Innomarkkinat: Designing with and for people

Design researcher Evert Ypma correctly identified that the main "question of design" has been progressively evolving, since its inception as a discipline born from the industrial revolution.

If at first the question was "How do things function?", with modernism influences it became more of a "How are things structured?": here we are still investigating the tangible world of products and objects. After the narrative turn of art and the beginning of post-modernism the question started being "What does this thing mean, or is it supposed to mean?": so the object of design wasn't only "stuff", but also intangible matters, related to human expression, behavior, needs.

So, where are we now? As Ypma, I also believe that to respond to the needs of a globalized, multicultural world, and in reaction against to a dispossessing use of our identities by commercial brands, the "question of design" needs to shift even more towards an intangible, human-centric dimension, trying to understand "How does it work between us humans?".

This opens up the challenge of designing a better world, through human-centered services, social actions and practices pervading everyday life. In this challenge everyone can become a designer, because we need to collaboratively and openly give a form to our societies.

But how are we going to do it? Well, I would say, by just start doing. Our culture needs to plan, talk and worry less, and concretely do more. Everyone should be keeping their eyes open, spot issues, and personally try to do something about it: it doesn't matter if the problem is big or small, the important is to start doing what we can about it.

We need a more widespread culture of hands-on experimentalism, that encourages us to take action and learn from our failures in the process. We should systematically substitute the "thinking-by-planning" paradigm with a "thinking-by-doing" oriented one. Innovation, especially social innovation, is not about managing the existing, but finding answers to what we do not know yet: the only way to go about it is to more bravely get out of the building and start exploring through small, cheap, fast social experiments, that can eventually scale up.

So it is important to teach, learn and share attitudes and methods that can make us more experimental and more sensitive to listen to and co-design with our intended end-users. We should push human-centrism so far that we would end up not only "designing for", but "designing with and for" people. It is only by revealing the tacit knowledge that resides inside our "target group" that we can find truthful inspiration for truthful social innovation.

The writer, Stefania Passera, is part of MIND Research Group, a multidisciplinary research team belonging to the BIT Research Center at Aalto University. She has a background in communication design, and now conducts research about the role of fast prototyping and visualization as tools in strategic innovation processes. She will speak at the Innomarkkinat event on 14 December about social innovation and experimenting with social innovation.

Kirjoitus kuuluu Innokylän Innomarkkinat-blogisarjaan, joka tuo Innomarkkinat-tapahtuman ennakkotunnelmia ja antia saataville ajasta ja paikasta riippumatta. Innomarkkinoiden satoa julkaistaan Innokylän blogissa pääsääntöisesti keskiviikkoisin.

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