 Arnold Wasserman is Chairman of the Idea Factory, a consultancy based in Singapore and San Francisco, specializing in innovation, strategy, and design. He is also Founding Partner of Collective Invention, an innovation consultancy based in San Francisco focused on “Innovation for the Common Good” to improve life in the public domain. Arnold writes and lectures frequently on design, strategy, management and innovation and often acts as jury member for design award organizations and as advisor to international design and business organizations. Most recently, Arnold is on the advisory board for the International Council of Industrial Design’s 2009 Congress in Singapore, where he initiated and is Principal Advisor for the Congress theme: DESIGN2050. When most people think about future they think about it as a normal projection of the present, but designers approach it differently. We enquire deeply about how people live their lives, how they work, play, learn, travel and so on. Based on that insight we take an imaginative leap into intentional, designed futures (so-called “normative” futures) and backcast to what has to happen – the pathways of change and the solution milestones along the path ¬– to bring those futures into being. Trusting that this is somehow a useful thing to do might appear to some to lie somewhere between childish fantasy and shamanism. But that trust comes from many years of experiencing the effectiveness of Design Thinking for developing products, services, communications, environments, organizations and new ventures – and in more recent years at larger scale, developing strategies, plans and systems for organizations involved in education, healthcare, sustainability, philanthropy and national economic development. Thinking “from-the-future-back” allows you to see things differently – opportunities and possibilities arise that simply are not visible thinking “from-the-present -forward.” That is why I believe design has a major role to play in helping us imagine and bring into being a future of economic, social and environmental sustainability that is also a future of opportunity, health, equity and creative fulfilment. As designers responsible for much of the creation of material culture, we need to think of the future as something we deliberately and intentionally design. That sounds like the biggest and most daunting design project in the world – but what else is worth working on? And so DESIGN2050 was born… We asked nine design masters from across the world to put together design studios, working on a topic of their choice, in the way they wanted to conduct it. They each created a representation of life in 2050, visualizing it for us today in 2009. By applying the designer’s repertoire of techniques they were able to make future ideas tangible in the present moment. How they chose to do that was entirely up to them. The subjects ranged from food production, mobility, entertainment and healthcare to sustainable cities, production and consumption. The results have been astounding, showing a broad array of ways to think about successful futures and possible solutions to bring those futures into being. So during the Icsid World Design Congress in Singapore in November we used the design propositions from these studios to help launch a perpetual open source collaboratory of design thinking to bring the next industrial revolution into being. We involved designers and business leaders from around the world, representatives from the design industry’s professional associations, societies and institutions plus teams from the public and private sectors - from over 25 countries. At the end of the Icsid congress, attendees and others from around the world who have been tracking Design2050 on the internet have started to sign up on the new Design2050 collaborative groupsite, committed to starting up their own studios to begin working on designing life in 2050. We expect this to be the beginning of the viral diffusion of a worldwide “design-our-future” movement. I believe there is nothing more important, daunting, challenging or exciting than the idea of creating our intentional future by design.
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