Ezio Manzini, the Milan-based advocate of design and sustainability, recently visited Australia to speak at the Alfred Deakin Eco-Innovation Lectures about the projects designers should be turning their attention to for the future – socially innovative projects including cooperative childcare models and communal home based restaurants. Here, Ewan McEoin looks at the growing role for designers beyond the object.

More than 30 years ago, during an interview with Charles Leadbeater for the Eames’ film series Design Q&A, Charles Eames, the American multidisciplinary designer was asked, ‘What are the boundaries of design?’. Eames replied, ‘What are the boundaries of problems?’*

On a recent visit to Melbourne, Milanese academic and prolific author on design and sustainability, Ezio Manzini, offered a range of examples he believes typify the kind of projects designers should be turning their attention to today, as both a social imperative and an intelligent business decision. Some of the projects put forward by Manzini include the development of networks and frameworks for urban farmers markets, share systems for household appliances, cooperative childcare models, and communal home based restaurants.

In Australia as part of the Alfred Deakin Eco-Innovation Lectures, curated by Professor Chris Ryan at VEIL, Manzini’s lecture and workshop responded to the theme ‘Climate and Innovation – Embracing the Low Carbon Economy Now’. Having traversed a lifelong investigation of design and sustainability – from green products to product service systems – Ezio Manzini believes that it is design for social innovation that is particularly suited to deliver the new social resources for a sustainable society.

As designers beaver away, applying their many skills to an ever expanding catalogue of products and places – from the necessary to the absurd – it’s easy for us all to get preoccupied with the never-ending exploration of the next great product idea, the next device, system, space or interface. Design responds and reacts in a uniquely servile guise to the needs, wants and desires of the market – yet by nature it remains flexible, adaptable and above all constantly reconfigurable for new circumstances and conditions. How this capability is enacted for the future is really up to designers and who they choose to work for, and what they choose to design.

The time has come for more designers to be encouraged to redirect their skills to social innovation that responds to the shifting strata of business and community, addressing social needs and the replacement of old systems that no longer work. Unlike the traditional design development process, which is only responsive to either a commission or a market gap, social innovations are not activated by consumer demand, but by an active decision on the part of a ‘social entrepreneur’ to prototype a new way of being and doing.

Focusing design thinking and skill towards social innovation projects that may not have a tangible physical product outcome is a shift many designers are starting to make – both philosophically and literally. Placed somewhere between the not-for-profit, government and for-profit sectors, social innovation is perhaps the new paradigm that deep down we knew we really wanted. The situation remains that even with better products, places, and systems, many of the most compelling issues facing our communities and broader society cannot be addressed – because we are not applying our most creative minds to them.

While Manzini concludes that it is not explicitly necessary for designers to participate for the social innovation process to occur, it is designers who are perfectly resourced to be in the vanguard of the social entrepreneurs. As part of ADU’s exploration of creative entrepreneurship, we can see the challenge this puts forward to entrepreneurial Australian designers well equipped with the tools for searching out problems or opportunities, and implementing and testing the solutions to address them.

With healthcare and education set to be the boom industries of the next generations, designers who can shift beyond the traditional physicality of the end-product and move to a world of design that enables socially responsible systems and networks are well placed. Inevitably we are realising that neither government nor business is going to deliver the world we all want to live in, so we need a good crop of social innovators to make it happen.

Ezio Manzini’s four steps for social innovation:

1. Create the brief (understand and frame)
A way of ‘stopping before you start’. This step asks designers to focus on the problem from the perspective of those that experience it. What is the root cause underlying the need, and what outcomes do people themselves want to achieve?

2. Design development (generate solutions)
Innovative and divergent thinking is the currency of social innovation. Many techniques for design exist – but Manzini focuses on user-centred co-creation – working closely with the end users in a cycle of design development that is facilitated and not imposed by designers.

3. Prototyping (develop and test)
As with the world of product design – social innovation requires small-scale, rapid prototyping and experimentation, this part of the social innovation process requires a clear focus on social outcomes.

4. Mass Production (Scale up)
Through an open source system or a collaborative network – creating the structures and support to facilitate the diffusion and dissemination of a successful innovation to a point where it can effect significant social change.

By Ewan McEoin.

Some Rights Reserved. View ADU Creative Commons license here.

Watch part 1 and 2 of the video recording of the Deakins 09 lecture by Ezio Manzini here.

Further Links:

Ezio Manzini, Alfred Deakin Eco-Innovation Lecture 2009 (audio available, video available soon)
http://www.climateandinnovation.com.au/program-09/social-innovation-and-sustainable-living-global-perspectives

Sustainable Everyday (Ezio Manzini’s international website)
www.sustainable-everyday.net

DESIS – Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (International)
www.desis-network.org

Geoff Mulgan:Post-crash, investing in a better world
Geoff Mulgan is the Director of the Young Foundation –  a centre for social innovation, social enterprise and public policy that pioneers ideas in fields such as aging, education and poverty.
www.ted.com/talks/geoff_mulgan_post_crash_investing_in_a_better_world_1.html

Social Innovation Camp (International)
www.sicamp.org

Participle (Leading UK social innovation practice)
www.participle.net

Centre for Social Innovation (NZ)
www.nzcsi.org

Centre for Social Innovation (Canada)
www.socialinnovation.ca

Centre for Social Impact, University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia)
www.csi.edu.au

*Interview by Charles Leadbeater with Charles Eames documented in “Design Q&A (1972, 5 min.)”, The Films of Charles and Ray Eames – Volume 4. Los Angeles, California: Image Entertainment, 2000.

Comments (1)