. “Britain has been deluded in believing that it leads the way into a post-industrial society”, he said. “The illusion that financial services can compensate for the massive imbalance of trade created by our decline in manufacturing has been removed by the collapse of the global financial system”. Removed. I like that. Finally, and with feeling: “An industrial renaissance is achievable”.
My wise and thoughtful interlocutors at lunch, Millie Banerjee of Ofcom and David Bott of the Technology Strategy Board, bemoaned the cultural prejudices against science – and by extension, engineering and industrial manufacturing technology – that deter young people from considering science as an academic option and career. Perception has it that there’s less freedom in science than in the arts and humanities; less metaphorical expansiveness; less sociability.
Don’t these alleged perceptions make us all sound shallow and merely discursive? I personally confess to nailing it, so easily persuaded as a young teenager by my mother’s declaration that I was, like her, an “arts person”. Although spurred by a keen crush on my chemistry teacher I had recently scored 95% in the exam, I found this idea that I was an “arts person” instantly alluring. Perhaps it was the notion of being any kind of a “person”; perhaps it doesn’t occur to scientists to profile themselves in this way. Anyway that was the end of my science education, apart from a biology O-level that, being essentially narrative, doesn’t seem to count.
I asked them if they agreed that the diminishment in our general capacity to make or repair contributed to this cultural prejudice. In our predilection to consume, the less we make; the less we can or want to make. They agreed pretty wholeheartedly. Furthermore I wonder if science simply offers less to consume; fewer mental or material objects ready-made, in a language we understand.
But all the same I left with quite strong hope that culture could change, and inclined to believe Sir Alan, given the mess we’re in. But the following morning Sir John Sorrell launched the London Design Festival 2009 to the press with the thought that creativity is the strength to which Britain must play, in the unequivocal absence of financial services or manufacturing. Gonners, apparently, at least for the forseeable future.
Ben Evans introduced the Festival programme as featuring “a different kind of project this year; perhaps less about money and more about the quality of ideas and thought”. Woops. Was’t not ever thus? Fortunately Henrietta Thompson quickly distracted us with the glorious High Wycombe tradition of the commemorative “chair arch” which is to be recreated as a Wallpaper* project by a mystery European designer in South Kensington in September. Churlish and un-festive of me perhaps to doubt that the post-modern version will bear much trace if the original’s spirit of community erection.
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