Design, When Everybody Designs

Big-ego design and post-it design – Big-ego design is left over from the last century’s demiurgic vision, in which design was the act of particularly gifted individuals capable of imprinting their personal stamp on artefacts and environments. Even though this may still mean something in some very specific design fields, this way of thinking and doing become highly dangerous when applied to complex social problems. Therefore, it is important to react against the idea that design in general may be reduced to big-ego design.

Post-it design is a way of seeing the design process that emerges from the positive idea of considering all the social actors, ordinary citizens included, as potential resources for the solution of a given problem: as people with some thing significant to bring to the design process. For sure, the post-it design approach is also motivated by a reaction against big-ego design. The problem is that, starting from this intention of countering big-ego design, post-it design ends up by transforming design experts into administrative actors, with no specific contributions to bring, other than aiding the process with their post-its (and at the end, maybe, with some pleasing visualisations). In other words, from the post-it design perspective the design process is reduced to a polite conversation around the table of some participatory design exercise. In my view, the social conversation on which the co-design process is based is much more than that.

A disabling well-being – Twentieth-century modernity has led us to an idea of well-being as liberation from the weight of everyday activities, where our own skills and capabilities are replaced by a growing series of products and services to be purchased on the market or received from the state. In this way, health care always requires not only good doctors but also more and more medicine. Our children’s education requires not only school and good teachers but also gyms, televisions, and more and more electronic gadgetry. The upkeep of our things is replaced by throwaway objects, the production of public space by visits to shopping malls or theme parks. Our ability to entertain ourselves and others is swept away by the wave of reality shows. All this, so it is said, turns the wheels of the economy and produces wealth – for everybody.

Quite apart from its evident environmental costs, this way of thinking and doing things entails an enormous social cost and, ultimately, an economic cost also: since its underlying reference is always to a well-being based on the reduction of any kind of obligation in terms of time, energy, attention, and ability, it tends to propagate the idea of passive and solitary, not to say lazy and incapable, subjects. Thus it encourages, and actually produces, social figures who are indeed like this. Furthermore, people who are induced to seek wellbeing in the passive, individual satisfaction of their own needs and desires are needy in all respects, but everything they need must be purchased, and to purchase it they need more money. Thus they must work more. The end result is a vicious circle by which, in the quest for a well-being based on the idea of reducing our obligation to do things ourselves (in terms of everyday life), we end up having to work more and more.

Projects and experiments – In a rapidly and profoundly changing world, all projects, including all life projects, are to varying extents experimental projects. This means that given certain motivations and after certain hypotheses, we cannot know beforehand what the result will be. In effect, an awareness on the part of its promoter of what the result will be. In effect, an awareness on the part of its promoter of the possibility of not achieving the expected results is the first and fundamental distinguishing characteristic of an experimental project. Obviously, all projects, like all human activities, may fail. In this case, however, failure is openly contemplated as a possible outcome of the project itself. This has two implications. The first concerns the aim and nature of the project: it is necessary that in all cases, even if the outcome is negative, it will not result in catastrophe. Following this guideline is known as adopting an error-friendly approach. The second implication is that it is necessary to develop the design process in such a way that it really is possible to make good use of the experience. This means that the projects must be organised as experiments. This calls for ‘laboratories’ in which these can take place under the best possible conditions. The creation of such laboratories is one of the first moves to make in infrastructuring an environment, when we intend to make it more favourable and productive for social innovation.