Design to improve life education
0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN
Design 3.0
HOW DESIGN GREW FROM STUFF
TO SOCIOTECHNICAL SYSTEMS AND
BECAME TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE
TO DESIGNERS
By Arnold Wasserman
Chairman of The Idea
Factory, Singapore.
Founding Principal of
Collective Invention,
San Francisco.
Vice-Chairman of the
INDEX: Awards nomina-
tion committee and jury.
Member, INDEX: board
of advisors.
Design Today
Design encompasses many discrete
disciplines, each with its own specialized
purpose, preparation and practice. But
certain common themes cut across all the
diverse domains of design. Design is the
integration of art and technology for the
creation of products, communications and
environments that serve human needs.
Design is also a translator of the intangible
values of a nations art and culture into its
tangible artifacts of innovation. Design
is, to quote Paul Saffo: Form Imbued
with Meaning. Finally, design is not
the exclusive province of professional
designers. As Nobelist Herbert A. Simon
so eloquently put it:
Everyone designs who devises courses
of action aimed at changing existing
situations into preferred ones.
The intellectual activity that produces
material artifacts is no different funda-
mentally from the one that prescribes
remedies for a sick patient or the one that
devises a new sales plan for a company
or a social welfare policy for a state.
Design, so construed, is the core of all
professional training; it is the principal
mark that distinguishes the professions
from the sciences.
(Herbert A. Simon,
The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969)
What most people understand as design
has to do with familiar material objects -
from Arne Jacobson chairs to iPads, from
H&M fashion to the Swatch Smart Car,
from Frank Gehry museums to sustainable
green communities.
But design today is evolving along new
paths and at an accelerating pace, blurring
the traditional boundaries of design and
compounding the ambiguity between
design as product - physical, tangible stuff
- and design as process - a way of thinking,
a set of cognitive skills, methods, tools and
techniques having intrinsic value in their
own right.
DESIGN 3.
Design Thinking
In recent years, Design Thinking has
become a cultural meme familiar far
beyond the conventionally understood
boundaries of professional design. Those
of us who were trained in design schools
and who work in a design studio - indus-
trial designers, archi-tects, communi-
cations designers, digital media designers
- know tacitly what design thinking is. We
do it every day (although it must be said that
few designers are self-reflective about the
process itself or know the epistemology
of the field.)
These days non-designers have discovered
how powerful design thinking can be as a
cognitive strategy and they are applying
it to fields outside the traditional scope
of design, such as health care, education,
sustainable production and consumption,
new enterprise creation - and at the large
scales of strategic planning, future scenario
planning, organizational transformation,
public policy, national economic and social
development and field building in the civil
and philanthropic sectors.
The focus of design thinking has shifted
successively from things to people to society
at large. In the process, design has grown
from the making and selling of stuff to the
development of complex sociotechnical
systems that improve life.
In its simplest form, design thinking is a
set of practices for gaining insight about
people and their needs, building strategic
foresight, discovering new opportunities,
generating creative possibilities, inventing
novel solutions of value and delivering these
into the world as innovations adopted at
scale. In application, design thinking makes
use of a broad repertoire of methods, tools
and techniques - expressed most often as an
iterative, spiral development process model.
The following generic model is typical of the
application of design thin-
king to the process of innovation
Prior to the 1980s design was thought of
as one step in the process of innovation.
Today, design and innovation have become
almost interchangeable terms.
Design to improve life education DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN

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1 2
HUMAN-CENTERED INNOVATION PROCESS DESIGNING DESIGN

3.0

10
LEARN

9 1
IMPLEMENT DEFINE

2.0
2
DELIVER RESEARCH

8
ITERATE DISCOVER

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OP
SC
7 3
TEST IDEATE

4
DEVELOP VISUALIZE

1.0 HUMAN FACTORS

6 MARKETING
CHOOSE DESIGN
SERVICES
5. MAKING &
PROTOTYPE ENVIRONMENTS SELLING STUFF
SCALE

COMMUNICATIONS
PRODUCTS
1956 1960s 1970s 1980s

5 6
As Bruce Nussbaum, editor of Business While these practices may seem axiomatic Design is Too Important to Leave
Week magazine put it: to most designers and educators today, to Designers
they were far from widespread twenty-five Most of my work these days is to give away
years ago. design thinking, not only to designers but
When people talked about innovation in to people that dont think of themselves as
the 1990s theyDESIGN
DESIGNING meant technology. Today Design Thinking flourishes best in or- designers.
DESIGNINGI amDESIGN
guided by three tenets.
when they talk about innovation they ganizations that have a particular way

SOCIO-CENT
3.0
mean design. INTERNATIONAL FIELD INNOVATION
of thinking about the organization itself, 1. 3.0
Everybody can learn to think and work INTERNATIONAL FIE

NATIONAL INNOVATION STRATEGIES NATIONAL INNOVATIO
as best stated by Robert F. Sutton: like designers.
FUTURE SCENARIOS FUTURE SCENARIOS
Design thinking entails deep research to CHANGING 2. Designers should disseminate design
PUBLIC POLICY THE WORLD PUBLIC POLICY
gain insight into the tacit and latent needs
SOCIAL INNOVATION thinking to improve life widelySOCIALbeyond INNOVATION
and wants of users in target markets; future
SUSTAINABILITY What is Design Thinking? It happens in the traditional boundaries ofSUSTAINABILITY
design by
scenarios
2.0 to develop foresight about the
ORGANIZATIONS an organization that considers itself an 2.0collaborating with practitioners from
ORGANIZATIONS
forces that are going to create change in
BRANDS unfinished prototype. other disciplines and by co-designing
BRANDS

the future; anticipation ofEXPERIENCES

products in with non-designers, especially the
EXPERIENCES

advance of engineering development;

INTERACTION and Design thinking is one of enlightened stakeholders, users andINTERACTION
customers of

HUMAN-CEN
NEW MEDIA NEW MEDIA
future product innovation shaped as much trial and error wherein one observes the design - the real people.
E

E
OP

OP

CO-DESIGN CO-DESIGN
by user needs as by technology. Above all, world, identifies the patterns of behavior,
FIELD BUILDING 3. Design thinking should be made
SC

SC

INTERDISCIPLINARITY & EMBEDDING INTERDISCIPLINARITY

design thinking entails a robust innovation generates ideas, gets feedback, repeats available to everybody by embedding it
DESIGN RESEARCH DESIGN RESEARCH
methodology in which the disciplines of
DESIGN LANGUAGE
the process and keeps on refining. in K-12 curricula, both as a subject
DESIGN LANGUAGE
design, social science, strategy, engineering,
CORPORATE STRATEGIES domain in its own right, STRATEGIES
CORPORATE just like math
and marketingENTREPRENEURSHIP
collaborate as an integrated Robert i. Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer, or science, and as a pedagogical
ENTREPRENEURSHIP

interdisciplinary team throughout the

SYSTEMS Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths structure for teaching academic subject
SYSTEMS

product
1.0 lifeHUMAN
cycle FACTORS
from initial identification and Total Nonsense: Profiting From matter.
1.0 HUMAN FACTORS
MARKETING MARKETING
of opportunity, through research, product Evidence-Based Management, 2006
SERVICES SERVICES
definition and detailed design to execution
MAKING & MAKING &

ARTIFACT-C
ENVIRONMENTS SELLING STUFF ENVIRONMENTS SELLING STUFF
and assessment.
SCALE

SCALE

COMMUNICATIONS COMMUNICATIONS
PRODUCTS PRODUCTS
1956 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012 1956 1960s 1970s 1980s
 Design to improve life education DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN

Designing
Design

Over the past half-century or so, as the

2
VATION PROCESS DESIGNING DESIGN
realm of design has broadened in scope
3.0
and increased in scale, designers have
10 had to redesign design, changing what we
LEARN
do and how we do it, learning new skills,
devising new
1 methods, techniques and tools
T DEFINE
and learning how to partner with other
professions. 2.0
2
RESEARCH
The following charts are a quick fly-
through of designs progression:
DISCOVER
From Making and Selling Stuff:

E
OP
Industrial Aesthetics SC

To Human-Centered 3Innovation:
IDEATE
Building the Design Field and Embed-
ding Design in Organizations:
4
To Design to Change the World:
VISUALIZE
Sociotechnical Systems.
1.0 HUMAN FACTORS
MARKETING
DESIGN
SERVICES
5. MAKING &
PROTOTYPE ENVIRONMENTS SELLING STUFF
SCALE

COMMUNICATIONS
PRODUCTS
1956 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012

DESIGN 0.0: The Designer Artisan
Before the mid-18th Century and the
industrial revolution, the person that
designed something was usually the
person that made it, whether the artifact
was a bowl, a chair, a boat or a cathedral.
6
so-called product-marketing mix for the
purpose of making and selling stuff.
When I graduated as an industrial
designer in 1956 for Carnegie Mellon
DESIGNING DESIGN
University in Pittsburgh, my education
In the late 1960s and 70s an important
new element entered the design repertoire.
This was Human Factors, or as it was
known in Europe, Ergonomics, which grew
mainly out of the need during World War
II to adapt the design of complex military

SOCIO-CENTRIC
Initiation into
INTERNATIONAL FIELDaINNOVATION
useful trade required long was identical
3.0 systems to
to what I would have receivedINTERNATIONAL theINNOVATION
FIELD physical and cognitive
NATIONAL INNOVATION STRATEGIES NATIONAL INNOVATION STRATEGIES
apprenticeship, overseen by master artisans in the 1920s at the renowned Bauhaus capabilities of operators. Now designers
FUTURE SCENARIOS FUTURE SCENARIOS
and craftsmen organized in associations,
CHANGING in Dessau, Germany. Four years later I discovered that the same disciplines could
CHANGING
PUBLIC POLICY THE WORLD PUBLIC POLICY THE WORLD
such as
SOCIAL INNOVATION
guilds, With industrialization became director of design at the ParisSOCIAL INNOVATION make products, services, environments and
and machine mass production came a
SUSTAINABILITY office of Raymond Loewy, then the largest communications more usable and useful.
SUSTAINABILITY
RGANIZATIONS separation of designing from making. consultancy
2.0 in Europe. How design ORGANIZATIONSMuch of design - home furnishings, a set of
NDS Professionalization of the design arts meant practice and education have changed BRANDS in mixing bowls, a wristwatch -- continues to
RIENCES that the designer of a chair did not actually that half century is summed up in the
EXPERIENCES center on aesthetics, and legitimately so.
CTION INTERACTION
build it, the graphic designer no longer set name of Loewys office, La Compagnie But state-of-the-art design today is almost

HUMAN-CENTRIC
IA NEW MEDIA
type and operated the printing press and the de lEsthetique Industrielle. Industrial an inversion of the old model. At the core
E
OP

CO-DESIGN
architect might never set a course of stone in
FIELD BUILDING aesthetics - the cosmetic appearance of today is human-centered innovation,
FIELD BUILDING
SC

INARITY & EMBEDDING INTERDISCIPLINARITY & EMBEDDING

RCH mortar in his lifetime. products, graphics, and interiors -- was
DESIGN RESEARCH entailing rigor about human needs,
GE the core of what both practitioners
DESIGN LANGUAGEand functionality, marketability, usability, and
TEGIES DESIGN 1.0: Making and Selling clients then assumed design wasSTRATEGIES
CORPORATE about. If, sustainability. External appearance is but
Stuff: Industrial Aesthetics as often happened along the way to figuring one dimension, albeit an important one,
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
SYSTEMS
During the 1950s and 60s, the purpose of out how things should look, we did some among many in the complex interactions
1.0 HUMAN FACTORS
professional design was what it had been serious work on what people wanted or by which people discover, understand,
MARKETING
since the Great Depression days of the 1930s how things worked, were
SERVICES
used, maintained, learn, and adopt artifacts and construct
MAKING when
& companies discovered that design and disposed ENVIRONMENTS we &meaning by using them.
of, well, that was nice, butMAKING

ARTIFACT-CENTRIC
SELLING STUFF SELLING STUFF
could help increase demand for products. did not get hired for that and we did not get
SCALE

COMMUNICATIONS

The job of DESIGN 1.0 was to enhance the paid for it. PRODUCTS
70s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012 1956 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012
 Design to improve life education DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN

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3
DESIGNING DESIGN

3.0

2.0 ORGANIZATIONS
BRANDS
EXPERIENCES
INTERACTION
NEW MEDIA

E
OP
CO-DESIGN
FIELD BUILDING
SC INTERDISCIPLINARITY & EMBEDDING
DESIGN RESEARCH
DESIGN LANGUAGE
CORPORATE STRATEGIES
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
SYSTEMS
1.0 HUMAN FACTORS
MARKETING
SERVICES
MAKING & MAKING &
SELLING STUFF ENVIRONMENTS SELLING STUFF
SCALE

COMMUNICATIONS
PRODUCTS
1970s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012 1956 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012

DESIGN 2.0: Human-Centered
Innovation: Field-Building &
Embedding
The 1970s, 80s and 90s were decades of
dramatic building for the field of design.
With the advent of solid state electronics
4
in the 1980s, accelerating in the 1990s,
when Business Week magazine, the premier
business weekly, introduced Design as a
strategic business concern to its 1 million
business readers worldwide through its
annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards
global networks. Much of what we think
of as a product may not even be physically
tangible. Often the real product is streams
of bits that momentarily aggregate as
sounds, images, text, or tactile sensations.
Designing for such a world necessitated

-CENTRIC
and digitalFIELD
INTERNATIONAL displays, products of all kinds
INNOVATION (IDEA) competition, sponsored jointly with broad and deep change in understanding
NATIONAL INNOVATION STRATEGIES
became systems with complex functions IDSA, and its online Innovation & Design what it means to design and how to go
FUTURE SCENARIOS
making use of programmable intelligence
CHANGING website edited by Bruce Nussbaum. about it.
PUBLIC POLICY THE WORLD
and interactive controls and user interfaces.
SOCIAL INNOVATION
Designers learned a whole new repertoire of
SUSTAINABILITY
Five major forces of change brought about 2. Silicon Valley: Along the southern
RGANIZATIONS methods, techniques and tools. In Europe a heightened understanding of design by shores of San Francisco Bay in the 1980s we
NDS and particularly Japan, export-oriented business during this period: witnessed the seismic birth of a completely
RIENCES companies transformed design from a new entrepreneurial culture whose ethos
CTION
discretionary technical service subordinate 1. Digital Technology: When the was not stabilization and control, but

N-CENTRIC
IA
to engineering or marketing to a core semiconductor transistor and integrated disruptive innovation and unpredictable
strategic competency embedded at the
FIELD BUILDING circuit emerged in the 1960s, few people change. A new kind of design was needed
INARITY & EMBEDDING
RCH
senior levels of the corporation. American foresaw a universe of smart mobs to keep pace where everything was being
GE companies, threatened by design-driven internetworked over mobile photo smart invented new every day - knowledge,
EGIES foreign competitors, eventually followed phones, PCs, PDAs, and iPads -- all talking technology, organizational structures, work
suit. to each other all the time. The central practices. California became a magnet for
problem of design moved far beyond the designers from the American East Coast
Traditionally, corporate executives had unitary, free-standing artifact to crafting and Midwest, as well as from Britain,
thought of design, if they thought of it at all, the interactions, behaviors, and experiences France, Germany, and Japan. Exported
MAKING as
& a second or third order aesthetic service, of software-driven systems comprised of worldwide, the new culture of design

ACT-CENTRIC
SELLING STUFF
buried in the engineering or marketing humans, atoms, and bits. Everything has was, paradoxically, both Californian and
function. Change in this perception began programmable intelligence and lives on intensely international.
70s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012
Design to improve life education
<<
3. The Japan Effect: The third major
force of change in design was the emergence
of Japan as a dominant competitive actor in
the world economy. By the 1980s, Japan
Incorporated had targeted and dominated
one American industry after another:
Integrated circuitry, cameras, motorcycles,
consumer electronics, and office equipment.
One out of every three cars sold in the U.S.
was Japanese. No longer was Japan copying
the West, but originating inventions, for
that matter creating entire new product
genres, like the Sony Walkman, that we had
not anticipated and that customers all over
the world loved. Japan positioned design
at the center of its industrial strategy of
rapid cycle innovation, superior quality,
and global export. Japanese companies
invested seriously in design staff, facilities
and training and repositioned design as
a strategic business function reporting
at the senior management level of the
organization.
Japans success with design-driven export
industry forced business executives in the
U.S. and in Europe to pursue a similar
course beginning in the 1980s.
4. Business Process Reengineering:
In response to the Japan Effect, hundreds
of Western companies, including the three
companies where I was Vice President of
Design, NCR, Xerox, and Unisys, threw out
their traditional ways of doing everything.
They set up internal universities to teach
executives, managers, and professionals
how to develop products to match Japanese
benchmarks: reducing development times
from 2 - 3 years to 6 months; cutting
manufacturing costs by half or more.
Every function in a business organization
now had to benchmark itself against
comparable Japanese functions and justify
its costs - vs - benefits. More than an a priori
good, design could demonstrate tangible
value added.
5. Customer Insight Research: Perhaps
the most important single tool in the design
tool kit was Customer and User Needs
Research. Studies by Harvard Business
School show that poor understanding of
DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN
user needs is responsible for more than two/ Designers, together with practitioners
thirds of the failures of new products. from technical and scientific fields formerly
unassociated with design, migrated freely
In 1984, a family living in Orange County, across design specializations. Industrial
California sued a major Japanese carmaker designers worked on eCommerce strategies
for invasion of privacy. Having rented a and web design; architects created film
room to a young Japanese man who said he special effects; anthropologists probed what
was a student, the family discovered that products, communications, and services
he was recording every detail of their daily people will want next; communication
lives: what was in their refrigerator, cabinets designers worked with linguists to make
and closets; what they ate, drove, wore; information clear and understandable.
watched on TV and at the movies; what they
did for fun, studied at school, and did at Every few years, an entirely new design
work. The young man was a researcher for specialization showed up: Computer-
the carmaker, looking for insight into the Human Interface Design; Interaction
life-styles of people in the worlds premier Design; Universal Design; Design for
car culture, Southern California. Sustainability; Experience Design; Brand
Design; Co-Design and more.
Today, all of us who practice design do
exactly what that young researcher did,
except that we now get permission first.
We call it ethnographic research, customer
insight, contextual inquiry, or design DESIGN:
research. It is integral to how we design
everything from kitchen tools and razors Increases product cost
to new passenger trains and jet aircraft by 24 %
to office workplaces and new education Increases product sales
systems. by 47 %
Increases sales prices
In this period, designers became entrepre- by 32 %
neurs, corporate executives and consultants
to senior management on everything (According to the 2004
from research, new product development Influence & Vision Corpo-
and marketing to corporate strategy, rate Design Group Study
innovation and organizational creativity. by IDSA)
This shift in professional practice -- from
the design of artifacts to the design of
systems, situations, interactions and
experiences -- reached a tipping point
about twenty-five years ago. Since then,
an interdisciplinary practice of strategic
design has replaced traditional technical
disciplines once divided narrowly into
industrial design, graphic design, interior
design, and architecture. We now apply a
new array of design methods and tools to
the creation of products, communications,
and environments. And we have scaled up
design methodology to address complex
problems of corporate strategy, new
venture creation, institutional structure
and organizational performance as well as
public sector programs and policies.
 6
CHOOSE DESIGN
Design to improve life education DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN
5.
PROTOTYPE

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DESIGN 3.0:
5
DESIGNING DESIGN
Changing the World:
Sociotechnical Systems 3.0 INTERNATIONAL FIELD INNOVATION
NATIONAL INNOVATION STRATEGIES
Since the mid-1990s,
FUTURE SCENARIOS
designers have become CHANGING
PUBLIC POLICY THE WORLD
increasingly engaged SOCIAL INNOVATION
in social, political and SUSTAINABILITY
economic transformation. 2.0 ORGANIZATIONS

The new practice goes by BRANDS

<<
EXPERIENCES
names like Social Design,
INTERACTION
Philanthropic Design,
NEW MEDIA
Humanitarian Design,

E
OP
CO-DESIGN
Design for Impact, Design SC INTERDISCIPLINARITY
FIELD BUILDING
& EMBEDDING
Activism and Design to DESIGN RESEARCH
Improve Life. It constitutes DESIGN LANGUAGE

a fundamental reimagining CORPORATE STRATEGIES

ENTREPRENEURSHIP
of how design - at its
SYSTEMS
best - can serve to enrich
1.0 HUMAN FACTORS
the experience of life for MARKETING
people as individuals, in SERVICES
MAKING &
organizations and in the ENVIRONMENTS SELLING STUFF
SCALE

human community at large. COMMUNICATIONS

PRODUCTS
1956 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012
Design has grown up.
 1.0 HUMAN FACTORS 1.0
MARKETING
DESIGN
Design to improve life education SERVICES DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN
5. MAKING &
PROTOTYPE ENVIRONMENTS SELLING STUFF

From artifact-centric

SCALE

SCALE
COMMUNICATIONS
PRODUCTS

to human-centric 1956 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012

to socio-centric

From artifact-centric to
6 4
DESIGNING DESIGN
human-centric to socio-

SOCIO-CENTRIC
INTERNATIONAL FIELD INNOVATION 3.0 INTERNATIONAL FIELD INNOVATION
centric
NATIONAL INNOVATION STRATEGIES NATIONAL INNOVATION STRATEGIES
FUTURE SCENARIOS FUTURE SCENARIOS
This trajectory of design
PUBLIC POLICY
CHANGING
PUBLIC POLICY
CHANGING
THE WORLD THE WORLD
practice from artifacts to
OCIAL INNOVATION SOCIAL INNOVATION
STAINABILITYpeople to sociotechnical SUSTAINABILITY
ANIZATIONS systems can be traced 2.0 ORGANIZATIONS
S as an epistemic shift in BRANDS
NCES EXPERIENCES
what people can agree on
ON INTERACTION
as the values, beliefs and

HUMAN-CENTRIC
NEW MEDIA
knowledge that constitute E
OP
CO-DESIGN
FIELD BUILDING FIELD BUILDING
design. Following is a table
SC

ARITY & EMBEDDING INTERDISCIPLINARITY & EMBEDDING

H characterizing the shift. DESIGN RESEARCH
DESIGN LANGUAGE
IES CORPORATE STRATEGIES
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
SYSTEMS
1.0 HUMAN FACTORS
MARKETING
SERVICES
MAKING & MAKING &

ARTIFACT-CENTRIC
SELLING STUFF ENVIRONMENTS SELLING STUFF
SCALE

COMMUNICATIONS
PRODUCTS
s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012 1956 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000 2012
8
Design
overskrift
to improve life education DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN

DESIGN 1.0 DESIGN 2.0 DESIGN 3.0

Product-Driven Process-Driven

Product Function User Experience

Supply Push Demand Pull

Technology Driven Invention Human-Centered Innovation

Producer-Centric Customer-Centric

Our Way Your Way

We Know What You Should Want What Do You Really Need & Want

Design For Design With

Think From Inside the Company Outward Thinking From Outside in the World Back-
Into the World ward into the Company

Experience-Based Judgment Research-Based Insight/Foresight

Specification Culture Prototyping Culture

Physical Science, Engineering, Technological Social Science, Ecology, Biology, Human Sys-
Systems, Finance tems, Life-Cycle Economics

Maximize Shareholder Wealth Maximize Human Benefit

Think From the Present Forward Think From The Future Back

Limited Production & Mass Manufacturing Flexible Manufacturing & Mass Customizaton

Serial Functional Hand-Off Product Iterative Parallel Interdisciplinary Team

Development Product DEvElOpMENt.

Professional Experts Only Co-Design, Co-Development With Users

National/Local International/Global/Multilocal

Point Product Platforms, Families, Extensions

Mechanical/Electro-Mechanical/Atoms Digital /Software-Driven/Bits

Dumb, Free-Standing, Unitary Programmable Intelligence, Networked

Resource & Energy-Intensive Green, Recyclable, Sustainable

Big, Slow, Heavy Small, Fast, Light

Adoptive Adaptive

Academic/Policy Generated Practitioner/User Generated

Fidelity Emphasis Context Sensitive

Drive Out Variance Enhance Variance

Only Designers Design Everybody Can Use Design Methods & Tools

Only Design Students Should Learn Everybody Should Learn Innovation and
Innovation and Design Design As a General Knowledge Subject K- 12

American, European, Japanese or Chinese Worldwide Design,

Design, Production & Markets Production & Markets

Vertical, Centralized Power Lateral, Polycentric Power

More is Better Better is Better

We provide products and content We provide platforms, algorithms, scripts,

libraries, tools and networks. You create
the content

Design Is For Making & Selling Design Is For Making Better Socio-Technical
Stuff Systems, Experiences, Strategies, Ventures,
Organizations, Habitats, Public Policies &
Programs
Design to improve life education
INDEX 3.0
In 2002 INDEX: Award Denmark pioneered
The future is already here
- it's just not very evenly
distributed.
(William Gibson, 1993)
Design to Improve Life, an idea that was at
the time at the outer edge of design discourse
and has since moved to the center in guises
such as Social Design, Design for Impact,
Sustainable Design, Humanitarian
Design, Design Activism and so on.
Thanks to INDEXs intellectual leader-
ship, nobody any longer says Thats not
design. Now Design to Improve Life is an
international movement with a worldwide
constituency.Like design itself, INDEX:
has grown through three stages:
INDEX 1.0
In 2002, our original INDEX: idea was to
break from the standard design award model.
We would have the most open and least
structured process possible. Unlike other
programs, we would not predetermine sec-
tors like product design, communication
design, environmental design, etc.. We
would have a single overarching theme:
Design to Improve Life, organized in five
broad collection categories (Body, Home,
Work, Play, Community)
We ourselves would not define what Design
to Improve Life means. Instead we would
crowd-source that definition by letting
submitters tell us what it meant to them.
We would aggregate all those different ideas
into an ever-evolving dialogue revealing the
spectrum of what Design to Improve Life,
means to different people.
We wanted the nominators to be third
party sources rather than the designers
themselves, hoping to get more thoughtful
presentations and to get away from the
standard, self-celebratory vanity model:
Here is the latest wonderful design from
wonderful moi and why it is so wonderful!
We wanted only recent designs that had
been produced within the prior 2 years or
about to be, not a lot of student projects or
undeveloped concepts. At the inaugural
INDEX in 2005, Design To Improve Life
was decidedly ahead of the curve, to a
degree that caused more than a little aggro
among the established designerati. Thats
when we knew we were on the right track.
DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD
overskrift
WASSERMANN
9
That was INDEX: 1.0.
INDEX 2.0
The tireless resourcefulness of Kigge Hvid
& Co. won out over budgetary vicissitudes
and bureaucratic resistance. INDEX: came
to define the leading edge of design and
innovation discourse in the world.
Since 2005, INDEX: has been wonderfully
entrepreneurial in extending its reach
internationally and creating new programs
beyond the original award competition-
especially in education.
The field of design has moved fast since
2005, seeing rapid diffusion in education
and practice of Open Design, Crowdsour-
cing, Design-driven Innovation, Interaction
Design, Experience Design, Design Hacking,
Do-It-Yourself, Design Entrepreneurship,
User-created Content, Apps, Web-based
Everything and in particular a worldwide
movement of students and designers
pursuing sustainable design and social
impact engagement of all kinds.
Every year (I should say every month) we
see ever more varied and unanticipated
modalities for applying design thinking,
methods and tools to improve life, adding
ever more voices to the conversation
INDEX: initiated. In a recent email to me,
Ravi Naidoo summed it up nicely:
Design for social good is trending .. to use
twitterspeak!Its become hip... its amazing
to see the makeover of some of the world's
biggest design agencies ... mostly in their
brochureware! And many young designers
are picking up these cues ... its seen in the
graduation shows of the design schools all
around the world now.
Talking to graduates at Design Academy
Eindhoven last year... they are not trying
to get into Phillips or BMW... now, most
want to change the world, be design
activists ... or create a start-up ... they
hardly ever are looking for a job!
(Ravi Naidoo, 2011)
Design to improve life education
<<
Now INDEX: is all grown up and Design
to Improve Life is an international move-
ment with a worldwide constituency and
many imitators.
INDEX 3.0
Now INDEX: is moving to shift its emphasis
From awarding backward to investing
forward, working with international
partners to sponsor programs addressing
the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.
In the field of education INDEX: already
has pioneered annual student Design Labs,
most recently the Yonsei INDEX: Design
to Improve Life Summer School in Seoul,
Korea. New initiatives include the INDEX:
Design Challenge, an international student
competition in partnership with UNICEF,
to address education in developing regions
and Design to Improve Life Education, a
collaboration between Denmark, Sweden
and the European Regional Development
Fund to co-develop a framework for
formally certifying educators and teachers
to teach Design to Improve Life as part
of the general education curriculum at
professional colleges as well as primary
and secondary schools.
INDEX: is also initiating a program called
INDEX: Indepth to sponsor the writing
of a series of cases about INDEX: finalists
and winners, not as isolated design projects
but as points along a continuum of design
inquiry playing out over time. These will be
longitudinal, epistemological critiques of
design as episodes in unfolding stories of
creative exploration.
DESIGN 3.0 and INDEX: 3.0 have matured
together to the stage where they are now
ready to take part in the biggest design
project of all
- the design of WORLD 3.0.
WORLD 3.0
Here is a capsule history of the world:
WORLD 0.0, the first world, was nature as
humans first encountered it.
WORLD 1.0 began 8,000 years ago when
Neolithic hunter-gatherers first established
permanent agrarian-based settlements.
DESIGN 3.0 BY ARNOLD WASSERMANN
WORLD 2.0 began with the industrial
revolution in the mid-18th Century, giving Business-as-usual cannot
rise to modern liberal economic theory get us to sustainability or
based on the assumption of ever growing secure economic and social
populations consuming ever more goods prosperity; these can be
produced from extracted materials con- achieved only through
verted by fossil energy. This basic model, radical change, starting
accompanied by mechanistic/positivist now.
philosophies of the Enlightenment, brought
an end to feudal monarchy and gave rise (Vision 2050, World
to democratic self-government and to Business Council for
a worldwide middle class schooled in Sustainable Development,
the doctrine that health, longevity, edu- 2010)
cation, prosperity, creative opportunity
and individual liberty will continue to
progress indefinitely.
This extraordinarily successful civilizational
model now appears to be approaching its
limits. Fundamental assumptions of both
free market capitalism and social welfare
statism are now being called into question.
If the 9+ billion inhabitants forecast for
2050 live at the same levels of consumption
as do Americans and Europeans today,
it will require the biocapacity of 4 planet
Earths to support them. Add to this the
forecast peak of such basic resources as oil,
coal, copper and nickel within this century.
Already, peak water is being approached
in many areas around the world. Finally,
the economic regimes that produced the
global middle class have at the same time
operated to concentrate wealth and power
in the hands of capital and political elites.
Economic disparities between the blest and
the rest have been cast into sharper focus by
the recent recession and financial turmoil,
creating widespread social disruption.
We are entering turbulent times.
WORLD 3.0 will entail radical transfor-
mation of the institutional foundations
of economic enterprise, governance and
public policy. It will have to produce a world
regime of new industries, technologies,
professions and jobs.
Who will design WORLD 3.0?
This time - all of us.
Let us begin.