Hasta La Ideas

Patrick Flick’s rate of change graphic. Copenhagen August 28 2009

With the economic, social and environmental problems that the planet faces today it would be easy to give in to a pessimistic world view: science offers a gloomy outlook and attempts to reverse the negative tide often appear too little, too late. Yet from the design sector comes hope: in the midst of eco buzzwords and sustainability banter, there is a new generation of designers who are implementing ‘new design’ and starting to reap the benefits.

‘New design’ deploys the potential and fluidity of the design process in multidisciplinary fields to produce tangible solutions to global problems; this new form of design is dubbed ‘process design’, ‘service design’ or ‘human centered desig’, but could simply be called designing for good.

To shed light on the economic potential and business value of design for good, the INDEX: organization invited four major contemporary design figures to a seminar moderated by Alice Rawsthorn, entitled ‘Designing For Good – What do you get out of it?’. The speakers – Chris Bangle, Fabio Cavalli, Cameron Sinclair and Patrick Flick – each unraveled their motivations and methodologies for addressing global problems through design.

In her comprehensive introduction Alice Rawsthorn stated: “There is nothing new about designing for good because there is no such thing as designing for bad”, pointing out examples of sustainable design practices that date back to the 1920s. However she also admitted that: “ugly fuel-guzzling cars, malfunctioning mobile phones, illegible instruction books and landfills filled with crap” have tarnished the reputation of design, associating it in the public eye with the mass production of things that people don’t really need and that then fail to go away; a phenomenon she described as a post-modern design nightmare.

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