Design topics — 1x4, Co-design spreading: the connective encounter that boosts our collective intelligence
The fourth Topic of this column deals with the currently growing phenomenon of participatory designing, also known as co-design. As highlighted in the Intro, in fact, especially in today’s capitalist context, co-design appears to be a practice of great value and a source of emancipation for both the private/public sectors, which find new configurations in the connective encounters co-design practices provide them. As Sangiorgi, Patricio and Zurlo correctly pointed out regarding the ServDes Conference held in Milan in 2018, design stimulus, above all Service design, tends to make “design knowledge tangible and transferable and build design capabilities in organisations and communities”. And again: “this basically entails the compilation of numerous toolkits, the organisation of training initiatives and the establishment of in-house design/innovation labs”. Therefore, from an organisational viewpoint, “design” today takes the form of thousands of people (internals and externals to an organisation) who are supposed to reach efficacy, creativity and consistency between their tasks. So, all the intra-exchanges — which, as emphasised within the previous Topic, should also reckon with ethics — are effective and produce innovation. And it is essential to acknowledge that the increasing usage of participatory design practices is accounted for by the constructive and enabling impact it has on people. Indeed, it employs cultural/interpretative envisioning (even though it is not the only one possible) as a participatory/prospective medium to achieve an organisation’s strengthening and transformation purposes. Now, considering the context in which organisations try to tackle that innovation challenge or a structural socio-technical dynamism, co-design must account for its capacity to intercept and allow evident ongoing phenomena. Firstly, the urgent demand for people’s participation in transformation and change processes; secondly, the general democratisation of innovation and design thanks to the spread of user-driven approaches. Finally, in this wide range of design activities, in addition to ethics and design culture, a deeper, extremely human skill is activated: collaboration. As sociologist Richard Sennett maintained in his seminal work Together, collaborative capabilities “emerges in the context of shared experimentation and communication”. In fact, by exploring co-design practices, collaboration, learning, and experimentation can be nourished and increased into a participatory lens. At the same time, these activities require commitment, will and psychological and social efforts.
Taking a step back, it is worth wondering what curbs an organisation’s capability to design itself in such contextual relationships. There are dozens of issues to consider, from the ability to understand problems sufficiently to the effective implementation of designs. Then, while outside the organisations, everything is amplified by complexity and influenced by thousands of environmental changes; within organisations, management is often “fixed” in ultra-orthodox mantras, which offer a reassuring perception of control and conservation. That balancing goes at the expense of self-criticism (tiring and unpleasant) but necessary to develop and evolve further. This results in stagnation on a company level, where employees are immobilised within undifferentiated traits, tendencies and goals. Once again, concerning Sennett’s analysis, he identifies the causes which undermine the crucial abilities for making things together in the current labour morphology. Namely: “the superficial relations and weak institutional bonds reinforce the effect silos: people do their own business (…) in particular does not enter into a relationship with how many (…) perform other tasks”. In short, both disaffection and dogmas increase the employees’ need to find a new compensation between the specialised division of work and the creative/spiritual vein necessary to maintain it lively. Thus, the psychic impact of the such organisational condition begins to emerge. The Ego affirms itself by rejecting the Other, focusing just on its purposes and opposing Logos as a humanising practice. In this respect, given the boundaries between people, the establishment of pre-determined tasks and the outright absence of critical exercise, design — and even innovation — is almost impossible to develop. As well as, it becomes really complicated to be “agile” individuals. As Hegel correctly pointed out, work is no longer an “appetite held in check” under these conditions. It is no longer what assigns dignity and value to life, fulfilling it from a social point of view. So, how to reignite the vitality and creative spirit necessary for any organisation? How to change a company’s habitus? This is not merely a question of pure marketing but of re-interpretation of one’s traditions and history. And precisely on this matter (already widely spanned in the Topic of problem-framing), as suggested by researchers M. Venus and D. A. Stamm, it is the management’s responsibility to maintain the “continuity” between old and new. In their pivotal work, Visions of Change as Visions of Continuity indeed, they explain the “cause of resistance to change is that employees identify with and care for their organisations”. And then, “effective change leadership has to emphasise continuity — how what is central to “who we are” as an organisation will be preserved, despite the uncertainty and changes on the horizon.”
In front of such a delicate econiche, it is not surprising that within organisations, the gears of innovation and, more generally, of creativity — whose Latin roots, as Ron Carucci reminds us, “describe a social, communal experience” — often get stuck. Thus requiring new configurations to be found. So, when considering co-design practices, we obviously cross different orders of issues. However, I believe that the individual growth of design capacity and the crucial recovery of being together (or designing collectively) are the most important. Although the present Topic is not devoted exclusively to the individual capability of designing per se, it remains central, and one may easily encompass it through today’s “design thinking” discourse. An entire Topic has been dedicated to this issue, which I tried to describe as an exploratory modality: an “undisciplined intersection consisting of a mindset, a set of tools and a series of activities; spaces and specific explorations, which, moreover, are combined into the explorer subjectivity”. Hence, regarding this aspect, among the different reports that bring out the impacts of design diffusion within organisations, the oft-cited inquiry by DMI of 2016 is a good starting point: the report highlights that companies which leverage design activities outperform the market by 211%. It is of utmost importance to recognise that a company cannot be saved from bankruptcy by a few workshop sessions. Instead, two essential strategies are employed by successful companies: firstly, design is strategically put at the core of every activity. Secondly, design methodologies have been experimented with for 10/15 years. As Professor Roberto Quaglia underpinned in his Leadership Management Framework, “today’s most innovative approaches proposed a shift of focus: to engage corporate energy towards developing people, rather than top-down mechanistic solutions”. Thus, an ethical application of today’s Co-design practices should aim at something more than immediate results, that is, at a cultural change, particularly a design-oriented one, to increase the company’s resilience. As shown by another design-impact report developed by Service Design Network within the Public sector, the first success factor accounted by the interviewed participants of co-design activities is the “cultural change” within an organisation. Once again, people experiencing design culture seem to increase their development potential and design capacity. Such studies as The Design Ladder, developed by the Danish Design Centre, and Educational Design Ladder, developed by Cara Wrigley and Kara Straker, provide a further overview of the various levels of design intensity and activities in organisational and meta-cognitive terms, respectively. Thus connective encounters can re-enable and recover creativity as a necessary social experience of making things together by sculpting the participants’ behaviours from the outside in.
On the flip side, the other essential ability here is being together within the tiring journey of giving meaning to an organisation’s hidden potentialities. The purpose of co-design may be conceived as what the philosopher Peter Singer calls the enlargement of “the circle of the We”, in which “we” indicates the ability to recognise the Otherness that can “act” and “think” in the same way as us. In this respect, as the researcher Daniela Selloni emphasises in his Codesign for Public Interests Services, participatory practices are a sort of “hybrid space” in which “inspiration, exploration, discussion and deliberation” are enacted and boosted to connect different people’s languages and devices. This condition opens up a crucial question about people’s relationships. As Italian psychoanalyst, Massimo Recalcati said, “life is human life because animated by the transcendence of desire as a desire of the Other” [ndr]. Following his viewpoint, the importance of the presence of the Other emerges as a means of transcendence. Indeed, the power of the differentiating exchange between two individuals can reach the awareness of their current and potential conditions. And the opportunity to put Co-design activities into practice enables us to build connective encounters in which people can embody and mend gestures, rituals and intelligence (such as Goleman’s emotional one). Even Jacques Derrida, a highly stigmatised thinker, underlined the living and vivifying “coming of the other” as a foreign body that breaches our powerful illusion of belonging and identity and shows us the hidden sense, i.e., the meaning not yet unfolded. Now, as for these tacit dynamics between human behaviours that could be elicited by the connective encounters, it is worth asking ourselves which ethical dimension should be accounted for (e.g. the very dear to design inclusiveness), going beyond that of Phronesis tackled in the previous Topic. Indeed, designers act not only as mediators or facilitators but also as authentic “influencers” of such design struggle, as suggested by researchers Meroni, Selloni and Rossi in Collaborative design framework: “how the designer interacts with other participants influence their awareness of the process”. The study also explains the problematic condition the participants may incur if not being “adequately enabled to contribute”. Here, the essential role played by transparency and plurality of communication is evident. By using the words of professor Jorge Frascara: “unidirectional communication is unethical and inefficient, and it promotes a passivity that in the long run will weaken our civilisation”. In this regard, paraphrasing Ezio Manzini’s seminal work, the designer should aim for a “dialogic conversation” supported by the design methodologies, through which he can gradually achieve several collaborative results, from “shared vision” to “effective decision”. To further corroborate the validity of this approach, a crucial reflection by Ricard Rorty could be mentioned. Given people’s neverending search for happiness, Rorty underlines the importance of a “horizontal progress toward a worldwide cooperative commonwealth”. In this respect, nobody occupies privileged positions, but a strong foundation looks for “accord”. Thus the Co-design practices become an art of encountering the natural “competition” between people’s values. As stressed in Geoff Mulgan’s Big Mind, co-design increases collective intelligence, i.e., a trustworthy “social resource” which can reach the causative interweaving of reality and, therefore, a systemic awareness.
In conclusion, in light of such vital cooperation, Co-design activities may be conceived as an explorative experience of mankind, capable of triggering collective intelligence to reach an accord. And having experience of Otherness in both spiritual and physical terms through the peculiar design-modality “touch” becomes the essence of these connective encounters. Therefore, the recovery of that human attitude could be read according to several perspectives: one can see it from an existential viewpoint or within a relational dimension where, through the Other, our projects are humanised and acquire meaning. This is also consistent with Lacan’s thought on Desire: “desire is always what is inscribed as a repercussion of the articulation of language at the level of the Other”. Hence, it is by turning one’s Ego outwards that collaboration is enabled and takes shape. And thus, it is required to acknowledge people’s unique and irreducible particularities. Logos finds here its deepest and natural mission: making things semiotically recognisable, conveying a universe of meanings, a coherent symbolic order, to embrace what stands in front of us. From a cognitive viewpoint, this confrontation among people’s cognitions which may leverage human dialogic conversation, rationality, and empathic abilities (not to be confused with the sympatheia ones), entails the completion of a pragmatic agreement regarding the consequences to be achieved. Viceversa, doubts about these great human capacities nurture solipsistic perspectives against the variety of values, i.e. relativism. As Karl Popper maintained in Myth of the framework, it is under conditions of diversity that a dialogue can generate new forms, attributes, and qualities, isn’t it? As well as by a socio-cultural viewpoint, co-design activities, as a space for connection, critique and ideation, become a true intermediate-body (almost vanished in our political dialectic) owing to their mediation mechanism. A fundamental condition acknowledged by several authors and described as “social technology” (Liedtka), “socio-material assembly” (Selloni), “boundary object” (Star) and “design device” (Ehn). Once again, as Sennett remembers us when together we do, i.e., when having the authentic experience of collaboration, the latter “becomes an end in itself, not a mere instrument for other ends” [ndr]. And this is more fruitful in terms of human capability. Hence, in this controversial historical moment, the connective encounters should be legitimised as genuine moments of activism. Proactivity against that peculiar organisation entropy — mentioned at the beginning of this Topic. To create and motivate people’s commitment and passion around new goals settled by today’s dynamism, places for experiential, communicative, and imaginative endeavours are necessary to strengthen our development capacity and theories and stimulate new behavioural objectives.
