On Fashion

I've had some interesting discussions with friends lately regarding the Ikea Effect. A common criticism is that an Ikea couch is designed to last as long as it's in style. So why pay three times as much for a couch that will be obsolete well before it's time.

There's a very clear point I'm trying to make with this blog/book. It is critical, right now, that we stop seeing design as fashion and start delivering design that solves important problems. Virtually every design profession, worldwide, from architecture to apparel to graphic, has been based on the notion of design as an aesthetic endeavor for centuries. But the foundations of design are rooted in ethics, in shared information and progressively improving solutions to necessary problems.

We, in the developed world, are a culture of wants. Unfortunately, we all need the creative energy that has been long devoted to the wants of our culture, rather than the needs of everyone.

So I will only amend this from my post on the Ikea Effect. Both couches, simply because they are bound to the short term wants (fashion) of our culture, are worthless. For on the list of biggest problems in the world, "how to create a soft place to sit down" is significantly lower than "how to prevent the deaths of millions due to diseases with known cures."

The point remains, though, design can have a major impact on economies and we are, right now, desperately in need of economic solutions. We all, as designers, must now take responsibility for the economic impact of our decisions and start creating economically sustainable systems.

Elegance and the iPhone

It's the attribute of being unusually effective and simple. That's the accepted definition and it made me ponder that word.

Great designers excel and achieving unusual effectiveness and a clarity or simplicity in its expression. At the dawn of human civilization, design refined, modified, and improved solutions for real problems like shelter, food, sanitation, and clothing. Then, at some point, design was dimished to merely an art.

For example, the iPhone is considered a triumph of design. But what problem does it solve? If we judged the iPhone on the importance of the problem that it strives to improve, it would no doubt be seen as a failure.

Consider this. Apple has a team of designers and a process that results in unmistakeable elegance. If they simply took the time to ask themselves, "What should we design? What does the world need the most?" If they started by designing the problem without commercial bias, that team of designers may very well be capable of ending desertification in Sub-Saharan Africa effectively ending the humanitarian autrocities of Darfur. Or maybe they'd be capable of discovering a way to create tenure in urban slums in Delhi, stopping the demolition of millions of people's homes.

Elegance is so difficult to achieve, but designers know how to do it. The question now is, will design end its centuries long vacation and get back to work, advancing solutions to real problems, and achieving elegance for the world's biggest problems?

Microfinance

There is a gigantic, but silent, economic crisis in the world today, one that adversely effects 1/3 of the world's population. A lack of solutions to basic human needs causes millions of deaths every year. In the other two thirds of the world, there are countless products, solutions and services that serve as perfect solutions. There's a demand and a supply, but for some reason, the transaction isn't happening. This is not a problem of technology or medicine. It's an economic crisis that demands a design response.

The microloan, first developed by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, is the world's first attempt and, to no surprise, is already overwhelmingly successful. The concept is to give small loans to individuals and groups not based on any financial assets or credit ratings, but based on their social assets.

On the surface, this seems like a very bad idea. The loans rely on an entrereneurial spirit surfacing in situations where dispair is prevalent. It depends on the poorest in the world reliably paying back at a high interest rate. But once again, the phenomenon of social networks has shown its power. Microlenders have developed a strong reputation for high payback rates, some of them higher than 95%, with most paying back in under three months.

I'm grossly oversimplifying, but will get into great depth on this later. For now, what's important to understand is that we can always create new economies if we just focus on what is abundant. And today, in this world, with so much of the economy centered around scarce resources, social capital is abundant. If we can learn to design in ways that monetize social capital, we will begin making giant strides, just as microfinance has, in preserving humanity.

Mechanism Design Theory

Last year, three guys won the Nobel Prize for Economics, one from the University of Minnesota, for taking a method of designing board games and applying it to global economics. The idea, mechanism design theory, is a way of constructing the rules of a game in order to achieve a desired outcome. Anyone who plays the game is self motivated, but their incentives are established, albeit indirectly, by the design of the game.

So what makes this so significant? Well, consider the current economic philosophy. Capitalism is run on greed. As Gordon Gekko would say, "Greed is good." And certainly, that is what makes capitalism work. It's a free market which means there is no desired outcome. In fact, there is no preconceived outcome of any kind. The loophole in capitalism, of course, is that it can make people do things they don't want to do.

If you were to embrace mechanism design theory, you could essentially reverse engineer an economy. You could start with the desired outcome, like social welfare or even distribution of wealth, and then design the rules of the game in order to create mutually beneficial incentives. No, it's not THE answer for global economics, but it certainly has applications, particularly in areas of the world in the midst of humanitarian crises because of greed run amok.

What fascinates me is that mechanism design theory is, essentially, a design process. Current design processes are similar to capitalism. We are given a design problem and then asked to explore possibilities without any anticipated outcome, but the power of design is not in the solution. It's in how the criteria are set, how the problem itself is defined. So, mechanism design theory may be able to show us a new design process, one where we identify a problem and begin with a vision of a world with that problem solved. Then, we design incentives that allow people to be self motivated but constantly working toward the solution.

BOPreneurs

I had an opportunity to peruse the exhibit at the Walker, Design for the Other 90% last week and was once again inspired by the seemingly endless supply of amazing, world changing ideas in the world. I was asked, about 10 months ago, to submit the Clean Hub for consideration in the exhibit, but something didn't feel right to me.

Yesterday, thanks to an email from a friend after reading my blog, I was introduced to the International Development Design Summit. The goal of the program is simple: to develop simple, inexpensive devices that can be produced locally and make a real difference for people and communities. From there, I stumbled upon a blog by Paul Polak and his new made up word, BOpreneur, an entrepreneur dedicated to improving the lives of the world's poorest.

Worldchanging posted an entry about all this that I think serves as a valid criticism to the Cooper Hewitt's traveling exhibit.

Too often, scientists and engineers think about the business side of things late in the game, haphazardly bolting it on to the finished product, so to speak. Paul's mission: bake the business stuff into the product now, at IDDS.

Suddenly my bad vibe from months ago started making sense. Amidst the sea of amazing design ideas, there wasn't a single business plan or financial statement. Without it, the exhibit was feeling like a set of interesting solutions, but not necessarily the most feasible. I know, it's the nature of a museum exhibit. And yes, the Clean Hub probably would have fit right in to that mold, but I'm not quite ready to put it behind museum glass and call the idea complete. I plan on returning to the origin of the idea to "bake the business stuff into the product."