Design and Difference

I am giving a Keynote on March 3rd at 9:45 at the Icograda Design Week in Doha. The topics revolve around collaboration and globalisation. To suggest a perspective I wrote a short text:

1. Globalization, otherness, and locality

Globalization is essentially a formation process of a particular large-scale system based on the exchange of goods and services. This is not new –throughout the better part of history, goods such as textiles, pottery, spices etc. have been transported from culture to culture and over large distances. People had been well aware when things had been from other places – it was something interesting and sought after for its special value. The difference in the last wave of globalization is that products from elsewhere are often not any more made and bought as if they are from elsewhere. In having no connection to where they are designed and made, products inevitably lose a good part of what makes them interesting: Difference and otherness.

When we look at the role of design in the development of economies in the last 20 years, otherness, locality and globalization are closely connected. In the initial phase of an emerging economy, a local market is gradually more involved in international trade. In this phase, local consumers have a high regard for imported goods, either because they are not available locally, or because they are of better quality, or because they are more interesting. Consequently, in this first phase, local producers tend to imitate and interpret foreign designs, both to retain local consumers and to win new customers abroad. This phenomenon happened 20 years ago in Taiwan and South Korea, and in the recent years in China. This is the phase when “otherness” is absorbed locally and exported again. However, this is a learning process which only starts with imitation. Over time, when an economy is maturing, manufacturers and service providers move on from imitation to gradually acquiring the knowledge to create their own design language, usually based on intrinsic qualities of their own culture. See also Alchemy of Cultures (2001), and Imitated, Commodified, Experienced (2005).

Emerging economies in the last years went through a similar phase, which is one reason why newer buildings in places far apart can look quite similar. They take on “dominant designs” such as, for instance, the steel skyscraper. Originally a 19th-century American concept, it became so much a 20th century symbol of technological progress that it is now, over 100 years after its creation by William Le Baron Jenney and Louis Sullivan, a dominant design which can now be found all over the planet, in the process having pushed aside much of the traditions of local architecture. Design, however, is not about sameness, but about making a positive difference.

2. Collaboration and design as black box and process

We desire difference because we are different. People naturally have different world views, expectations and ways of accomplishing tasks. These differences increase: as professional disciplines get increasingly specialized, people get increasingly locked into their domain knowledge. This is because modes of working are prescribed within a particular domain which over time adapts to different external environments. In the course of these adaptations, increasingly specialized tools and languages are developed. For example: Mathematicians and architects both use white sheets of paper with symbols on it. They can interchange their concepts (= communicate) as long as these concepts are fairly simple. However, once these concepts become more advanced, they inevitably become more complex, less intelligible without particular specialized knowledge, and hence less interchangeable.

As a result, collaboration is easy within simple tasks. However, where we need advanced collaboration is in complex situations, to solve complex problems. But the more advanced the required knowledge, the more difficult is cross-disciplinary collaboration, because domain knowledge involved becomes increasingly specialized.

Is design a solution to enable collaboration? It depends how you approach it.  When you describe design with a traditional art school approach, design is a “black box” where talent is put in and a design, somewhat miraculously, comes out. In this approach, we don’t really know how design comes about. Design is thought to emerge from a special artistic trait which you either have, or you don’t. However, you can also describe design differently - not as a “black box”, but a piece of software. In this model, the process makes the design. Once the process is understood, essentially everybody can be a designer.
The process approach makes design a way of thinking and solving problems. To enable design as  process, it is a good starting point to acknowledge difference while focusing on common aims – here an illustration of common aims between the design and the management profession.

Design as process comes in as a fundamental tool to rethink and improve. The future of design, then, is to advance economic, ecologic and social models, systems, and services.