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François Jégou, director of the Brussels-based design research company Strategic Design Scenarios, has 20 years of experience in strategic design, participative scenario building and new product-services system definition. He is active in various fields and research projects such as investigating Creatives Communities for Sustainable Lifestyles in China, India, Brazil and Africa for UNEP; exploring immersive service design approach in public institutions for the 27e Région or building a deliberative platform on nanotechnologies. François teaches as visiting professor in the Faculty of Design of the Politecnico in Milan and La Cambre school of design, Brussels. Along with with Ezio Manzini, he co-produced the Sustainable Everyday Project. This collection of scenarios and case of social innovations asked: what might everyday life be like in a sustainable society? How would we work, move, and take care of each other? The picture that emerged, says Jegou, was that of a ‘multi-local city…based on participative connected citizens”. Last book on the subject: Collaborative services, Social innovations and design for sustainability..

Updating elderly…

EESC Design Eleven is a competition launched in November 2010 by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) to prepare the European Year of Active Ageing and Intergenerational Solidarity.
The Design Award, initiated by the European Economic and Social Committee, intends to support smart and sustainable European products, by the same time putting focus on the work of organised civil society. The peculiarity of this competition is that it includes the production of the winning object and its distribution throughout an international network of institutional stakeholders.

It’s not an easy task for the participating designers to meet the criteria of EESC Design Award: the apparently straight forward idea of asking for an innovative ageless, intergenerational solution and use it as a high level gift for the institution tends to induce a trade-off difficult to solve. On the one hand, pertinent innovation emerged from user centred observations generates functional answers to daily living questions that, assessed as a gift emblematic for EESC policy, tends to be too specific and not explicit enough to be understood at first sight by who will be given the present. On the other hand, a self-explanatory gift that communicates immediately values of inclusiveness, sustainability and creativity tends to appear as a more light, symbolic gadget that is not a serious and pertinent solution from user daily living point of view…

Beyond this challenge that could be easily solved, the briefing of the EESC Design Award appears to me a very important instrument to face nowadays societal challenges. Subsidizing the production of a first series of advanced products selected because they challenge lacks in the current consumer market should be seen as a form of public procurement. And in that sense, it is a very important and valuable action from the EESC to orient innovation supporting the launch of emblematic products and to influence consumer markets towards more inclusiveness and sustainability. The Design Award should certainly be redesigned in that direction and it should be promoted as such to get a larger audience among the design schools throughout Europe.

Last but not least, what strike browsing the entries shortlisted for the EESC Design Award is the latent image of aging that emerge. Beyond the intrinsic quality and pertinence of the answers, it seems that the designers taking part are challenging through their projects a somewhat old fashioned understanding of seniors, as sort of romantic grand mother knitting and darning and looking for her glasses… This raises an important question and debate for EESC and the vision of active ageing it promotes. What does it mean today ageing in our society between the senior marketing focusing the relative economic power of last baby-boomers, the so-called generation of migrant that are more and more active on the Internet and the increasing mono-parental families that result in ageing alone? More that a debate, it is a societal challenge: the future of ageing has to be invented. Beyond the traditional image of ‘library of knowledge’ and ‘sedimentation of wisdom’, new social roles of seniors have to be explored? This is a great challenge where creative design-driven participative approaches can contribute a lot and it is maybe a suggestion for next year Design Award?

Innovating within innovations challenges…

How is innovation changing and which challenges innovation will have to face in the coming future? INFU is an on-going European research project focusing futures of innovation, scanning weak signals of change in the current innovation landscape, extrapolating new patterns, discussing emerging visions, scenarios and implications for policy and practices.

Starting from this teasing material we proposed LIFT 2011 participants to join a board meeting of an Innovation Agency in 2036 as one of the workshop organised by within the famous conference programme in Marseille between the 6^th and the 8^th of July.

The Innovation Agency is specialized in how to innovate in innovation and was seeking for help to face the challenges that were just emerging 25 years ago in 2011 but that now are… burning!

The meaning of this workshop was to prompt strategic conversation about the possible consequences of todays’ and tomorrows’ innovation policies. The debate was triggered by a series of challenges based on extrapolating or exaggerating the trends observed through the INFU research project. The current motto is the consecration of the innovation society. What could be the externalities in terms of sustainability, employment, citizenship… if the booster of innovation reclaimed today will effectively happen?

LIFT conference is a good test bed for INFU: participants are all involved in a way or another in the development of innovation either as inventors or facilitators or even analysts of innovation processes. But they seem to be more focussed in detecting the emergence of a new phenomena than considering the diffusion or even the saturation of an innovation that is already known. The selection of weak signals scanned in the INFU research project and proposed as teasers to kick-off the workshop were already known and metabolised by most of the participants. Any form of ‘innovation camp’ for instance or the emergence of ‘co-working space’ seems to belong already to the past for Lifters whereas most companies and public institutions don’t even have experienced these forms of stimulation of innovation or haven even hardly heard of it…

The challenges focused on maturity or saturation rather than launch trigger instead active debates. Participants aggregate in small groups around the topics they mostly fell challenged with and try to shape some solutions. We reproduce here the seven challenges and introduce the 5 minutes videos synthesizing each subgroup achievements:

1_Challenge about rhythms in innovation:

Companies’ pressure on their employees to permanently innovate everyday of work provokes a range of suicides in companies. The Ministry of Labour and the Trade Unions would like the Innovation Agency to invent a new framework to regulate innovation expectations at work.

 
The group did not believe innovation pressure could be as dramatic as that but surprisingly the solution they propose starts from relieving this pressure, allocating more time to innovation, transparency in the management process but surprisingly, finished to build a scary control of innovation performances of employees integrated in human resources that let suppose that the challenge we wrote may become reality quicker than expected!

2_Challenge on eco-innovation:
Waste based innovation has take off in the 00′s and a complete new range of new products definitions and production processes based on reuse of existing components instead of rough materials. The world waste stock exchange market is working very well, even too well inducing a perverse increasing demand for waste materials. The Innovation Agency is asked to propose solutions to avoid this bias.

The group ends-up with results that seems also to acknowledge the proposed challenge: they indicate localisation of innovation and feedback processes to avoid global financial spin.

3_Challenge on users engagement in innovation:
Users have been more and more involved in innovations processes, included in users communities, trained to participation, enabled by do-it-yourself innovation kits… They have reached a level of autonomy in self-development of the solutions they benefit from. The global picture is more and more an atomization of micro-solutions, lack of interoperability, robustness, solidarity at macro-levels… European Commissions is pointing this problem in FP12 research calls to which the Innovation Agency is intending to respond…

The group diverged proposing 2 different solutions: the ‘catalyst’ that spread innovation, arbitrate between parties in a creative commons spirit against the ‘facilitator’, a regulator that don’t pretend to understand innovation and control processes but just try to remove locally the barriers…

4_Challenge on innovation stakeholder interaction:
In the last 2 decades the focus shift on the constant emergence of new players and new processes in innovation. Crowd sourcing facilities operating online worldwide, innovation camps between local stakeholders, spontaneous social innovation survey, distributed fabbing and production… challenge the former players of innovation. Research in public laboratories and universities, R&D of large corporations, open innovation platforms set by companies, design consultancies and classical innovation stakeholders appears less and less trendy, attract less talents and feel disconnected from the new players. The Innovation Agency is in charge of organizing a large conference in November 2037 to bring traditional and new innovation stakeholder together to debate and reconnect in a new innovation eco-system…

The subgroup advocate for the creation of a Shake-up platform promoting processes less focussed on owning the knowledge but by sharing, provoking, learning, catalyzing… is trying to get value out of the control of knowledge flows…

5_Challenge on public services innovation:
Dramatic shortage in public budgets in the 00′s pushed local authorities and national governments in putting the service burden on the shoulders of the citizens themselves. Shifts from public services to enable civic society, cities proposing open innovation platforms to involve their population, EU putting emphasis on social innovation as a new Eldorado… leads to some interesting developments but also many scary and insane experimentations to simply cover drastic budget cuts. After more than 2 decades now citizens demonstrate a clear participation fatigue reinforced also by the abuse of the collaborative consumption in the private sector. The Association of European Regions is commissioning the Innovation Agency to organize a symposium called: The Big New Deal between Big government and Big Society!

For the group, the public service is substituted by a Public Action Marketplace trading participation and personal contribution between citizens and a micro-local organisation of public services to generate a form of active welfare…

6_ Challenge on unsustainable externalities of innovation:
Innovation policies ever reinforced from the 00′s provoke an explosion of creativity and new products proposal are booming. The Council of Sustainable Development of the UN is urging the Innovation Agency to find a process to responsible innovation process and limit it to innovation supporting sustainability;

The group proposed the RIPA: Responsible Innovation Process Agency in charge at the same time to stimulate local communities to innovate but also to feedback to them the global impact consequences of their innovation…

7_Challenge on management of innovation:
Incentive in innovation during the last decades produced an exponential innovation process. EU Innovation Policy advocates it’s now time to promote active ‘recycling’ of innovation rather than stimulating new ones. The Innovation Agency is asked to develop a framework to facilitate this process;

Trash Reash proposed by the group is a super semantic search engine together with community based tagging that allow to scan innovations leftovers from technical innovation to managerial or social and cluster it as the basis of setting-up new companies..

by François Jégou

How many design schools around the world are now focussing on social change towards sustainability? How many innovative projects inspired by social innovations are imagined by creative teams of students and their professors? But what is the visibility of all these efforts to stimulate new an more sustainable living? How to access them easily, exhaustively in order to spread good and promising ideas?

These concerns were at the start of the organisation of the DESIS Forum that just took place in Paris the 21st of May at Strate College back-to-back to the Cumulus annual conference.
The goal of a DESIS Forum is to provide an overview of design schools activities related to design for social innovation and sustainability and at the same time, to enrich a shared catalogue of projects within more schools involved in the network.
For this first edition of the DESIS Forum, we received more than 50 DESIS-related projects from 23 schools and universities and 13 countries all around the world.
Even if this only represents a very tiny bit of what is produced by the design schools community, it’s a snapshot that allows to get an idea of what is going on, stimulate debate and new vocations among the 80 participants assisting to the Forum last Saturday morning.

(more…)

DESIS Europe, the European branch of the international Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability network is already active with projects, research and workshops but had not been effectively launched: this was one of the many activities scheduled between the 1st and the 4th of June in Malmö, Sweden. Two events were organised back-to-back at MEDEA Lab settled at the University of Malmö: (Re)designing the Regions was a 3 day study tour organised by La 27e Région a French public innovation lab; SEE that stand for Sustainable Everyday Exploration was a workshop organised by Strategic Design Scenarios and Politecnico di Milano within the PERL (Partnership for Research and Education for Responsible Living) European project. Both overlap in time and share the same concerns: how can we innovate in local transformative processes towards sustainability; how to renovate the way public actions and policies are made and foster social innovation-based bottom-up processes towards new sustainable ways of living… The seminar focused on local projects such as Living Labs in Malmö and Copenhagen, the MindLab of the Danish Ministry of Finance but also on many invited participants representing original projects and institutions such as Social Entrepreneurship in Residence from the Young Foundation, WWF One Planet Mobility, UK Building Schools of the Future programme, the MidtLab from central Danmark region or Inciativa Joven from Estremadura region in Spain… (more…)

“Greeness to be clarified” is the claim of the Conference on Green Design 2010 organised by the Hunan University of Technology May 21-25 in Zhuzhou, China. It’s a good title… As a lot has effectively to be clarified about sustainability today. It’s striking when strolling across the huge EXPO path where no pavilion -be a city, a company or a country- forgets to advert any kinds of effort to be green as the ultimate solution. And it’s also true for universities and design education in particular which are seeking for which way to go between enjoying two digits national growth or wondering what designing more sustainable ways of living means when 300 million Chinese are expected to rush from the countryside into the cities in the next 20 years…

“How many time do you think China will need to catch-up with France?” asks Pr. Wang, ink painter teaching at Hunan University when driving through the huge building plant of the future Changsha airport… The country is rushing to catch-up. It’s even more clear when visiting Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall and considering the football field large model with thousands of skyscrapers demonstrating how Shanghai should look like in the near future. But it is not clear to catch-up with what and if visions have been updated… A 360° 3D animation immerses visitors into the ever astonishing dream of the city of tomorrow that dominate city planning since more than 50 years now…

The gigantic EXPO is the ultimate one-to-one scale model that -if necessary- demonstrates the lack of scenarios for the future. Starting from the form: where is the exhibition? Nothing on display but a more of less lucky scenography of screens showing conventional corporate communication to rushing visitors. The architecture of the pavilions is really worth to see it but… it is asking also questions: how this demonstration of creative architecture in the ‘EXPO playground’ will cope with outside million of people packed in high-rise if it is unable to adapt the flow of visitors that have to stand in lines for hours to sneak 5 mn inside each pavilion.

‘Better city, better life’ should be searched at another scale and the real richness of the expo is elsewhere. To see it you have to look down in front of you and watch the thousands of English speaking Chinese students that volunteers as assistant staff, smiling all day, supporting tired visitors and representing the only true part of humanity in this mega-galactic old dream…

Coming back to the Green Design conference, many interventions were searching for new inspirations to shift away from the western consumption-centric imported model: it’s difficult without a deep understanding of the Chinese language and philosophy to assess the potentials for instance of the “Shanshui City”, presented by Hu Jie, Director of Beijing Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute or Prof. Liu Guanzhong of the Academy of Art and Design of the same Tsinghua university advocating design as third category of wisdom and ability for human to survive in addition to science and art. But which design?

Many of these works are fundamental research as European green architects reviewed by Mario Brizzi of Università degli studi Florence or the personal research of a green philosophy in vegetal digital sculpture of Prof. Liu Yudong, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Moreover they start from scratch as if time and resources where sufficient to rebuild our world in a proper way… Benny Leong, School of Design, Hong-kong Polytechnic University in more pragmatic terms depicts a large panorama from simple eco-design improvements to more radical scenarios of sustainable lifestyles exploring the use of distant digital collaboration. An on-going field study investigates most sustainable and unsustainable aspects of Chinese lifestyles and shows an interesting attempt to create a common ground and a digital platform among the DfS (Design for Sustainability) network of main Chinese universities…

Tomohiro Fukuda described in his speech Osaka University current developments in green design with 2 scenarios capturing the ambivalence in the conference participants between 2 temptations: the sustainable techno-optimism and a reasonable slowing down. Moreover, he presented the Kobunaki Eco-village using a 3DCG simulation software: flying above an area of Omihachiman city, the camera plunge down to the ground in a vertiginous pure style of 3D urban planning phantasmagoric visualisations but instead of skyscrapers it lands into a neighbourhood with habitants cultivating their orchard and kids playing in the middle of the street: clever mistification or signal of change of mindset…?

J.W. Drukker, professor of design history in Delft university concludes his speach acknowledging the only really successful birth control policy achieved by the Chinese government in the recent years asking indirectly the critical question of balance between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ measures in the rapid transformative change towards sustainability… an great risks that too match plannification disconnected from the people real life represents…

The hypothesis of a transformative change towads sustainable ways of living through an ‘acupuncture’ of micro-projects we presented was welcome: the challenging metaphor in the country where this traditional medecine was invented seems to effectively inspire a different attitude to projects. The experiences of residences of La 27e Région in France as an innovative process to activate energy of local projects is a promising way to pass from theory to practice. In particular the debate between participants during the second day largely agreed it inspires a necessary change in the design attitude teach to the students: as Chen Anying vice chief editor of the journal of Zhuangshi, academic journal for arts and design in China and co-organisor of the conference reported in plenary, it time to pass from a ‘design for’ to ‘design with’…

François Jégou

20 images in 20 seconds.

Notes for open conference at Victoria Eco Innovation Lab in Melbourne, Nov 2007

Transitions toward sustainability implies to address systems that are more and more large, fast moving, complex and with numerous inter-related actors… Scenario thinking in such context is a way to overcome the on-going evolution, to envision discontinuities, to stimulate strategic conversation between stakeholders and bring them along to implement radically new solutions…

The talk will focus on 3 areas of Solutioning scenario building activities:

To explore opportunities…

Investigation of social innovation is a way to focus new and more sustainable lifestyles. VideoSketching technique and the use of other visualisation tools allow to show alternative ways of daily living, simulate new visions and describe possible reconfigurations of complex systems.

To facilitate convergence…

Co-design and participative techniques allow to involve users and stakeholders in the construction of their own futures. Sustainable Everyday Project events around the world blow this process at a large scale involving visitors of exhibitions in building their own sustainable lifestyle and showing how the use of scenario could foster the social conversation on sustainability…

To focalize solutions…

The development of new product-service systems requires new instruments for the designer. SystemMap, OfferingDiagrams, InteractionTable, StakeholderMatrix… an entire “solution notation toolbox” has been developed and experimented during the HiCS European research project to progressively share and specify a solution between different players. (more…)