As we see the founding principles for our societies erode, we need to ask ourselves what’s next and how we can regain control, argues author Kaspar Colling Nielsen in this keynote from Danish Design Centre’s “Experimentation by Design” conference on January 29.

It seems to me that some of the fundamental ideas of our modern societies are eroding, perhaps even dying. The great German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, recently said that we, the people, were the progressive forces of the 20th century. We changed society through political engagement and political struggles. We fought for labor rights, women’s rights, a better and more equal society. Our struggles were rooted in certain political core values. Today, we, the people, are no longer the progressive forces of change. We are not able to change anything. Today’s forces of change are technology and capital management. These are the forces that shape and change our societies and we, the people, are reduced to mere observers, trying to adapt, and to understand what is happening.

Western societies are becoming more and more unequal. Everyone knows this. Even the WTO is concerned, but it’s very hard to do anything about it, because it has just happened. It is not the outcome of any deliberate political action or plan that real estate prices in capital cities have skyrocketed. No government ever deliberately wished for its citizens to live with insane mortgages. It’s just something that happened because the capital system dictated it. Because it was possible. It is basically an economic premise: The cost of an apartment can be infinitely high if the interest rate is zero. Private banks are allowed to produce new money, when we obtain mortgage loans. The Danish national bank is only creating about four percent of the new money in Denmark, the rest is produced by private banks when they give out loans. The billions and trillions of the extremely wealthy come from your debt. Again; no government or individual politician ever wanted the system to have that effect.

The capital system is changing and defining our societies to a much larger extent than the political system, creating changes with much greater effect than the any political reforms in history.

Tech: If it’s possible, we make it
The other progressive force of the 21th century, according to Sloterdijk, is technology. Or rather new technology. New technologies are developed constantly without any of us truly understanding their implications. Technologies, like the capital system, also just emerge at a fast and uncontrollable (and unstoppable) pace. If it’s possible to make, we have to make it.

The problem with these new progressive forces is that they are blind. They do not want or wish for anything. They are not based on any kind of value system. They do not hold any kind of belief in anything. A smartphone does not come with an ideology or any kind of value system. Even the people who designed them don’t know what kind of changes they will create. Facebook has profoundly changed our democratic conversation, and we didn’t even realize it before Trump and Brexit was a fact. We only understand the implications of new technology, when it’s too late.

Democracy first?
We are facing other fundamental and difficult challenges. The Western democracies used to be the most powerful on the planet. For centuries, we were by comparison the most intelligent, the most advanced, the richest, and the strongest in the world. This is no longer self-evident. There are other regions in the world, other kinds of societies that are prospering and growing, much more than us in the West. Asia, for one, is challenging the global sovereignty of the Western societies. Why is that a problem? Because the historic connection between democracies and prosperity in a society is disregarded. Twenty years or even ten years ago, it was a widely held assumption that if a developing country had hopes of becoming a wealthy, industrialized country, democracy came first. That democracy was a precondition for properity. Now, the globalized world has shown us that our democracies are perhaps no longer the most effective or prosperous systems of governance.

The point is that if the development of our once great societies is guided by value — any kind of humanistic, democratic and benign value — that can strengthen our ability to imagine, almost catch a glimpse of a better future.

The challenge for humanism
Not only democracy, but humanism itself is challenged. Since Immanuel Kant wrote his moral philosophy in the 18th century, we have considered the individual as something that held certain rights. Europe’s modern history, since the time of Enlightenment until today, has been the story of states gradually and steadily giving more rights to more people. Kant also taught us that moral ideas could be universalised as general rules. The culmination of our European humanism is formulated formally in the Refugee Convention and the Human Rights Declaration. In a sense, these are sacred texts in our secularized societies, but in recent years politicians and others have begun criticizing them. Some believe that the right thing to do is to step out of these international agreements. This would have been an unthinkable proposal just 10 years ago.

The real tragedy is that the critical voices aimed at these “founding” democratic and humanistic declarations are not completely wrong. Humanism is in crisis for a reason. Refugee and migrant flows force us to deny hundreds of thousands of people their basic rights for protection. The number of refugees from Africa is projected to rise in the coming years, and European governments will predictably turn them down. By denying them these rights, we fail our own ideals. We abandon the core values of who we are, and what we believe in. But we have to deny them these rights, we feel forced to do so, because half of the world’s population wants to live where we live.

The great Italian author Umberto Eco said it best on his death bed: “If we open our borders, we lose ourselves, if we close our borders, we also lose ourselves.”

In recent years we have learned that our humanism is not at all universal. It does not apply to everyone and the hard truth is, it never did. European humanism emerged from and was created by Europeans and nobody else.

The death of art’s core
Art is also dying. Who f…… cares, right? I do. I think art is extremely important, but today, art resembles a supernova, an exploding star. It grows in size, but the core is dead. The bourgeois public of the past has been transformed into a pop-cultural public. Talking about art, consuming it, but not reflecting upon it. People know the names of all of Brat Pitt’s ex-wives, but few know the name of the Chinese president.

People know the names of all of Brat Pitt’s ex-wives, but few know the name of the Chinese president.

Art is dying because there is no legitimate place from which art can emanate anymore. A couple of hundred years ago, the artist was a person inspired by God, and therefore any authority in its right mind would cater and succumb to the artist and his divine work. After the modern breakthrough, the artist became a Van Gogh-type of character. An abuser or a mentally disturbed person, somebody on the verge of normality but who, by virtue of his vices, had some sort of access to subconscious layers in the dark corners of the mind, which he could then express in works of art. The idea behind ​​modern expressive art was that when people saw the artwork at a gallery, they would experience an infusion of some kind of hidden truth that the viewer could only relate to, or sense at a subconscious level. The viewer (re-)experienced a truth they had forgotten about. This notion of art was later scientifically sanctioned by psychoanalysis.

Nobody believes that art works like that anymore. The artist is neither someone divinely inspired, nor someone who can convey deep truths from the deepest layers of the human psyche. Art is dying and with the death of art, we lose the ability to create magical and sublime pieces of work and, we are left with large gallery walls filled with superficial aesthetics or simply odd-looking things.

So what does this all mean?
The death of humanity, the death of democracy, the death of art, and our loss of faith in technology are all ill-boding developments, because they represent the death of ideas born in the time of enlightenment more than 250 years ago. Ideas, on which our modern societies are built. Ideas that we all held as self-evident truths, no matter our political views.

When the foundation of our societies erodes, our societies face the risk of collapsing.

We need a new Era of Enlightenment. We need to define our lives all over again.

Granted, not an easy task, and it becomes even more difficult because everything seems so complex and everything is changing exponentially. Even the concepts and ideas that I have mentioned here are changing. Technology is becoming biology and will change our bodies and minds, and, in turn, the concepts of humanity. My grandkids might live for 300 years, and if you live that long, you might live to see even more sophisticated biotech that can ensure eternal life.

We need a new Era of Enlightenment. We need to define our lives all over again.

Ten years ago, when I published my first novel, the science-fiction genre was not an overcrowded scene amongst writers. Now, more and more sci-fi writers are emerging, putting words to dystopian stories.

I think the reason is because everything is changing so rapidly. Because society seems infinitely complex, impossible to control, and on the verge of becoming fictional itself. The dystopian movement in fiction as well as film and television is simply a symptom of creative minds not finding it very easy to spot a happy ending for us all, to put it bluntly.

Just try to imagine how future wars will be fought. Insect drones, dropped from a mother drone somewhere in some foreign country. Some youngsters sitting safely in Denmark in their gaming chairs controlling the drones hovering above ground many thousands of kilometres away. The drones fly silently through deserts or jungles. Perhaps they look like small mosquitos, passing villages unnoticed. The drones might sit and observe their target for a while, maybe collecting intel before eventually engaging.

This is of course just a figment of my imagination. But by imagining and writing about the future, we are actually analysing the present.

Writing about the future and what might come gives us the, perhaps false, notion that we understand what is going on right now. We all need to make certain projections, not to predict the future per se, but to understand the present. It does not really matter that our projections are always wrong. Because by projecting through future scenarios, we are analyzing present movements through time and through various landscapes. We are letting them interact with other observations and phenomena, thereby understanding much more about what they are and how they work. Come to think of it: writing fiction is not as much a way of analyzing the present as a way to realize it.

That leads me to the final crisis: the climate. If we, by enormous combined effort, succeed in changing our current systems and markets to a sustainable way of living, it will be due to our ability to make projections. Because we are able to imagine future disasters. Only projections can make us invest the huge sums of money needed now to ensure a better world tomorrow. But projecting the consequences of climate change, we can also change the way we view other present phenomena. If we really agreed that we need a green revolution, everything must be viewed in that light. New technology must be sustainable or able to better enhance sustainability. Capital management must equal sustainable investments. The way we live, produce, and consume must be sustainable.

By projecting through future scenarios, we are analyzing present movements through time and through various landscapes.

When you think of it, by striving for sustainability, we are not only fighting climate change, we are saving ourselves by once again putting values first. It’s already happening. The capital system is investing heavily in new, green technologies. This is of course because they achieve the desired revenue, you might say, but it doesn’t really matter. The point is that if the development of our once great societies is guided by value — any kind of humanistic, democratic and benign value — that can strengthen our ability to imagine, almost catch a glimpse of a better future. This sparks a tiny flame of hope that we can regain control of our societies.

Thank you

We need a new Era of Enlightenment, and we need it now was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It seems like a paradox:

On the one hand, the world is operating under conditions that pose an extraordinary challenge to sustainable development: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). Mixed progress on democratic governance after the euphoric wave of political liberalisation in the 1990s, the spread of new technologies and knowledge and big structural shifts such as a rapidly evolving global balance of economic power, urbanisation and climate change — together with shrinking resources relative to the scale and intensity of the effects unleashed — has accelerated the VUCA effect in the public and international development sectors.

On the other hand, leaders in the development arena have access to abundant amounts of knowledge, creativity and increasingly cheap technology. And with the United Nation’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), public and private resources can potentially be aligned around common global goals like never before. Many development organizations, including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), are asking a critical question: how to navigate uncertainty while managing greater complexity, and deliver effective outcomes by crowding in knowledge no matter where it sits?

Towards networked governance for a networked world

In this context, a quest for a silver bullet and a linear concept of ‘scaling up’ borrowed from the engineering world no longer applies. At UNDP, the response has been experimentation with the principles of a platform way of working: the notion that public purpose organisations can orchestrate multiple external actors around a common mission. The idea seems attractive: what if the UNDP could design platforms — both digital and physical — which would enable it to shift from a project-based way of more or less top-down implementation working with few (but significant) clients, to a platform way of working which would reach out to the non-usual actors, including the private sector, civic activists, individuals, that might be crucial to achieving long-term development outcomes?

The rationale for shifting to a new mindset and governance model — a platform way of working — is to enable the organization to generate better outcomes at a higher level of efficiency. In other words, the UNDP would actively reposition itself and its resources as a key node in a bigger, distributed ecosystem of stakeholders bound together by purpose, and whose impact becomes bigger than the sum of its individual parts. This would not only gear UNDP resources with a much bigger pool of public/private funds and initiatives, but also emphasize its facilitating role without the UNDP having to carry all the weight. Lastly, but just as importantly, it would create a broader sense of co-ownership of the mission across a much wider range of stakeholders.

The platform way of working is also designed to change how complex problems are tackled, moving away from the application of often sectoral and standalone solutions towards a heterodox mix of connected solutions that impact key points in the systems that shape outcomes. This is often manifested in a portfolio of experiments, which is also one of the defining features of the UNDP’s emerging Acceleration practice currently being rolled out in 60 countries globally.

Practical manifestations of platform or networked governance are emerging many places around the world. For example, Estonia’s E-Residence programme offers a transnational digital identity that anyone in the world can apply for to obtain access to the European Union’s business environment and digital public services. It enables simplified online registration of businesses from any part of the world, and a growing community development function that encourages more serendipitous growth of joint business ventures among members. UNDP has also found inspiration from Climate KIC’s Winners Project platform that focuses on integrating evidence from varied sources (satellite data, academia and think tanks, insurance and banking sector, and global food suppliers) for design of an early warning risk mitigation system meant to protect both food consumers and producers from climate driven risks.

Experimenting in 40+ countries

Last year, together with the Danish Design Centre, a public purpose institution in Copenhagen, over 40+ UNDP Country Offices from Europe, Asia and Latin America, and an international advisory board (see at the bottom who they are), drew upon existing literature and practices looking for a big picture response to the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the transition to the platform approach and broke this process down into a set of component parts with potential implications for the work of UNDP.

A collection of canvases and tools were developed, tested and revised over several iterations in close collaboration with a number of UNDP country offices. Through design thinking methodology this working package has been crafted in a manner that intuitively transforms the approach and mindset of the country offices while building a new platform offering.

What are the early learnings?

1. Platforms enable organizations to quickly identify non-traditional partners and hereby develop higher quality solutions.

In Ukraine, UNDP works on the development and operationalization of a platform that will function as a transparent, easily accessible market for services and resources available to home-owners and home-owners’ associations to boost energy efficiency in residential buildings. In order to set up this platform, UNDP is mobilizing the expertise of both traditional and non-traditional actors like construction companies, energy efficient solutions suppliers, home-owners’ associations and residents (individuals). By activating these networks, UNDP will be able to help identify better development solutions that reflect the genuine needs of stakeholders and begin to bridge investment gaps.

2. Organizations create new types of engagement — both digital and physical — that can generate new interactions through platforms.

In Rwanda, where over 70% of young people are underemployed, the YouthConnekt platform, supported by UNDP, provides an integrated physical and virtual platform to enable youth to create employment opportunities and engage in their community, supported by a partnership of the private sector, youth groups, international organizations, government, banks and NGOs. The platform has already helped to create 8,000 new jobs, enabled 1 million young people to engage in voluntary community service, and engaged over 4 million young women and men in activities that promote positive values and attitudes, nurturing a new generation of leaders. YouthConnekt has expanded to Cape Verde, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Zambia.

3. Platforms harness collective intelligence by adopting signals from the ground into new products and by enabling a continuous learning process.

In Brazil, growing urban populations and inequality are pushing demand for better public services such as sanitation, lighting, public security, education, transport and health. UNDP is working with subnational authorities, civil society, businesses, media outlets and universities to create SDG Commissions, Dialogue Groups and online platforms to map, track and improve local services. These platforms will source and manage local data using AI algorithms to track progress of development indicators and public service targets, informing local planning and monitoring of implementation. The platforms are designed to help integrate services to be more efficient and effective at reaching those furthest behind, boosting healthy lives and promoting well-being for all.

4. Platforms enable rapid spotting of emerging trends and continued experimentation.

In 2016–17, Somalia narrowly avoided drought-related famine, raising a record USD 1.3 billion in humanitarian assistance. But this type of intervention is unsustainable. In response, the Government established a Recovery and Resilience Framework (RRF) — or a platform — with UNDP, the World Bank and the EU as well as the private sector, investors and humanitarian actors. This platform has helped the government adapt to changing events, improved how different streams of resources are blended and managed for improved investment, and enhanced the availability, analysis and use of data. As a result, it is building confidence, attracting investment from new sources, and improving resilience of the local economy. The aim is to ensure that a drought never turns into a famine again.

5. Working in a platform can speed-up learning and create alignment around missions by putting outcomes first.

UNDP Moldova is setting up a data sharing platform to improve the lives of people in urban settlements using new types of evidence (open data, big data, user-generated data) and appealing to collective intelligence. For this purpose, the platform (digital and physical) will enable private companies, urban residents and City Hall to share data to address development issues. By working in this way, the platform is expected to reduce transaction costs and allow traditional and non-traditional actors to engage actively in the identification of solutions to urban issues.

As we move forward, we place premium on learning how these principles are applied in diverse development contexts across the world and how they generate different solutions to sticky problems. For example, the Accelerator Lab initiative has drawn strongly from this work as it seeks to operationalize 60 teams in 60 countries to address the deep-seated issues of depopulation, migrations, and implications of the changing climate.

In addition to the cited examples of platform way of working in UNDP, there are a number of other Country Offices that are putting this approach to work (In Serbia, Argentina, Indonesia, Turkey, etc). We will be posting stories from those experience in the upcoming period so stay tuned. We’d also like to thank the following individuals for guiding our thinking and providing critical advice and council on the basis of their experience and expertise on applying platform design principles in development:

Geoff Mulgan, Nesta

Kees Dorst, UTS

Sarah Josephine Hjorth, Canopy Lab

Michel Bauwens, P2P

Stephanie Wade, Bloomberg Philanthropies

Jono Bacon, Jono Bacon Consulting

Thomas Ugo Ermacora, Machines Room

Gabriella Gomez-Mont, Lab de la Ciudad

Marco Steinberg, Snowcone & Haystack,

Indy Johar, Dark Matters Inc.

Daniel Zimmer, Climate KIC

Simone Cicero, PlarformsDesign

Banny Banerjee, Stanford ChangeLabs

Gabriella Gomez-Mont, Lab de la Ciudad

Gorka Espiau Idoiaga, La Caixa Foundation

Platform way of working: Reimagining development in the SDG era was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week, a delegation from Oxford Saïd Business School is visiting the Danish Design Centre to explore scenarios for the future of work. In our “Boxing Future Health”-programme, participants will go through four scenarios for healthcare and discuss the transformation of the sector. Dr. Rafael Ramirez, one of the world’s leading experts in scenario planning, explains why scenarios are such a powerful tool.

Scenario planning has become increasingly popular in recent years. Why?
It’s a conjunction of factors — major organizations began using it, and people have become disenchanted with conventional forecasting, which is treating the world as though it was yesterday. I’m flying British Airways to Copenhagen. I assume they know how much fuel they need, and how tired their pilot will be after a number of working hours, because they have a track record based on big amounts of data. But there are parts of our future where yesterday’s data are no longer helpful. Say, planning for a future after Brexit. In scenario planning, we talk about TUNA — Turbulence, Unpredictable uncertainty, Novelty and Ambiguity. Any one of those conditions will make traditional forecasting unhelpful.

I’m a CEO with a strategy for my company. It has a mission, vision, action points, KPIs etc. I’m focused on my bottom line and attracting the right people. My strategy is tangible and I know how to implement it. Why would I need scenario planning?
Because your strategy assumes that there is a home for it during the implementation. You need scenario planning, when you’re not confident that the future is right for your strategy. Take Roll’s Royce that designs, manufactures, and distributes power systems for aviation and other industries. In 2014, the oil prices dropped significantly, and the cost of replacing engines was not really worth it when the fuel prices were so low. Which meant nobody wanted to invest in marine engines. These are factors you can’t plan for.

“You need scenario planning, when you’re not confident that the future is right for your strategy.”

If you want to make an Olympic team, you know what to do; train. But if you are planning the Olympics, you don’t always know the given context and whether your strategy will fit in. You need a plan that’s robust enough to cope with unforeseen changes. And that’s where scenario planning comes into play.

You have me convinced. How should I initiate this process and whom should I involve?
First of all, you need to realize that there’s a lot of bad scenario planning around. You need to be able to distinguish good practices from bad practices — look at failures and successes, talk to a number of people that have been on that journey. Send 2–3 people to a scenario planning program, and carefully consider how to adopt the principles, and whether or not you need to hire a consultant to complete the process.

Good scenario planning starts backwards with looking at the user and purpose. When scenario planning fails, it is often because it is not clear who should use the output and deliverables — is it for the CEO, the chairman of the board, risk manager etc. And how will it help the company. There must be a user, use and a clear purpose. Don’t confuse predictions with scenarios. The future is very different from the long-term. In scenario planning, we are working with the future for the present.

“Good scenario planning starts backwards with looking at the user and purpose.”

The French distinguish between “le futur” — the future — and “l’avenir” — what will come. You need to imagine possible futures to inform your activity today. The best scenarios have both good and bad things in them. It’s not heaven or hell. You need to assess both new opportunities and new risks. And first and foremost, you need to make sure that your expectations are realistic. If you invest 100 hours in scenario planning, make sure that two thirds of those hours go into figuring out the results are for, how the scenarios will make a difference and what the success criteria are.

Originally published at danskdesigncenter.dk on July 8th, 2019.

Why Designing Scenarios Should Be Your Next Strategic Step was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the occasion of our 40th birthday, we have published a magazine under the title Shaping the Next.

The keyword is empathy
In the spring of 2019, I attended the interactive festival SXSW in Austin, Texas. It was my third visit and I was happy to be reminded of a lot of relevant questions for our technological future, presented by a variety of leading experts, politicians, futurists, designers and authors.

Every presentation I saw, every talk I heard, and every book people referred to had an overarching theme. Of course, there was a lot about the coming age of machine learning, artificial intelligence and data security. But above all else, weaved into almost every conversation, whether it was about new forms of workspaces and education, IoT or blockchain, was one word: Empathy. Empathy — or the lack of it.

Thousands of people in Austin seemed to agree that, above anything else, we need to find a way back to being human in our digital age. Now, this is good news in more than one sense. It is of course reassuring that people who have contributed to seductive marketing through social media, who have coded addictive algorithms, and who have helped push political agendas via our e-mails seem to have woken up simultaneously to realise: We are not doing the right thing.

Being empathetic in all endeavours means you notice if a CEO of a major company has lost his or her emotional compass and is treating employees badly. You notice if they are hogging our personal data with the purpose of using it against our best interest. With empathy, we can steer the development of the most intelligent new technologies simply by asking ourselves not how fast it runs, or how much data it can collect and use, but how it can help humans in the best way possible. It means that something as fluffy as how something feels is actually recognised as a value.

Empathy is a skill
For designers, empathy is nothing new. Empathy is a skill (not a trait) that designers use, train, refine, steer by. But as I have spent most of my career studying and working with design, I notice a shift in my own world as well — a new focus on and recognition of empathy as a vital value. If more empathy is indeed part of what we need to address our challenges — and I believe it is — designers have a key role in bringing it into play.

I believe that the large tech-corporations, governments and organisations that are capable of taking users and customers seriously as humans, will ultimately be the ones who will define our shared future — and thereby the next society.

This year, the Danish Design Centre turns 40, and so it is timely to turn our sights to what is in store for the longer term. I hope by reading the following pages you will learn more about how we and our partners see the potential of design for creating a better present and for shaping the next 40 years.

Enjoy!

Originally published at danskdesigncenter.dk on April 25, 2019.
You can download the magazine here.

Anniversary: SHAPING THE NEXT 40 was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We need to look beyond public-private partnerships and engage citizens in driving urban innovation.

The main talk of my hometown, Sorgenfri, is currently our local shopping square. Or rather, the grand scheme to overhaul the square, which was originally laid out and built in the 1950s. The process has been ongoing for nearly a decade. At first, private entrepreneurs were given free reins to model and rebuild the square. Protests from local residents became so heated that the local government stepped in and — after a drawn-out political process — came up with a new scenario, literally named Plan B. Both residents and shop owners said no. As optician Peter Pico put it in the local paper: “We need a living square. The life on the square is our livelihood.”

The tale of Sorgenfri’s town square is as old as urban planning. Squarely put: We design public spaces to allow private companies to drive economic growth that, in turn, helps the city thrive. But perhaps it is time for a new equation, if we truly want to build a living city. Let’s ask ourselves not only which plans fit the overall design of the city or benefit economic growth, but what life we wish to design it for. How will a kid get from school to her after-school activity? How will a busy parent get from point A to B to C? Which facilities do senior citizens look for when they go about their daily routines?

The reality of city life is so much more complex than any plans that private entrepreneurs and local government can create on their own, even in a public-private partnership. In a time where we increasingly rely on expertise and “smart” technology to create our future cities, we urgently need a human intervention. Citizen-driven urban innovation will ensure that we include human values like empathy and creativity in shaping the future of urban life.

“Design is about interventions that gradually change entire systems for the better.”
— Kees Dorst, Dutch industrial designer and design thinker

This is not an easy process, and it requires that decision-makers in both the public and private sector make the conscious decision to listen, include and iterate. But if we are willing to look, a number of cities are already paving the way.

An excellent example of direct citizen inclusion is the Buurbouw project in Amsterdam. When the city government decided to run a busy throughway directly through a low-income neighborhood, the Zuidoost district, designers saw an opportunity to develop the area and opened a dialogue with local residents to implement their ideas — from a pop-up trunk restaurant for construction workers to a community art project. This is the essence of a design approach: Putting people and their communities first and including a range of diverse voices in the process. As Dutch industrial designer and design thinker Kees Dorst puts it, “Design is about interventions that gradually change entire systems for the better.”

Other cities, like Barcelona and Seoul, have created innovation labs specifically designed for citizen inclusion, and the City of Montreal has even created a “listening platform”.

In my hometown of Sorgenfri, the local government has finally decided to open the dialogue and include residents in the next phase of their plans. They’ve even commissioned an external consultant to facilitate the process. It took a while. But, hopefully, the next town square will create life in Sorgenfri for many decades to come.

A human intervention: Let citizens co-design future cities was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Interview with Matilda McQuaid from our magazine “Shaping the Next”.

How has Danish design shaped global design history?

Danish design has helped shape the notion of timelessness in design with its longstanding tradition of intrinsic craftsmanship. It combines the best of craft with the best of industrial design.

Danish design has helped move the focus to the user. It invites user interaction and centers around a positive user experience. There is a tactility and warmth about Danish design, that also places significance on function. And let’s not forget that designers are users, too. Design is more than aesthetic and form-for-form’s sake. It is humanistic, and Danish design incorporates this in their best designs.

We see this in the current generation of designers, such as Cecilie Manz, who Cooper Hewitt included in its 2010 National Design Triennial. Her multifunctional Pluralis Chair combined table, step ladder and chair into one artifact, while drawing on the tradition of minimalist art. Artist/designer Olafur Eliasson is playful and accessible on many different levels, such as “The Little Sun,” which has now become an important social enterprise for solar energy.

The high-tech character of some industrial design has it limits, and the pendulum keeps swinging back to a closer relationship with nature and the touch of the designer’s or maker’s hand. Danish design encapsulates this moment.

Which trends from Danish design have made a lasting impact in the US?

Danish design has been influential in elevating everyday objects to a higher level. When I think of Danish design, I think of the comforts of home, especially those utilitarian objects that provide that comfort — from furniture to table settings. Most of our time is spent outside our homes, so we want efficiency combined with pleasant experiences in those precious hours we spend at home and interact with our objects. In the United States, we look to Danish design for guidance in reducing design to its minimal components without sacrificing tactility, comfort, and function.

When I think of Danish design, I think of home, but the utilitarian aspects of home, like a table setting or functional gadgets.

In addition, traditions of craft have become quite important in the US, and we look at many different maker cultures around the world, including Denmark. More recently, comfort in the form of “hygge” has seeped into the American culture and language.

The concept of design has changed significantly over the past 40 years, perhaps particularly in the last decade. How do you see Danish design contributing to this shift — and to solving future challenges?

One of the greatest strengths of Danish design is its tradition — there is a solid foundation on which contemporary Danish design stands. And in areas like healthcare, the US looks to many Scandinavian countries, like Denmark for inspiration. For instance, in Nature — Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Triennial opening in May 2019, Nacadia Therapy Garden, is being featured. Nacadia is a research-based therapy garden for patients suffering from various mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and can be considered a model for certain types of mental health treatments.

The concept of craft has also evolved. Craft used to have a negative connotation, but this has changed in the last decade, and there is a greater appreciation of it with many initiatives taking place that are helping reinvigorate various craft traditions. It has also become closer aligned with design. In Danish design the importance of craft has always been there, but we are now looking at it in a new context that is more welcoming to tradition, which has resulted in craft being more relevant than ever before.

Originally published at danskdesigncenter.dk on May 24th, 2019.

Matilda McQuaid: Danish design elevates everyday life was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is dangerous to take leadership for granted in public administration and governance. CEO of DDC Christian Bason highlights to two ways to implement better leadership in the public sector.

By Christian Bason, CEO, Danish Design Centre

Many years ago when I entered the civil service in Danish central government, I attended a so-called strategy seminar with the management team of the department of business.

Coming from the private sector I was stunned when the managers questioned if they had any role to play in strategy making. “That’s the minister’s job” they said to each other, and hardly engaged in the seminar. Comparing this to the heated and engaged conversations at my former workplace, the consultancy Ramboll, I realised there was a massive difference in how leadership was viewed.
In a skills-intensive and highly competitive sector like management consulting, attracting, retaining and developing talent was seen as absolutely crucial. Further, the strategic choices we made were easily assessed in terms of their success in the market — so feedback loops were fast and unmistakable.

The myth of the born leader
In the policy department, however, leadership was underappreciated. Part of the reason was that access to talent was taken for granted. The brightest young minds from economics, law and political science wanted to be close to power and gain experience in policy making. They were extremely self-motivated and prepared to work hard without much encouragement, stewardship or support from leaders; they played their part as if they were on autopilot.

And making strategic choices were not only perceived to be the job of politicians (although hundreds of essential decisions were of course taken daily by the civil service) — feedback loops that show whether choices worked or not, for instance in terms of enhancing citizen experiences or driving business innovation across society, were often long and sometimes non-existent.

This experience illustrates why good, ambitious and visionary leaders are rarely rewarded in public organisations. What gets recognised is “hard” professional and analytical skills, the ability to deliver predictable and robust material up the chain of command, and the willingness to put in hours needed. This is certainly the case at the top of the pyramid — and this culture tends to trickle down to lower levels. The key fallacy here is that it is somehow assumed that these traits must be a reflection of good leadership, while in fact they have very little to do with that.

Good leadership, simply defined, includes a powerful mixture of strong interpersonal skills, high individual integrity, and huge strategic bandwidth. These are not abilities anyone is born with; these are abilities that can be learned, honed and developed.

“Good, ambitious and visionary leaders are rarely rewarded in public organisations.”

Most people in management positions probably think of themselves as good leaders. But are they able to articulate what that means? Could they reflect on how they develop their leadership abilities? Leadership becomes an unspoken, taken-for-granted aspect of management. And that’s really dangerous. Because if you do not actively seek to practice good leadership, how can you know you aren’t doing the opposite?

We need to invest
This vacuum is exacerbated by under-investment in leadership development in the public sector. For instance, there exists no international executive masters of public administration that are in the same league as the hundreds of MBAs on offer; schools of government around the world have been closed (as in the UK and Denmark) or are underutilised; a country like Singapore is the exception to the rule; public managers are often limited in their ability to travel to study and exchange with their peers internationally — personal development is often seen as frivolous.

Even when leadership gets recognised as a part of public service reform, policy makers don’t know how to support it. In Denmark, the minister for public sector innovation, Sofie Løhde, did attempt to place leadership at the heart of her public sector reform package, “the coherence reform”. A manifesto for good leadership was developed and shipped to tens of thousands of managers. But there was no investment to back it up, no changes in policy frameworks, and no real political engagement in the cause.

“If you do not actively seek to practice good leadership, how can you know you aren’t doing the opposite?”

Unleasing public leadership
When I recently conducted my Ph.D. thesis on the role of public managers using service design to drive innovation in government, I travelled to five different countries to explore the characteristics of managers who were successful in catalysing change. I found that they saw themselves as much more than decision-makers — rather as “future makers”. As I wrote recently in Harvard Business Review, these leaders were prepared to empathise with citizens to create momentum for change; they were open to bring other voices to create new ideas; and they insisted that to create more value for people and society they would also have to create a better and more meaningful workplace. Great leadership does exist in the public sector, it just needs to be unlocked.

How can we unleash more of such leadership? I suggest two approaches. Something you can do tomorrow — and something that’ll take years to build:

Tomorrow, start writing a personal leadership journal where you write down observations, thoughts and ideas about your own leadership practice. Use the journal as your personal development tool, starting a conversation with yourself.

“Even when leadership gets recognised as a part of public service reform, policy makers don’t know how to support it.”

In the next few years, we should establish a global Executive Master of Public Leadership.
This would be an interdisciplinary, international platform for advanced leadership development, pooling the best research and faculty from around the world. It should teach leadership through hands-on problem solving on real-world cases, leveraging peer-to-peer learning, and it should be offered to political and administrative leaders alike from across international, national, regional and local government. Let’s start the conversation on how to make that happen.

Originally published at danskdesigncenter.dk on June 6th, 2019.

We can make public leadership better — if we invest was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Christian Villum, Director of Future and Digital Thinking, Danish Design Centre

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves,” said Shakespeare, and with that he reminded everyone of the agency given to us at birth to shape the lives we want to live. While this may seem quite obvious to many, we generally still seem to forget about it when we discuss — and often worry about — the future. The stars are clearly no longer the dominant mystical force that we trust to shape our destinies, but we have found another almost other-worldly deity to worship: Technology. Always a source of both uncertainty and opportunity — not just now, but throughout history — it seems more important than ever to remember that we are shaping technology, not the other way around. Or are we?

AI will at some point reach sentience: It may take 25 or 50 years, but it will happen. The outcome will be beings that we will need to co-exist with, and you can argue that they represent that supernatural force that Shakespeare so confidently wrote off. In other words, it will be part of the shaping of our destiny. But is that so bad? If we imagine AI to become Terminator-like creatures that may decide that humans would be better off extinct: Yes, that would be bad. But what if the evolution of the human species and that of AI are much more directly entwined leaving us not to develop as rivals, but rather a team of one?

“The stars are clearly no longer the dominant mystical force that we trust to shape our destinies, but we have found another almost other-worldly deity to worship: Technology.”

Right now, we are already dissolving the idea of the human being as remaining a solely biological, naturally evolved organism. Augmentations such as medical implants (pacemakers, hip replacements, etc.), sensory enhancements (ie. glasses, contact lenses, hearing aids) and advanced surgery coupled with the potentials of the new frontier of DNA sequencing and gene modification is just the beginning of making humans something more.

As we continue to hack and improve ourselves, the human being and the machine will melt together long before true AI — or what is referred to as AGI, Artificial General Intelligence — becomes a reality. Small AI brain enhancements, or what Doug Engelbert back in 1962 coined IA, Intelligence Amplification, will merely be the first stage of the amalgamation of our brain and computer chips, and down the line our reality, identity and self-perception will naturally resemble the node structure of computer networks much more than we are able to imagine at this point. It is the natural proliferation of the kind of super-connectedness that we are already fully embedded in. This merging — the true realization of the cyborg — will happen well in advance of the emergence of artificial superbeings saying ‘hello world’ for the first time.

“Right now, we are already dissolving the idea of the human being as remaining a solely biological, naturally evolved organism.”

In other words, building that superbeing capability into ourselves and enhancing ourselves rather than building it as an external entity might be the natural step. If you think about it, it plays right into Shakespeare’s quote and human nature: The ability to shape our destiny comes from within. Can you imagine future generations using the pinnacle of technological achievement to advance anything other than ourselves and our own ability and opportunity? Those believing in the singularity predict it to happen around 2045; that’s when the first humans will upload themselves to the cloud. Might as well download some superhuman AI too, then.

Let’s take a step back to the present day and say to ourselves: If this is likely where we are heading, then let’s abandon our fear of this new technology and replace it with constructive and critical curiosity. Whichever supernatural power it will produce will ultimately become ours to absorb anyway. Let’s take control and design that future in which new amazing technology adds to the human condition, rather than taking away from it. Because this is the role of design: To proactively look into the future with curiosity and making that future one that is better for us than where we currently are.

Historically, when new technologies have presented us with the inability to see the future clearly, we have always been able to rely on design practices to help us explore and take charge to create sound and healthy outcomes, even if the path towards it is unclear. Our current challenges are no different; they are just taking us beyond our wildest dreams.

Or at least the dreams of Shakespeare.

Originally published at danskdesigncenter.dk on June 7th, 2019.

As we reach for the stars was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Interview with Joel Towers from our magazine “Shaping the Next”.

If you were to name three ways in which the concept of design has changed over the past decade, what would they be?
The concept of design has emerged as being as much about strategy and systems as about physical objects. Meaning that we’re now using design methods and approaches to solve system-level problems and drive innovation.

Secondly, the concept of design has been democratised as a result of changes in media and communication, including social media and mass communication. The notion of usercentered design has changed, now that the user has the option to provide feedback.

Finally, the biggest change — and this is of course also one of the most complex issues facing society overall — is climate change and environmental issues. The boundaries of the natural system are defining the characteristic of the work designers will do in the future. We have been used to having the capacity to use creativity and innovation to transform the environment around us. But now, we’ve gotten to a point with industrialization and tech, where we must take into account the impact of being human.

How can design help solve the issue of climate change?
At first design was about avoiding the impact, now it’s about redesigning the systems. We’re destroying the planet through the current design of our systems for energy, for cities, for houses. We’re externalizing the waste stream, so turning towards a more circular model is crucial.

We haven’t been taking the restraints of the environment into account, but people are beginning to demand this work. Nobody wants to buy things that make the future impossible.

What does this mean for the future generation of designers?
They will have a knowledge gap. We need the training and education of designers that can equip them with the right tool sets to meet these challenges. At the same time, the regulatory systems are still very immature in accounting for the system change, and there is still an economic disincentive to move away from the existing systems. We can’t address this nationally by ourselves, because the impact of systems of design is global. In much of the world, the ethics of a product now takes into account human wellbeing. The impact of systems not been seen as an ethical challenge yet. In that sense, the evolution of natural rights is still in its very early stages.

What can designers as changemakers do right now?
Designers are really fantastic at taking on constraint. I think all designers have an obligation to evaluate their work, both the things they make, and the systems they design. By standards that account for the way that they produce it. They need to educate themselves about natural resource depletion and risk — and hold themselves to that standard.

In the students, I see a very real interest in doing this — mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism and a kind of impatience. They know very well that they are the first generation that need to comprehensively deal with the impact of climate change. Obviously, we’ve known about climate change for a while, but this is the vanguard of first generation that will truly feel the impact while also being the last generation to take action in time.

Why is it so important to include international knowledge exchange and inspiration in design education?
Because we are facing global challenge. The basic framework of innovation requires mixing perspectives, cultures and solution approaches. That comes from the paradigm in which you grow up. We need to create a context — a microcosm — for solutions that can come from anywhere and everywhere. In the case of Denmark, Danish design influences our disciplinary perspective. Denmark’s commitment in product design and fashion design, where you are addressing zero-waste, reusability, local production, material selection. For example the green fashion summit this year.

And what was your motivation for establishing a long-term collaboration with Denmark?
Denmark is a leader in every one of these areas. You have a long tradition of design excellence, but equally important is that the national design commitment has increasingly been integrated with the environmental mission. There are still challenges and areas of improvement, but on the whole, Denmark represents an approach of examples and possibility which is very motivating. We can have the hope that things can move in a direction with resource awareness, balance etc., but it’s also important to have those examples.

Originally published at danskdesigncenter.dk on May 2, 2019.

Joel Towers: Nobody wants to buy things that make the future impossible was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Christina Melander, Programme Director, Danish Design Centre

We are facing big challenges
What will a future with bionic minds and robots look like? How do we design new products, services and systems that mitigate climate change, secure growth for businesses in a digital age and create a human healthcare system?

These are major challenges that, at a glance, can seem impossible to surmount. We need a holistic approach that puts humans first and places values like empathy and sustainability front and centre. We need design thinking.

As more and more companies and organizations realise the urgency of adapting to these challenges, they are turning to designers to better understand and create tangible results for an uncertain future. Design creates coherence through a people-centered approach, resulting in social, democratic and accessible solutions. Although these would traditionally be considered “soft” values, they are a powerful means to achieving “hard” goals — growth, job creation and innovation.

The Danish Design DNA
Few countries in the world stand on such a strong design foundation as Denmark. This is partly due to our successful furniture icons of the 1950s and 60s. But Danish Design has always been more than icons. And Danish design was always more than just beauty — though always aesthetic.

The essence of Danish Design and our creative DNA correspond with the essence and values of the Danish society. Community, equality, democracy and transparency.

These key values have made Danish design an inherent part of Denmark’s global brand and Danish export successes for many decades. Take a look at the finalists and winners of the Danish Design Award (formerly the Danish Design Prize) that for the past 50 years has celebrated the difference design makes. These include VELUX windows, Energy system labs in Nordhavn, playgrounds from Kompan, medical equipment from Radiometer,, pumps from Grundfos, wheelchairs from R82, hearing aids from Oticon, bicycles from Biomega, Refugee housing concepts from VenligBolig, textiles from Kvadrat, car sharing from GoMore, Open Embassy, and colostomy bags from Coloplast. Just to mention a few.

“I don’t think Denmark realizes that the world is actually looking at countries like yours. There are very few countries which have the track record, the talents, the potential to bring tremendously transformative and deeply systemic solutions to the world.”

Our biggest challenge is that design, and the way we design, is so embedded in our DNA that we tend to take it for granted. In the words of advisory board member for the Danish Design Center and CEO of Change Labs at Stanford University, Banny Banerjee, “I don’t think Denmark realizes that the world is actually looking at countries like yours. There are very few countries which have the track record, the talents, the potential to bring tremendously transformative and deeply systemic solutions to the world.”

The opportunity to shape a new golden age for Danish Design is now. If we dare to be ambitious, activate our world-class design ecosystem and meet the global challenges with our strong tradition for collaboration, openness and curiosity, we can literally help make the world a better place, whether it be for products, systems or business models.

Originally published at danskdesigncenter.dk on June 3rd, 2019.

Shaping the Next Golden Age for Danish Design was originally published in Danish Design Centre on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.