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PHD-DESIGN  January 2008

PHD-DESIGN January 2008

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Subject:

E.Manzini - V.Margolin - J.Frascara - L.Bistagnino about Cha

From:

Changing the Change <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Changing the Change <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sun, 6 Jan 2008 15:24:38 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (265 lines)

[Please accept our apologies for cross postings]

CHANGING THE CHANGE
An international conference on the role and potential of design research
in  the transition towards sustainability

Torino 10th - 11th - 12th July 2008

Newsletter 01

Contents:
Dear friends and colleagues -  Ezio Manzini  (conference coordinator)
An attractive challenge - Jorge Frascara (international advisory committee member)
Changing the Change: Design for Society - Victor Margolin   (international advisory committee member)
Design, flexibility and sustainability - Luigi Bistagnino   (international advisory committee member)


Call for papers and visualisations
Please visit the conference website:
www.changingthechange.org

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear friends and colleagues…
Ezio Manzini
(conference coordinator)

This newsletter intends to facilitate the Changing the Change conference
preparation. It will anticipate programmes, abstracts and speakers profiles.
And it will give information on different kinds of Conference-related news.
But not only. It also intends to be the platform for a discussion that will
start with short interventions of different authors and will continue on the
newsletter-related blog (the CtC Blog). This discussion will , I hope,
continue beyond the conference itself.

In particular, in the next months, from now to January 2008, the newsletter
main goal is to trigger design researchers to submit paper proposals
coherent with the conference aims. This is not an easy task: Changing the
Change wants to be a research conference with a strong and ambitious
political goal: to focus on the design research potentialities in the
transition towards a sustainable knowledge society. And to present them to
the same design community (to make it more confident in its possibilities)
and to other social actors (to contribute to the social conversations on the
future and/or to solve some specific problems).

This conference, in the organisers’ intentions, should show that these
design research potentialities exist. That they can be found in all the
design application fields (form products to communication, from interiors to
services, from ITC to crafts, from medical devices to fashion) and in all
the regions of the world (from the most mature industrial societies to the
emerging ones). Finally, it wants to state that the possibility to play a
positive role in the transition towards sustainability is not only an issue
for those designers who, in the past years, have taken the first steps in
this direction, but it is a challenge for every designer and every design
researcher.

To do all that, Changing the Change has to receive papers presenting and
discussing stimulating design research results: visions, proposals and tools
developed by design researchers (or better: by interdisciplinary teams where
designers played an important role), using specific design skills and
presented in an highly communicative way (i.e. with good visualization
materials in order to create a parallel exhibition: visions and proposals
from design research world wide).

Leave a comment on the CtC Blog:
http://www.changingthechange.org/blog/2007/11/26/dear-colleagues-and-friends/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An attractive challenge
Jorge Frascara
(international advisory committee member)

Changing the Change is a working conference. It has a clear aim: to discuss
the role of design in moving society toward making human life sustainable.
We, however, do not know how to reach that aim. Finding ways to meet this
goal is actually the purpose of the conference.

The organizers have resisted the notion of breaking interpreting the scope
of the meeting beyond its heading. The conference itself will hopefully do
that; the participants’ proposals and experience, their ideas and visions,
will flesh out the territory of possibilities of responses to the challenges
we face.

The conference is organized by designers and directed at designers. We
believe that designers could play a role in changing the change, in
re-directing the development of our world. Is it on the basis of our
capacity to work systematically toward imagining and designing futures, our
capacity to turn our ideas into images and then make them take form in the
real world? Weren’t Jules Verne as an author and Flash Gordon as a character
highly instrumental in shaping the future, just because they made it
visible, and therefore desirable? How can sustainability become desirable?
How can it enter the equation of quality, of what designers and clients
place at the top of their lists?

Some initiatives are promising: some international corporations are looking
at zero waste, while others have increased their allocation to research on
alternative sources of energy, and on more efficient ways of generating
energy. The City of New York is looking at turning all its taxicabs into
hybrid cars. Too little too late? Not at all. Fifty years ago environmental
conservation was totally absent from the big corporations’ agendas. Maybe
these are the first steps toward sustainability. Including the notion in the
agenda is useful, more than useful: important.

Other interesting things that involve more paradigmatic shifts are happening
at the other end of the spectrum, like in the interior of Argentina, where I
was last May. Cooperatives are developing interesting production and
distribution systems, helping the locals, recovering cultural history, and
using zero environmental impact technologies. All materials used are
natural, renewable, and indigenous to the region.

Insights discover interstices that allow action in the most unimaginable
places. We are looking for testimonies to this, we are looking for actual,
factual experiences of implementing novel design approaches that find
opportunities where everybody sees only challenges, and spaces, however
narrow, that permit innovative action. The conference is looking for ideas
to share. The scale is irrelevant. Large or small. The changes proposed
could be paradigmatic or gradual. We need to explore and discuss models of
intervention.

To sum up:
How can a new direction be applied to the way things are, and change our
culture into a sustainable one?
How could design research contribute to this change?
How could designers add the notion of sustainability to their list,
affecting the way in which products, systems, and communications are
designed?
How could we put together a critical mass of successful case histories, that
could serve as models to be adapted and followed?
What other strategies could be useful to this end?
What are the strategies that have been successfully implemented in different
contexts to make products, systems, and services, more compatible with the
idea of sustainability?
What could be the role of communication design in this process?

We open this newsletter for contributions that could initiate the
exploration of possibilities, and meet the challenge proposed by Changing
the Change.

Leave a comment on the CtC Blog:
http://www.changingthechange.org/blog/2007/11/26/an-attractive-challenge/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Changing the Change: Design for Society
Victor Margolin
(international advisory committee member)

The term "social design" is relatively new in the design vocabulary. Of
course, one could say that all design is social in one way or another since
its products are introduced into society. But the term "social" as in
"social work", "social welfare", or "social responsibility" also carries the
connotation of serving a social good. Today, we understand "social good" to
be a concept that is larger than the satisfaction of each member of society.
In material terms, we now realize that it is not possible to satisfy
everyone by providing the same level of goods and material consumption that
is currently enjoyed by those in the most economically developed countries.
We also know that consumption has its side effects. It pollutes the
atmosphere and contributes to climate change; it produces waste material
that is difficult to dispose of; and it absorbs resources that might be
otherwise used for more beneficial purposes.

Thus, we can recognize social design as design that contributes to the
social good. Recently, Archeworks, a one-year school in Chicago that focuses
on social design projects, published a book called Design Denied. The book
states that design which addresses social needs should be available to
everyone though we know this not to be the case. So one aim of social design
is to reach people who are currently not receiving the benefits of design.
Another is to produce goods and services that avoid the negative effects of
much that we currently produce.

Fortunately, the need to change our social habits has become more evident.
Thoughtful people accept the reality of climate change. They also understand
that the gap between wealthy and poor people is growing and needs to be
narrowed. And they know that we cannot create infinite landfills. Many
people are already addressing these problems, designers among them. The
purpose of Changing the Change is to bring together people who are working
in new directions that are intended to improve social wellbeing. Last June a
group of designers and design educators met in Brighton, England, to discuss
the future of design. The main point of their manifesto, Brighton 05/06/07,
was that design’s principal purpose is human wellbeing. This is a
fundamental shift from the traditional aim of putting market success first.
It demands more thought about what should be designed and how. Listening to
presentations of projects that are focused on these questions is a good
start. From gatherings of people with shred objectives come social networks,
new projects, and increased effects. That is what the organizers of Changing
the Change are hoping for.

Leave a comment on the CtC Blog:
http://www.changingthechange.org/blog/2007/11/25/changing-the-change-design-for-society/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Design, flexibility and sustainability
Luigi Bistagnino
(international advisory committee member)

Flexibility will be the slogan of the Torino World Design Capital events.
Modern society requires flexible responses. Industrial enterprises and other
social actors have to be capable of remodelling themselves and designing new
products, services and systems to react to on-going change. But not only:
they also have to do so to re-orient themselves towards a sustainable
perspective. That is, as we say in this conference, to change the change.

Design must play a part in this innovation towards flexibility and
sustainability, making the human factor central to the process, especially
human values: ethical (sustainable development, care for the quality of the
environment, energy reduction); social (relational systems); perceptive
(cognitive sciences, not only ergonomics as ‘adaptation of work to man’);
functional (functional and symbolic factors); cultural (areas such as
cultural heritage). In fact, innovation does not lie in continual
technological updating, but in the way in which we look at a particular
problem. And here is where design can play a major role.

Facing the issue of flexibility and sustainability, designers are seen more
and more as antennas capable of picking up on changes before they are
apparent. Their success in doing this is confirmed by the appeal of design
schools and the numerous professions they feed: a whole range of activities,
not just in industrial production, but also in ergonomics, virtuality,
ecology, advertising and the web.

This kind of flexibility, which students learn in schools, becomes a
fundamental tool for managing projects in diverse work settings. And the
crucial point here is their capacity to relate and calibrate connections
between function, seduction, innovation and adaptation to the context, i.e.
of the diverse dimensions that are essential to good design. This approach
is not easy, since market pressure tends to push for one of these variables
at the expense of others, thereby influencing the quality of the final
project. Vice versa, this complex sphere of human relationships should be
the basis of all design activities aiming at realising products, services
and systems (considering them in all their life cycle, from production to
the end of their life).

In conclusion, the need for renewed attention to the centrality of human
values in research into innovation for flexibility and sustainability leads
us to consider the strategic role that these values can play within the
whole process and to investigate all the interdisciplinary aspects of human
factors today. That is, in view of the challenge of changing the change.

Leave a comment on the CtC Blog:
http://www.changingthechange.org/blog/2007/11/26/design-flexibility-and-sustainability/


top Last news / now on line
- International and National Advisory Committees
- Specifications for abstracts and draft visualisations

Important dates
extended_ February 18: deadline for abstracts and visualisations
extended _ March 20: notification to accepted abstracts and visualisations
May 26: deadline for full papers and final visualisations
July 10-11-12: conference

--------------------------------------------
Changing the change conference

In the framework of
WORLD DESIGN CAPITAL TORINO 2008 | © ICSID An Icsid initiative of the IDA

Organizers:
Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino

Promoters:
Co-ordination of Italian Design Research Doctorates with Conference of
Italian Design Faculty Deans and Programme Heads

Endorsements:
CUMULUS and BEDA 

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