That's me, with a broken wrist and a smile,
with my compañeros Juan, Miriam (aka Osa La Poderosa) Leo and Ricardo.
We're at Eloísa´s previous headquarters, in La Boca.
Photo by Ileana Ochoa.
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A short introduction to the “cartonero” publishing phenomenon:
For an introduction to this universe of cardboard books, cumbia dancing and half-naked heroines, allow me a brief picture of the context most of these projects sprouted from, the 2001 crisis:
We are aware how troubled Argentine economy has been in its short - but intense - history. To talk about a “crisis” in Argentina is awfully general and encompassing. When was there no crisis? - we could ask. Throughout the last decades there was an acquiescent middle class that was recurrently pacified through manipulative and often corrupt political measures, like paring the dollar with the peso. This huge middle class, historically the largest in Latin America, was forced to wake up to the hardships the lower classes had been experiencing since always, when in 2001 all bank accounts were frozen and no one could have access to their own savings (1) . Half the population fell below poverty line, people were thrown out of their jobs in massive numbers, industries and services were closed overnight, and an unparalleled social turmoil emerged. People got together and filled the streets, both protesting as well as organizing in communal projects. This was the start of the famous barter clubs, and all sorts of similar collaborative endeavours and forms of self-government. To survive, thousands of people were forced to collect scraps of cardboard and paper from the gutters and rubbish bins to sell for whatever they could get, giving birth to a whole new class of urban poor. They were known as cartoneros, meaning the “cardboard pickers”.

Then came Eloísa…
Eloísa was the name of an enchanting Bolivian woman with which Javier Barilaro fell in love with. Barilaro, graphic artist, together with acclaimed writer Washington Cucurto were busy at this time (summer 2003) with manufacturing poetry books. The love affair between Javier and Eloísa is said not to have gone very far, but her name and beauty would in any case serve as muse to the birth of a great big family: the Eloísa project. And from there, an extended family of sister-Eloísas and cousin-Eloísas would come to arise, all over South America.
With the challenges offered by the crisis and the reunion of the inspired artists, the ground was set for the creation of a publishing house. The only piece missing is said to have arrived in a sunny spring afternoon in a pink bike wearing a green skirt. She was artist Fernanda Laguna, who met the two book-manufacturers and offered them the space for the first Cartoneria.
In those early days in the quarter of Almagro one could buy not only books but also vegetables. The project was an immediate success.

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Beyond the unmissable names (Barilaro, Cucurto and Laguna)
who started the whole thing, Eloísa is the result of the work 
and passion of hundreds of people  who have passed through it
during six years of work - and play.
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Eloísa is often said to be “a product of the crisis” or a project which “aestheticized misery“. Truth or not, this is far from how they portray themselves. If you ask any of them, they are a work collective. They get together to be together, to learn new skills with one another, to make a decent living, and to serve society around them. In addition to all, they take great joy out of producing beautiful books and meeting new people.
Ricardo Piglia, one of Eloísa’s published authors and household names, and a great name of Argentinean literature, couldn’t have state it better:

“It’s not about making a cult of poverty, but rather, not allowing oneself to be intimidated by it.”

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A reporter’s treat
One of the most extraordinary aspects about the Eloísa publishing phenomenon is undoubtedly the media attention it got all through the years. I can’t recall a day’s work where there wasn’t a visit of a reporter, a photographer, a student, or a scholar of some sort. In the half a year I was there I witnessed so many articles I grew tired of always hearing the same story, like a fairy tale. Adding to that some more six years of inquiring and interviewing, it is immense what has been said and published about Eloísa.

Norwegian filmmaker Annie Rostad has become a good friend
of the project while filming a documentary piece
(soon to be out!)
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You know when you chant a word over and over again until it completely looses meaning?
I wondered how many times they could tell their story before it got detached from their real living organic process. I mean, it was in the end very beautiful to perceive the daily fluctuations of narrative, how they kept contradicting themselves, the background stories arising within the “official story”. I also enjoyed reading the recurrent interviews and newspaper articles, as that gave me an uncannily different perception from the one I was building while watching it from the inside out. (Well, this is yet another topic - Was I ever really inside?…).
It was not the case that I found what was published untruthful. It doesn’t really come down to falsity, it comes down to the many ways one can tell a story, and the disparity of stories cohabiting inside any given organization or project. Despite confusing at first, I came to perceive these multiple narratives as something very vibrant and human-like. Every time I went home and wrote something down about Eloísa, I was pretty sure that the next day it could so well become something completely different.
At this point it became truly literary: like a book I just had to go on reading, turning one more page every time I went to the “carto” (2).

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Ricardo Piña, poet and one of the fixed workers who come everyday,
is being interviewed for the German DeutscheWelle
while is colleague Alejandro patiently paints some more covers.
All in a day's work…
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When organizational storytelling gets too detached from what is happening, or when it becomes symbolic of the values the organization somehow “sells“, some beautiful myths can arise. Even in the case when nothing is apparently “sold“, I reckon this could also be the case.
As myths, they are not necessarily true, but they do stand for an essence which is there. Eloísa is surely a good example of a project that has an aura, and for that has been largely mythicised. Again, I’m not interested in unravelling what is actually true or not from all the kilometres of paper printed on behalf of Eloísa. Much more than books, Eloísa sells myths. They sell idealistic dreams of alternative modes of functioning. So it makes perfect sense that they are surrounded in stories that are very much myth-like. It makes sense that the name refers to a beautiful yet unreachable woman turned into myth, and that one of the mentors behind it is one of Argentina’s most polemic literary myths these days (I mean Cucurto, and please do go on reading for more on Cucurto, because I had to save that for last…).

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This was certainly a mythic day at Eloísa.
The day two huge celebrities from Argentine culture
(Natalia Oreiro and Ricardo Mollo) appeared unannounced.
Here, with Alejandro and Miriam.
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One of my favourite myths is definitely the one about the renowned musical atmosphere one is supposed to always enjoy at the Cartoneria. Before arriving, I had a picture of it as some sort of ongoing concert of cumbia and dancing, and that is mostly because most of the articles and depictions do mention this. Eloísa is most often portrayed as a small place where people paint covers and drink mate-tea to the sound of popular hits. This story is still told, even when the radio got stolen more than one year ago, and the cartoneria is silent ever since.
This silence turned out to be a blissful one for me, hardly a huge fan of such music, and thankful for the many discussions that took place to “fill the silence”. Between the people working around a table together, with the people who came to visit, discussions ranged from every topic imaginable, from politics to sex, from cultural clichés (it’s an international venue after all) to being-Argentinean, from language to literature, to love and life.
I didn’t find the concert hall I had imagined, but I found a small community of debate, a sort of social “agora“.

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Much more than books (3)
One question mark that was always in my mind raised: What is it that they sell, really?

In objective terms, you might hold in your hands a light-weighted book made of reutilized cardboard, directly picked from the streets, colourfully and amusingly hand-painted in all styles and outcomes - therefore always a unique piece. There are no two books alike. They look odd and precious, but most likely you won’t buy them for their quality. The binding promises not to last long, it will most likely leave stains in your purse or in your hands, and they can’t be folded. You may come to find pages glued to each other and it is not rare to find books with missing pages. Buying such a book surely places you a thousand miles from the normalised and standardised experience of any normal bookshop. It’s almost an adventure.
Yet, there is something truly irresistible about them, and once you start buying them you will often find yourself starting a collection.

It is evident that Eloísa doesn’t sell only books. As said above, they also sell myths. They sell values, idealism… they sell hope. They sell - or better put, they offer! - different values to different audiences.
To the average Argentinean, they offer an opportunity for questioning his strong but globally dominated publishing industry, and the traps of their profoundly capitalist-dependent culture. For the lower classes, they offer a way-out prospect for those who feel helpless or overpowered by the lack of employment. For everyone else, it offers some beautifully romantic ideas of other ways the world could work. It also offers access to and visibility for a phenomenon that shouldn’t go unspoken, that of the thousands of people living of their societies’ detritus.
In operational and social terms, it offers potentials - to establish a closer relationship between reader, writer, and publisher; To enact literature in a closer dynamic to social and economic cooperation, by offering feasible prices to those who can’t afford regular book prices, therefore providing quality literature to a large numbers of readers who wouldn’t otherwise pay for such books.
For all of us interested in Social Design, they offer an inspirational example of a project that can stand by its own, and they offer books which are symbolic of community power in moments of crisis, and which certainly feel like tokens of bottom-up empowerment.

Ah, of course, they also sell books. Beautiful and one of a kind books that might stain your purse or get glued to your wallet, but which intonate some of the best voices South-American literature has to offer.

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“”Las editoriales alternativas -no solamente Eloísas- forman una red simbólica de poder frente a las grandes transnacionales que quieren dictarnos qué leer y qué pensar. Por ello, estas editoriales son un medio, contra lo hegemónico, de subvertir esos poderes.”

(”Alternative publishers - not only Eloísa - form a symbolic network of power against the large corporations that want to dictate what to read and think about. Therefore, these publishers are a way against hegemony, a way of subverting these powers.”)

Fabián Darío Mosquera (4)

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The catalogue
Definitely, one of this project’s greatest achievements is the impressive catalogue they managed to pull together.
In the early years, the it launched with acclaimed writers, such as Ricardo Piglia, or César Aira. These were followed by very experimental texts by unknown or emerging authors, as well as rare and out-of-print books. Nowadays, with almost two hundred titles, ranging from poetry to short stories, short novels and theatre plays, even literature for children, it has broadened his scope to include authors from Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Costa Rica and Peru.
It never ceased to amaze me how such meagre productions, in a material sense, could embed such high cultural value. Nonetheless, this is said to be typically a Latin American characteristic, that of achieving economically weak but culturally strong products and social structures. It costs close to nothing to produce one of these items, at least by western standards, but the literary quality is even so of very high value.

Aesthetic and the role of arts
In those hectic days when the streets became a horizontal meeting point for all classes, a new temporary flattened class was improvised - more awakened, united, and above all, a hiper-creative one. This was a creativity born out of the most extreme conditions, which is arguably a criteria most theories on creativity require.
This reminds me of a phrase many project-owners and people I spoke with used during our informal interviews: “The la deseperación nasce la créacion “(5). This sentence gave me the chills. I am one that defends freedom from the suffering anguished artist stereotype. And yet there was another saying, and this I heard solely at Eloísa, which I found even more unsettling: “Las tapas feas venden más“, I was explained - Ugly covers sell more.
This stood of course for a very particular artistic approach, one that in the beginning truly surprised, even chocked me. I came to perceive how poverty is in this case very much a deliberate aesthetic choice. It is nothing compared with a phenomenon such as green-washing, because these covers don’t pretend to refer to a poverty they have nothing to do with. They describe exactly the backdrop they were born off, and in that sense, they are genuine. They are surely not some deceptive strategy aimed towards selling more books. But the people selling and painting the books are in any case very much aware of the values and the myths they are selling (as previously discussed) and they do take advantage of that. Badly-painted covers do sell more, because they look more “crafty”, less “professional”, more “genuine”. They appeal to romantic ideals and they represent a social phenomenon we can then empathize with, namely poverty and the cartonero phenomenon.
This results in a strong aesthetic positioning based in a strong and visual reactivity to high culture and institutionalized art, everything properly crafted and standard made. It offers implicitly a return to the rough, rude, raw and ready-made aspect of objects. This is achieved by the use of bright and primary colours from very cheap pigments, an intentional unskilful aspect, lack of precise finishing and attention to details, and little or no elaboration in what regards ornaments and sophisticated visual elements.

The position of the designer was gladly abolished. The book covers can be designed by virtually anyone. If you enter the store one day and feel like painting some covers, you are very welcome to do so. Anything that you might be able to put together will be good enough, there are no covers better than others. Anything goes - and that is somehow liberating.

From a designers’ viewpoint, it is also noticeable how the covers had no visual reference of the content, beyond stating the title and author. There are no typographic copyrights issues, as everything is hand-drawn, cut, glued, and then painted - or directly painted. There is no template, no designated cover designer, no artistic direction whatsoever.

There also isn’t a consensus when it comes to the role of arts in all this. Despite being a project where literature, painting, and crafts have such protagonism, I was often explained how this project has “nothing to do with arts“.

In the earlier days, the artistic was first defended by Barilaro, who by the time I was there had already left the project, in his own words, to work “on is own things“. In his work as an artist Barilaro explores the same universe of typographic vernacular and cumbia-dancing-meets-book-publishing. A sort of meeting point between artistic expressions, social systems, and life at large. This has everything to do with artistically unifying concepts of artistic practices such as Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture” concepts (6), which Javier himself has in different interviews referenced as an important link to the social design work carried out by Eloísa.

He was also one of the elements in the team that took the project to the 27th São Paulo’s Art Biennale, by that placing the project in a clear institutional art setting.

Here, the translation of a social design project into an art gallery setting
(27th São Paulo's Art Biennale)
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Ramona Leiva was the one accompanying Javier in his institutional art pursuits, and she is as well another important piece of Eloísa’s story. As Barilaro, she as left the project to pursuit her own projects. At the time she was with Eloísa she expanded the concept to include a tailoring section. They redesigned used clothing and made T-shirts with images of the writers they publish.
A reporter once asked Ramona “What is an artist?” To what she replied: “Someone who does what s/he enjoys” (7).
After stepping away from Eloísa Ramona initiated together with other former prisoners, being a former prisoner herself, a beautiful crafts collective called “Yo No Fui” (”Wasn’t Me!“).

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Ramona teaching us how to use the silk-screen boards
to make t-shirts for Yo No Fui.
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With Javier and Ramona’s departure, there was no one else who clearly stood by the role of arts in this organizational dynamics. Not that there is anybody clearly opposing it, but I felt from the discourse that the project is perceived to have developed towards something “more social“. “It wasn’t just about art anymore“, I was explained.
This was when I realized how “artistic” can be spoken about in contradiction to, or at least incompatible with, “social“. Everybody is aware that this endeavour was artistic from the very first day, started out by three artists, with creative and artistic intentions. But in six years it is said to have become “less about art and more about people“.
These are two paradigms existing within social design practices: it is distinct to have a design or arts project, initiated by designers or artists, who utilizes people and communities, and by that becomes “social” (social as content and territory); or a project that is initiated and taken forth by the people themselves, regardless of their “artistic status”. This is the road Eloísa travelled in six years, which lead me to eventually find participants who defended art had nothing to do with it what so ever: this one project is supposed to be about people.
I was forced to ask them - But are they necessarily self-excluding? And forced to ask myself - How to find a discourse where all these levels can co-exist and people don’t perceive them as self-excluding?

Economical sustainability
This was hardly the only question I was forced to ask myself. So many others followed, specially on the topic of money and economical sustainability. Does a social design project need to be economically sustainable to be effective? How about all those wonderful ideas inside organizations which can’t make ends meet? Further more, how to escape the subvention dependency?
The thing about Eloísa is that it actually works. It works, in the sense that they are self-sufficient. They have never taken a subsidy or funding of any sort. And this is rare. On the other hand, this puts an economical pressure over the project that makes it often neglect the social and artistic aspects of it. Simply because books must be sold.
I found it curious, and symptomatic of how (non)organized it all is, that they said not to keep track of their sales. Books are produced as they are missing from the shelf, and this is not quantified. Yes, they could show me their “best-sellers”, that is, the titles that sell more. But they couldn’t estimate if this meant three hundred or three thousand books sold. (A rough estimate tells me that they have to sell at least 400 books per month to keep the people that keep the project running).
This pressure towards self-sufficiency and the unarguable need to sell, as said, brings a pressure that raises many issues. No doubt this is a progressive publishing model, with obvious social and cultural value and which in some extent does challenge the dominating neo-liberal economic hegemony. But on the other hand it can be said it goes on feeding the system it attempts to attack, it is as capitalist-dependent as any other business, and instrumentalizes strategies of marketing and franchising (see below, on the expansion of the Cartonerias through South-America) like any other business.

Measuring impact and the problem with numbers.
So, it works. But to which extent? Surely one wouldn’t defend that such a project has any major impact over the Argentine economic situation. If accounted, the number of people directly profiting from this project is quite limited. You have a handful of cartoneros who profit from the cardboard they can sell, a even lower number that could actually get off the streets and start working with the books instead, and this way you have a group of 5 to 10 people directly making a living out of it, and then you have a larger audience which surely profits from the high-literary-quality/really-low-price product they offer. If you also consider the above mentioned ideological outcomes, i.e., what they sell (offer) beyond the physical books, then you have even a larger audience to assess when measuring impact. And this can already account for you and me, probably thousand miles away from Buenos Aires, but nourishing from the inspiration they present.

Measuring impact is one of the most pressing debates in Social Design these days, and not a straight-forward one. Never to forget that one is dealing with people above numbers.

Cardboard and recycling
The environmental component was what got me in touch with Eloísa in the first place, through TreeHugger’s article. But in the end this turned out to for me be the least well-solved aspect of Eloísa.
So you have a picture, imagine that every night tens of thousands of people (8) walk the streets of Buenos Aires going through every rubbish bin. They are the cartoneros, the city’s unofficial recycling system. They open every container and rip the plastic bags apart when scavenging for the materials they can later sell. If on the one hand this activity keeps many families from falling completely beneath the poverty line and enables materials to be reintroduced in the production and consumption chain and therefore not wasted, the way they do it is also what turns Buenos Aires into a huge urban dump, and therefore decreases life quality, health and environmental urban levels.
It’s often said that Eloísa sells recycled books - but that’s incorrect. They take cardboard that would in any case be resold, and give it a new life. That is surely something. But they are in any case using bleached white paper and chemical pigments and manufacturing new books with it. They don’t trade, they sell.
They are environmentally and economically wise (as this often goes hand in hand) but they don’t directly solve any environmental issue. What they do, and that has to be valued, is raise awareness to the life prolonging potential that any material in our trash bins has. If you take this further, you can even consider an implicit metaphorical statement in the way that material excess and social excess, both created by capitalist and neo-liberalism, is reintegrated in the larger social landscape and given a new life.
In any case, if evaluated for its environmental impact I would have to say this is hardly this project’s strongest asset

Washington Cucurto…
It’s quite difficult to talk about Eloísa Cartonera without mentioning Washington Cucurto. If Eloísa has covered many rolls of newspaper, Cucurto has flamed many more. This enfant terrible of Argentine literature is either adored or loathed, but hardly anyone remains indifferent to him. Often I experienced when I told people I was collaborating with Eloísa, the first inquiry I got was “What do you think about this Cucurto fellow…?” - and whatever I might answer would then determine the future of this potential relationship.

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Washington Cucurto
standing in front of Eloísa Cartonera's colourful window.
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Cucurto is a pseudonym of Norberto Santiago Vega, born in one of the many impoverished communities of Buenos Aires. In 98, he won a prestigious literary prize and achieved notoriety for his poetry collection, Zelarayan. This was later banned from public libraries and burned for its obscene, pornographic and xenophobic content. His writings are down-right polemic and his plots are carbon copied from his life experience in the night-life of Buenos Aires, with all the social outcasts and all the political turmoil. Very far from the tradition of Borges and other erudite cultural expressions, Cucurto’s writing touches the nerve of the Argentine intellectuals. Nevertheless, he is a phenomenon of notoriety, with media coverage from such publications as The Guardian, Rolling Stone, BBC World, or Financial Times.
In 2002, before Eloísa was born, he owned a small publishing house that would be ravished like many others by the economic collapse. In the summer of 2003 he was manufacturing colorful poetry books with his friend Javier Barilaro - and the rest is history.
There is obviously a parallel between the negation of Europeanized, neo-liberal and high-culture values in everything that could be said both on Cucurto’s fiction and poetry, as well as on Eloisa’s aesthetic choices and overall positioning.

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A Social Design project inside a Social Design Project
In 2005 Cucurto attempted an interesting literary social experiment. Every week he would publish a new chapter from his unreleased “Hasta quitarle Panamá a los Yanquis” (”Until I take Panama away from the Yankees”). This was done every week at 7pm, before leaving to one more cumbia night at Samber or Bronco (9). Internauts could then have free access to the text, and enough time to read and actually meet the author for a dance in the very same night. This is again just a small example of one more strategy used by Cucurto and his clan to bring the writer-reader love story out of its platonic canons and into the physical, euphoric, sensual dance-hall.

Exploring the web
This small experiment above was only possible because this online presence had already been drafted. Eloísa was already running for three years when designer Pablo Martín approached Barilaro with the exciting idea of taking the project online. Back then the web of cartonerias across South America (now most of them with their own blogs and online presences) hadn’t grew into what we have today, so there was little material about all this online. Pablo grabbed the opportunity and together they built a very unique website inspired in all the elements that make the daily tasks at Eloísa - the cardboard and the letters from cut-out stencils, and the color that characterize Eloísa. Pablo later extended his collaboration with the project to a series of comic series in which he drew and Cucurto wrote.

www.eloisacartonera.com.ar

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Going viral through South America
With time, the concept would expand and become so popular that it travelled to neighbour countries. Today it has spread with different names to different cities - same core concept. You will find Sarita Cartonera in Lima, Peru; Animita Cartonera in Santiago, Chile; La Cartonera in Cuernavaca, México; Yiyi Yambo in Asunción, Paraguay; Felicita Cartonera in Asunción, Paraguay; Dulcineia Catadora in Sao Paulo, Brasil; Mandrágora Cartonera in Cochabamba, Bolívia or Yerba Mala Cartonera in La Paz, Bolivia - and others.
If on the one hand this feels like a hopeful symptom of viral spreading of counter-discourses against cultural and economic hegemony, it is ironic how it so closely resembles the mechanism itself rejects, such as franchising. It happens all too often that marginal and borderline cultural manifestations are integrated or even swallowed by mainstream culture, and this way fundamentally perverted. This is only to shed attention into the fact that, beautiful that it may sound that Cartonerias are popping up every where, this could also turn it into one more brand phenomenon.

Much more than books - II (3)
We have seen how they “sell” (offer, make available) much more than books, but do they produce more products other than books? I learned that several of the other Cartonerias added social and educational events to their activities, ranging from workshops to book launches and discussion round tables. This wasn’t happening at Eloísa at the time I was there, even though it is included in the bigger picture.
In the bigger picture though, was now something truly to look forward to. At the time I left they were purchasing a piece of land one hour away from the city. One hectare of land to build a house and start an organic food garden, a non-formal school and who knows what else. The book production could go on from there, while reconnecting people to nature and working the land. Self-sustainability is still a pre-requisite.

This happening, would mean that something that started off as a business platform with liberating aspects to it would actually turn into an integral and holistic project beyond money-dependency and generating self-sufficiency, self-governance and self-empowerment.

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Looking forward to the next chapters…!

By Joana Bértholo.

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PLUS!

How to get your hand on one of these books!
If you are in Buenos Aires (…lucky you!) you should get to La Boca, not far from the famous Boca Junior stadium, to Aristóbulo del Valle 666. If you want to order them via mail you can do so through here.

Useful Links
Official website.
Eloísa Cartonera at SocialDesignSite.
Conference Cartonera Publishers: Recycling Latin American Bookscapes; October 8th-9h, 2009 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Footnotes
(1) This episode was caustically called “The Curralito” and you can read more about here.
(2) Pet name they give to their workshop, short for “cartoneria“.
(3) “Mucho más que libros” is actually one of the main slogans of the project.
(4) in ” El telegrafo online“, 21 de marzo del 2009, “Literatura humilde, pero rebelde”
(5) From despair comes creation.
(6) See also www.social-sculpture.org
(7) “¿Qué es un artista? Alguien que hace lo que le gusta.”
(8) Its hard to estimate how many cartoneros there might be, due to not being registered and all, but number point to something around 100.000 (source: Pablo Schamber, Una etnografia de los cartoneros, Editorial SB, Buenos Aires 2008).
(9) Famous venues for dancing cumbia in the Buenos Aires’s quarter of Constituición.

Our world has reached a crucial shifting point. With all the problems we have been having lately like the economic crisis, climate change, environmental disasters and political conflicts among others, it is quite obvious that something is terribly wrong with the society we have built for ourselves. Along with these problems, our world has also reached a whole new era of design, creating a whole new role for designers, giving us endless opportunities to improve our society. Now designers have to be more concerned about creating design processes rather than a “design product”. This new role does not substitute the traditional one, but rather works side by side with it, creating and opening new field of activities. It gives us the opportunity to create networks with individual people, enterprises, non-profit organizations, local and global institutions that together generate tangible steps to sustainability. The idea of what a designer is in our day and age must change. We have to learn to view designers as social actors and as strategic planners that will create platforms enabling solutions.

There are pretty big egos in the “design world”. Every designer wants to be the best. Every designer wants to be coolest and the most innovative one. I think that it’s important to accept the fact that nowadays according to contemporary sociology, “everybody designs”. We have to recognize that the era of “design monopoly” is over when only “highly talented” individuals were able to create new things. Having said this, lets think about the role that design could play in our daily-life. It is crucial for designers to start thinking more about already existing scenarios that could be improved, emphasising the most interesting aspects and interpreting situations that arises from different cases. In other words, lets start thinking on how could a specific system could be improved using design-thinking as the key ingredient for its development.

Improvement starts in a local scale problem. We have to think that creativity is a diffuse attitude and it can certainly be used as a social resource. It is astonishing to see that the real driving forces of change are the “ordinary people” when given the right opportunities.

Take as an example the “Biblioburro” in Colombia. The Biblioburro is literally a “travelling library” powered by two donkeys named, Alfa and Beto and created by Luis Soriano. Soriano created a “travelling library” to distribute books to the most confined areas in Colombia that had been affected by guerrilla conflicts. His project started with only 70 books, but now has expanded to 4,800 volumes thanks to donations. Now, children have found hope and joy in literature that first had been restricted to them. As another example, take Fernando Llort in El Salvador. He is an artist than during the verge of the Salvadorian civil war, taught and inspired the small town of La Palma how to make a living through art by making workshops with local people. These examples show us that even the most “ordinary” things can transform people’s life into extraordinary ones.

Pretty cool, huh? So now my wounds are healed. We all have the power to improve and even change our reality. No great talent is needed; we all can do it. The only thing needed is the willingness and courage to actually want to do something.

By Nora Vargas.

“It all began with the crisis of 2001. As some say, “we are a product of the crisis”, or that we “aestheticized misery”. Actually, it was nothing like that. We were a group of people who came together to work in a different way, to learn new things through work, to build up a cooperative, to learn how to subsist and manage ourselves, to work towards a common good. Like many of the movements and collectives born out of those insane times, we organized into a cooperative, or a small assembly group, as there were also neighbourhood and community groups, and all sorts of social movements. Citizens, workers and neighbours - there we were.”

I do intend to write about Eloisa in more depth in an upcoming post. But working next to them, while trying to take distance and ponder on their choices and their process and the way they have changed so much since 2003 has proved for me to be a rich but complex exercise, and I will need more time until I can come up with anything remotely readable about them.

What I did immediately realized was that a project like Eloisa was but one example of the multitude of collaborative and community solutions that emerged in those years following the referred crisis. As the above quote bears witness, people took the streets and found in community and collaborative practices the way to cope with such an acute scenario. Very creatively, the Argentineans developed a multitude of ways to make it through the day, applying creativity and developing design and artistic projects for a very specific and demanding context.

There were all sorts of alternative economies popping up, like the barter clubs or similar exchange platforms. Workers took over the factories they had been dismissed from, and ran self-organized independent businesses. Theater and street performance became major political participation instruments, with massive citizen involvement and even the creation of a specific form of performance - the escrache.

“The escrache is a particular political demonstration that emerged in Argentina in the turn of the century by the organization H.I.J.O.S. The members of H.I.J.O.S. started the escraches as a way of showing to the community the presence of unpunished criminals of the dictatorship (1976-1983).” (read more about the escrache phenomenon here).

An array of cooperative structures emerged, where it’s arguable that design is more or less present, and which got me wondering - where were the designers through all this, and how were they engaging?
I already came up with a couple of answers. Obviously, it was never a straightforward response.

One of the many examples one might present was a graphic design competition followed by an itinerant exhibition, under the name ¡Dios es argentino! (meaning God is Argentinean!). Although it sounds very peculiar and even arrogant to my ears, this is said to be a house-hold expression in Argentina. It’s a curious cultural expression from people that once lived in the “land of abundance” and that underwent a harsh decade of scarcity, repression, unemployment and social inequality. It has to do with the pride Argentineans carry themselves with, it has to do with the awareness of being a very privileged country in terms of natural and also cultural resources, it even has to do with Diego Maradona; But it also has to do with all the opposites - the irony of what was made of such a promising nation, or as I was heard it in a documentary film the other day: “¿ Si Dios es Argentino por qué nos abandonó?” (If God is Argentinean why did he abandoned us?).

Two of the thirty posters that made up the final selection of this exhibition (it’s stated that a hundred were submitted) refer exactly to that divinized self-perception. Pablo Agustin Mendoza (author of the poster at the left) and Sara Paoletti (right) both visually represent this divine aspect of being Argentinean. But while Pablo lists the same reasons above stated (the most beautiful women, the best performers, tango dancing, the best meat, the best landscapes, mate-tea, the wine, the people - and of course, Diego Maradona…) Sara takes it further to the irony of it all. In her poster one can read “God is poor, God is an artist, God is a cardboard-picker, God is dangerous…God is Argentinean”. I particularly appreciate her poster for bringing to light all these aspects that emerged from the afflicting situations the crisis created, and for more or less placing artist and the need to be creative in the bigger picture. It’s important to realize how for so many people this fall into creativity and artistic production was nothing less than a terrible consequence of an despairing impotence.

In Gustavo Saliola’s poster (below) the disillusioned self-perception goes even further. The Argentineans are depicted as specialists, that’s for sure, but of unwholesome skills, to say the least. In the simulated street graffiti one can read “Che Bush, if you ever need help let us know, here in Argentina we really know how to destroy a country!”. And it’s not by chance that it’s set in a street from Palermo, and a particularly dirty one (well, as most of them are…). The author goes on to state: “There is something I’m sure about. If our country gets cleaner in the upcoming years, nobody will convince me God is not Argentinean“.

Many of the posters represent this generalized disappointment. They reflect a massive effect of shock the Argentinean people lived through, witnessing a country that had everything to make it greatly, and that for many years enjoyed a considerable amount of material prosperity and wealth, suddenly caught in a economical farmyard (literally, considering they named it “corralito“), unable to take their money from the banks, seeing poverty in all forms (including political) strike like a wave.

Sol Mendonza gives us a testimony on how the design class lived it, or escaped from it, in the poster below, which demands no translation.

And for a more positive outlook over it all, the winners of the competition, Amalia González and Ezequiel Bluvstein’s poster (below). To remind us that all that happened can serve as a wake up call to the need for social engagement, or as the designers themselves put it: “The events of the 19th and 20th of December 2001, under the noise of “cacerolas” (cooking pans) were a turning point in Argentina’s history as a large part of society got out and into the streets, awakening from social lethargy, in a society where unemployment and poverty and a deteriorated educational system had deepened. People began to take charge of their own destiny, new political actors emerged with communal assemblies, with the movements of unemployed workers and with factories which were recovered by their workers.” (2)

¡ Dios es argentino ! was organized by the Design European Institute in Barcelona. It was curated by Elenio Pico and Luciana Leveratto. The awarded posters were selected by an international jury composed of Mario Eskenazi, Andrea Rauch, Manuel Estrada, Norberto Chaves and Gustavo Fosco. The exhibition was shown in several occasions both in Argentina as in Spain (in 2004) and it’s possible to see it online here.

By Joana Bértholo

(1) “De algo estoy seguro. Si nuestro país se limpia un poco en los próximos años, no me van a negar que Dios es Argentino…“

(2) “Los sucesos del 19 y 20 de diciembre de 2001, bajo el ruido de las cacerolas, fueron un punto de inflexión en la historia argentina ya que una gran parte de la sociedad salió a la calle, despertando del letargo a una sociedad que había profundizado en el desempleo y la pobreza y deteriorado el sistema educativo. De este modo, el pueblo comenzó a tomar las riendas de su propio destino, surgiendo nuevos actores políticos como las asambleas populares, los movimientos de trabajadores desocupados y las fábricas recuperadas por sus obreros.“

All posters are credited except the ones in the homepage, from Paula Morkin (the thumbnail that says “Tengo Hambre”) and from Araceli Deregibus (the cacerolazo image temporarily in the slideshow above).

The intention is viral, that is, the more these ideas are being read, spoken out, thought and discussed, the more their energy will manifest in our world and in our society. It counts with the participation of everyone with whom it resonates with. This participation can be manifold - you can choose to pass it along to people you know, publish it on your own blog or website, discuss it with friends, or you can even create your own Cultural Revolutionaries actions and share it on the project’s website.
You can also get involved by translating it into your language. So far, the declaration is already available in english (below), deutsch, español, français, chinese, português de portugal, italiano, svenska, and euskera.

DECLARATION OF CULTURAL REVOLUTIONARIES 2009

Cultural revolutionaries in 2009…

_live, act, work with and not against nature
_know that life is too complex to understand it intellectually
_build and support local, self-governed economies
_value and safe-guard diversity of all kind
_value interdependence, since they know that nothing is separate
_regard themselves as equal to all life forms
_protect and support life
_love and support children unconditionally
_work on themselves towards greater awareness
_know about ecological principles and integrate them into their lifes
_see music and dance as an integral part of their expression and communication
_live on an animate earth and regard it as sacred
_know how to grow their own food
_appreciate their sensory awareness
_celebrate life
_cooperate
_make the shift from thinking ‘either, or’ to thinking ‘as well, as’
_share their knowledge
_understand and integrate process as a way of being
_are not identified with their body, thoughts or emotions
_see the mind as a tool
_realize that there is no right or wrong
_are not identified with any social tag, their past or their future
_are aware that the very essence of who they are is life itself
_take responsibility for their emotions
_are aware of and value their relationships to their living and seemingly non-living surroundings
_value and integrate the wisdom of women
_value and integrate the wisdom of indigenous cultures
_value generalist knowledge
_are aware of change as one of the core principles of evolution
_work towards diversification and decentralization
_engage in and create bonds to the place where they live
_turn from dependent consumers to responsible producers
_are looking for ways so that their interests and talents may unfold
_have the courage to resist and disobey laws that render self-rule, self-provisioning, and self-sustenance illegal
_are informed about the current money system and identify it as a contemporary form of enslavement
_identify and boycott biological, cultural, social and philosophical monocultures
_boycott monopolies of any kind
_question everyone who promotes one solution
_value environmental and human ethics over profit maximization
_boycott corporations and banks operating for profit maximization
_reclaim land and forests as common good
_reclaim water as common good
_reclaim biodiversity and knowledge as common good
_are aware that they participate in the process of co-creation at all time
_allow life to unfold through them

Berlin, 03/2009, by art-ecology-education.org

Here are some examples of CR interventions in the streets of Berlin:

By Joana Bértholo.

Wheatley, a management and organizational specialist, explores the implications of systems thinking, chaos theory and quantum physics on organizational practices. Her book does not directly refer to design practices as anyone owning a design studio might conceive them, but it has everything to do with them. It talks about creativity and flexibility, finding order in the midst of chaos, and the challenge of designing for a constantly changing scenario. It addresses the need of understanding how the emerging and often complex scientific tenets (at least for lay people as myself) can be used to redesign institutions, communities, and the way we are living and working together. The new physics is opening frontiers of knowledge that could be among the most significant of our history.

“There are many places to search for new answers in a time of paradigm shifts“. (p7)

To think design and creativity at large shouldn’t get involved with this strikes me as unreasonable:
All in all, what is the impact of what’s happening in science in our way of producing images, art, and cultural value? How does it affect the way we relate to and integrate in our line of work concepts we work with such as matter, communication, dynamics or energy? How does it affect the way we design products, services, and experiences?

“(…) science has changed. If we are to continue to draw from science to create and manage organizations, to design research, and to formulate ideas about organizational design, planning, economics, human motivation, and change processes (the list can be much longer) then we need to at least ground our work in the science of our times. We need to stop seeking after the universe of the seventeenth century and begin to explore what has become known to us during the twentieth century. We need to expand our search for the principle of organization to include what is presently known about how the universe organizes.“

Wheatley starts of from a fairly given premise: due to the great influence of Newtonian science on our way of thinking and perceiving reality, we tend to organize this perceived reality through the analogy of a machine, which can be broken down into parts.
That leads us to the fallacy of believing that if we can break things into parts, and address problems in a reducionist manner, working in each individual component with a separate logic, in separate teams, we can finally assembly the machine back together and it will be working perfectly. The challenge begins, as Margaret Wheatley recurrently reminds us, when people and projects refuse to function that way. Life itself does not work like that.

New discoveries in science tell us that a new view of the world is emerging. They tell us that life and the cosmos are an organic and highly coherent and interconnected system. The analogy of the machine gives place to a view of the world as a living organism. “Its logic is the logic of life itself: evolution towards coherence and wholeness, through interconnection and interaction” (Ervin Laszlo, 2006).

One overwhelming observation made by these new scientists is that, at the particle level, nothing is separate, nothing exists except in relationship to everything else. Whereas Newtonian physics focused on things and matter rather than interconnectedness, in quantum theories, relationship is the key determiner of everything.

Some key ideas any designer might want to follow and might try to integrate into his daily practices after reading this book could be:

• When we study the individual parts or try to understand a system through discrete quantities, we get lost. To understand and work with the system, we need to observe in its wholeness, and this is revealed only as a shape, not facts. Systems reveal themselves as patterns, not as isolated incidents or data points. (see Fritjof Capra, 1999, ch.3)
• Information is what defines who we are, what we can become, what we can perceive, what we are capable of achieving. The crucial feature of the emerging scientific view is space and time transcending correlation, where information is available non-locally and atemporally. (see the Akashic Field theory by Ervin Laszlo)
• The universe is a participative place: any act of looking for certain information evokes the information we went looking for. This simultaneously eliminates our opportunity to observe other information. Every act of measurement potentially looses more information than it gains. Our old views constrain us. They deprive us from engaging fully with a universe of potentials.
• We have to move beyond the fallacy of control and stop fearing change so much, as individuals, as designers, as team-workers. We have to learn to indulge in the experience of disequilibrium, novelty, loss of control and surprise, as part of the playground of growth and continuous change.
• “The natural dynamics of simple dissipative structures teach the optimistic principle of which we tend to despair in the human world: the more freedom in self-organization, the more order“. (see Erich Jantsch, 1980)
• Take disorder as an opportunity. “The things we fear most in organizations - disruption, confusion, chaos - need not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these conditions are necessary to awaken creativity.”
• There is no objective reality “out there”. The environment we experience is co-created through our acts of observation, what we choose to notice and worry about. We inhabit a world that co-evolves as we interact with it.
• Acting should precede planning. Instead of the ability to analyze and predict, we need to know how to stay acutely aware of what’s happening now, and we need to be better, faster learners from what just happened. Dealing with whatever is.
• “Matter doesn’t matter“, focus on awareness, relationships, communication, the quality of information and connections.

Finally, and because this line of wondering can tend to get to abstract and apart from everyday movement, a personal testimony on how Weathley herself integrated such broad and far-reaching discoveries into her daily practice:

“My growing sensibility of this quantum world has profoundly affected my practice in organizations. Now I struggle to remain aware of the system and give up my well trained abilities to reduce and separate things as the route to understanding. I concentrate much more on processes now, focusing on qualities rather than quantities, paying more attention to things lie pattern, direction, feel, and the internal rhythm of what’s happening. Long ago I gave up looking for straightforward cause and effect. I feel similarly that positioning things as polarities doesn’t help - we need to stop drawing lines of opposition and try to understand the “and” of “one and one”. (p45/46)

Well, if that is not wisdom from which any designer can grow from, I don’t know what is…

As I don’t offer any answers in this post and come forward with too many questions, I will compensate by closing it with a link to a slideshow that presents many concrete proposals on how systemic and complex thinking can be scaled down to practice in a real world project. It is also one I greatly admire:

What designers can learn from the Transition Movement

By Joana Bértholo.

image credits: http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/%7Eadenau/cs206/

Take a look at the full list here.

The world is full of visionaries and people who want to make a difference in the world, and many of those people share their knowledge online through their blogs. Whether you want to change the world through environment, humanitarianism, business, or any other way, there’s a blog out there that can offer you guidance and inspiration. Read on, and you’ll find 100 blogs that can help you change the world.

And on behalf of everyone behind the Blog On Social Design, Thank You!

By Joana Bértholo.

Good 50×70 is a non-profit, independent, international social communication project that aims to provide charities with creativity for free and wake the creative community up to the power they have to be a force for good. When we launched it in 2007, we were only a few people working in the communication industry with an idea but no support whatsoever. Getting the idea off the ground was incredibly hard, as none of the organisations we approached were interested in helping us.

For the first time in our working lives in agencies and design studios, simply having a good idea wasn’t enough. If we wanted Good 50×70 to happen, we had to do it ourselves. It’s the biggest, and most valuable, lesson we’ve learned – how to turn an idea into a reality with your own resources, by sharing it with like-minded people.

The vital help we need to kickstart the project came from the designers we contacted to be part of our jury. Despite the fact we had no official endorsement or funding at this stage, they joined us nonetheless, making it possible for us to give a weight and structure to our project.
Then there was the overwhelming response from the global creative community. We never expected that designers from all over the world would get involved so quickly in our project, and in so many numbers. Although it might not be noticeable from the posters themselves, there is an incredible variety of people participating. In 2008 we had entries from over 150 countries.

To give you an example of how far people would go to send in a poster, there was one Norwegian participant who didn’t work with computers, but wanted to take part. So he sent his entry via fax to his national graphic designers association, who then scanned it and sent it to our website. That really touched us.

As we’re a small initiative, run by a small group of people, it would have never been possible for us to put together all of this on our own. Opening up the project to anyone who wants to collaborate with us has been the driving force behind our growth. Many of the exhibitions or workshops we’ve organized were done with the help of participants, studios or schools connected with them. The result is that Good 50×70 is now a project of collaboration between the design community, the public, and the charities we are working for to produce posters that might make a positive difference to the world.
For our third edition, which is now currently open for entries, it might seem that everything’s exactly the same as in our first – a poster contest run via our website, with briefs set by our endorsing charities confronting seven critical global issues. But things have changed – and it’s something we believe passionately we have to keep on doing to make Good 50×70 as relevant as possible.

This year our intention is to make Good 50×70 easier to participate in, for both creatives and our charities, and on a wider level. That’s why we’ve decided to interview our jury members, starting with Yossi Lemel.

Yossi Lemel interview - What’s a good example of social poster? from Good 50×70 on Vimeo

To start with, we’re opening our database of all the posters entered to any charity that wants them. But what’s really new for 2009 is our plan to organise all of our activities (contest, workshops, exhibitions) on a local level. This means working with local charities, local school and local designers in one city on posters that will be displayed around the city and that will hopefully have a genuine impact on the local community and produce something positive and tangible for the charities involved. We’re currently working on projects in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Suriname, with more to come. The beauty of Good 50×70 is that anyone can (and is more than welcome to) pick it up and make it their own. We hope that the next version the Good 50×70 website will make it easier for collaborations between creatives and charities to blossom.

But back to this year’s contest. As ever, the aim is to produce the best possible work for our charities, to try and stimulate interest and even a solution to the problems they address. To this end, we’d like to improve our activities to produce a catalogue that’s not simply a summary of the competition, but strong enough to be stand on its own.

Above anything we want to do something positive and pro-active for the charities that work with us, and any other charity that works in the same field. And Good 50×70 will keep evolving and growing to meet their needs and ensure that social communication gets the attention it deserves. Which will be good for all of us.

The call for entries for the 2009 contest is closing on the 1st of April. The next stop for Good 50×70’s exhibition will be in Hong Kong at the OC Gallery from the 9th April to 5th May and at the City University Campus from the 27th April to end of May.

By Pasquale Volpe and Tommaso Minnetti, Good 50×70 founders.

Design is first and foremost about intention. Intention is starting point, path and destination at the same time.

Social is about human, the fountain of intention. People working individually with similarly good intentions, will inevitably bridge many divides along the way and eventually solve complex problems.

Divides and weaving

There are many divides, some of which are: scale, space, time, issue, expertise, need, and the greatest of all, is that between idea and reality. Let’s take peace-making as a social design issue.

Scale.

A monk prayed for peace on earth, an activist march the street to tell people about the raging war, a diplomat signed a cease-fire agreement between the parties at war, a mother whose son was killed in the war forgive the killer, a man makes peace with his neighbor from the other side, a father coming home from work smile at a TV show on this peace and read a bed time story about a peace in some fantasy land to his children . From one man to the world, and back to one man again.

Space.

The monk prayed from a monastery, the activist held his banners high in the street, the diplomat went to the warzones and back to the roundtable, the mother lives in occupied territory, the man walked across the border to his neighbor. The father may be yours. They live everywhere.

Time.

The monk lived hundreds of years ago. The diplomat, mother and neighbors lived in the now, the man and his children are not even born yet. They live all the time.

Issue.

The monk prayed that war in all its forms is a spiritual dead end. The activist makes the case on how war is also ravaging the economy and people’s livelihood at home. The diplomat dives to the racial roots of the war and find a cure. The mother understand that soldiers are humans too. The neighbors forgot all together what started their war. The man was just making a good living. Their different roads leads to the same destination.

Expertise.

The monk understands the nature of reality. The activist knows how to make good noise. The diplomat is skilled in pacifying opposites. The mother has what it takes for forgiveness. The neighbors are good at friendship. The man is a captivating story-teller. Each has a role to play.

Need.

The monk seeks fulfillment by walking the spiritual path. The activist’s calling is channeled through her campaigning. The diplomat was challenged at what he does best. The mother simply wants peace for her family. The neighbors relies on the services they provide to each other. The man just want his children to have sweet dreams. Everyone is in need.

Idea to reality.

All started as an idea, for some clear, for others vague. Everyone makes use of what’s in front of them the best they can. Both deliberate and emergent processes, intertwined in the manifestation of individual intentions. Some immediately, some on a later date. Every intention will eventually translate to reality.

Forward

What’s true about intangible outcomes such as peace, should even be truer for tangible outcomes of social design. What’s true for such less-deliberate social design, should even be truer for more-deliberate social design. What’s true about social design in the face of divides, should even be truer when there’s less of it.

We are here together in this defining moment in history. There are things that only you can do, and things that only we can do together. We have the tools to work across divides, so let’s do social design better together.

Start with a real problem, a good intention, and whatever you have at your disposal. Connect and collaborate with others whenever and wherever possible. And even if you’re all alone, do your thing. A wise man once said, “what is once well done is done forever.”

By Wibowo Sulistio.

Photo credits (creative commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124447823@N01/369559602/

Citizen designers and interdisciplinary leaders are guiding clients and peers toward sustainable design and progressively toward a social transformation agenda (with an ongoing dialogue which we explore in some depth online at Transforming Transformation, request to join). And this shift in values (or the predominance now of actions consistent with values) co-occurs with the devastating upheaval in economic fortunes among those heavily invested in the previous century’s perspective and commitments to growth.

Yet in the gritty reality of everyday work, the vast majority of working designers and design educators are training for, skilled for, and planning on a future led by corporate projects. Many of us owe our livings in a creative, dynamic profession to the overabundance of producing new things and marketing those things and services via every channel of media available. We might accept this reality as yet another dichotomy among those of our modern values systems, which indeed it is. Many of us love and enjoy the constructive and skillful work we do, but may not love some of the outcomes we are making happen. Yet I say we can find new ways to motivate and lead by asking questions, presenting alternatives, and designing social opportunities as we might create artifacts.

Must design management continue to follow the lead of technology and the markets forming around technological innovation and capital? Can we start leading our prospects toward the innovation of social opportunities and serve to enhance our clients’ awareness of long-term possibilities? Can we lead effectively without being ‘thought leaders” and acknowledged iconoclasts? Can we, as Benjamin Zander encourages his orchestral players to do, lead from any chair, the chair we are given to play from?

Transformation design has struggled to purchase true global recognition, and yet it is a necessary next phase of design thinking across the many disciplines in which we teach and practice. We will see it converging with the already several well-accepted models of next-generation and transformative design practice, including IIT’s Human-Centered Innovation, the Design + Business movement, the systems thinking school (e.g. Dialogic Design and Idealized Design) and Design 3.0.

NextD’s GK van Patter has widely presented a progressive model of a design theory of practice, which offers a simple framework for thinking about the emergence of future practice.

• Design 1.0 as traditional graphic and industrial design, design as making.
• Design 2.0 as design as value creation (including service design, holistic product innovation, multi-channel, and user experience), design as integrating.
• The perspective called Design 3.0 that requires a social, inclusive design process. A multidisciplinary design approach that reimagines systems and takes leadership toward change in social and organizational structures and systems. Design as transforming.

(Allow me a pre-emptive caveat: NextD adopted the x.0 referents well before Everything 2.0 caught on to the point of weariness). The progressive concept is not intended as a growth sequence, where designers move on from 1.0 to 3.0. Instead, in many cases, all three modes of design thought can co-occur and cooperate in a single program or organization. The implied sequence from 1.0 to 3.0 advances a progressively inclusive design leadership that engages effective design processes for multidisciplinary collaboration in the service of understanding and addressing complex problem systems. The concept is not that of replacement of Design 1.0 craftsmanship by Design 3.0 leadership. It is a way of scaling up to deal with ever-increasing complexity. But there are no “pure Design 3.0” firms in the world today; most design firms are a mix of practice types. However, the shift to design thinking for complex problem systems is by no means a progressive enhancement to practice. It requires designers to trust the inclusion of non-experts, and requires they release authority over tangible outcomes. It is not a comfortable transition for the individually expressive designer.

The leap to Design 3 is not intuitive or simple. It requires the discipline of innovation process. Shifting the target of design from a print or material artifact (D1.0) to a systemic product or service (D2.0) may not require a huge change in design practices, but represents a shift in artifact complexity and knowledge sharing. Most of us who have designed integrated services or complex web products have made this shift already and may often combine these kinds of projects within the same product. Think of a print and web marketing campaign (D1.0) for a complex web + retail service.

But expanding the target of design to the organization itself – one that is already structured and skilled to function as a repeatable production system of such web services and marketing campaigns - is another matter. Design 3.0 can be seen as a designing of practices that help multidisciplinary teams and organizations reinvent and sustain their innovation capacities. As with other design schools of thought, D3.0 adapts to business or social innovation problems. But it focuses on the problematizing more than the
problem – the skill of collaborative rethinking and reframing of problems so that the right problem is solved, rather than solving the problem correctly.

A socially progressive design theory is worth considering in light of the seismic social and economic shifts occurring in our organizations, communities, and nations today. (Which shifts in particular? Choose your crisis. Without enumerating any of the multiple co-occurring predicaments, let’s accept that we each have a favorite crisis by now – interconnected economies, food and water supplies, overpopulation, peak oil geopolitics).

These crises have become so interconnected and tangled, in my view they have advanced beyond the wicked problem concept of Rittel and Weber’s definition. They have become massively scaled, global problem systems – each one a cluster of wicked problems. We barely know how to think through the issues of a wicked problem, so how might we seriously frame and coordinate action toward problem systems?

Inventive, systemically effective, and forward-looking responses to these crises require non-conformist, disruptive design leaders to inspire and guide currents leading to cultural sea changes. We need pragmatic, experimental, and courageous social design thinking, right now.

While at the same time, the ground under which traditional design has been built is also crumbling under the global seismic breakdown. Our corporate organizations and clients have no special foresight or clarity to lead through this mess. They will muddle through at best. Designers can be excused for feeling at loss for action, without a contributing vision, or for being unable to clarify the very design problem we aim to solve that could drive leadership forward.

But we should not be excused for long. The creative professions must earn the right to create a new context for serving human social needs as actual human needs change. I want to turn our way of thinking about designing for social contexts right-side up. When the dust has settled from the current chaotic turning, I expect us to speak a new language about human needs and human betterment. I envision our clients (in 3-5 years) asking us about how to best serve communities and people, not consumers and users.

For those of us in leadership roles in our day jobs, as team leads, project leaders, entrepreneurial principals, we have the direct opportunity to find eradicated budgets, abandoned business strategies, and muddled objectives almost anywhere we turn. These are leading indicators that disruptive social and organizational design will be called for, and yet, we are not positioned as safe harbors during the storms of crisis. Nor should we be considered “safe,” as safe thinking and reasonableness are dead weight in times of total systemic change. What our teams, organizations, and political communities need from us is that which we do best, and that which efficient organizations typically avoid. Our call to action includes inciting imagination, multidisciplinary collaboration, re-inventing participation, rethinking business strategy, and inspiring and visualizing alternative scenarios from all players.

Our world now presents us with problem systems, not just complex problems, but chaotically interconnected situations of systemically connected problems. Design 3.0 can be seen as a framework, a system of language, that by learning we may be encouraged to dare to take on the problem systems in our own organizations and encounters.

By Peter Jones.

When I recently came across the notice that it is out in French, Italian and Portuguese (from Brazil), and expected soon in Dutch, German, Japanese and Chinese - the memory of those days came back, and how novel most of those ideas were to me, and it felt like taking it off the shelf again.

In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. It confronts us with the straightforward questions: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? and their multifaceted answers. The solutions and alternative paths he presents don’t form any Utopian scenario, but rather present us with a vast array of innovation projects and products already real. This wealth of examples emphasizes how ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without hindering social growth.
The less-stuff-more-people world will still be in need of good design - systems, platforms and services will have to be efficiently put together. This transition from what he calls “innovation driven by science fiction to innovation inspired by social fiction” is still hold back mostly by inadequate information diffusion (overloaded and underframed) and a lack of holistic and systems thinking.
“Use, not own” is one of the mottos he sets forth. This implies a shift to a service-based economy, rather than product-based one. Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and of The Next Economy, while considering this book once stated:

“If there is one pervasive criticism of global capitalism that cuts across all ideologies, it is this: goods have become more important and are treated better than people. We are producing higher quality computers than children. John Thackara’s brilliant book about quotidian design describes design innovation driven by social fiction instead of science fiction. This is design focused on what Fernand Braudel called ‘everyday life’: the demands and pleasures of caring for others, raising children, meaningful work, and journeying. These inspired and innovative technologies return people to the heart of the world and help them create a fulfilling life.“

Thackara also exposes the often forgotten vision of how “every product that enters our lives has a ‘hidden’ history, an undocumented inventory of wasted or lost materials used in its production, transport, use, and disposal.”

Thus, if you have any French, Italian or Portuguese speaking friends interested in these issues, here’s a good recommendation for them. Added to all that has been mentioned, the new edition is said to be substantially changed from the original English edition. It’s abridged, and it features an updated introduction and three new chapters - on Food, Development, and Telepresence.

The French edition was translated by Anne Despond-Barre and is published by Marc Partouche for Cite du Design Editions. The Italian edition was translated by Niels Betori and is published by Pier Paolo Peruccio for Allemandi. And the Portuguese edition is published by Marcelo Melo at Virgilia and available from Saraiva.

Meanwhile, you can listen to John Thackara himself reading extracts from the book in an installation at the Permormative Cities exhibition at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.

By Joana Bértholo.