Design Entrepreneurship — The New Social
Creating new stuff isn’t the answer. It’s taking everything available and creating value concepts by combining existing pieces.
“Social” is a word that takes our mind off on an imagination cruise of altruism, non-profit, service, and what not. And that’s just my point. Social is simply an adjective. It’s about society — us. That’s the reason why Twitter qualifies as the 2015 winner of Techcrunch.com’s Crunchie Award for Biggest Social Impact[i].
[i] Twitter Wins Crunchie Award For Biggest Social Impact — http://goo.gl/GO908R
“…pretty much anytime people were talking about something important last year, they were doing it on Twitter. And while conversation doesn’t automatically lead to positive change, it’s often where change starts.”
Social impact therefore, is anything that impacts society or a section of society. Tsunamis, Financial crises, global warming, terrorism, wars, crimes, fundamentalism, etc. all impact society as do social ills such as female foeticide, child labour, rape, slavery, exploitation and others. Positive social impact starts from attacking and eliminating negative impactors while simultaneously solving problems using design thinking and technology.
Since Design, the profession, has been singularly responsible for the present state of our planet, it stands to reason that design should take the responsibility of reversing some of the ill-effects of industrialization. A possibly inadvertent but clear side-effect of good design is consumerisation of life. Which is not necessarily a bad thing provided it can balance human greed with need. Most ill effects of consumerisitic behaviour have come about as a result of conscious acts of ignorance whereas others have happened by accidents of knowledge.
We can use all the knowledge we have to create all the stuff we need without heeding the potential ways it can negatively impact society, environment and culture. The scales have tipped.
Progress in technology can, at best, provide marginal increase in value — for years now, technology has been racing past what the human race needs or can do with it. Our emphasis should begin to shift towards creating ‘value concepts’ that are needed even to harness the power of technology. We need to develop these value concepts directly.
In the old days — as recently as the dying years of the last century — technology was trying to keep up with our needs. But instead of playing catch up, its pace overtook our needs. In the end, technology, especially those products that were powered by the silicon chip, won the race. Today we have more technology than we need and yet, rather than using what already exists to solve societal problems, we still go after creating more and more technology for the narrowest part of the pyramid — the top.
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Economics drives everything in today’s world, whereas it is supposed to be merely a function of supply and demand. Could we adopt newer business models such as crowdsourcing, collaborative manufacturing and other such innovation to drive down costs while increasing value? Low-cost is different from cost-effective is different from value added.
Unless the envisaged product enhances value, low-cost has no meaning.
The effects of technology ubiquity, now smartphones, are visible in the westernized lifestyle of metropolitan cities across the world. They have provided the velocity of capital needed to fulfill the rising aspirations of the middle class. We need not only to shape markets but also reshape the patterns of consumption to conform to sustainability guidelines and eco-friendly practices.
It is evident now that mobile ubiquity, especially smartphones, have bridged the so-called digital divide. In many ways, this revolution has erased disparities along literacy lines as well. The smartphone has powered the crowd to directly engage and participate in disruptive social change. There is an urgent need to linger at the confluence of disciplines where we can collectively identify potential areas of application of value and then go about actualizing it.
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Technology businesses seem to suffer from a blind spot. To them it isn’t apparent that many of the existing pieces of technology — hardware and software — are easily reconfigurable to create basic utilities for underserved sections of society, at extraordinarily low risk to reward ratios. Or perhaps they simply can’t see the massive opportunity on the other side. This becomes even more significant when even the consumer segment is largely ignorant of the state of technology and how it can make their lives better. Is this relevant only to emerging markets aka the third world economies? Short answer, no. The long answer is what Design Entrepreneurship will soon uncover— collaboratively, cooperatively and co-creatively. It will be a concerted attempt to disrupt conventional measurements of value, by unveiling the bigger picture. It will put a larger share of the social responsibility equation on Design Entrepreneurs — the new social.
More reading:
- The great debate happening here -
2. Becoming Rich by Designing for the Poor: Low cost is not about poor quality. It is about optimising at every level. Including design.
