Dear Colleagues,

Here is Peter Butenschon's keynote speech from the DRS
Common Ground conference.

Peter Butenschon is president of ICSID, the International
Congress of Societies of Industrial Design. Former professor
of architecture at the Oslo College of Architecture, he is
just completing a successful decade as director of Norsk
Form. In January, he will take on new responsibilities in
design research and design education as president
of the Oslo National College of the Arts.

Please feel free to share this with your friends and
colleagues.

Best regards,

Ken Friedman


--

Design Research Society - Common Ground International Conference

5-7 September 2002 at Brunel University, UK

--

Worlds apart: An international agenda for design

Peter Butenschon

ICSID President

--

Is there an agenda for design?

Is there Common Ground? Is there a collective agenda for the design
community, fit as a workable platform for an international
organization? Or is the talk of a design agenda mostly useful for
flag-waving, something to talk about at international conferences or
as food for the growing bands of design researchers worldwide?

**

What is the design agenda? It seems that, as never before, there is
need for some reflection, for a cool look at what is out there, a
questioning mind to meet the barrage of influences on our senses.
There is clearly a need not just to look at all the answers, but to
ask some questions of what it is all for. What purposes are served by
all these busy designers - and their court of researchers?

Discussing design has become an increasingly complex affair, since
the agenda seems to be shifting all the time.

There is a popular agenda. For some years now, branding and logos
have been on everyone's lips. Design, we are told, has to do with
communicating identity, of the produced object as well as of the
buyer and user. The kids in my family know only too well that when
they pay 100 Euro for some Nike shoes, they pay only 10 Euro or so
for the footwear and the rest for the designed identity, the name,
the image, the symbolic belonging to the sphere of Nike-users. When I
buy a chair or a car or a house, even my own kids know that I'm not
primarily judging practical performance. When I buy a Citroen, they
know that I know that it is not because it is a good car, measured on
some utilitarian yardstick. It is because I am an architect, and
Norwegian architects drive Citroen or Saab. From an early age, kids
learn to assume that all options work well, and that the difference
between them lie in the story that is told, in the aesthetic
expression of purpose. Not surprisingly, design quality has become
the leading edge for competitive industry in the world of high
consumption.

And then, the agenda of design seems to shift. The Johannesburg
Summit was recently unable to find sufficient common ground for a
forceful attack on the mismanagement of world resources. We are not
able to or willing to apply the knowledge we have for producing the
goods we need without cutting down the world forests, or transporting
clean water to where people need it or sewerage away from where they
don't need it, or tap clean energy for all the machines we have
designed to make life for ourselves safer or easier or more
enjoyable. Many of the Johannesburg issues were design issues, when
looking beyond the formalities and the ceremonials and the political
fistfights, issues given the highest priority in a world debate
concerning global decency.

And again the agenda shifts, as the one-year mark passes since the
September 11 attacks in New York, and normally level-headed
commentators claim that the concerns of the design world has now
changed, that the agenda itself is forever changed, now that
"security and safety are paramount concerns; where firefighters,
police, soldiers and other people in uniform - not the stock jocks on
CNBC or the dot.com kids - are our heroes".* On this new agenda,
design suddenly addresses essential issues of survival, both at the
top end and the bottom end of the world order.

And then again, the agenda seems to shift, as yet another
technological innovation hits the market and knocks at our
imagination, particularly in the field of communication, where it may
seem that the world of physical artifacts is becoming obsolete or at
least boringly old-fashioned, replaced by the shining world of the
virtual and the unseen, the imagined and immaterial.

These changing agendas tell us that design - and the designer - is
now everywhere, that the importance of what designers work with has
never been greater or has had greater impact on the changing order of
things. And that there are several agendas, not one.

**

The design agenda shifts within our own society, within our own
lives. It is something we all grow up with. I was born in Norway,
almost 60 years ago. In that whole post-war era, the understanding of
'quality of life' has changed. The concept the quality of our lives
seems, in this period, more than anything measured in the
privatization of what was formerly held collectively.

We privatized the water post, from the yard to our own kitchen sink.
We split up the public bath and put it inside our own bathroom. We
took the collective washing machine from the cellar up to the washing
room. The cinema was put into our TV room, the public playground into
the kids room, the park into our own garden. We left the bus to take
the car, we moved from the factory floor into our own office. We even
moved the music from the concert hall to the gramophone player and
then straight to our own protected ear through the walkman.

We are proud of these advances - all the way through double garage
doors into the secluded cozy armchair. We are so proud that we tend
to forget that 55% of households in today's Oslo are single, or
consist of one grownup with one child, and that these people perhaps
have more need for connection to a community than to the
disconnection that they are offered in the privacy of their private
homes and private gardens far away from the bustle of collectivity.

But perhaps something of significance fell out of the political
agenda along the way? Where is the glue, that 'society' which Maggie
Thatcher so sarcastically denied the existence of? Where do we meet
the unknown, the uncommon, where do we challenge our own conventions?
Where are we confronted with 'the other', the strange and the
stranger, the Turks and Pakistanis? Not at The Club, the pub, the
golf course, the Rotary meeting, not even at the local shopping
center. We meet it, and them, on the street, in the public square, in
the park, on what is left of common turf.

It is now one of the major political challenges of our time to
create, design and service open public arenas which invite and cater
to community. If we do not give priority to this, political
institutions - democratic institutions - will wither away,
suffocating in the closed privacy of the protected individual, behind
the walls of our gated communities.

This is actually a design agenda - supplying and equipping an
essential public good in the public space, because our way of life
depends upon it.

**

Over these 60 years, I sense that the very concept of quality has
changed dramatically.

In the early post-war years, quality meant that a thing worked. The
quality of the house was that the roof did not leak, the wall kept
wet and wind out, hot water came out of the tap when turned. These
qualities are now expected, at least here in Europe. Few people test
the water tap before buying a house. I have even bought a car without
checking whether there was an engine in it.

Today, quality is instead measured in what pleases us, what is
beautiful, what is me. Quality is a matter of status, symbol. We
design and produce for the satisfaction of desire, not need. The
quality of the product lies in the story that is told.

Cars are now marketed as life-style, not as means of transportation.
Nokia supposedly won the battle with Ericsson because they understood
that a mobile phone was an expression of personality, not a
technological device. No people have ever used as many candles as
Norwegians at the turn of the millennium; not because they need the
light: After all, no people have ever had more cheap electric power
to put into all their light bulbs.

It is in this story of the different qualities that we see the
difference between a house and a home. People live in homes, and the
difference to the house lies in all the personal additions, from the
doorstep with nameplate in brass, welcoming mat and cozy light to the
mementoes on the walls and the heavily communicating furniture. These
are additions of personal quality. In the same way, office buildings
today are not designed with reference to the local building codes or
the political guideline issued by the city council, but with
reference to facade stories of business success and symbols of
corporate innovation, as currently interpreted in Silicon Valley and
on the New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo stock exchanges.

This changed agenda on quality is, you may say, a Norwegian or a
European affair. It is a luxury position, a matter of design for
want, not for need.

**

Let me return to some of the different design agendas - let me choose
the one of the branded goods of Levis, Swatch, Gucci and Nokia, and
the one from Johannesburg. Do they speak to different worlds?

When we hear and see stories of volcanic eruptions, landslides,
hurricanes and floods, mostly in the poor parts of the world, we are
reminded of the importance of proper tools for living. At the same
time, we are once again made aware of how difficult it is for us to
deliver these tools - products and services - where and when they are
most urgently needed. Some hundred thousands, sometimes millions, of
people are suddenly left without the most basic amenities - shelter,
clean water and food - and without the simplest means of delivering
these amenities - transportation and containers.

Never in history has industry produced such a large variety of
products. Almost everything is available, almost anywhere, at almost
any price. The global market is overflowing with things -badly
designed or well designed, useful or useless. We are drowning in
things. And yet, never did it seem that the supply of appropriate
goods to a stricken population were further away. It is never within
reach where and when it is most needed.

There is a strange paradox in our situation. Designers contribute
impressively and globally to the quality of goods and services. I am
not disregarding or being disrespectful of the normal design work of
most designers. But the research that goes into the improvement of
products and the creativity invested in their unstoppable reshaping
and refashioning is increasingly locked up into a specialised and
vulnerable system of production, transportation, distribution,
marketing and sale. It is design for the shop shelf first, for human
need second.

We know today that whichever product we want, the best is available
to us, mostly within the day, from almost any spot in the
industrialised world. We will get it if we want it, order it and pay
for it.

When I was a child, we would order whatever we needed from the local
craftsman or shop, or from the next village or town. Now, I order
similar things from somewhere in Asia, through some incomprehensible
web connection or some network of agents, and it is probably both
better and cheaper than what I used to get locally.

But I suspect my order would never be delivered to the towns hit by
volcanic eruption in the Congo or to a flood-stricken village of
Bangladesh or to a refugee camp on the border of Afghanistan or to
the site of a landslide in Nicaragua or to a village hit by a forest
fire in Java.

**

Somehow, the more clever we become, the more advanced our design
analysis is and the more we are able to produce with staggering
technological finesse, the more unable we also are at delivering to
the most basic of human needs.

This is the paradox. Because we have become so proficient and
advanced as designers, we may have removed ourselves from the needs
that actually confront a major part of the world population. We have
become part of a system of close-knit interdependence that assumes
well-functioning finances, marketing and infrastructure, individual
purchasing power, access to shop, a system that is simply not
relevant in Congo or on the mountain plateau of Afghanistan.

For this reason, it is now more important than ever that designers
boldly confront that 'other' situation, the situation facing us
beyond the shop shelf and the stuffed wallet.

This is, I believe, what we are trying to do with Design for the
World, the joint organization based in Barcelona, set up by the three
international design organizations IFI, ICOGRADA and ICSID. This is
why we recently sent designers to a refugee camp on the border of
Rwanda to look, with humanitarian organizations, at how we as
designers can be of some use. This is what some Norwegian designers,
through our design center in Oslo, are trying to do, working in
Guatemala with garbage disposal systems, tents for camps, latrines,
and colouring machinery for textile dying.

Take the case of land mine removal. Hundreds of millions need to be
dug up before they maim or kill more civilians. The technology
available for these operations is basically unaltered since 1914. It
still involves poking in the ground at random with simple iron rods,
with bad safety protection and little aid of modern ergonomic
knowledge, as if nothing was learned in the meantime. It seems fairly
obvious that improvements can be made to face, chest and knee
protection, to face shields that can be kept on in hot climate, to
simple searching tools. But big industry and big money seems to
prefer making big machines, with limited relevance where most of the
mines are located. (And of course the industry for artificial limbs
is more profitable, and has made more progress over the years, with
the good help of designers).

So we sent some designers to investigate and analyze. At first, our
partners in the aid community thought that we could design Armani
suits and fast cars, and did not quite see the relevance. Now some of
these key people in the international aid community have come to see
that designers can be useful in other ways. (It is not that designers
are not able to assist people digging in the earth. In Victor
Margolin's recent book, The Politics of the Artificial, he gives
another example of design interest in the ground: "Even an activity
like gardening, which never required fancy equipment, has now become
the impetus for the sale of expensive gear that includes kids gloves,
special pants, kneepads, expensive Swiss pruners, high-priced
watering cans for hard-to-reach places. and a silver trowel costing
2000 dollars").

At the Johannesburg summit, one of the very few concrete results was
the agreement that the number of poor people without access to clean
water and sanitation services should be reduced by half by the year
2015. This is in keeping with reports and demands made at the UN
Habitat first World Urban Forum of experts in Nairobi in May of this
year.

According to UN Habitat, there are four conditions typifying urban
poverty - insecure land tenure, unsound housing construction, lack of
clean water, lack of sanitation service. Three of these are basically
design issues. Why are they not solved - by designers and their
industrial partners?

There may be at least two types of explanations. The first is that
these are not popular issues - there is little money in it, up to now
given little international prestige. The other is that the design
community has misunderstood the conditions of use, the thresholds
that have to be passed in order for a technical solution being
applied: Community sensitivity, religious and cultural beliefs, local
organizations, the power play of local politicians and businessmen.

Water is deity, poetry, tradition, religion. Water is used to baptize
people into life and community. It is not just a chemical substance,
a life-saving liquid. Its importance can be compared to that of fire;
you cannot just replace the wood fire in the compound with a smart
and energy-efficient stove without perhaps breaking into the most
important family bond or disrupting the essential community ceremony.

As designers, we may have thought we could implement the good design
solutions from outside, because we thought design consisted of clever
things and had consequences restricted to their technical field of
operation. Instead, at the Habitat conference in May, ICSID proposed
a project starting one step back. Let us investigate: Which solutions
are available? Why do they fail? Why are they not implemented? After
Johannesburg, and before the World Water Forum in Osaka next spring,
we will establish teams of experts, local and international, to
document the situation in several African countries. On the basis of
this, we will be able to recommend approaches and sometimes
design-solutions suited to a local context. For Habitat, it will be
work done on their premises rather on our traditional ones.

Clearly, design work is only a part of these complex issues. But I
think the Habitat community understands that these also are design
issue; that these are challenges that involve our competence in
analyzing, developing and giving form - practically, economically and
durably, and within the available means, cultural context and
existing implementation structure.

**

In these issues, we are dealing with users who are not buyers, we are
dealing with intermediaries in the shape of governments and
international and local organizations, with communities on the spot,
and we are dealing with a cultural context that is more demanding and
sensitive than anything we ever face as we work with brand builders
and marketing analysts. We are dealing with raw humanity, bare need,
a context which may be unpolite, ungrateful, uncool, not dealt with
at polished negotiating tables.

Products for inexpensively purifying water are rare, as are the
methods for transporting water. Don't you think we could produce some
breakthroughs if we put the right minds - and the right amounts of
money - to it? There was never much professional prestige to be found
there. We are very good at designing refrigerators that tell us when
something is missing inside, even notifying the local shop of this
miserable fact, but not very good at the cooling of foodstuffs with
solar power. The solutions are probably there, but the motivation to
put them into use is not really present, because our incentives seem
so closely tied up with a system of production and purchase. That
system is clearly missing for this category of product.

If these are difficult design issues to handle for the commercial
world, it is also difficult for the community of designers, and their
organizations. ICSID does not have its membership located out there,
in or near the urban slums of this world. This is not where we find
our network. To be effective there, we need to build co-operation
with international aid organizations, with UN bodies and with
governments, more than with advertising agents and fashion trend
experts.

This is not what we are good at. We need to place our competence as
designers and problem solvers, in a very broad sense, rather humbly
on the table of people who understand this situation better than we
do. We need to understand the context of use. Working with design for
crisis and development, with design for need and not just for desire,
is not just another job, it seems to require a different attitude.

In emphasizing this, I do not mean to disregard all the useful work
that designers do every day in our own richer societies, with new and
improved goods and services for both private and public sectors. None
of us have any problems in praising the significance of good design
work for the improvement of the lives of people around us. Only, this
was not on my agenda today.

**

Is there a role here for international organizations, like ICSID and
DRS? If there are several design agendas - are we suitable only for
the one concerning brands, and perhaps the one on technological
innovation? Not the one highlighted at Johannesburg and UN Habitat,
or even the one focused on after the events of nine-eleven?

In ICSID, we have said: Perhaps our own agenda is not up to tackling
such challenges in a satisfactory way. We have the opportunity,
because we include professional designers, educational institutions,
promotional center as well as business and government, from some 55
countries. Perhaps ICSID, IFI, and ICOGRADA are outdated, stuck in
the industrial era. We see professional borders breaking down, the
work on products becoming the work on services and experiences. We
see designers work globally, on more fluid concepts transgressing
normal boundaries between design professions.

So, to some of us, the old design separations seem increasingly
irrelevant. People around us, outside our professional community, do
not understand our divisions. Most of business do not understand.
Schools educate designers, not sector specialists. Creativity takes
place, we recognize, between disciplines.

We have what seem to be stiff organizations, based on old-fashioned
professional divisions. We know that in the past, ideas followed
organizations, were shaped by organizations. Today, organizations
follow ideas. They have to adjust to changing ideas, or go bust.

What can be the role of international organization, in our times? It
is not in the production of new knowledge - that is done at
universities. It is not in the selling of products, that is done in
the marketplace. It is not in the development of new technology -
that requires resources that we will never be touching. It is not to
do what others can do better than us.

I believe there are at least two important roles for us. One is to
address the big issues, build bridges between knowledge fields and
professions, connect people, provide the meeting ground and the
useful events. The other is to reflect that other agenda, the
Johannesburg agenda, relate design challenges to that half of the
world population that has less than 15 dollars a day to spend, to the
86% of the population who have never heard a phone ring, to the 93%
of people who have never been on the web.

For these reasons, a clear majority of the ICSID membership wants to
drop the word 'industrial' from our name, and we want one
international design organization, speaking with one voice on design
and for designers. We are in talks with IFI and ICOGRADA on this, on
the setting up of a joint secretariat, a joint agency, a joint board,
under a new name. We are hoping that it can be done without scrapping
the professional identity of designers groups, like graphic designers.

**

There are worlds, with several agendas. Perhaps it is useful
sometimes to go back to ones own childhood, when design quality meant
that the roof did not leak and hot water enthusiastically came out of
the tap? After Johannesburg and the WTC affair, we should be
troubled, and we should ask the big questions of relevance.

ICSID sees itself as the major international platform for this
discussion, across national and professional boundaries. Within the
ICSID framework, designers, academics, promotional expertise,
business and governments can discuss issues that confront design and
designers, and issues in human society that can be attacked with
design competence as a useful tool.

We do not present an ideology of design, and we do not conclude any
of the ongoing discussions on the agendas. Rather, we want to be a
facilitator for discussion and insight, and we want to help write the
agenda. Having such arenas for discussion and confrontation, for the
exchange of ideas and experience, means standing a better chance of
seeing the connection between the branding of identity, the
Johannesburg challenges, the fight on terrorism following the WTC
crash and the technological advances that will continue putting stars
in our bright designers eyes.

It will be the test of relevance for an international organization if
we can be seen to combine agendas, build bridges and place our
energies where most needed, where no one else can do it. To invite
DRS and its membership into that debate is an important message to
you.


* Bruce Nussbaum, Editor of Business Week, in Innovation, Spring 2002.