"The main activity of designers will be as social innovators," said Ezio Manzini during an intimate conversation with o2NYC on May 6. Ezio's talk outlined an exit strategy for conscious designers, a shift from making things to designing tools for a better society. For those of us who have signed on to the green revolution, who commit to having the conversation with clients, sourcing better materials, reducing life cycle impacts, doing the hard work of greener design, we need an exit strategy. How do we stop making things less bad and start actually solving for climate change?
Ezio Manzini has been thinking about the sustainable design problem for 20+ years. A professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic, he is Director of CIRIS (the Interdepartmental Centre for Research on Innovation for Sustainability), and is the author of several books on sustainable design: The Material of Invention, Artifacts: Towards a New Ecology of the Artificial Environment and Sustainable Everyday. Ezio feels he has "been telling the same story for 20 years. Always change it by the end it is the same." What has changed lately, though, is his rhetoric, from the soon to be possible to the here and now. That is the opportunity that crisis brings – a chance to rethink how we've been operating as a society, and offer new visions for how we can live.
Ezio first pointed out the problem with the green design movement, and its focus on "fixing the past," which is "doomed because it requires asking people to 'reduce,' asking them to have 'the same, but less.' Instead we need to offer them 'different, but better.'" So what's better?
Ezio points to a movement started in Europe that's recently gained ground here in the US: Slow Food....
(((Okay, I pretty well know how Slow Food makes money, but "social innovators"? It would almost be easier to get people to pay you for being a "nice guy.")))
