Ezio Manzini’s book “Design, When Everybody Design” was on my reading list for many years. Finally this December I ordered an Estonian physical copy and read in January.
I’m not sure why I didn’t read it before, but I’m glad that I did it now. The whole book goes hand in hand with everything that I hope to accomplish with my thesis project. The book is from 2015, and I’ve been reading into similar thinking in the last 12-18 months but from other authors. Mostly everything that Helsinki Design Lab did from 2011 to 2013.
As I said, the timing was perfect, and I enjoyed the projects that Manzini introduced to introduce his idea better. I’ve just found out that Manzini wrote a book about politics in 2019, so I must add this to my reading list as well.
With the rest of the article, I want to wrap up the main learnings and insights. It’s not a review, because I would end up praising the book the whole article.
To be on the same page, I need to define the design of how Manzini views it.
Design is a culture and practice related to how things should-be to achieve the desired purpose and meaning.
Even if the decisions aren’t thought through and happen, it’s still a “designed” state that can be re-designed. At the same time, before starting with any activities, it’s crucial to figure out the desired end state. It’s one of the most challenging tasks in the whole process because of the number of stakeholders within the communities.
The (changing) role of expert designers
In social innovation and strategic design, an expert designer’s role is to improve how different stakeholders can take part in co-design processes. Often the expert designer is the initiator of new design projects.
For design experts, this means that they should focus not only on individuals but also on communities. The designer should launch co-design projects in which all interested parties can contribute.
By improving the conditions, Manzini brought out that experts’ role is to plan and strengthen the various design initiatives addressed at the different stages of the design process.
For example,
- carrying out ethnographic analysis;
- mapping of the physical and social resources;
- designing communicative artefacts to stimulate future debate, offering a variety of options;
- the creation of a prototype or pilot project to make a feature more tangible to a broader audience.
The hyperlocal cosmopolitan world
Since the 1970s and the triumph of neoliberalism, the societies have been going through the process of individualisation. It means that the local communities lost their strength and people’s safety nets weakened because of the weakened social structures.
Since the 2008 economic crisis and the increasing impacts of climate disaster, people have started to co-operate again. They are finding answers in communities and small networks.
Disappointment with the officials has opened people’s eyes to cooperation. You can say that it’s been a rediscovery of communities and their potential. More so, it’s about people’s wish to create a positive change for themselves and others around them.
My retelling might not be the best, but I think it’s necessary to understand the concept of cosmopolitan localism.
Cosmopolitan localism is a social innovation approach to community development. It links local and global communities through flexible infrastructures to bring production and consumption closer together.
The short-distance networks generate the local socio-economic fabric. The long-distance networks connect a particular community to the rest of the world.
Distributed systems are inherently more flexible than more traditional vertical systems. They can create socio-technical systems that can recover from potential unforeseen problems and learn from the consequences.
Small-scale organisations are generally more transparent and understandable and therefore, closer to the local community. And another vital insight is that innovative solutions come from relocating current resources. The answers have to be discovered, and it starts with agreeing on the desired end state.
Co-produced public services
Co-produced services do not diminish the importance of public entities—instead, their role changes.
The role of public authorities as service providers should be to offer citizens an active partnership as co-producers. It means becoming organisations capable of supporting and, where appropriate, initiating and guiding citizens ‘participation by making the best use of citizens’ knowledge, experience and direct involvement.
Laozi wrote more than 2,500 years ago, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for one day. Teach him to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.”
According to Manzini, he meant two things:
- to ensure the long-term well-being of people, we need to enable them to be active and to deal with their problems, and
- secondly, they need access to the appropriate knowledge and tools.