Richard Buckminster Fuller and Roberto Burle Marx,
and industrial designers such as Dieter Rams and
Charles and Ray Eames, whose work was so remarkable
it transcended the pressure to compromise) escaped
those constraints, but they were rare exceptions.
All of that has changed with the arrival of relatively
inexpensive but powerful new digital tools. Basic though
most of these technologies are, they have transformed
the practice of design, enabling designers to operate
independently and to pursue their own objectives.
Other fields have been affected by them too, but
seldom to the same degree. As well as managing huge
quantities of complex data, designers can use social
media to raise awareness of their work; find suppliers,
collaborators and fabricators; or clinch funding.
They are also able to raise capital from crowdfunding
platforms, and to secure grants from the non-profits
that support social and humanitarian design, including
the Acumen fund and the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. Individually, each of these changes
would have had a positive impact on design culture.
Collectively, they have proved metamorphic.
Take a particularly ambitious independent design
project, The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch non-profit that
has developed a gigantic floating structure with which
it aims to clear plastic trash from the oceans. It plans to
go live in the Pacific this spring after raising over $30m
in just four years. The Ocean Cleanup has been beset
by criticism from scientists and environmentalists, who
claim its system is flawed, yet its success so far shows
how compelling a persuasively presented independent
design endeavour for an important cause can be.
More and more socially and environmentally
conscious designers are following suit, including those
in parts of the developing world that previously lacked
the resources to forge thriving design cultures. A new
generation of African designers has emerged at the
forefront of Internet of Things technologies in countries
where more people have access to cellular networks
than to clean running water. Portable diagnostic
devices such as the Cardiopad heart monitor, developed
by Arthur Zang in Cameroon, and the Peek Retina
ophthalmoscope, devised by a group of doctors and
designers in Kenya and the UK, are already improving
the quality of healthcare for thousands of people.
In the UK, social scientist Hilary Cottam co-
founded the social design group Participle to conduct
a decade of experiments in developing more effective
solutions for acute problems, like improving the care
of the elderly and helping the long-term unemployed
return to work. Participle formed multidisciplinaryteams led by designers that treated each issue as a design
challenge and applied the design process to analyse it.
Other social designers have done the same, choosing
specialists from different fields as their collaborators.
By opening up design to new perspectives, these
designers are reinvigorating what was once a seemingly
impenetrable white man’s world of specially trained
professionals, by making design more diverse in terms
of gender, culture and skills, as well as geography.
The same technological changes, combined with
growing financial, social and ecological pressures, have
had an equally dramatic effect on design’s corporate
role. As well as its traditional function of translating
technological advances into new or improved products
and services, design is increasingly used as a general
management tool to improve planning and delivery
across businesses, much as Cottam and her co-workers
deployed it at Participle. Design thinking, as this
phenomenon is called, is almost as fuzzy a concept
as design itself, but its underlying principle – that
strategic decisions can benefit from being interrogated
with the openness, thoughtfulness and rigour of the
design process – has proved effective.
Take Nike, which owed its early success in the 1970s
to the resourcefulness with which its co-founders,
Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman, designed shoes that
helped athletes to run faster. Its goals in product design
are much the same today, but its resources – including
motion-capture studios and high-speed cameras
filming the soles of athletes’ feet through transparent
floor plates – are much more sophisticated. Nike, one
of the very few Fortune 100 companies to be led by a
designer – its chairman and CEO, Mark Parker – applies
design thinking throughout the business, from human
resources to supply chains. It has played a critical part
in helping to restructure Nike’s operations to meet
higher ethical and environmental standards. The
ongoing efforts to eliminate waste and consume less
fuel and water, for example, have been planned to cut
costs as well as to reduce the risk of a repetition of the
1990s protests against Nike’s ethics, like those that
still beset Apple and Canada Goose.
Could a fallen 21st-century corporate star like Uber
have avoided its current predicament by adopting as
coherent an approach to design? Uber was designed to
meet a genuine need with huge commercial potential
for an inexpensive, speedily accessible car service.
It expanded aggressively, but failed to anticipate its
impact on drivers and customers, and is now mired in
rows with regulators and law suits, and demonised as
the arch-villain of the gig economy. Would a smart
and sensitive design thinking strategy have helped to
anticipate those problems and encouraged Uber to
refine its business model? Possibly. Will other companies
avoid making the same mistakes when deciding how to
design the driverless cars, robotic nurses, smart cities
and any of the other technologies we expect to become
ubiquitous in the near future? Let’s hope so. ∂
The Brainstorm Design Conference is co-produced by
Wallpaper*, TIME and Fortune magazines,
brainstormdesign.com. Alice Rawsthorn’s next book,
Design as an Attitude (£16, JRP Ringier), is out in MayWould sensitive design
thinking have helped
fallen corporate star Uber
anticipate its problems?
Intelligence
138 ∑