Hasta La Ideas

L’artiste Marco Cianfanelli a imaginé l’année dernière cette sculpture en l’honneur de Nelson Mandela. Une superbe installation composée de 50 colonnes d’acier découpées au laser, dessinant au loin le visage de Madiba installé à KwaZulu-Natal, là où il a été arrêté en 1963. Plus de détails dans la suite.

Moon (2009)

Broadly speaking, design projects may be split into three categories: now, next and future. Most of our time as designers is concerned with the now or next, but occasionally we are called upon to embrace projects which are overtly future facing in nature.

These projects are typically used as a platform to tell a story, be that a business projection, a socio-cultural exploration, or an illustration of new materials or technologies, so it comes as no surprise that one of the more significant inputs for many designers is science fiction cinema.

Science fiction works in the space between people and technology in much the same way as industrial design, and the two have an influential effect upon each other. If you have visited any design tumblr in the last six months you will no doubt have seen countless sketches and production stills from Oblivion, and design’s (sometimes literal) impact on science fiction cinema is well documented. In some respects, it’s difficult to divorce the two industries, but there is a key difference which often gets missed: For the sake of brevity, I need to be reductive, so if there is a line to be drawn between industrial design futurism and science fiction cinema, then that’s the line between narrative, story and plot.

Industrial design futures require a story, a sequence of events that happen. In some cases they require a narrative—a way in which the story is told—but they almost never need a plot. Science fiction cinema, which has an implicit role as entertainment, requires a plot. Plots are difficult, complex and involved. Plots require significant development of character and space, leading to an aesthetic that drives the narrative forward.

When creating future visions, industrial designers have a habit of grabbing at cinematic aesthetics without a plot, leading to images, products and movies such as this:

Videos and presentations of this sort are plentiful indeed, and in some respects they have a place, yet they invariably seem banal, twee and idealistic to the point of fantasy. For this reason, it’s often easy to scoff at such work and dismiss it out of hand.

In 2002, at the Clarion writing workshop, science fiction novelist Geoff Ryman expressed similar concerns about the prevalence of fantasy elements in his genre. Warp drives, invisibility and interstellar travel were becoming the norm in science fiction writing, distracting readers from critical subjects closer to home. He introduced the concept of ‘Mundane Science Fiction,’ which aimed to generate literature based on or near earth with a believable use of technology as it exists in the time the story is written.

As a counter to the fantasy-laden future worlds generated by our industry, I’d like to propose a design approach which I call ‘The Future Mundane.’ The approach consists of three major elements, which I will outline below.

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Imagine you move to a new city and after some time you decide to have your hair cut or get a new hairstyle. For some people, this would be a frightening thought. Based on your knowledge of the consequences of not finding a new hairdresser who is “as good as” the one you used to have, what would your options be in such a situation? You would probably turn to your local acquaintances to hear about their suggestions and experiences. Then, you could personally visit some of the suggested hair salons to see if they meet your expectations in styles and budget. That’s a start. But wouldn’t it be great if you could present your previous experiences to this new hair dresser, showing images and ratings of those experiences? After all, all of that knowledge you created in your previous visits to the hairdresser is now the most useful asset you could wish for in order to guide you into this new experience.

But the truth is, that knowledge is not easily available. Most certainly you will have to start from scratch. You’ll have to test the available options here and there, until you’re confident of having re-established your “knowledge base” in this new city.

That’s how it is, but definitely not how it needs to be. The currently available technologies make it very simple to create a platform that could collect data from your experiences going to a hair salon in a very easy and rewarding way. The development of a system (e.g. an app, a website, etc.) that could collect key points on the agreement between your previous hair dressers and you would be reasonably simple to implement nowadays. For example, instead of doing a simple “mirror walk” at the end of the haircut, there could be a system that would privately collect pictures or videos of your final haircut and upload it to a platform (e.g., using a tablet connected to the internet), along with your name and the one from the hair dresser, making future service provisions much easier.

After that, you could rate the whole experience attributing levels of satisfaction for each of the service phases based on the perceived benefits you think you got from them. The hairdresser(s) could also add the experience they had with you to their profile, classifying it based on the type of hair, your personality and the purpose of the specific hair style.
The possibilities to add all sorts of information are too broad to be presented here, but (to mention a few) even the chemical products applied to your hair could be made explicit and then related to the final perception of benefit, including allergies and other unwanted reactions, that was registered by you and the service provider.

All of those possibilities—or better yet, those potential service innovations—are made clear if you look at them throughout the lens of a new “logic” to the service provisions: the Service-Dominant Logic.

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Market shockwaves are all around. The exchange place has never been so liquid and vulnerable. In this scenario, intuition gains momentum when compared to the sciences because everybody knows that to act instantly one needs to learn how to let instincts take over.

The temple of the technological wonders that used to be called R&D opens space for the search of a new construction mechanism, more human, collaborative, and decentralized inside organizations.

Call this what you may, a New Design, Design Thinking, it doesn’t matter… The only approach fit to deliver such a human and business balance to these companies is Design.

And don’t be fooled. I’m writing from Brazil and the winds of change that bring these shockwaves, have already swept through our shores as well, it started long ago, and culminated yesterday at the historical 16th of June night, when hundreds of thousands of people took the streets and the congress, to protest against corruption, lack of public services infrastructure, and an forthcoming World Cup that is causing the government to deviate money that should be used to improve health, education and other basic services.

But the implementation of a culture that allows companies and governments to adopt a Design-—like mindset isn’t child’s play. Neither can it be done overnight. Since I’ve started Livework in Brazil, I’ve been involved in projects directed towards the implementation of a culture of innovation through the lens of Design in several organizations, among them Itau, the biggest bank of the southern hemisphere, Bradesco, its biggest competitor, Petrobras—yes, the oil giant is also interested in Design—and many other clients.

This means we ‘vehelped those organizations learn how to think Design, not only use it into their projects, but also make good use of it in their small day-­to‐day decisions. It was Paul Hawken in his book Natural Capitalism who said, “Natural Capitalism is not about making sudden changes, uprooting institutions, or fomenting upheaval for a new social order, Natural Capitalism is about making small, critical choices that can tip the economic and social factors in positive ways.”

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Continuing our journey through Design @ Your Service, the article below is a contribution from service thinker Luis Alt (founder of live|work in Brazil). Good read!

–Tennyson Pinheiro

Take a look around. It is very likely that right now you are surrounded by objects that in some way or another make your life better and more pleasant. All those objects have been in some degree designed—some nicely, others not so much.

Now, if you start thinking about the way you interact with the world around you, you will notice one other common pattern: you access your life through services. Private services, governmental services, local services, global services, digital services, physical services. You use the world around through the services that somewhat are available to you. When you interact with a product, very often someone has put a lot of thought into figuring out beforehand how your experience should be when dealing with this object. Product and interaction designers take into consideration users desires and needs, materials and processes that are available for manufacturing the product and they run a series of anthropometric and ergonomic studies to come up with the final object. Everything is done in order to make sure that you will get the best experience possible when in contact with this product—which also makes it easier to sell it in the first place.

But let’s take a look at the different services that we access. Who is behind the solutions we use on a daily basis? Who is thinking about our experience when we order something at a restaurant, don’t receive a package at home or forget to pay a bill that never got to us in the first place? Unfortunately the answer is, in most cases, no one. We are using everyday services that have not been thought to our benefit as customers, but instead to be easy and, most of all, efficient to its providers. The business must run efficiently and it’s up to the user to ‘deal’ with it.

Much has been said in marketing theories that we get to use products by interacting with a whole range of services that exist around it. If I want to use my phone, for instance, I have to buy it in a retail store, pay my monthly bills and then I’m ready to, well, use the device. We think the opposite. Service thinking teaches us that any product is just one mean to access a set of services (or a main service). Take the mobile phone, for instance: in the essence of everything is the service. The bill, the store, the mobile phone, etc. are just products or services that help me to communicate with others or access information through a connected network. In the core of everything, there is the service.

Now the really good question is, “What exactly should be designed in a service?” And our answer to that is: what shouldn’t? Service designers have to take an important role in the new service order, given they are the ones with the capacity to navigate between the broad and strategic aspects of the service and to translate the business purpose into user journeys that are useful, usable and desirable, thinking on the overall experiences of clients and service providers that are connected throughout different touchpoints.

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