The worlds we make
Relating conversations for design(s) in transition(s)
You can find a version in catalan of this piece here.
You might see the world as a perfect machine, clumsy but steady progressing towards individual liberation, or as a never ending story repeating again and again the same power struggles where you work to create pockets of care and love. You might feel it as a complex and co-evolutive web of interactions between beings all going and coming from the same pulse of life, or from your unique location of the Polak game.
Whatever stories of the world you weave in, aware or unaware of it, it’s key to acknowledge that stories like these end up playing an important role in how you engage with and shape the world.
Regardless if it’s the accelerating climate crisis or the backlash to democratic values, designers tend to feel such perceived social outcomes as something personal. We keep saying to ourselves that we are change makers, we are world builders. So, what worlds are we creating? Besides noting an inflated sense of worth and well developed sensitivities, we might aswell acknowledge that world-making is a social process in which we take part. That regardless where one would place us in the spectrum of power, we must take responsibility for the worlds we make.
We started as a collective in 2014 with a gut feeling that we are undergoing deep transitions, both in society and in the world of design, wondering how could we contribute to make a positive impact. After these years of practice we learnt some things, but more than answers we feel are starting to find what are some key questions. The #worldswemake is a proposal to explore with the rest of the design community these questions grouped in five related conversations. With all this invitation we look forward to engage in critical and practical conversations that sometimes happen disconnected from each other. More importantly, we believe it’s key to acknowledge the interconnections between those conversations and its practical implications in order to create sustained impact with our agencies as designers and/or design teams.
One of these conversations focuses on why we think is key to make explicit our worldviews as change agents, which we loosely define as being planetary societies. Another discussion is on the worlds we want to contribute making in accordance with our worldview, this is what we call vision and in our case what we mean by transitions. We also found ourselves often in conversations on what all this means for our every day design practice in itself. We’re seeing how is changing the way we define our practice based on the process it follows or the results it creates to the impact it aims, thus we frame what we do as transition design. We also found ourselves having conversations as well around us as an organisation and its legal and informal shapes and its impact on the politics of our agency. Finally, another open question we hold is about the emerging discussions on the role of our own life projects as individuals in social narratives and lifestyles in all of the above.
Following there is a short description detailing a bit these conversations, which could be understood as sort of landscape to guide our transformation as designers and design organisations. We shared when possible our experience as an example with the aim to welcome any other standpoint. Hopefully we can contribute to be more determined in this transitional times about the worlds we all make as designers with society and the rest of beings on Earth, alive and to come along.
Worldviews — Planetary societies
Who are we, what’s out there or what’s the meaning of being here. What are our core beliefs, assumptions and values defining our answers to those initial questions? How do they affect our attitudes, and how they dialogue with our experience with cultural norms, religious and spiritual frames and the socio-economic and political paradigms to which we subscribe? How does this organise what we perceive, how does it impact how we make sense of our experiences and guide our interaction with the social and physical environment, and of course, to our own design practice?
Questions like these drawn by Terry Irwin conform our worldviews. In our case, we value our collective as a space that was born and strives to continue to be an evolving space for those using their practice to scrutinise questions like these. So far, the more synthetic way to represent our worldviews could be about a shared consciousness that we are planetary societies of beings.
Vision for the world — We mean transitions
One way to weave some of the facts about the world today is that we are living longer with lifestyles that not necessary increase our wellbeing thanks to the over-depletion of finite resources and the creation of human and inter-species inequalities necessary to extract and process them. We think we could do better than that as human societies and we propose to add our bit by using design’s impact to shape the everyday life of systemic changes. In our case, one way to describe our vision as a design collective would be to contribute shaping the human and non-human experiences of the myriad of initiatives shifting the foundations of what we feel could be better in the world.
Just to give some examples, we did it by strengthening SMEs capacity to contribute to a circular economy by creating eco-innovative business models or by providing service strategies and the capacity to ensure the sustainability of ecodesign actions by SMEs of our local context and international corporations. By facilitating convivial and sustainable lifestyles co-designing services for housing cooperatives going beyond real estate speculation as a city housing strategy, or by reimagining the user experience of digital platforms empowering coffee producers by bringing transparency and fairness to value chains.
Our practice — Transition design
Design as a term is becoming ubiquitous in many languages. This could be seen as a cultural sign of the spread of it as a predominant creative change making culture of our times. Many in design have noticed and reflected on this expansion, from Manzini’s take in Design when Everybody Design to Stelkerman and The Design Way, to Cross and its outline of design as the third culture between science and humanities. The rise of design thinking in industry could be seen also a sign of this predominance of design.
This is raising concerns to include pluralistic understandings of design as a change making culture and be literate on issues of power and justice if it’s to take a dominant position, or to question the logics of hegemonies altogether. This calls for deepening the conversations and practices exploring what transitions might still yet to be lived in the usually changing nature of our profession as a result of the ongoing transitions in society, while being honest with our evolving worldviews and visions for the world each of us will hold true at that moment. In our case, that’s why more than defining ourselves by the objects we design or the methodology we might use, we like to define ourselves by the impact we seek, thus we frame what we do as transition design.
How we organise — The politics of our agencies
To reflect on ourselves and how we see the world, to engage with organisations building a world we also belief in, and to keep evolving our design practice to make the most of them requires as well to organise for it.
We started as a ‘collective’ moving from the pyramidal logic of traditional agencies, built sometimes as narrowing organisations for personal and professional growth. Traditionally those founding members (mostly white men) stay on top and whoever wants to grow end up starting another pyramid elsewhere. Thus we decided to build on democratic approaches to organise human agency, or cooperatives to say it shortly. This was beyond values of fairness with the intuition that it would be specially productive for creative agencies. This means spreading a real sense of company ownership and promoting spaces for everyone on the organisation to build on their creative agency. Of course it’s not easy, as the majority of our (organisational) cultures were built on organising principles for a world of slow social change and not for the fluidity of our times.
Regardless of deep cultural barriers, we think is important to focus our attention on what we call the politics of how we organise our agency. From decisions of who we work with and on what topics, to the impact on concrete organisational practices of our organisations. From what are our rates, to what is our organisational legal form and its relation to social benefits (at least as it is in our local context) to any organisational practice in between. We so far kept being an open collective, took the legal form of a non-profit coop and have a work in process open source handbook of how we work.
We are keen to expand this conversation on clarifying the criteria to assess ourselves as agencies being aware that every organisation will find and evolve their own ways to contribute to the worlds we make. We also feel that for a productive conversation on this area we shall be focusing on how to complement the diversity of approaches our agencies can take and find inspiration from each other.
Own lifestyles — Design and life projects
We often engage in chats with industry colleagues sensitive to the world’s state of affairs struggling to find meaning in many projects they take part of. What we also observed is that for example, even if we earn enough to live, the same industry colleagues can earn up to 2 or 3 times what we do. This is just our local example in Barcelona, and is part of a much complex not just city, but global dynamics around available incomes.
Still, income is closely related to our capacity to bring about our life projects. If one looks at the people in our collective might see many riding bikes, working from home or shared offices, being members of energy or data network cooperatives building infrastructure as a common, using fairphones, living in housing cooperatives, taking part of our neighbors activities, buying second hand and slow fashion or, even if it’s particularly easy in Catalonia, buying mostly local organic fair-priced food.
One would also see that there is a lot of room for improvement the day we will figure out our individual and aggregate share use of global resources as a collective, or in how to avoid self-precariating practices. Besides personal stories of our members and their privileges, this is just a simplification and there is plenty of room to explore the multitude of localised lifestyles that fit into one planet.
Still, our lifestyles and life project’s narratives are intimately related to make it work for each of us to carry our practice of design in the context and qualities we are striving for. So, if anyone is able to use their professional expertise to help carry on their life projects, what is ours as designers? In other words, to round up the dynamic inter-relations among these conversations we are proposing to have, we might focus too in the role of our own lifestyles on it. Given that arguably our ultimate goal as a designers is to contribute shaping everyday life experiences that in aggregation conform lifestyles in and for worlds worth living in, how do we shape our personal life projects as designers? How might we use our learnings to expand the array of capabilities for stirring one planet life projects?
These conversations moved out of our collective to include the local design community in Barcelona. We’re now hosting these conversations with a format beyond regular workshops aiming to foster authenticity, which we call ‘design overtables’, a sort of a long lunch which we would love you to host in your local context. Let us know if you fancy hosting one and need a hand or if you write your thoughts or reflections on this article using the #worldswemake so we can keep up the loop.
Read [in catalan] the results of the overtables that happened during Victor Papanek’s exhibition at the Barcelona Design Museum ‘The Politics of Design’ in November 2019.
We would like to appreciate BAU Design Forum and Ramon Rispoli for instigating this series of conversations ❤
