Stefano Marzano CEO & Chief Creative Director, Philips Design
Diversity a problem?
We are here to consider the "collide-o-scope": a mosaic of colliding cultures, diversities, attitudes, interests and beliefs. But diversity itself is not a problem. On the contrary, it is a great treasure. The problem is our attitude to it.
Great expectations
We experience today’s fragmented world as painful and problematic, particularly when we compare it with the situation of a decade or more ago. When the Berlin Wall came down in 89, we were all full of hope. There was a new sense of unity in the world, a sense that a New World Order, in which peace would reign supreme, was finally about to happen. Apart from the blip of the Gulf War, everything seemed to be moving in the right direction. Yeltsin defeated a reactionary coup against Gorbachev, and in 1993, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn. Around the same time, De Klerk and Mandela began to dismantle apartheid in South Africa. Then in 1994, we saw the Rio Earth Summit, and governments started to think about matters that, until then, only environmental extremists and nuclear protesters had been shouting about. The concept of Sustainability itself started to make itself felt, not only in environmental matters, but also in the wider economic and social fields.
Despite there being an economic recession for part of the time, those five years from 89 to 94 saw an incredible surge of energy. There were high expectations that the human race was about to make great progress. In the design world, we came up with a variety of strategies for turning ideals into practical reality, strategies such as clean cycles, disassembly, miniaturization and durability.
What happened?
But now, almost ten years on, what has actually been achieved? That beautiful New World Order has not materialized.
In the developed countries, we have continued to advance our own level of comfort although many people are doubtful as to whether more comfort is what they really want. In the immortal words of Peggy Lee, they're asking of their lives: Is that all there is?
To be sure, economically, certain regions have become more securely established on the world map the key role of Finland and Sweden in telecommunications, for instance, has boosted the economies of both nations. And, despite a nasty setback in the mid-nineties, Asian countries are beginning to recover their balance again. Even Russia seems to finally be getting its act together.
But in Africa, we see precious little progress. AIDS is destroying a whole generation throughout the continent. Zimbabwe has degenerated into despotism and is on the verge of famine. The Congo is bankrupt, and new racial tensions are emerging in South Africa.
In South America, once stable countries like Argentina and Brazil are teetering on the edge of an abyss. India and Pakistan are poised to annihilate each other over Kashmir, and in the Middle East, Israel and Palestine are again tearing each other apart.
No wonder millions of people are on the move, fleeing conflicts, persecution or simply poverty.
Radical reaction
The world's reaction to these uncertain situations seems to be a radical one, be it right-wing politics in Europe, street riots around G8 meetings, or the fanatical terrorism of religious fundamentalists.
People are fearful. Instead of rejoicing in the diversity of the human race and its myriad cultures, we look suspiciously at strangers and cross the road to avoid them, just in case. We try to shut them out.
Fighting symptoms not causes
But these are all reactions to effects. They tackle only the symptoms of tension; they do not deal with its underlying causes.
What can we do?
In the case of so much chaos and uncertainty, it is tempting to sink into despair, and think "But what can WE do?" However, I think there is an important, useful role that we as designers can play in all this, if we want to.
Fear of the unknown
What really lies at the heart of this situation, and what I believe we urgently need to confront as individuals and as a community of design professionals is the psychological and economic gaps that separate people. It is this distance that gives rise to fear… fear of the unknown; fear that stands in the way of any deep understanding of difference and diversity.
Spread accumulated knowledge
What I want to suggest to you today is that it's our job, as designers, to work to reduce that fear by reducing ignorance and by ignorance here I don't simply mean a lack of facts, but rather a lack of wisdom and understanding. The sort of wisdom and understanding that comes with time, with age. The wisdom that is passed from generation to generation. The wisdom that comes from contact with a wide range of people from different cultures. We need to find better ways of spreading that accumulated knowledge and wisdom.
Today, we live in a world where many children have little contact with one or both parents, let alone their grandparents. Many children don't even know who their father is. Knowing where we come from gives us a sense of identity, of continuity. A sense of being part of a process that goes beyond ourselves, stretching infinitely far back into the past, and infinitely far forward into the future. It is not for nothing that many of Americans now like to qualify their American-ness with a prefix that says where their ancestors came from. (Italian-American, Afro-American, Swedish-American, and so on.) Knowing where we come from gives us a comforting feeling that we are not alone, and that there is a momentum that carries us forward. In the light of the past, the future may seem a good deal less frightening. In the same way, knowing how others cope with problems in their cultures helps to cope better and more confidently with our own problems. Knowledge and the wisdom that it can bring are powerful weapons in the fight against fear.
The urge to survive
This fear which is basically fear of the unknown, of what lies ahead or around the next corner is rooted in what is probably the most basic human instinct of all the urge to survive. When we were still living in caves, our first instinct was to protect ourselves against threats from our surroundings the elements, famine, wild animals or other human beings. All things that we didn't understand. Defensive tactics were the only ones possible against the elements, but, as the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001 so graphically portrayed, our ancestors soon discovered how useful an animal bone could be as a weapon and how effective violence can be against threats from other mammals.
Safety through invincibility
Humans beings usually perpetrate violence because they want to provoke more fear in the other party than they feel themselves. Taking this thought to its logical conclusion, it means safety is only guaranteed if you are invincible. Being able to win every time means survival and no more threats.
Becoming demi-gods
Given this logic, could it be that, deep-down, we human beings really long to be invincible, immortal demi-gods? Such a semi-divine status would, after all, allow us live our lives as freely and as comfortably as possible. If so, it means we essentially want to know everything, be everywhere and do everything. And to achieve it with a minimum of effort and a maximum of comfort.
Reflections in popular culture
Such a deep-seated human longing does seem to be widely reflected in myths and popular culture the Faust story, Superman, and Bionic Woman, for instance and in many religions, where gods or goddesses are often seen as human-like but all-powerful.
Guiding principle
I'm inclined to believe that this instinctive drive to find greater power, knowledge and freedom not only guided the development of early societies but is still a major guiding principle today for better or for worse.
The rise of intelligence
One important by-product of learning how to fight and cope with the threats in our environment is that we have become highly intelligent. We have become capable of learning and then passing on the knowledge and skills we have learned. We have also learned how to develop technologies that extend the powers and capacities of our mind and body. They started with the animal bone and stone axe, and now encompass artificial intelligence and the space shuttle.
Old fears overcome, new fears created
Interestingly and ironically this urge to know, do and be has also served to reduce the fear it was designed to overcome in the first place. The more we know, the less we are afraid. And of course, life being it what it is, there will always be new things to be afraid of.
Developing civilization feminine values
If you believe in the popular dichotomy of masculine and feminine values, you might say that, as we have increased our understanding, the rather masculine principle of power, knowledge and freedom at all costs' has increasingly been tempered by a more feminine principle of negotiation, reconciliation and co-existence. For one thing, we learned to tame our instinctive egocentricity. As we came into contact with other people and got to know them as fellow human-beings, we began to realize that we couldn't always pursue our ambitions at the expense of others or other things in our environment. We now consider slavery morally unacceptable, for instance, and we have rules and regulations to protect livestock from cruelty. Most recently we have realized that we have to treat the physical environment with respect. And so, gradually, we are admitting limitations to our own freedom of action. These rules of good neighbourliness we like to call "civilization". The emphasis is increasingly now on achieving fulfillment not through the exploitation of our surroundings but through self-generated personal growth. Gradually, we are developing a global civilisation that allows for all organic and inorganic elements in the world to survive and prosper. A sustainable global culture.
And what were seeing in business - and this can only be accelerated by the current corporate scandals - is that the old models of commercial power at any cost are being replaced by sustainability models of continuity that take account of the interests of all stakeholders. In fact, more generally, we can probably say that, in today’s interdependent world, the role played by testosterone-powered physical strength in ensuring survival is becoming less important than oestrogen-powered solidarity and cooperation.
Paradise Regained
About ten years ago, in a speech called Flying over Las Vegas, I described such a world in which we could achieve self-actualization while respecting the equal interests of others, as a Paradise Regained. I see it as the sort of ideal represented in various religions as heaven or nirvana, and expressed by many philosophers, leaders and politicians in our day, perhaps most memorably by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Kennedy spoke of "a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved". He knew it was a long-term project: but, as he said, "let us begin." King, in his speech in Washington on August 28 1963, expressed his "dream" for America, but it might equally well apply to the world.
Lessons of the past
The goal of an equitable society has not really changed. But we have apparently failed to apply the lessons of the past. I suggest that this is because we have not devoted sufficient energy to passing on the knowledge and understanding we already have the accumulated wisdom of humankind, from the precepts of philosophies and religions to the practical skills of how to bring up children and care for the old and sick. Within diminishing bounds, we have continued to apply the age-old techniques of domination and violence, trying to
Bridging the gaps
As designers, we can apply our creativity and experience to help bridge the gaps between people around the world by disseminating humanity's accumulated wisdom. Our challenge will be to find ways of making it easy and economically viable to compress this wisdom and rapidly convey it to the people who need it. At any and all levels. Business, politics, family life... Social, individual... If we can do this, we will be making an important contribution to progress, because it can help to prevent the mistakes of the past being.
When I talk about bridging gaps, what sort of gaps am I referring to? Gaps in living standards, gaps in education, gaps created by distance even gaps created by time, like the gaps between generations. We hear a lot about living in the here and now: we're told to "Seize the day!" But it's just as important to have a sense of where we've come from and where were going. History gives us perspective. It reminds us of our own mortality, and makes us aware of our duty to future generations.
Village life
Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase the global village way back in the 1960s. We are not there yet by a long way. Ideally, villages are places where people know each other, and look out for each other, and take an interest in each other’s welfare. They may gossip and pry, and they may have their disputes, but
Traditions and roots
Villages also have a shared history, a history that is not hidden away in books and records, but which is very visible, in the form of old buildings, old paths.
So suppose we see the world, ideally, as a village, with a sense of now, and a sense of past and future, with shared traditions, shared knowledge and shared interests. A sense of community. A social network.
How can we help to facilitate the development of such a village community, through the dissemination of knowledge, information and understanding?
Of course, in time - a very long time - such transfer would probably occur naturally by a sort of communicative osmosis. But we now have the means to accelerate the process. This is the incredible power of information technology: it can connect people, and connecting them lays the foundation for reducing the gaps between them. And it is rapid. E-mail has been around for barely ten years, and it is now an integral part of many people's lives around the world. The same goes for the World Wide Web. The more people hear about these means of communication, the more they will expect to benefit from them.
So the technology for knowledge transfer is there; the question is how is to be used to bridge the gaps?
Let me just briefly describe a couple of projects we have been working on in Europe. They're both pilot projects sponsored by the European Union and carried out by consortium of universities and companies, including Philips.
Living Memory
In the first project, called Living Memory, we explored how communities develop online and offline, and how people interact within them. Basically, we were looking at how the connections within a modern village-like community actually develop and operate. The project involved setting up a network in one part of Edinburgh a reasonably self-contained social community. We created a hybrid infrastructure, combining physical locations and a closed computer network. We studied how people normally operated within this community the places they went to, the people they met there, what they did, and so on.
We then developed some appropriate interfaces that could be placed at key locations, so that people could enter all sorts of information, ideas, comments, questions anything they liked into a database. This database was designed to mature, so that people could continue to access material that was used a lot, while material that was only accessed rarely would gradually sink down, as it were, and be buried in the depths, rather like what happens in a human memory. This system allows people to use modern technology to maintain or even create the same sort of community feeling you once had in villages. Even though the people involved are probably more spread out than in a traditional village, and lead more complex lives, and keep different hours, they can still
Coffee-bar table
This gives you an idea of the sort of interfaces we came up with. This is a coffee-bar table. A touch-screen has been incorporated into the table top. If you want to take information away with you, you drop a solid-state token in, the information you need is downloaded, and you then remove it and take it away with you. This is an interface for in a coffee shop, but for other locations libraries, shops or bus stops, for instances you'd obviously have different types of interface.
Living Memory is a relatively simple example of a project designed to tackle the problem of fragmenting communities, with neighbours who don't know each other, various ethnic groups, and people coming and going. In effect, the global village in microcosm, we might say.
Community networks of this sort could be useful not only in consolidating neighbourhoods, but also other types of communities, both larger and smaller. Within companies, for instance, they could help to promote a sense of community among staff, many of whom are telecommuting, or working at widely separate branches. The same goes for schools, colleges or churches. And in families, it could also be helpful, keeping distant family members in touch, and within the home, serve as sort of digital cross between the refrigerator door, the scribbled note on the table, the family conference and the answering machine or voice mail.
Pogo
My second example is a project (called Pogo) that uses an interactive network to help children in different locations to work together on creative story-telling. It enables them to share stories and ideas with each other. In a virtual world, they can create characters and plots, using interactive tools or toys that they hold and manipulate a magic wand, or a teddy bear, for instance. The toys can actually enter and take part in the virtual world.
This project was set up by the European Union to look at educational alternatives to violent video games. But from our point of view, one the most interesting aspects is that it provides a digital tool for exchanging ideas and experiences, and co-creating new solutions not just for children, but for anyone.
Living Memory and Pogo are just two examples of the sorts of projects that could bring people into contact with each other and help them exchange the wisdom and experience that can bridge the gaps between them. In other words, these projects show how we can begin to apply design thinking to educational and community-binding systems, so that the accumulated wisdom that is already in the world can be disseminated more rapidly.
Not an association of ostriches
But much, much more is possible. It is up to us, as designers, to use our creativity to explore new possibilities, sketching out road maps that will take us in the right direction towards a sustainable paradise regained. We must not be an association of ostriches, burying our heads in the sand, and hoping that that it will all go away.
Personal contribution
It will require an immense effort, a personal contribution from each of us. As individual citizens and voters, we need to support politicians, organizations, or
As design professionals, we need to be creative visionaries. We need to actively participate in the creation of new models, models that reflect sustainable development, linking the development of business with the equitable distribution of wealth and the development of a global civilization.
What's in it for them?
We'll need to show the companies we work for that this sort of creative thinking can produce propositions that will give them a significant advantage in the coming world of new competitiveness, where STAKEholder value is more
Realistic
Of course, we have to be realistic. We cannot just stop designing all the objects that earn the profits that pay our salaries. All I'm saying is: we should apply our innovation skills to developing more ideas that will take the human race in the right direction design ideas that will increase contacts and understanding between peoples and cultures; facilitate the dissemination of experience and wisdom; and inspire an appreciation of diversity rather than tending to eliminate it.
Marketing myopia
This also means we need to broaden our rather myopic view of our potential markets. All too often when we talk about the global marketplace, we really mean only North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and the developed nations of Asia. If we are really going to reduce the distance between the various groups around the world, we need to think of how we can provide those groups many of whom are not in developed markets with
Global competences local customization
This calls for a slightly new approach to design. Rather than designing purely for one limited market, we need to look around the world in many different markets including many contexts that we may not even think of as being markets. From all those different markets and their many specific problems, we need to distil the generic problems. Then we can design generic solutions for those generic problems based on general or global competences and technologies. Finally, for each specific problem in each specific local market, we can then design highly customized instantiations of our general, global solution.
Web-based education
Take web-based education, for instance. In the developed industrialised world, this is an interesting alternative to bricks-and-mortar education and there is certainly a market for it. But given the generally excellent and quite dense physical infrastructure of schools and colleges that is already in place in developed countries, it is not vital. However, in the remoter parts of Brazil or Africa, for instance, where schools are relatively few and students live far apart, the introduction of web-based education could be a relatively inexpensive way of raising educational standards quickly.
Support for the elderly
The same technology could also be adapted to provide a service in the industrialized world to older people, in the form of online health monitoring or home diagnostics, perhaps combined with a shopping ordering and delivery
Bridging different gaps
In one case we overcome the distances of the students from schools, and help to narrow the educational gap between the developed and the developing world. In the other case, we can solve another distance problem the distance of the consumer from the hospital or shop, and the inconvenience of trying to bridge it, as well the gap that threatens to arise between those who are fit and healthy in society and those who less so. In both cases, the technology is the same, but the group served is quite different.
The more you start thinking along these lines, the more possibilities you can think of. Speech technology, for instance, saves people the bother of writing or typing or reading. And of course, it gives people who cant see access to normal channels of communication. But that's all in our own developed markets. What about the millions of people around the world who have got plenty of time, and can see and hear perfectly well but who simply can't read or write? How could speech technology help them? And we dont need to discard that idea on the grounds that they couldn't afford to have access to the technology. Hewlett-Packard are already working on a project they call “World e-inclusion”, which aims to provide low-cost digital access for people in developing countries.
New partnerships
Just as we need to open our minds to new markets, we also need to open our minds to working with new partners. Companies developing products or services for the business or consumer markets in developed countries will need to partner with, for example, educational authorities, universities or healthcare providers. Certainly, the complexity of the operation in either case would be so great that no one organisation could deal with it easily alone.
Highly Contextualized Solutions
We have actually been taking part in another joint project for the European Union that tackles the problem of how you could deal with the practicalities involved. Specifically, we have been looking into the possibility of developing technological and organizational platforms that can be customized, or rather, contextualized on a local scale, using local people, environments and infrastructures. That is at the local end.
At the global end, so to speak, the platforms also need to be able to integrate the contributions of the various global partners. We took the generic problem of people who have restricted access to food. Examples of specific situations that follow from this generic situation might include senior citizens living at home but unable to prepare their own meals, individuals who need to follow a strict diet for medical reasons, people who need to eat at places where there are cooking facilities, and so on. The same partners are involved: the customer, of course, plus the food provider, the food preparer and the deliverer, the medical service provider and the financial service provider.
The providers roles will vary from context to context as the customers needs and circumstances vary. We see this as a first step along the path from mass customisation to what we can call local diversity.
New role for design media
As designers, these are just a few of the sorts of lead we can give, if we want. I've been talking about reducing gaps, but we should not forget the gaps among ourselves as designers. The emphasis in the design world as reflected in the design media and design competitions is on the aesthetically striking, on the glitzy and the glamorous. Surely in the light of the growing interest in new reporting initiatives, which emphazise sustainability, it is a good time for the design media to pick up the flag of sustainability and rally us around it.
Building new heroes
They could provide a showcase for new thinking that sketches possible road maps towards sustainability. They could build NEW design heroes, especially young designers who come up with practical ideas for sustainability that can be immediately implemented. In this way, this whole topic would be able to move in the limelight where it deserves to be.
From crisis to opportunity
As designers, it is our job to use our creativity to come up with tangible ideas for the future, ideas that show people possible ways forward.
The world is presently in crisis. Yet crises also contain opportunities. Let us seize this opportunity to help companies choose the right direction to go in. With the recent corporate scandals still very much in the news, they may now be more inclined to reflect on these issues.
It's up to us to make a start as individuals, as members of society, and as a community of professionals. If we make a start now, perhaps we will be able to repair the “collide-o-scope”, so that when our children look into it, they will see a world of diversity: harmonious, in balance, dynamic and sustainable.
It is a long-term project, certainly. Maybe one that we will never see finished in our lifetimes.
But we, too, can say: "We have a dream". Let us now begin to fulfill it!
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