by Tim Brown
There are at least three significant areas where design thinking can promote what the Canadian designer Bruce Mau calls the “massive change” that is called for today. The first has to do with informing ourselves about what is at stake and making visible the true costs of the choices we make. The second involves a fundamental reassessment of the systems and processes we use to create new things. The third task to which design thinking must respond is to find ways to encourage individuals to move toward more sustainable behaviors.
informing ourselves
Environmentalism entered the cultural mainstream with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, but it would take another forty years—after two oil crises and a broad scientific consensus—for a general awareness of the crisis to sink in. A major stimulus was the release of Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, in 2006, an event that suggests the power of imagery to motivate fundamental change. Together with the fact-based investigations of journalists, the data-driven analyses of scientists, and the politically inspired activism of communities, the work of visual artists can play a vital role in moving us back from the precipice.
Chris Jordan is an American artist who uses the power of scale to connect us to many different social issues. His series Picturing Excess includes images such as a five-by-ten-foot representation of the number of plastic water bottles—about 2 million—consumed in the United States every five minutes. Another composition depicts 426,000 cell phones—the number retired by Americans every day. The visual impact of his work exposes our profligate use of the earth’s finite resources in a way that words cannot.
Another artist, the Canadian Edward Burtynsky, has traveled the planet recording the beauty and the horror of human impact. Burtynsky’s large-format photographs draw the viewer into the lives of Chinese villagers breaking apart used computer monitors with hammers or laboring in the cavernous factories of Shenzhen. The eerie beauty of orange tailings snaking across the landscape from the nickel mines of Ontario conveys the scale of our activities in a way that is visceral and emotional.
The vast photographic landscapes of Edward Burtynsky and the intricate visualizations of data conceived by Chris Jordan overwhelm us with scale, but design thinkers have also shown that it is possible to approach the challenge of sustainability at a more immediately accessible level. As director of the global foresight and innovation initiative at the engineering firm Arup, Dr. Chris Luebkeman created decks of cards he calls Drivers of Change. Each mutually reinforcing set covers a major category of environmental change—climate, energy, urbanization, waste, water, and demographics—with each card illustrating a single driver for change from a different perspective: society, technology, economics, environment, and politics. By means of imagery, graphs, and a few well-chosen facts, each card gives a clear picture of a single issue without overloading the viewer’s capacity to absorb and understand. One asks, “How important are trees?” and goes on to explain the issue of carbon emissions from deforestation. Another asks, “Can we afford a low carbon future?” and explains the impact of developing economies on carbon output. Arup uses Drivers of Change as a tool for discussion groups, as personal prompts, for workshop events, or simply as an inspirational “thought for the week.” By thinking like a designer and using insights as a source of inspiration, Luebkeman has created a valuable tool that may inspire other design thinkers in their search for solutions.
doing more with less
Pangea Organics—“pangea” means “whole earth”—is a small company based in Boulder, Colorado, that makes natural body care products. After four years in operation Pangea soaps, lotions, and shampoos could be found in natural food stores within a limited range, and its founder, Joshua Onysko, began to think about how to grow the company without compromising the core environmental values on which it was based. A competent designer might have proposed a nationwide advertising campaign complete with eye-catching packaging and a more mainstream message. A team of design thinkers, however, saw the brief more broadly: it was not just about selling soap but about selling the idea of sustainability, wellness, and responsibility.
Taking into account Pangea’s need for a viable business strategy and its customers’ desire for products that made them feel like responsible custodians of the earth, the team turned to the question of what was feasible within the constraints of low cost and minimum environmental impact. The result was a comprehensive rebranding that leads customers on a journey not from factory to landfill but rather, to borrow the words of the architect and designer William McDonough, from “cradle to cradle.” Just as the “packaging” of a banana becomes a nutrient for the next generation of trees, the new compostable carton for Pangea’s soaps is embedded with wildflower seeds: soak it in water, toss it into your backyard, come back a few days later to find a garden.
The author Janine Benyus, who has popularized the concept of biomimicry, has observed that the industrial age was founded on the triadic principle of “heat, beat, and treat.” This muscular approach has to be replaced by alternatives that are far less intrusive and wasteful and whose inspiration is more biological than mechanical. The brief being handed to design thinkers today is to find new ways of balancing desirability, feasibility, and viability, but in a way that closes the loop.
What Pangea Organics is attempting to do on a small scale, Amory Lovins wants to do for the whole of the automobile industry. Lovins does not start by asking how we might design a more appealing or even economical car. He and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) have framed the question with different parameters, more akin to the tenets of design thinking than of design: “How do we get to a three-to five-fold increase in fuel economy, equal or better performance, safety, amenity, and affordability compared to today’s vehicles?” From this human-centered, systemswide brief they arrived at the Hypercar, a vehicle that makes use of advanced composites, low-drag design, hybrid electric drive, and efficient accessories. RMI set up the Hypercar Center in 1994 to prototype ideas, and the institute now has a for-profit company, Fiberforge, that is developing advanced composites to support this effort. By thinking upstream, beyond the artifact, RMI formulated a different design problem from the one that most automotive companies concern themselves with today. In the past there was a streak of utopianism in RMI’s quixotic campaign, but the precarious state of the automotive industry may help to pull such efforts in from the margins.
If we take time to examine the whole cycle of creation and use of a product—from the extraction of raw materials used in manufacturing to disposal at the end of its useful life—we may be able to find new opportunities for innovation that reduce environmental impact while enhancing rather than diminishing the quality of life we have come to expect. By thinking in terms of the whole system, companies can capture bigger opportunities. But we can’t stop there. Design thinkers must also consider the demand side of the equation.
altering our behaviors
The SUV may be the defining artifact of our time. More than any other product, it embodies the nature of corporations to respond to what people want, usually with more of the same—in this case much more—no matter what the cost. The popularity of these dangerous, expensive, inefficient, and ecologically disastrous vehicles demonstrates that change needs to happen simultaneously at the level of demand and supply. We need to find ways to encourage people to see energy conservation as more of an investment than a sacrifice, as so many have when they resolved to give up cigarettes, lose weight, or save for retirement.
The U.S. Department of Energy understood this when officials in its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) used design thinking to broaden their efforts. DoE had traditionally begun with the assumption that people already care about energy efficiency and directed its resources toward R&D programs whose fruits—new energy-efficient technologies—would satisfy this demand. In a program codenamed Shift Focus, IDEO proposed a new, human-centered approach that began by questioning this
assumption.
After an intensive period of field research, in which the IDEO team sampled consumer opinion in Mobile, Dallas, Phoenix, Boston, Juneau, and Detroit, it came to an arresting conclusion: people do not care about energy efficiency. This does not mean that the public is ignorant, profligate, or irresponsible but that “energy efficiency” is an abstraction that is at best a means of achieving goals that people really do care about: comfort, style, community. This finding led the design team to recommend that DoE shift from finding engineering solutions to people’s presumed needs to finding ways to engage them at the level of their actual values and at meaningful points in their lives. The design proposals that followed built upon these foundations: stylish but thermally efficient window coverings, retail displays of energy-efficient lighting, informational and educational tools to capitalize upon people’s heightened receptivity at moments of change such as buying a new house or upgrading their utilities.
We are in the midst of an epochal shift in the balance of power as economies evolve from a focus on manufactured products to one that favors services and experiences. Companies are ceding control and coming to see their customers not as “end users” but rather as participants in a two-way process. What is emerging is nothing less that a new social contract.
Every contract, however, has two parties. If people do not wish companies to treat them like passive consumers, they must step up to the controls and assume their fair share of responsibility. This means that we cannot sit back and wait for new choices to emerge from the inner sanctum of corporate marketing departments, R&D labs, and design studios. The implications are clear: the public, too, must commit to the principles of design thinking, just like the nurses at Kaiser, the production workers at Toyota, the WOLF Packs at Best Buy, and the public servants at the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Energy.
As the circle of design thinkers grows, we will see solutions evolving that will improve the character of the products and services we buy. Even on a large scale and even at the level of the most challenging problems we face in our society today, design thinking can provide guidance. Left to its own, the vicious circle of design-manufacture-marketing-consumption will exhaust itself and Spaceship Earth will run out of fuel. With the active participation of people at every level, we may just be able to extend this journey for a while longer.
CHAPTER NINE
design activism,
or inspiring solutions with global potential
A half century ago Raymond Loewy boasted of his role in boosting the sales of Lucky Strike cigarettes by fiddling with the graphics on the box. Few designers today would even touch this type of project. The rise of design thinking corresponds to a culture change, and what excites the best thinkers today is the challenge of applying their skills to problems that matter. Improving the lives of people in extreme need is near the top of that list.
This is not merely a matter of collective altruism. The greatest design thinkers have always been drawn to the greatest challenges, whether delivering fresh water to Imperial Rome, vaulting the dome of the Florence Cathedral, running a rail line through the British Midlands, or designing the first laptop computer. They have searched out the problems that allowed them to work at the edge because this was where they were most likely to achieve something that has not been done before. For the last generation of designers, those problems were driven by new technologies. For the next generation, the most pressing—and the most exciting—challenges may lie in the highlands of southeast Asia, the malarial wetlands of East Africa, the favelas and rain forests of Brazil, and the melting glaciers of Greenland.
I do not mean to suggest that designers have never before taken on problems at the scale of sustainability and global poverty. Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World was required reading when I entered art school three decades ago, and I still recall our late-night discussions about design being for “people, not profit.” Out of this righteous indignation came any number of tin-can radios and emergency shelters, but apart from a dawning consciousness of our social responsibilities, there is little evidence of its having had a lasting impact. The reason is that as designers we focused our skills on the object in question and ignored the rest of the system: Who will use it, how, and under what circumstances? How will it be manufactured, distributed, and maintained? Will it support cultural traditions or disrupt them?
A better model is that developed by Martin Fisher, a Stanford PhD who was denied a Fulbright scholarship to work in Peru because he didn’t speak Spanish. Fisher reluctantly agreed to a ten-month assignment in Kenya, where he ended up staying for seventeen years. In Nairobi he observed that people in poor countries who have been thrust into the global economy do not need money so much as the means to earn money. Together with his development partner Nick Moon, Fisher founded KickStart, a provider of low-cost “microtechnologies” including a treadle-operated deepwater pump—significantly called the “Super MoneyMaker”—that have helped more than 80,000 local farmers launch small businesses in East Africa. Fisher understood that the ingenious pumps, brick presses, and palm-oil extractors were not enough. His customers needed a local infrastructure including marketing, distribution, and maintenance. Educated in the high-technology world of Silicon Valley and schooled in the slums of Nairobi, Fisher shows how design thinking extends the perimeter around a problem.
the most extreme users of them all
When Hewlett-Packard asked IDEO to study microfinance in East Africa, our human factors experts did not know what they were getting into. We did not have much experience with Africa, and it would be generous to say that we are experts in microfinance. So of course we accepted the assignment.
The two-person team traveled to Uganda, where they planted themselves in various rural communities and in the capital city of Kampala, where they talked to local women about the on-the-ground realities of microfinance. In the course of their fieldwork, the pair noted an acute need for keeping accurate records of financial transactions but also saw the obstacles of doing so with the tools and technologies we take for granted in the West. The use of electronics is not widespread in rural Africa. Components need to be simple and robust. Products need to be designed so that they may be easily repaired or inexpensively replaced. Reprogramming a Windows-like interface is far too costly for the small populations of tribes speaking numerous languages and dialects. The closer the team looked, the more daunting the list of constraints became.
With the return of the field researchers, the full design team began work on a product that owed more to IDEO’s decades-long work with the toy industry than with consumer electronics. The device uses simple, off-the-shelf electronic components that are inexpensive, readily available, and easy to repair. Instead of an interface based on a large, expensive display, a simple printed-paper keyboard sits over the buttons so that adapting to a new language is as simple as printing a new piece of paper—or even handwriting a new sheet. The “Universal Remote Transaction Device” would not have been a big hit at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it was an appropriate tool for an emerging market in a developing country. Even better, the device could be used not just for keeping track of microfinancial transactions but also for remote monitoring of health care incidents, agricultural issues, supply-chain management, and more.
I wrote early on about the benefits that come from seeking out extreme users and why the most compelling insights often come from looking outward, to the edges of the market. The objective is not so much to design for these marginal, outlying populations as to gain inspiration from their passion, their knowledge, or simply the extremity of their circumstances. We may, however, be far too timid about what this concept implies. Even when we look at tech-savvy teenagers in Korea to help us think about what’s next for middle-aged Americans, we are sticking to the places and people we already know and to consumer-oriented problems that are basically our own. We do not often think of going to the poores
t, most neglected corners of the earth to learn about the lives of people who have fallen out of the system, but this is where we may find globally applicable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Sometimes necessity is the mother of innovation.
This argument can be misconstrued. Though it is praiseworthy to contribute our talents to the eradication of preventable disease, disaster relief, and rural education, too often our instinct has been to think of these interventions as social acts that are different from and superior to the practical concerns of business. They are the domain of foundations, charities, volunteers, and NGOs, not of “soulless corporations,” which attend only to the bottom line. Neither of these is any longer an acceptable model, however. Businesses that focus solely on bumping up their market share by a few tenths of a percentage point miss significant opportunities to change the rules of the game, and nonprofit organizations that go it alone may be denying themselves access to the human and technical resources necessary to create sustainable, systemic long-term change. The influential business strategist C. K. Prahalad has written about the fortune to be found at the “bottom of the pyramid” by companies that dare to approach the world’s poorest citizens not as suppliers of cheap labor or recipients of their charitable largesse but rather as partners in creative entrepreneurship. Prahalad’s description of the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India, is a case in point.
a passage to India
Aravind was founded in 1976 by the late Dr. G. Venkataswamy—“Dr. V,” as everyone called him—to explore ways to deliver medical care to inhabitants of poor and developing countries. The alternatives, at that time, were to import practices and facilities from the West—which placed them impossibly beyond the reach of most Indians—or to rely on “traditional” practices, which deny people the fruits of modern research and often simply mean no treatment at all. Dr. V felt there must be a third way.