Solving Today’s Epic Challenges through the Power of Design + Creative Collaboration
By Lynelle Cameron and Dr. Randy Swearer
With a projected 10 billion people living on the planet in 2050, we are at a crucial time to find ways to support an ever-increasing population to live well and live within the limits of the planet. Among other global issues, climate change and waste are two critically important problems that require our attention. Approximately 95% of us will live within a day’s drive of a city and the global middle class will grow to make up nearly half of the global population, placing more demand than ever before on our natural resources and infrastructures. In addition, our continued and growing focus on producing and consuming as cheaply as possible has created a linear economy in which objects are briefly used and then discarded as waste.
So how can we solve for these global crises? The Clinton Foundation “believe[s] that the best way to unlock human potential is through the power of creative collaboration…to work faster, leaner, and better; to find solutions that last; and to transform lives and communities from what they are today to what they can be, tomorrow.” At Autodesk, we’ve seen that creative collaboration through design has the potential to develop truly disruptive solutions that can help change the world for the better, and inspiring creative young talent will bring us bold new approaches to solving today’s epic challenges.
With a projected 10 billion people living on the planet in 2050, we are at a crucial time to find ways to support an ever-increasing population to live well and live within the limits of the planet.
Opening today is the ninth annual Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) meeting, which will be held at UC Berkeley and bring together more than 1,000 innovative student leaders to make Commitments to Action in CGI U’s five focus areas: Education, Environment and Climate Change, Peace and Human Rights, Poverty Alleviation, and Public Health.
We have a tradition of deep involvement in education and sustainability efforts and will be guiding student leaders at CGI U through two different activities: a “design swarm” addressing an issue created by climate change, and a working session on expanding the circular economy. We know through the power of design, we have an opportunity to create a better world. Exposing young people to design, and inspiring them to use design to solve for some of the largest problems facing our population today is imperative if we’re going to build a flourishing future.
One of the ways we’ve found to elicit engagement with designing for a better world is by getting students involved in “design swarming”, which is a group problem-solving process that is gaining popularity as a way for small teams to come together and address a problem by harnessing the unique strengths of individual team members and the collective genius of the swarm team. It builds on techniques from design thinking and agile problem solving.
Collaboration through design has the potential to develop truly disruptive solutions that can help change the world for the better, and inspiring creative young talent will bring us bold new approaches to solving today’s epic challenges.
Recently at the Pune Design Festival in India, we hosted a design swarm comprised of 100 participants, most of them students, divided into 10 teams. The challenge was to solve a wicked problem — the ocean pollution crisis caused by single use plastic bags — over the course of just of 5 hours. At the end the students provided their solutions using storyboards, pitches, and 3D printed artifacts.
At CGI U, we’re asking students to help design a solution that will address the effect of climate change on the world’s water supply. Climate change is disrupting weather patterns so that rainfall is getting increasingly unpredictable swinging between extreme drought to devastating floods. This is a worldwide phenomenon that scientists warn is only going to increase. We have to find ways to gather, use and store rain water when we receive it.
Unfortunately, with the dramatic increase in atmospheric pollutants and their global movements, rain water is not uniform in its purity, varying from pristine to polluted, often changing in purity in the same location from hour to hour. We’re challenging students to propose a design solution for domestic use of the PureSponge filter, which costs only $10 and can purify a continuous stream of water with the use of no power at all.
If the design swarm tackles one big problem by using collective brainpower to design one solution, our working session on exploring a circular economy will help us look at improving the actual process of design to facilitate building an economic system in which no materials are wasted. Through innovation in recycling technologies, sustainable design, and biomimicry, we can look at how to design and build products where they can be reused and refurbished, creating a circular re-exploitation of resources and reducing our ecological footprint. As an added benefit, circular economy models have the potential to generate a total of $1 trillion a year for the global economy by 2025, making them increasingly attractive to companies around the world.
By addressing global issues, such as climate change and waste, through an introduction of collaborative design, we hope to inspire further commitments that help CGI members translate practical goals into a better world for all of us. To date, members of the Clinton Global Initiative community have made more than 3,400 commitments which have improved the lives of more than 430 million people in more than 180 countries. Follow along at @AutodeskEDU on Twitter to hear more about our activities at CGI U.
Lynelle Cameron is President & CEO of the Autodesk Foundation and Senior Director of Sustainability at Autodesk, Inc. Cameron established both groups at Autodesk to invest in and support people, organizations, students and entrepreneurs who are designing solutions to solve today’s most epic challenges.
Dr. Randy Swearer is the vice president for Autodesk’s global education team. Swearer has a background in academia and technology, including roles as the dean of Parsons School of Design and provost at Philadelphia University; as well as senior designer and supervisor at Wang Laboratories and senior communications specialist at IBM.
