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President's Design Award '08 Jury Panel
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Ninart Lui
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Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Arnold Wasserman
For example, in 1714, the British Parliament offered a money prize to anybody that could solve the urgent problem of accurately finding the longitude at sea. Sir Isaac Newton, then president of the Royal Society and world-acknowledged genius of science and mathematics, said that a solution would have to be based on celestial navigation. Solutions based on time-keeping would not work because it was theoretically impossible to build a watch that would keep exact enough time. John Harrison, a modest clockmaker, after 20 years of laborious trail and error making and testing successive prototypes, produced a marine chronometer that kept time with the precision Sir Isaac Newton deemed impossible. Harrison’s innovation in navigation made possible the successful voyages that gave rise to the British Empire.
Sir Isaac Newton is not dead. He pops up in every designer’s career with dependable regularity.
However expert one is, one must always approach each new problem with what Zen philosophers call “Beginner’s Mind.”
TAXI >>Having been named one of “20 Masters of Design” by Fast Company magazine and being one of the pioneers in the practice of user-centered, multidisciplinary product development as a competitive business strategy, how do you envision this entire regime to evolve within the next generation of fully Internet-savvy users?
Arnold Wasserman>>I want to answer this question by talking about how designers think and how we need to think about design now.
What most people understand as ‘design’ has to do with familiar material objects - from Arne Jacobson chairs to iPhones, from H&M fashion to the Swatch Smart Car, from Frank Gehry museums to sustainable green communities. Design today is evolving along new paths and at an accelerating pace, blurring the traditional boundaries of design and compounding the ambiguity between ‘design as product’ - physical, tangible stuff - and ‘design as process’ - a way of thinking, a set of cognitive skills, methods, tools and techniques having intrinsic value in their own right. Those of us who were trained in design schools and who work every day in a design studio - industrial designers, architects, communications designers, digital media designers - know tacitly what design thinking is. We do it every day (although it must be said that few designers are self-reflective about the process itself or know the epistemology of the field.) What we don’t realize is how alien our way of thinking is to non-designers and how powerful it can be as a cognitive methodology applicable to fields far beyond the traditional scope of design, such as health care, educational transformation and sustainable development — and at larger scales of strategic planning, organizational transformation and public policy.
In its simplest form, design thinking is a set of practices for gaining insight about people and their needs, building strategic foresight, discovering new opportunities, generating creative possibilities, inventing novel solutions of value and delivering these into the world as innovations adopted at scale. In application, design thinking makes use of a broad repertoire of methods, tools and techniques - expressed most often in an iterative, spiral development process model.
Three tenets of design thinking guide my own practice. The first is that designers should apply design thinking to improve life widely beyond the traditional boundaries of design. The second is that everybody can learn design thinking and that designers should disseminate design thinking by collaborating, not only with practitioners from other disciplines but with non-designers - the practice known as ‘co-design’. Finally, design thinking should be embedded in K-12 curricula both as a subject domain in its own right and as a pedagogical structure for teaching academic subject matter.
As to internet-savvy users, the emergence of a “Digital Native” culture shifts power from producers to users in ways that challenge what it means “to design.” The shift is from a "Create-and-producer-push" model of design to a "Co-create-and-user-pull" model of design, as exemplified by the explosion of user-generated content in Web 2.0 sites -- games, 3-D virtual worlds, blogs, vlogs and social networks. We are sitting in the middle of a design transformation wherein the designer delivers not the finished product, but the platform, algorithms, objects, scripts and tools for users to create the content themselves. The customer as co-designer is a new and unprecedented design genre that is affecting how all design -- of material as well as virtual artifacts -- will be conceived, executed and experienced from now on.
TAXI >>You once talked about how your favorite piece of design was your 1956 Indian Apache 650cc. flat track racing bike, not because it was a fungible commodity, but because it was a singular and difficult personality with which you developed an emotional bond. With products now designed for replacement and upgrading rather than maintenance and upkeep, how has social networking and blogs replaced this void in terms of emotional connection between man to man, or man to machine?
Arnold Wasserman>>In my youth I owned motorcycles, the last of which was a 1956 Indian Apache 650 cc. flat track racing bike. It violated all of today’s rules of “good design.” It was unpredictable, unreliable, anti-ergonomic and user-hostile. A high center of gravity made it very prone to tipping over when it was cornering. A very high compression ratio meant that on cold mornings the kick-starter would kick back in an attempt to tear off my foot. The bike was designed to go very fast in a straight line on a race track, but I insisted on using it as an every day street bike. I insisted; the bike resisted.
I loved how that bike looked: a pure piece of engineering construction; no concession to contrived aesthetics; no aerodynamic windscreen, fairings or cowlings,
This bike was not a fungible commodity. It was a singular and difficult personality with which I had, apparently, an emotional bond. I loved its spirit, individuality and primal beauty, the throaty rattle of the engine and its smell of gas, oil and rubber.
The gas tank was small and it would only run on white gas, which was hard to find. So I had to plan every trip and map every gas source for several hundred miles around to make sure I wouldn’t run out.
To keep it running, I had to spend every weekend working on the bike—changing the carburetor slides whenever the barometric pressure changed; unpacking and repacking the clutch assembly; adjusting and replacing cables; lubricating, tightening; adjusting the chain drive.
As I learned years later reading Robert Pirsig’s philosophical treatise Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this routine was a Zen meditative practice, a communion of human and machine, a journey on the universal and timeless path of Quality. As Pirsig wrote: “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be ‘out there’ and the person that appears to be ‘in here’ are not two separate things. They grow towards quality or fall away from Quality together.”
When I no longer had the time to keep the bike in running condition, I sold it. When I did, I gave up a meditative practice and thereby “fell away from Quality” in some important way. I never had that kind of existential engagement with a product since.
By making products ever more technologically sophisticated, reliable and user-obsequious, we deny ourselves the experience of adjusting, maintaining, improvising and tinkering with things. It could be that part of the attraction of digital games, virtual worlds, blogs, vlogs, music lists and social networks is that they afford the opportunity to tinker – to engage with things in ways denied us by physical objects that work pretty much perfectly pretty much all the time and are no longer intended to be maintained and repaired but discarded and replaced.
TAXI >>What do you see as the biggest challenge facing developing nations when it comes to implementing sustainable design while facing problems with poverty, hunger and lack of education?
Arnold Wasserman>>This is a BIG question that does not submit to a simple answer. The best I can do is suggest that everybody concerned with this subject become literate about the debate going on between the two public intellectuals that represent opposing poles of thought on the matter: William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs.
Easterly wrote the much lauded (and criticized) book, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), and most recently, Reinventing Foreign Aid. His view of the failure of aid is summed up:
“Poverty never has been ended and never will be ended by foreign experts or for¬eign aid. Poverty will end as it has ended everywhere else, by home grown political, economic, and social reformers and entrepreneurs that unleash the power of de¬mocracy and free markets.” - William Easterly, New York Review of Books, v54 n1, 2007
Easterly marshals extensive data to show that most aid ends up supporting corrupt, autocratic regimes that further repress their desperate populations.
In The White Man's Burden (The title referring to the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling,) Easterly elaborates on his views about the meaning of foreign aid. Released in the wake of Live8, the book is very critical of people like Bob Geldoff and Bono ("The white band's burden") and especially of fellow economist Jeffrey Sachs and his bestselling book The End of Poverty. Easterly suspects that such messianic do-good missions are ultimately modern reincarnations of the infamous, paternalistic colonial conceit of yore. He distinguishes two types of foreign aid donors: "Planners", who believe in imposing top-down big plans on poor countries, and "Searchers", who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian while Searchers are more realistic as they focus – following Karl Popper- on piecemeal interventions. Searchers, according to Easterly, have a much better chance to succeed.
In The End of Poverty, economist Jeffrey Sachs calls for a ‘big push’ that will finally lift millions out of poverty. The ‘big push’ involves substantial increases in aid to developing countries and the cancellation of their foreign debt.
Sachs responded to Easterly's arguments, leading to an ongoing debate. Sachs accused Easterly of excessive pessimism, overestimating costs, and overlooking past successes. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has praised Easterly for analysis of the problems of foreign aid, but criticized his sweeping debarment of all plans, lacking the due distinctions between different types of problems, and not giving the aid institutions credit for understanding the points he's making.
Is Easterly right? Is Sachs right? Are both right? Who, in conscience, can criticize giving food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education to those in need? At the same time, who in conscience can deny that much well intentioned aid sent from developed nations to poor ones never reaches its intended recipients, but goes to line the pockets of corrupt, autocratic regimes?
I do intend to agree with Easterly assertion that “Poverty never has been ended and never will be ended by foreign experts or for¬eign aid. Poverty will end as it has ended everywhere else, by home grown political, economic, and social reformers and entrepreneurs that unleash the power of de¬mocracy and free markets.”
Except that I do not share Easterly’s faith in unregulated free markets to reliably deliver equity of opportunity to the society at large along with economic benefit to the capital investment class.
We in the so-called developed nations have to think about these questions – a lot -- and confront them together with our counterparts in developing nations. At the same time, we have to reframe how we view developing nations. We can no longer view them as “the other.” We must shift from the frame of Them –vs- Us to one of They Are Us.
TAXI >>Your company uses “The Learning Journey” to allow employees to express their thoughts and ideas outside of a work context. What exactly does this entail, and is it more effective if implemented at a younger age?
Arnold Wasserman>>Age is of no consideration. Participants in our learning journeys have ranged from early secondary school students to retired elders.
Most of our clients are established, successful organizations that are looking for their next curve of development in a rapidly changing competitive environment. They come to us looking for ways to energize creativity leading to game-changing innovation. A truism of success is that as an organization gets better at what it is already doing, it gets worse at perceiving new and emerging patterns that lie outside its success model. The learning journey is one tool we use to shake people out of their comfort zone – immersing them in the worlds of other people creating innovation not only in the client’s own field but, in particular, in unfamiliar industries. Changing context forces people to perceive themselves in their own situation differently.
We have taken executives from a major computer maker to see how Volvo and BMW develop products and market their brands. We took executives from a major luxury goods producer on journeys into the industries of hospitality, experience creation, banking, technology solutions and travel. We took country presidents of a major international clothing producer into the worlds of transport, healthcare, media and infocommunications.
A learning journey is usually a prelude to an ideation workshop (we call it a “Charrette”). We have participants develop innovation concepts not in their own field but in an unfamiliar industry. For example, we have had both senior Malaysian bankers and large groups of Singapore school teachers develop user-centered concepts to improve elder health care services -- with inspiring results! Through these experiences, we guide participants into the real learning journey, which is to rediscover their own capacity to create innovation and to embed that capacity as a core competency in their own organizations.
TAXI >>With the explosion of the internet and social media, the world has become virtually barrier-less yet at the same time, more fragmented in terms of ideology, culture and language. How would the next generation of designers best use this to their advantage?
Arnold Wasserman>>Some experts worry that, along with the undeniable benefits of information technology, computer-mediated communication and social networks, we now see the emergence of problematic social and psychological effects. “Digital Natives”, they suggest, have a different cognitive repertoire. They incessantly shift back and forth across multiple modes of input/output – richly hyperlinking, mashing-up and remixing. But they have little patience for drilling down into anything in depth. They are very smart and mentally quick. But they have no knowledge of history or world literature, no interest in ideas in context, and their expository writing ability in their native language often borders on the semi-literate.
One of the most troubling effects has been the commercial application of data mining and collaborative filtering to aim ever more narrowly targeted offerings of information, goods and services at segmented “netizens.” The result is that what I see and hear online is not the vast world but a mirror image of my own circumscribed interests and those I share with my specialized niche tribe. The Web extended our reach broadly outward, but its Intense and skillful commercialization may be turning our attention narrowly inward.
If the question is how can the next generation of designers best help deploy social technologies to enrich and enlarge life experience rather than to narrow and specialize it, first, designers must become fully literate and active contributors to the discourse on the social, cultural, economic and political effects of computer- mediated communication and social technologies. This discourse is dominated by social scientists and computer scientists. Designers are largely absent from it.
The presence of a design voice in this conversation is all the more urgent if you believe visionary inventor Ray Kurzweil’s prognosis for exponential technological shift into the foreseeable future. He forecasts that the 21st Century will see a thousand times greater technological change than the 20th Century. That translates roughly to eighty times the advancement of the last century taking place in the next ten years. If he is correct, even within a 50% margin of error, the Internet is becoming a global brain, its users are entering into a new era in the evolution of our species, and fretting over the cognitive style of netizens is a waste of time because humans will never be what they once were:
TAXI >>Can you please tell us a bit more about the main components that make up Deep Design, and why it is essential for designers to quickly move towards this particular regime?
Arnold Wasserman>>We are at the inflection point of the Next Industrial Revolution, in which Deep Design will play a crucial role. Deep Design delivers the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental value. All the old rules for creating wealth by converting extracted materials into goods, services and environments through application of fossil energy are obsolete. Green is the new gold. This is not about corporate social responsibility, but about a massive shift in the technological and institutional organization of economic success. General public awareness has turned the corner; business leaders are catching on; supportive public policy will follow.
The Next Industrial Revolution will give rise to a new economic regime that levels the inequities between haves and have-nots by combining the creation of wealth with social, environmental and economic sustainability, giving rise to myriad opportunities for new industries, new technologies, new professions and new jobs.
Much of life today is mediated by material culture and design innovation plays an ever-greater role in defining that culture. The job of Deep Designers is to figure out how to apply design innovation to:
1) Economic, Social & Environmental sustainability
2) Green design of everything
3) Natural Capitalism
4) Globalization and social, economic and environmental equity
5) Poverty, hunger and disease, especially in emerging nations
6) New smart materials
7) Design in education -- both for developing professional practitioners and as a cognitive methodology to be learned by all
8) The scaling up of design thinking/design process to address strategic private sector and public sector problems
9) The adoption of design-driven, human-centered innovation -- as embedded practice, not just as a promotional slogan
10) The shift from a "Create-and-producer-push" model of design to a "Co-create-and-user-pull" model of design, as exemplified by the explosion of user-generated content in Web 2.0 sites -- games, 3-D virtual worlds, blogs, vlogs and social networks. We are sitting in the middle of a design transformation wherein the designer delivers not the finished product, but the platform, objects, scripts and tools for users to create the content themselves. The customer as co-designer is a new and unprecedented design genre that is affecting how all design -- of material as well as virtual artifacts -- will be conceived, executed and experienced from now on.
11) How all the above will be incorporated through “Deep Design” into the “Next Industrial Revolution.”
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Arnold Wasserman>> The story is told of the Zen apprentice who asks his master, “Master, what is the essence of Zen?”
“ATTENTION!” replies the master.
“But master, is there nothing else?” asks the apprentice.
“Attention, attention, attention!” replies the master.
Practicing attention as a state of mind is preconditional for everything else we want to achieve in design and innovation: seeing things clearly as they are; active listening without judging or accepting or rejecting; empathy with others; being present; seeing beauty; mastering the practices of craft; understanding consequences; seeing the interconnectedness of things; understanding things in context; letting go of belief systems; being humble; taking responsibility for our acts and their effects on others; understanding that in a world of extreme material prosperity it is not acceptable that large numbers of people live in extreme poverty, hunger and disease; and approaching everything in life with “beginner’s mind.”
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Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Paul MacKay
Education about reducing output and consumption and waste is vital. Digital technology allows us not merely to learn but to do something with our knowledge: we can take action.
Increasingly, the online experience will help us go greener, faster. We know people are willing to act individually. They want to play their part, whether through a simple everyday undertaking like re-cycling or a making a life long commitment to an eco lifestyle.
Going on-line plugs the individual into the world collective to find information, make contacts, contribute to the debate, share tools for action and give or receive support. It amplifies what is the truly global issue of our times.
TAXI >>Imagination Group prides itself for being a united, one-stop shop for its clients, with satellite offices located in Europe, North America and Asia. What are some of the difficulties faced in bridging such diverse cultures and markets and what are some of the more inventive solutions that have been brought up?
Paul MacKay>>The differences between cultures are what makes working at Imagination fascinating and challenging: fascinating in that we encounter the richness of other people’s lives and challenging because there are issues to overcome.
One of the most obvious is understanding how business is conducted day to day. We take so much for granted when working with people from a similar culture.
It is a fact that etiquette tends to set the tone in Asia and the Far East; I would say that developing relationships with clients based there relies on being aware of subtleties to a far greater degree than in the West.
That said, human nature is universal and you learn to trust your instincts.
We ensure our offices are closely attuned to their respective cultures by recruiting a range of people from that region. We regard each office as a lens on trends and developments which we can feed back to clients globally through our network.
One way to bridge diverse cultures is to ensure the spirit of Imagination is expressed consistently. We encourage people to re-locate from our global HQ in London to live and work in our main hubs, long term.
They take a bit of the magic with them, acting as internal Imagination ambassadors, if you like.
For major projects supporting global clients, we’re more than happy to bring the right people together, because there’s nothing like getting everyone around the same table in the same room in the same country. That’s when the ideas flow.
We also tend to talk a lot via iChat. And, inevitably, email plays a big part in keeping everyone abreast of what’s happening, particularly when you’re working across time zones.
TAXI >>What do you feel is most lacking in terms of design education and the integration of design business thinking into small and medium enterprises in developing economies, and how can governments work to address this?
Paul MacKay>>It’s regrettable, but I think few small and medium enterprises appreciate the value of design and communication as a business tool. Design is multi-faceted - for example, good product design improves quality, enhances functionality and can eliminate costs; communication, in terms of marketing and advertising, creates brand awareness and so drives sales.
I believe governments could help in two ways. One is to make design resources available to private enterprise, either through consultancy schemes or grants for specific ad hoc projects.
Secondly, consider how the scope of design education can be widened through its introduction to the national curriculum. We can harness the growing sophistication of today’s younger generation and their desire for consumer electronics and fashion and turn it into a passion for design of all kinds.
I believe Singapore provides an inspirational example of government getting this right. It’s great to see the Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts, working with its agency DesignSingapore, doing so much to promote design education.
TAXI >>One of the main reasons why Imagination Group expanded its reach in Asia was spurred on by the needs of existing European and American clients in the region, as well as help companies from the region present themselves in Europe and North America. What are some of the cultural differences encountered in this exchange and what do you feel can both sides of the divide best learn from each other?
Paul MacKay>>As we know, there are many cultural differences between Asia and Europe or North America. One that strikes me is the relationship between the individual and the mass.
I sense people in the East are a little less inclined to individuality than in the West. It may be the sheer volume of population, which tends to be concentrated in urban environments, but I find people are happy to be regarded as part of the masses.
Western consumerism is all about giving the individual the greatest possible choice. Self assertion and the exercise of choice is prized as an expression of individuality.
And so targeting the individual and talking to them in the most appropriate way is the focus of marketing communication in the West. In fact, we rate ourselves on how effective we are at getting the message to hit home with the individual.
In general, the fact there are cultural differences means we can learn about each other. And the more we know, the more we understand and the better we can communicate.
That said, some values are universal. For example, the notion of family and family values is absolute. No matter where you go or who you talk to, the family is all important.
TAXI >>Working with such an eclectic bunch of creative individuals, what are some of the processes Imagination Group undertakes to not lose focus of the bigger picture on projects?
Paul MacKay>>Pleasingly, given the business we work in, we believe the key to effective project management is communication towards close collaboration. We talk to each other, we talk to clients, we get clients to talk to each other and so on.
That’s the ethos which drives us day to day. Formally, we have developed our own 5 stage process, which begins with identifying a business opportunity and then goes through 32 discrete steps before ending with a client debrief and archiving.
Along with ISO 14001, we have also been registered to IS0 9001 since 2002, which benchmarks our performance against the highest standards. I’m also very proud of the fact Imagination secured Q1 status from Ford Motor Company in 2004, its highest award.
TAXI >>What Imagination Group does can be summarized in one word: communication. How has the explosion of digital technology morphed the way clients communicate with consumers?
Paul MacKay>>I can point to one example, a project we delivered for Ford Motor Company in Europe, which showed how digital technology can begin to change consumer relationships.
Ford wanted to tackle declining audiences for traditional marketing communications by engaging with people in a genuine way (rather than pushing out sales messages) and so establishing a closer, more direct connection with them.
Our concept was an interactive online comedy following the adventures of two characters on a European road-trip in a car provided by Ford, who sponsored the show with a subtle, low-key presence.
The characters were accompanied by a film crew who recorded an improvised episode each day for ‘broadcast’ on the Where Are The Joneses? blog and Youtube. The blog featured video contributions from online viewers, diaries written by the characters and audience comments.
A project wiki allowed the audience to collaborate on the storyline. Anyone could log on and submit ideas, write scripts, create new characters, even cast themselves to appear in the show. Many contributions were adopted, which made it an even more inclusive project.
I’m pleased to say the project attracted a significant level of media interest. It was acclaimed for its bold creative approach to content generation and participative engagement by allowing the consumer unprecedented access to media.
More to the point, extensive coverage in mainstream media achieved an important objective for Ford; the exercise was seen as a strong articulation of the primary brand positioning ‘Feel the difference’. I believe it inspired Ford’s marketing department to look beyond a traditional approach to media selection.
TAXI >>Having established a niche in the industry with a network of 10 offices worldwide, how in your own words h as the Imagination Group diversified since its inception and what is in store for the near future?
Paul MacKay>>Imagination was founded in 1978, and our team comprised many different people, some of whom had a background in theatrical production, including me.
We set out to bring the immediacy and impact of live story telling to brand communication, working to get audiences engaged with brands in direct and memorable ways. Essentially, that meant creating compelling experiences, whether face to face or through communication channels, to put the message across.
And that, in a nutshell, is what we do today. Over three decades, we have grown to work across all media. We have a 360˚approach which means we can choose the best channel or combination of channels to meet our client’s brief.
We have remained a single, independently owned organisation, which means we can be true to our perspective on the world. It also means we can offer wholly integrated solutions.
We believe the world of communications is changing, forming around integrated communications, with digital technologies at its core.
Future success will depend on our understanding of three factors: our clients’ need for greater integration in a world of media convergence; absolute accountability for our clients’ marketing spend; and the need to develop compelling creative work that gains traction in a world where the consumer is king.
For us, thinking, creating and delivering globally as one cohesive entity will be absolutely fundamental to continued success and progressive expansion.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Paul MacKay>>Sustainability. Not just in terms of costs, materials and delivery methods, but in ideas. We have to look to the long term and consider, daily, how we build true value - the human, social and cultural capital that will nurture future generations.
Visit the website to read more on the President's Design Award.
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Adelia Borges & Linda Fu
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Interview with Arnold Wasserman
 | TAXI >>Hello Arnold. You are a strong proponent of “expertise is the killer of innovation”. What is the most effective way, in your opinion, to “unlearn” all the knowledge built up over time?
Arnold Wasserman>>The question of expertise vis a vis innovation is much more complex than this flip statement that I made within a particular conversational context. Expertise, or mastery of a particular field of knowledge or practice, is crucial to all human endeavor. I only want to be operated on by an expert surgeon and fly next to a jet engine or cross a bridge designed and built by expert engineers. What I was trying to point to is the idea that carried to extreme, expertise can become a mind trap, inhibiting the exploration of “crazy” paths of creative imagination. It is all in how the expert holds his knowledge – as a provisional launch-pad for ever-further inquiry or as absolute law to be defended against any challenge. |
For example, in 1714, the British Parliament offered a money prize to anybody that could solve the urgent problem of accurately finding the longitude at sea. Sir Isaac Newton, then president of the Royal Society and world-acknowledged genius of science and mathematics, said that a solution would have to be based on celestial navigation. Solutions based on time-keeping would not work because it was theoretically impossible to build a watch that would keep exact enough time. John Harrison, a modest clockmaker, after 20 years of laborious trail and error making and testing successive prototypes, produced a marine chronometer that kept time with the precision Sir Isaac Newton deemed impossible. Harrison’s innovation in navigation made possible the successful voyages that gave rise to the British Empire.
Sir Isaac Newton is not dead. He pops up in every designer’s career with dependable regularity.
However expert one is, one must always approach each new problem with what Zen philosophers call “Beginner’s Mind.”
TAXI >>Having been named one of “20 Masters of Design” by Fast Company magazine and being one of the pioneers in the practice of user-centered, multidisciplinary product development as a competitive business strategy, how do you envision this entire regime to evolve within the next generation of fully Internet-savvy users?
Arnold Wasserman>>I want to answer this question by talking about how designers think and how we need to think about design now.
What most people understand as ‘design’ has to do with familiar material objects - from Arne Jacobson chairs to iPhones, from H&M fashion to the Swatch Smart Car, from Frank Gehry museums to sustainable green communities. Design today is evolving along new paths and at an accelerating pace, blurring the traditional boundaries of design and compounding the ambiguity between ‘design as product’ - physical, tangible stuff - and ‘design as process’ - a way of thinking, a set of cognitive skills, methods, tools and techniques having intrinsic value in their own right. Those of us who were trained in design schools and who work every day in a design studio - industrial designers, architects, communications designers, digital media designers - know tacitly what design thinking is. We do it every day (although it must be said that few designers are self-reflective about the process itself or know the epistemology of the field.) What we don’t realize is how alien our way of thinking is to non-designers and how powerful it can be as a cognitive methodology applicable to fields far beyond the traditional scope of design, such as health care, educational transformation and sustainable development — and at larger scales of strategic planning, organizational transformation and public policy.
In its simplest form, design thinking is a set of practices for gaining insight about people and their needs, building strategic foresight, discovering new opportunities, generating creative possibilities, inventing novel solutions of value and delivering these into the world as innovations adopted at scale. In application, design thinking makes use of a broad repertoire of methods, tools and techniques - expressed most often in an iterative, spiral development process model.
Three tenets of design thinking guide my own practice. The first is that designers should apply design thinking to improve life widely beyond the traditional boundaries of design. The second is that everybody can learn design thinking and that designers should disseminate design thinking by collaborating, not only with practitioners from other disciplines but with non-designers - the practice known as ‘co-design’. Finally, design thinking should be embedded in K-12 curricula both as a subject domain in its own right and as a pedagogical structure for teaching academic subject matter.
As to internet-savvy users, the emergence of a “Digital Native” culture shifts power from producers to users in ways that challenge what it means “to design.” The shift is from a "Create-and-producer-push" model of design to a "Co-create-and-user-pull" model of design, as exemplified by the explosion of user-generated content in Web 2.0 sites -- games, 3-D virtual worlds, blogs, vlogs and social networks. We are sitting in the middle of a design transformation wherein the designer delivers not the finished product, but the platform, algorithms, objects, scripts and tools for users to create the content themselves. The customer as co-designer is a new and unprecedented design genre that is affecting how all design -- of material as well as virtual artifacts -- will be conceived, executed and experienced from now on.
TAXI >>You once talked about how your favorite piece of design was your 1956 Indian Apache 650cc. flat track racing bike, not because it was a fungible commodity, but because it was a singular and difficult personality with which you developed an emotional bond. With products now designed for replacement and upgrading rather than maintenance and upkeep, how has social networking and blogs replaced this void in terms of emotional connection between man to man, or man to machine?
Arnold Wasserman>>In my youth I owned motorcycles, the last of which was a 1956 Indian Apache 650 cc. flat track racing bike. It violated all of today’s rules of “good design.” It was unpredictable, unreliable, anti-ergonomic and user-hostile. A high center of gravity made it very prone to tipping over when it was cornering. A very high compression ratio meant that on cold mornings the kick-starter would kick back in an attempt to tear off my foot. The bike was designed to go very fast in a straight line on a race track, but I insisted on using it as an every day street bike. I insisted; the bike resisted.
I loved how that bike looked: a pure piece of engineering construction; no concession to contrived aesthetics; no aerodynamic windscreen, fairings or cowlings,
This bike was not a fungible commodity. It was a singular and difficult personality with which I had, apparently, an emotional bond. I loved its spirit, individuality and primal beauty, the throaty rattle of the engine and its smell of gas, oil and rubber.
The gas tank was small and it would only run on white gas, which was hard to find. So I had to plan every trip and map every gas source for several hundred miles around to make sure I wouldn’t run out.
To keep it running, I had to spend every weekend working on the bike—changing the carburetor slides whenever the barometric pressure changed; unpacking and repacking the clutch assembly; adjusting and replacing cables; lubricating, tightening; adjusting the chain drive.
As I learned years later reading Robert Pirsig’s philosophical treatise Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this routine was a Zen meditative practice, a communion of human and machine, a journey on the universal and timeless path of Quality. As Pirsig wrote: “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be ‘out there’ and the person that appears to be ‘in here’ are not two separate things. They grow towards quality or fall away from Quality together.”
When I no longer had the time to keep the bike in running condition, I sold it. When I did, I gave up a meditative practice and thereby “fell away from Quality” in some important way. I never had that kind of existential engagement with a product since.
By making products ever more technologically sophisticated, reliable and user-obsequious, we deny ourselves the experience of adjusting, maintaining, improvising and tinkering with things. It could be that part of the attraction of digital games, virtual worlds, blogs, vlogs, music lists and social networks is that they afford the opportunity to tinker – to engage with things in ways denied us by physical objects that work pretty much perfectly pretty much all the time and are no longer intended to be maintained and repaired but discarded and replaced.
TAXI >>What do you see as the biggest challenge facing developing nations when it comes to implementing sustainable design while facing problems with poverty, hunger and lack of education?
Arnold Wasserman>>This is a BIG question that does not submit to a simple answer. The best I can do is suggest that everybody concerned with this subject become literate about the debate going on between the two public intellectuals that represent opposing poles of thought on the matter: William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs.
Easterly wrote the much lauded (and criticized) book, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), and most recently, Reinventing Foreign Aid. His view of the failure of aid is summed up:
“Poverty never has been ended and never will be ended by foreign experts or for¬eign aid. Poverty will end as it has ended everywhere else, by home grown political, economic, and social reformers and entrepreneurs that unleash the power of de¬mocracy and free markets.” - William Easterly, New York Review of Books, v54 n1, 2007
Easterly marshals extensive data to show that most aid ends up supporting corrupt, autocratic regimes that further repress their desperate populations.
In The White Man's Burden (The title referring to the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling,) Easterly elaborates on his views about the meaning of foreign aid. Released in the wake of Live8, the book is very critical of people like Bob Geldoff and Bono ("The white band's burden") and especially of fellow economist Jeffrey Sachs and his bestselling book The End of Poverty. Easterly suspects that such messianic do-good missions are ultimately modern reincarnations of the infamous, paternalistic colonial conceit of yore. He distinguishes two types of foreign aid donors: "Planners", who believe in imposing top-down big plans on poor countries, and "Searchers", who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian while Searchers are more realistic as they focus – following Karl Popper- on piecemeal interventions. Searchers, according to Easterly, have a much better chance to succeed.
In The End of Poverty, economist Jeffrey Sachs calls for a ‘big push’ that will finally lift millions out of poverty. The ‘big push’ involves substantial increases in aid to developing countries and the cancellation of their foreign debt.
Sachs responded to Easterly's arguments, leading to an ongoing debate. Sachs accused Easterly of excessive pessimism, overestimating costs, and overlooking past successes. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has praised Easterly for analysis of the problems of foreign aid, but criticized his sweeping debarment of all plans, lacking the due distinctions between different types of problems, and not giving the aid institutions credit for understanding the points he's making.
Is Easterly right? Is Sachs right? Are both right? Who, in conscience, can criticize giving food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education to those in need? At the same time, who in conscience can deny that much well intentioned aid sent from developed nations to poor ones never reaches its intended recipients, but goes to line the pockets of corrupt, autocratic regimes?
I do intend to agree with Easterly assertion that “Poverty never has been ended and never will be ended by foreign experts or for¬eign aid. Poverty will end as it has ended everywhere else, by home grown political, economic, and social reformers and entrepreneurs that unleash the power of de¬mocracy and free markets.”
Except that I do not share Easterly’s faith in unregulated free markets to reliably deliver equity of opportunity to the society at large along with economic benefit to the capital investment class.
We in the so-called developed nations have to think about these questions – a lot -- and confront them together with our counterparts in developing nations. At the same time, we have to reframe how we view developing nations. We can no longer view them as “the other.” We must shift from the frame of Them –vs- Us to one of They Are Us.
TAXI >>Your company uses “The Learning Journey” to allow employees to express their thoughts and ideas outside of a work context. What exactly does this entail, and is it more effective if implemented at a younger age?
Arnold Wasserman>>Age is of no consideration. Participants in our learning journeys have ranged from early secondary school students to retired elders.
Most of our clients are established, successful organizations that are looking for their next curve of development in a rapidly changing competitive environment. They come to us looking for ways to energize creativity leading to game-changing innovation. A truism of success is that as an organization gets better at what it is already doing, it gets worse at perceiving new and emerging patterns that lie outside its success model. The learning journey is one tool we use to shake people out of their comfort zone – immersing them in the worlds of other people creating innovation not only in the client’s own field but, in particular, in unfamiliar industries. Changing context forces people to perceive themselves in their own situation differently.
We have taken executives from a major computer maker to see how Volvo and BMW develop products and market their brands. We took executives from a major luxury goods producer on journeys into the industries of hospitality, experience creation, banking, technology solutions and travel. We took country presidents of a major international clothing producer into the worlds of transport, healthcare, media and infocommunications.
A learning journey is usually a prelude to an ideation workshop (we call it a “Charrette”). We have participants develop innovation concepts not in their own field but in an unfamiliar industry. For example, we have had both senior Malaysian bankers and large groups of Singapore school teachers develop user-centered concepts to improve elder health care services -- with inspiring results! Through these experiences, we guide participants into the real learning journey, which is to rediscover their own capacity to create innovation and to embed that capacity as a core competency in their own organizations.
TAXI >>With the explosion of the internet and social media, the world has become virtually barrier-less yet at the same time, more fragmented in terms of ideology, culture and language. How would the next generation of designers best use this to their advantage?
Arnold Wasserman>>Some experts worry that, along with the undeniable benefits of information technology, computer-mediated communication and social networks, we now see the emergence of problematic social and psychological effects. “Digital Natives”, they suggest, have a different cognitive repertoire. They incessantly shift back and forth across multiple modes of input/output – richly hyperlinking, mashing-up and remixing. But they have little patience for drilling down into anything in depth. They are very smart and mentally quick. But they have no knowledge of history or world literature, no interest in ideas in context, and their expository writing ability in their native language often borders on the semi-literate.
One of the most troubling effects has been the commercial application of data mining and collaborative filtering to aim ever more narrowly targeted offerings of information, goods and services at segmented “netizens.” The result is that what I see and hear online is not the vast world but a mirror image of my own circumscribed interests and those I share with my specialized niche tribe. The Web extended our reach broadly outward, but its Intense and skillful commercialization may be turning our attention narrowly inward.
If the question is how can the next generation of designers best help deploy social technologies to enrich and enlarge life experience rather than to narrow and specialize it, first, designers must become fully literate and active contributors to the discourse on the social, cultural, economic and political effects of computer- mediated communication and social technologies. This discourse is dominated by social scientists and computer scientists. Designers are largely absent from it.
The presence of a design voice in this conversation is all the more urgent if you believe visionary inventor Ray Kurzweil’s prognosis for exponential technological shift into the foreseeable future. He forecasts that the 21st Century will see a thousand times greater technological change than the 20th Century. That translates roughly to eighty times the advancement of the last century taking place in the next ten years. If he is correct, even within a 50% margin of error, the Internet is becoming a global brain, its users are entering into a new era in the evolution of our species, and fretting over the cognitive style of netizens is a waste of time because humans will never be what they once were:
TAXI >>Can you please tell us a bit more about the main components that make up Deep Design, and why it is essential for designers to quickly move towards this particular regime?
Arnold Wasserman>>We are at the inflection point of the Next Industrial Revolution, in which Deep Design will play a crucial role. Deep Design delivers the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental value. All the old rules for creating wealth by converting extracted materials into goods, services and environments through application of fossil energy are obsolete. Green is the new gold. This is not about corporate social responsibility, but about a massive shift in the technological and institutional organization of economic success. General public awareness has turned the corner; business leaders are catching on; supportive public policy will follow.
The Next Industrial Revolution will give rise to a new economic regime that levels the inequities between haves and have-nots by combining the creation of wealth with social, environmental and economic sustainability, giving rise to myriad opportunities for new industries, new technologies, new professions and new jobs.
Much of life today is mediated by material culture and design innovation plays an ever-greater role in defining that culture. The job of Deep Designers is to figure out how to apply design innovation to:
1) Economic, Social & Environmental sustainability
2) Green design of everything
3) Natural Capitalism
4) Globalization and social, economic and environmental equity
5) Poverty, hunger and disease, especially in emerging nations
6) New smart materials
7) Design in education -- both for developing professional practitioners and as a cognitive methodology to be learned by all
8) The scaling up of design thinking/design process to address strategic private sector and public sector problems
9) The adoption of design-driven, human-centered innovation -- as embedded practice, not just as a promotional slogan
10) The shift from a "Create-and-producer-push" model of design to a "Co-create-and-user-pull" model of design, as exemplified by the explosion of user-generated content in Web 2.0 sites -- games, 3-D virtual worlds, blogs, vlogs and social networks. We are sitting in the middle of a design transformation wherein the designer delivers not the finished product, but the platform, objects, scripts and tools for users to create the content themselves. The customer as co-designer is a new and unprecedented design genre that is affecting how all design -- of material as well as virtual artifacts -- will be conceived, executed and experienced from now on.
11) How all the above will be incorporated through “Deep Design” into the “Next Industrial Revolution.”
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Arnold Wasserman>> The story is told of the Zen apprentice who asks his master, “Master, what is the essence of Zen?”
“ATTENTION!” replies the master.
“But master, is there nothing else?” asks the apprentice.
“Attention, attention, attention!” replies the master.
Practicing attention as a state of mind is preconditional for everything else we want to achieve in design and innovation: seeing things clearly as they are; active listening without judging or accepting or rejecting; empathy with others; being present; seeing beauty; mastering the practices of craft; understanding consequences; seeing the interconnectedness of things; understanding things in context; letting go of belief systems; being humble; taking responsibility for our acts and their effects on others; understanding that in a world of extreme material prosperity it is not acceptable that large numbers of people live in extreme poverty, hunger and disease; and approaching everything in life with “beginner’s mind.”
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Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Paul MacKay
 | TAXI >>Hello Paul. Imagination Group was awarded EN ISO 14001:1996 registration, which is testament to its involvement in and dedication to environmental responsibility. As the world shifts on a massive scale onto the digital realm, how do you feel people can best be educated on reducing output, energy consumption and subsequent waste from content that has been created online?
Paul MacKay>>Consider the number of carbon offset schemes now linked to flight booking sites, offering you the facility of offsetting your carbon footprint at the same time as buying your ticket. That’s just one example of the impact of on-line technology on our ‘green’ consciousness. It’s an interesting example because it is about more than education. |
Education about reducing output and consumption and waste is vital. Digital technology allows us not merely to learn but to do something with our knowledge: we can take action.
Increasingly, the online experience will help us go greener, faster. We know people are willing to act individually. They want to play their part, whether through a simple everyday undertaking like re-cycling or a making a life long commitment to an eco lifestyle.
Going on-line plugs the individual into the world collective to find information, make contacts, contribute to the debate, share tools for action and give or receive support. It amplifies what is the truly global issue of our times.
TAXI >>Imagination Group prides itself for being a united, one-stop shop for its clients, with satellite offices located in Europe, North America and Asia. What are some of the difficulties faced in bridging such diverse cultures and markets and what are some of the more inventive solutions that have been brought up?
Paul MacKay>>The differences between cultures are what makes working at Imagination fascinating and challenging: fascinating in that we encounter the richness of other people’s lives and challenging because there are issues to overcome.
One of the most obvious is understanding how business is conducted day to day. We take so much for granted when working with people from a similar culture.
It is a fact that etiquette tends to set the tone in Asia and the Far East; I would say that developing relationships with clients based there relies on being aware of subtleties to a far greater degree than in the West.
That said, human nature is universal and you learn to trust your instincts.
We ensure our offices are closely attuned to their respective cultures by recruiting a range of people from that region. We regard each office as a lens on trends and developments which we can feed back to clients globally through our network.
One way to bridge diverse cultures is to ensure the spirit of Imagination is expressed consistently. We encourage people to re-locate from our global HQ in London to live and work in our main hubs, long term.
They take a bit of the magic with them, acting as internal Imagination ambassadors, if you like.
For major projects supporting global clients, we’re more than happy to bring the right people together, because there’s nothing like getting everyone around the same table in the same room in the same country. That’s when the ideas flow.
We also tend to talk a lot via iChat. And, inevitably, email plays a big part in keeping everyone abreast of what’s happening, particularly when you’re working across time zones.
TAXI >>What do you feel is most lacking in terms of design education and the integration of design business thinking into small and medium enterprises in developing economies, and how can governments work to address this?
Paul MacKay>>It’s regrettable, but I think few small and medium enterprises appreciate the value of design and communication as a business tool. Design is multi-faceted - for example, good product design improves quality, enhances functionality and can eliminate costs; communication, in terms of marketing and advertising, creates brand awareness and so drives sales.
I believe governments could help in two ways. One is to make design resources available to private enterprise, either through consultancy schemes or grants for specific ad hoc projects.
Secondly, consider how the scope of design education can be widened through its introduction to the national curriculum. We can harness the growing sophistication of today’s younger generation and their desire for consumer electronics and fashion and turn it into a passion for design of all kinds.
I believe Singapore provides an inspirational example of government getting this right. It’s great to see the Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts, working with its agency DesignSingapore, doing so much to promote design education.
TAXI >>One of the main reasons why Imagination Group expanded its reach in Asia was spurred on by the needs of existing European and American clients in the region, as well as help companies from the region present themselves in Europe and North America. What are some of the cultural differences encountered in this exchange and what do you feel can both sides of the divide best learn from each other?
Paul MacKay>>As we know, there are many cultural differences between Asia and Europe or North America. One that strikes me is the relationship between the individual and the mass.
I sense people in the East are a little less inclined to individuality than in the West. It may be the sheer volume of population, which tends to be concentrated in urban environments, but I find people are happy to be regarded as part of the masses.
Western consumerism is all about giving the individual the greatest possible choice. Self assertion and the exercise of choice is prized as an expression of individuality.
And so targeting the individual and talking to them in the most appropriate way is the focus of marketing communication in the West. In fact, we rate ourselves on how effective we are at getting the message to hit home with the individual.
In general, the fact there are cultural differences means we can learn about each other. And the more we know, the more we understand and the better we can communicate.
That said, some values are universal. For example, the notion of family and family values is absolute. No matter where you go or who you talk to, the family is all important.
TAXI >>Working with such an eclectic bunch of creative individuals, what are some of the processes Imagination Group undertakes to not lose focus of the bigger picture on projects?
Paul MacKay>>Pleasingly, given the business we work in, we believe the key to effective project management is communication towards close collaboration. We talk to each other, we talk to clients, we get clients to talk to each other and so on.
That’s the ethos which drives us day to day. Formally, we have developed our own 5 stage process, which begins with identifying a business opportunity and then goes through 32 discrete steps before ending with a client debrief and archiving.
Along with ISO 14001, we have also been registered to IS0 9001 since 2002, which benchmarks our performance against the highest standards. I’m also very proud of the fact Imagination secured Q1 status from Ford Motor Company in 2004, its highest award.
TAXI >>What Imagination Group does can be summarized in one word: communication. How has the explosion of digital technology morphed the way clients communicate with consumers?
Paul MacKay>>I can point to one example, a project we delivered for Ford Motor Company in Europe, which showed how digital technology can begin to change consumer relationships.
Ford wanted to tackle declining audiences for traditional marketing communications by engaging with people in a genuine way (rather than pushing out sales messages) and so establishing a closer, more direct connection with them.
Our concept was an interactive online comedy following the adventures of two characters on a European road-trip in a car provided by Ford, who sponsored the show with a subtle, low-key presence.
The characters were accompanied by a film crew who recorded an improvised episode each day for ‘broadcast’ on the Where Are The Joneses? blog and Youtube. The blog featured video contributions from online viewers, diaries written by the characters and audience comments.
A project wiki allowed the audience to collaborate on the storyline. Anyone could log on and submit ideas, write scripts, create new characters, even cast themselves to appear in the show. Many contributions were adopted, which made it an even more inclusive project.
I’m pleased to say the project attracted a significant level of media interest. It was acclaimed for its bold creative approach to content generation and participative engagement by allowing the consumer unprecedented access to media.
More to the point, extensive coverage in mainstream media achieved an important objective for Ford; the exercise was seen as a strong articulation of the primary brand positioning ‘Feel the difference’. I believe it inspired Ford’s marketing department to look beyond a traditional approach to media selection.
TAXI >>Having established a niche in the industry with a network of 10 offices worldwide, how in your own words h as the Imagination Group diversified since its inception and what is in store for the near future?
Paul MacKay>>Imagination was founded in 1978, and our team comprised many different people, some of whom had a background in theatrical production, including me.
We set out to bring the immediacy and impact of live story telling to brand communication, working to get audiences engaged with brands in direct and memorable ways. Essentially, that meant creating compelling experiences, whether face to face or through communication channels, to put the message across.
And that, in a nutshell, is what we do today. Over three decades, we have grown to work across all media. We have a 360˚approach which means we can choose the best channel or combination of channels to meet our client’s brief.
We have remained a single, independently owned organisation, which means we can be true to our perspective on the world. It also means we can offer wholly integrated solutions.
We believe the world of communications is changing, forming around integrated communications, with digital technologies at its core.
Future success will depend on our understanding of three factors: our clients’ need for greater integration in a world of media convergence; absolute accountability for our clients’ marketing spend; and the need to develop compelling creative work that gains traction in a world where the consumer is king.
For us, thinking, creating and delivering globally as one cohesive entity will be absolutely fundamental to continued success and progressive expansion.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Paul MacKay>>Sustainability. Not just in terms of costs, materials and delivery methods, but in ideas. We have to look to the long term and consider, daily, how we build true value - the human, social and cultural capital that will nurture future generations.
Visit the website to read more on the President's Design Award.
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