Some 'doomers' believe that today’s growth-at-all-costs, thermo-industrial, biosphere-killing economy is on its last legs. Those of a bottle-half-full disposition are confident that a crisis has passed and business as usual will soon return. Both groups would surely agree that we have much to learn about the creation value in ways that do not destroy natural and human assets.
Design has been changing to meet this existential challenge – but much too slowly. The mainstream of design is as bewitched as its clients by a high-entropy concept of quality and performance. Most design-business ecology still strives after infinite growth in a world whose carrying capacity is finite, and still delivers outcomes that cause society to waste vast amounts of energy and resources.
What kinds of design would be different, and genuinely leave the world better than we found it? Dott’s journey has been inspired by this simple question. In a variety of contexts, Dott has engaged with communities innovating new kinds of daily life-support systems – from growing food in cities, to caring for people with dementia – that are impactneutral, at best, on their situation. In each of these collaborations, Dott looked for ways to help improve and accelerate the work of local innovators. The keyword here is social innovation, as Dott has always been about groups of people innovating together – not about lone inventors, or super-smart designers,solving problems for the rest of us.
Dott has been a pioneer, but it is not unique. As Professor of Sustainability Ezio Manzini has recounted, ‘Dott-like initiatives’ are proliferating in other countries, too. Manzini himself has established a network, DESIS, in which schools of design and other institutions, in China, Brazil, India, and other countries, are connecting with local companies and non-profit organisations to engage in design for social innovation and sustainability. In Milan itself, for example, Manzini is associated with a new project called ‘Feeding Milan’ that is all about linking and enhancing existing small projects – farmers markets, purchasing groups, community supported agriculture projects.
In France, too, a new kind of organisation called La 27e Region (The 27th Region) is helping regional governments run collaborative projects that enable new partners to experience social innovation in practice. Multidisciplinary teams have conducted three-month residences, in different regions of France, on topics ranging from health centres, or the working lives of elected officials, to ‘augmented citizenship’ and the role of school canteens in tackling childhood obesity.
In Sweden, a masters programme at Blekinge Institute of Technology is researching collaborative services as a vehicle to move communities towards sustainability. As team leader Sophia Horowitz explains: ‘We have spent months learning and applying the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development to municipal, educational, business and community organisations across Europe. Collectively, we are a team of process facilitators, designers, architects and planners with experience working with community, and multi-stakeholder planning and dialogue processes’. See essay Collaborative Services: Communities Innovating Towards Sustainability, 2010.
Further afield, the example of Dott 07 inspired a workshop in southern California in 2009. A Los Angeles organisation called The Planning Center explored, in the words of producer Kati Rubinyi, ‘Practical examples of smallscale innovation that can be models for broader systemic, sustainable solutions to diverse community challenges”. The idea was to find out how design might help existing grassroots projects improve and scale up. Jules Dervaes, for example, a pioneer in urban edible gardens, sought input on ways to enhance his new social networking site. Mud Baron, who develops gardens and nature projects with schools all over the region, used the event to articulate arguments needed to help persuade planners and architects to design active contact with nature – not just LEED-compliant structures – into ‘Green’ schools.
What kinds of design would be different, and genuinely leave the world better than we found it? The journey taken by Dott has been inspired by this simple question
Also in 2009, members of the Dott 07 team also helped to organise Four Days Halifax (in Nova Scotia, Canada) also in 2009. Billed as ‘a time-compressed mini-festival’, its aim was to ‘help the city get its hands muddy in a Green economy’. The producer of Four Days, Rachel Derrah, explained that ‘our starting point was that many elements of a resilient Halifax already exist in embryonic form – but not all of them are visible in our own back yard. The most important preparation work was to identify these local assets: people, mainly, but also projects and places.’
As a response to UK conditions, Dott does not aspire to be a globally applicable model; forms of citizen participation vary from country to country. Look at Egypt today, for example. What connects disparate places and regions is the potential for cross fertilisation, and adaptation of existing models to different situations. Some of these elements are technological solutions. Some are to be found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution. The majority of solutions are social practices – some of them very old ones that have evolved in other societies and in other times.
From this insight flows the proposition that social innovators and service designers do not often need to start from scratch. They should also be hunter-gatherers of models, processes, and ways of living that may already exist. We need to ask: who has cracked a similar question in the past? How might we learn from, adapt, and piggyback on their success? How are we to choose among the myriad potential solutions to be found out there? The concept of enabling solutions is key here – both as a filter, and as an inspiration. The concept provides a vision of where we want to be, which drives strategy.
Most design-business ecology still strives after infinite growth in a world whose carrying capacity is finite, and still delivers outcomes that cause society to waste vast amounts of energy and resources
Policy-makers often complain that it is hard to mobilise people around the sustainability agenda. And they're right: telling people what to do seldom works – especially if you tell them to make marginal changes in consumption that everyone knows will make little difference on their own. Dott is developing a more promising approach: start with existing grassroots activity and then create frameworks and platforms that enable these actions to grow and develop. The world has changed dramatically over the past few years – and Dott is helping designers adapt to these new realities.