NextGen Housing Symposium

This interdisciplinary symposium explores design-led approaches for the next generation of affordable urban Australian housing. Australia currently has the least affordable housing of anywhere in the world, but the problem is increasingly a global issue.  Date: 8th August 2011, Venue: University of Technology Sydney.

Website: http://tinyurl.com/nextgen​housing

For free registration to attend, complete the online form at:
http://tinyurl.com/nextgen​register

Participate in the Affordable Housing research through our survey:  
https://www.surveymonkey.c​om/s/nextgenhousing

Where do good ideas come from?

Steven Johnson has written an interesting book on this question, and you can watch an animated summary of his thinking here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

IDEO - The emperor's new clothes?

I've generally made my career out of going the opposite way to everybody else.  This is good sense: I'll always find new things that have been missed.  Hence, I worry when everybody follows the lead of one person or organisation because the consensus is they are so special, so right and so perfect.

I get the feeling these days that IDEO, the design and innovation consulting firm, is too often pictured as walking on water.  I knew people at the chunk of IDEO that used to be Moggridge Associates in London.  They were mostly a product design business, but they'd been pioneering computer interface design, working for example on the icons for MacWrite.  Soon they introduced psychologists into their work and majored on user centred design with lots of observational reports.  It became clear that these 'extras' actually made more money than the product work and so the art of 'fee building' emerged – more and more services piled on to the core task.  Some years back, I visited the head of IDEO in London after the merger with Moggridge Associates.  He was a worried man: business was down in the recession and the Chinese manufacturers were starting to throw in product design as a freebie to clients.  As a result, the office had abandoned product design and had branched out into services, including running a lot of training and brainstorming workshops for clients.  And lo, profitability went up, up, up. 

So it is an interesting question: is IDEO the greatest fee-building organisation in design, or are they really delivering in a way that we should all emulate?  My greatest suspicion is that these guys are now telling businesses how to innovate and succeed in the market when the IDEO leadership haven't grown up as entrepreneurs through the harsh world of start-ups, failure and eventual success.  I have a lot of respect for IDEO, but they are not the role model - in fact, the role model doesn't yet exist.

Zaha Hadid's MAXXI art gallery in Rome is a miracle of pared down detailing - the sort of reduction that defies contractors and sometimes even physics.  How can we achieve this incredible minimalism in architecture?  Well, those in practice will know that such simplicity is actually very hard to realise: I've had a contractor weeping on site as he struggled for a fifth time to build an architrave-less door.

I've done a lot of projects with Zaha and I recall a visit I made to her studio shortly after they had won the Rome MAXXI project.  Their lead office architect was standing at the A0 printer watching drawings of MAXXI as they rolled out.  These drawings were huge but had almost nothing on them, just the main curves of the building.  The office architect looked at the drawings and said to me rather wistfully: "wouldn't you think there would be more detail on the drawings when we move from 1:200 up to 1:50?"

Hadid's studio was mostly staffed by recent graduates from the AA DRL Masters course that I taught on, and we had brilliant students but usually without any building experience.  They just didn't know about this fiddly stuff.  And the result?  Pure genius.  Ignorance is bliss!

Gehry building for University of Technology

It is hard to like the Gehry design that was unveiled last year unless you're in the Gehry fan camp since it is an extreme example of Gehry's approach.  But for the client, UTS, the project can't lose: whether the end result is hailed as a work of genius or otherwise, it has already amassed plenty of column inches in the press even before construction.  If the built result is controversial, the publicity will be there in spades. 

Whatever the outcome, we can be certain that Gehry is pretty serious about his work.  I had an intern in my architecture practice a few years back who went off to work for Gehry.  The intern was very talented and has a great sense of humour – too great for Gehry: the former intern was promoted recently at Gehry's office and in the letter confirming this were the words: 'Congratulations.. now that you have an important role you must refrain from making jokes with the clients at meetings'.

Group working in education - hot or not?

"Tutors LOVE group work.. they never have to prepare classwork.  Where groups abound, work ethic is scarcer than a patch of green grass on campus." - 2011 issue 2 of Vertigo, the UTS student magazine.  The students have spoken.  Needless to say, there isn't much green grass on the UTS campus!

What do you think?  What is your experience?  I began my teaching as a committed group worker, but these days I try to use it at the right time in the right way - it certainly isn't always the right way to do things.

Do wicked problems demand creative collaborations?

For the last 10 months, I've been working on a $50M Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) bid with five universities in Australia: RMIT, UTS, QUT, UWA and Newcastle.  It's called Design for Cities and Regional Centres.  This will focus on the wicked problems in our urban environment.  Our cities are full of these wicked problems – but what's a wicked problem?  Well, it's extremely hard to solve, and generally considered intractable.  Our theory is that if we are going to dislodge these problems and resolve conflicting requirements, we have to go beyond the traditional design team and bring all of the city stakeholders to bear on the issues.  This takes us closer to notions of web-based crowd sourcing and further away from generally unsatisfactory public consultation methods.  The approach will be design-led in terms of process, as well as collaborative and transdisciplinary.  It will also engages in 'deep practice' – the subject of a symposium chaired by Mark Burry and Terry Cutler for the RMIT Design Research Institute last month.  We see the need for creative collaboration across all the disciplines: bankers and funds, developers, government, planners, design teams, contractors, citizens.  We're also promoting the idea of a creative commons to industry participants so the value can flow through our system.  The book of wicked problems summarises our findings from over 30 meetings with industry and four workshops with over 100 participants.

To quote from  2010's book "Macrowikinomics – Rebooting business and the world", by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams: “For large and small companies alike, new models of mass collaboration provide myriad ways to harness external knowledge, resources and talent for greater competitiveness and growth. For governments and society as a whole, evidence is mounting that we can harness the explosion of knowledge, collaboration and business innovation to lead richer, fuller lives and spur prosperity and social development for all.”

Dinosaur Designs

We have to celebrate Dinosaur Designs www.dinosaurdesigns.com.au as an amazing example of Australian creative entrepreneurial talent.  It was set up in 1986 by three designers studying Professional Art Studies at City Art Institute.  They began be playing with casting resin for jewellery and expanded this into homeware and tableware.  They have stores in Australia and now a store in New York.  The work is great and the business has always kept its creative edge.  They sell online, why not buy something and support them?  It's a pity we don't hear more stories like this one.

Why carbon trading may not be necessary

OK, this is where I take a big risk and predict the impact of oil prices on the need for carbon trading.  My take on carbon trading is that if the price of oil is high enough then carbon trading isn't needed.  I'd put this price at $200 a barrel.  Today, Brent crude is at $122, not so far off the record peak in July 2008 of $145.  The high price will push industry, nations and individuals into adopting low energy solutions and renewables that suddenly make a lot of sense as the return on investment drops down to 5 years - I'd suggest this is the point at which consumers have a horizon on financial decisions (apart from buying a home).  What drives the price up?  Well, in the short terms problems in the Middle East.  But demand is growing ahead of production rates.  Additionally, the discovery of new oil reserves has been falling dramatically.  Peak oil is the point at which the maximum rate of global oil production has been reached, and it is followed by a decline.  The International Energy Agency says this happened in 2006.  Scarcity is essential to keep the world moving towards renewables.  Renewables will cause the oil price to fall as demand drops off; scarcity helps redress this.

Design thinking - does it exist?

'Design thinking' seems to have emerged as a term over the last few years, creeping up on us and becoming mainstream before anybody has really worked out whether it is needed, or even valid.  This has happened before, and we had it for example with: innovation (as in: I have arranged my pens on my desk in an innovative way), creative industries (now well and truly destroyed by Richard Florida's position that these industries even include lawyers!), urban resilience (this one is breaking news, apparently).  Can you think of some more?  These terms feel right but tend to be very vague.  It seems that there are two interpretations now for design thinking:

• Designers bringing their methods into business - by either taking part themselves in business process, or training business people to use design methods.
• Designers achieving innovative outputs, for example: 'the iPod is a great example of design thinking', or 'hey, excellent design thinking dude!'

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO seems to be oscillating between the two interpretations, possibly depending on his audience but also I suspect due to the fuzziness around the term.

Design researchers like the term because it gives them an area to research.  Designers like it because it conveys that somehow they have a few black arts that business people could learn from, or pay for.  The press like it because it gives them something tangible to say that a designer brings into play when creating something, fixing the problem of the public thinking designers lounge around all day and knock out the odd doodle.  Design thinking sounds like work, it sounds hard and it sounds important.

But is it the emperor's new clothes?  We don't talk about architecture thinking, or art thinking, so why design thinking?  And being actively engaged in research, I'm also very aware that the various methods that designers use, either tacit or explicit, or not unique to the young discipline.  An enlightened business person will use brainstorming techniques just as well as a spreadsheet.

I think in the end that what matters is creative collaboration, where a multidisciplinary team shares the benefits of the skillsets, experience and attitudes.

At last, the perfect killer app

Well, that edition of the New Yorker (28th March 2011) turned out to be a goldmine.  Here's a great article about the ultimate killer app: GOING OUTSIDE!  Makes you think..

Creative destruction: the impact of earthquakes

How can an earthquake be good for a country?  If it is a developed country, it seems that reconstruction can offer benefits through improved infrastructure and upgraded technology.  Have a look at this article, also from the New Yorker (28th March 2011).  I like the 'broken windows' fallacy that is given from Frederic Bastiat (19th century economist): the idea that breaking windows is economically useful, becuase it makes work for glaziers!

In support of disruption

Christian Louboutin, the innovative French shoe designer, is quoted in the New Yorker (March 28, 2011) as saying: "We have a phrase in French, le petit quelque chose qui fout tout par terre, which means 'the little thing that fucks everything up.' " - good for him, that's how you make a difference!

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog.  I'll be using this blog to comment on global design events and trends, as well as other topical issues relating to design, enterprise and sustainability.  I'll also be reflecting on the new course www.designenterprise.net that kicked off in March 2011 with its first 10 graduate students.  Based at the University of Technology in Sydney, the course is called sustainability, design and creative enterprise.

I sketched this balloon image on a napkin in 1999.  I was thinking about what my aims should be.  It symbolises visionary thinking tethered to reality.

Welcome aboard - and please do comment back!