Observations by Ric Grefé

In an Op-Ed piece in the New York TImes on June 13, 2013, David Brooks provided some thoughtful observations about "The Solitary Leaker":

"Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme."

Brooks then concludes, as he has often in the past, "For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures."

In a commencement address at Middlebury College, Jonathan Safran Foer raised questions about our diminishing ability to care. 

"Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile,messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it."

"The  problem with accepting — with preferring — diminished substitutes is that over time, we, too,become diminished substitutes. People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little."

Perhaps the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care…have the empathy and compassion that distinguishes us. And this is also one of the reasons that AIGA believes it has an important role in encouraging thoughtful conversations.

Martin Heidegger: "The more original the thinking, the richer will be what is unthought in it. The unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow."

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Are these the attributes AIGA should be fostering in a professional development programs?

·  Critical thinking and problem solving

·  Collaboration across networks and leading by influence

·  Agility and adaptability

·  Initiative and entrepreneurship

·  Accessing and analyzing information

·  Effective oral and written communications

·  Curiosity and imagination

Tim Brown might add:

·  Integrative thinking

·  Optimism

In a hyper-connected world, everyone must demonstrate how they can create value better than any alternative. The tools and methods we know are being made obsolete faster and faster.

Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who revolutionized the study of innovation with his book The Innovator’s Dilemma in the late 1990s, more recently published The Innovator’s DNA. In this study, he identifies the five habits of mind that characterize disruptive innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things.

These observations both validate the qualities of designers as innovators in a powerful economic sense and give us advice on developing the designer’s strength, rather than simply relying on innate talents:

·  Creative associations are enhanced by broadening your experience, so you meet new people.

·  Effective questioning is linked to a talent for observation.

·  For all their reputation as outsiders, great innovators tend to be great networkers.

·  Innovators are also inveterate experimenters who fiddle with their products and their business models (rapid prototyping!).

As designers today, seeking engagement in unconventional roles, we argue for the value of the creative mind in framing and proposing solutions to problems. In doing so, some would hear that the designer’s approach to problem-solving can occur without the experience and training of a designer. Without lowering the threshold of skill and judgment that defines a designer, how can the resourcefulness of designers be shared?

Emily Campbell, when she was at the RSA, asked whether designers could redefine themselves as more than making beautiful resources; rather, as making people more resourceful. In a sense, this is what is occurring in the experience communities have when designers facilitate problem solving exercises in Design for Good projects.

“Philosophical problems have the form: I don’t know my way around.” This amounts to a claim that the idea of a single repeatable method in philosophy is misguided. He argued that we have to make our own way in thought—to master “the geography of concepts”, so that philosophy is like “traveling in a landscape with a view toward constructing a map.”

Participatory networks, in which every member has access to and gains from everyone else in AIGA, is both the most productive and the most competitive organism possible.

The U.S. government spends a vast amount of money each year on procurement (essentially, the purchase of goods and services)—$535 billion in 2010. With that scale of investment, the government becomes a design leader by virtue of purchasing policies alone. If a client of this scale was to set explicit criteria of effectiveness—citizen experience and civil well-being that could override least cost—think of the transformation that would occur in the civic experience! Half a trillion dollars a year demonstrating the value of design...

Unfortunately, government doesn’t tend to behave like a design champion. Civil servants are—if not by nature then certainly by training—cautious. To my knowledge, rarely in the history of government procurement have either superiors or the citizenry at large encouraged civil servants to innovate, to be creative and to accept a degree of risk (with the notable and oft-cited exceptions of the space program and advanced military systems).

Without creativity, though, public sector services are unlikely to achieve their ultimate goal: to enhance the lives of citizens and improve the global perspective of the U.S. If government officials think good design is expensive, it has often been said that they should consider the cost of bad design.

Periodically there are conversations, usually strictly within the design community, about how our country should have a national design policy, but it has never been clear what a national design policy would encompass. Our ultimate goal should be a presidential statement in the State of the Union address: “Design forms an integral part of the government’s plans for innovation and growth, and our upcoming research and innovation strategy will have design at its heart.”

It will take many years to put an advocacy plan such as this one in place. But you can help.

If each designer began by relaying the same message at the city, county and state level, we could create a groundswell of learning about effective design throughout the country. The first step is to write your local newspaper about the issue and attend town hall meetings of candidates during the current campaign. Ask the candidates if they see design as critical to the long-term competitiveness and innovation of the U.S. economy. Don’t take lower taxes as the answer!