Fernanda Rizzo

London 2012 Designers Accord

The 2012 Designers Accord Town Hall event approved to be an very interesting and inspiring event. I as very happy to be able to attend it and will definitely be intending to go in any of the future events.

The Design Accord Background

Design Accord is a global coalition between professionals, educators and business that work together for a common good.

This event has been supported and organised mainly by the Design Council and Engage by Design.

Design Council

The design council is a charity which promotes that design and architecture can generate common good for society. This institution offers mentoring to public and private sectors and have been promoting challenge competitions to tackle issues within society. Initially these challenges were mainly focus into product design but they are now moving their focus into service design.

The head of design strategy within the Design Council, Marianne Guldbrandsen, was asking for further participation from the group of professional to give suggestions of areas that the design council should challenge further.

Engage by Design

Engage by Design is a design social enterprise and consultancy that provides strategic interventions that aim to support the transformation of your product or service into a more sustainable one ways in which design can influence society for a more sustainable future.

As an example of the work they support, they’ve shown The Kaledoscopio project (2011) which consists of videos in which they’ve asked a few key questions to designers from all around the world.

Speakers

Fiona Bennie – from Forum for the future

Fiona Bennie gave a small introduction about the tragic situation and depressing feeling when we analyse the current economic and environmental situation, mentioning the general rise of prices (food, energy bills, cost of living) and the current need to produce more than what the planet can produce.

She also metione that the UK has compromised itself to reduce its carbon emission in a international agreement.

The carbon emissions reduction targets are:

globally – 80-95% reduction by 2050 (IPCC)

UK’s target: 50% reduction by 2025 (The Guardian)

To reach this, the society needs to change drastically the way we live. The longer we wait to change, the harder and drastic it will be.

She has urged designers to help this change to happen as soon as possible. And that we need to generate ideas to improve business models.

Mike Sharp – from Design Council Challenges

Mike Sharp works as a Design Strategist, helping to develop and apply design thinking and strategy to various projects across the organisation.

In his talk he encouraged the empowerment of people and gave a few examples of people that decided to change something in society an just started doing. They did not wait until someone gave them the permission.

He also mentioned, as an example, that one personality that usually give real DIY incentives is Jaimie Oliver. He argues that although Jaimie Oliver is a rich celebrity and has lots of resources to invest, he still picks an issue and acts on it.

He mentions that he manages to follow 3 point that help its success over certain campaigns.

Make it visual and tangible
start from a small scale
spread ideas in a clever way

Andrea Koerselmen – from IDEO

Andrea Koerselman works as a service design specialist at IDEO and she defends the idea that we should all, as designers, make our concepts and ideas open source to develop it further into something bigger and therefore create real impact in the wrld. The more collaboration we have, the better the ideas will evolve. She suggests that we need to get people to connect better to the people they source.

As an example she mentioned the project of OpenIDEO.com. This organisation promotes the design collaboration for a common good. The organisation puts upfront an issue that needs to be solved as a challenge and it encourages people to work together. It’s all about collaboration for complex challenges. They believe the more you collaborate, the more you will gain points within the site and the more you will be recognised within the community. It’s all about broad thinking.

Gustavo Montes de Oca – from Hackney City Farm

Gustavo Montes de Oca focused his presentation on the issue of ‘WASTE’. He highlights that in nature there is no waste, everything is balanced. He gives the example of the death of a whale, and what happens of every stage of the decomposing process. He criticises that although we are clever and thinking human beings, we waste loads in the world. Pointing out that there is a huge difference between the proportion of our needs and our waste.

His suggestion, through the HackneyCityFarm, is to make waste stream visible to everyone. As designers we should help creating tools that enable us (and businesses) to monitor waste. The organisation inform where people can find the specific waste and other people come to reuse it. This can create businesses and reduce general waste (accumulation of waste in landfill and the transport of this waste.)

As an example of his idea, he mentions that as a trial of their idea they’ve identified some wood waste within their community and made other people aware of it. What happened is that once other people realised they could use that waste the wood was reused in furniture design, school classes and burnt to bake bread.

Paul Miller – from School of Everything

Paul Miller defends the idea that social innovation and technology can work closely together. He recalls, as our previous speaker Fiona, that if we observe the current situation of our economy, it’s easy to find yourself feeling really small. However he pointed out that we should observe what has changed in the past 15 year and how technology can revolutionise the way we do things (and already did), both in private live and in a business environment.

He urges that we need to apply technology to solve bigger problems. Observe how behaviour interacts with technology.

He synthesises 4 stages that needs doing to make this change possible: