ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for TEAGUE – see it here
Designers, in my experience, are a curious lot—fiercely competitive, at turns obsessively egocentric, but capable nonetheless of limitless magnanimity when it comes to advancing their trade and the community of design. I was reacquainted with this fact on a recent trip to Pune, India. Along with a group of designers from Adidas, BMW, Volvo, Orange Telecom and RKS, I was there to celebrate the inauguration of the DSK International School of Design —a joint enterprise between the French and Indian governments. After the conclusion of our formal duties, conducting workshops, giving lectures, we were ushered under a tent and introduced to the local press pool. Quickly exhausting the standard questions: our impressions of India, design’s prospects for brining about economic transformation, etc., the conversation took a more interesting turn, a detour into the murkier domain of professional aspiration. As each designer tackled the question of what India’s design future might be, what emerged was a genuine desire for India to reach the rather mundane, but altogether rare achievement of developing a contemporary design culture with its cultural heritage in tact.
Perhaps it is the inherent nature of globalization, or the leveling effect of capitalism, but ‘global’ design as we know it in its most familiar form: big box retail—seems systematically intent on burnishing down all the messy, non-conforming bits; the personal idiosyncrasies and peculiarities that would otherwise communicate place of origin. Reflecting on design’s recent path through such culturally rich locales as South Korea and China, the general consensus of those of us assembled in Pune was that while the successes of those nations was admirable; it had clearly come at the price of place. Anonymity, it appears, is the levy design and manufacturing are willing to pay in their quest for international success.
Compare that achievement to the integral, if accidental role ‘place’ has played in the exported design success of Europe, North America and Japan. Not too long ago ‘made in’ and the incidental export of cultural values and attitudes was part of the experience, indeed a backhanded benefit, of buying importedgoods. In that era place of origin was inevitably mixed in with the experience of ownership. A Braun razor, a pair of Levis, a Sony Walkman were not only useful products, they broadcasted the aspirations and ingenuity of the places they came from. Design not only spoke of manufacturing prowess, it telegraphed the ‘brand’ of nations as they vied for recognition in a rapidly converging marketplace.
Have we lost that? Why can’t the path ahead for places like India and Brazil return us to a similar era; one of cultural diversity in mainstream design rather than a future defined by antiseptic uniformity? A future where the manufactured object once again participates in the transmission of ideas and solutions, and where exposure through commerce can inspire us —designers and consumers alike—to contemplate new ways of doing. The path to economic transformation across which emerging markets progress is rife with social, economic, and environmental challenges, the solutions to which might prove every bit as relevant to developed markets as they aretransformative to domestic ones. Before you dismiss that idea as merely a romantic notion informed by too much mid-day sun, let me make a case for two benefits real cultural diversity could deliver the global toolkit of design.
EXTREMITY
If you read about design with any regularity you’ve no doubt heard the term ‘trickle-back’ or ‘blow-back’ innovation; the phenomena by which innovations and product advancements acquired in emerging markets find application in developed ones. In some cases the improvement is genuinely new, in other cases it’s often little more than an outsized process improvement ‘discovered’ in the process of addressing some basic oversight on the part of the exporter. But in the best cases, the ones that present insights for new ways of doing, something more akin to an extreme use case scenario lays at the heart of this insight. In extreme conditions long held assumptions break down, and the remedy to that condition, once identified, actually advances the product class or service in a way that finds broad application with mainstream users. This dynamic, this ‘stress-testing’ of assumptions happens so frequently in emerging markets one could very well make the case that emerging markets are the world’s laboratory for creating a steady supply of ‘extreme-users’; users who through cultural bias or context aren’t reflexively accepting of brands and solutions that have been ginned up in some foreign context.
So what informs this disposition? Why are emerging markets such reliable incubators of insights that contradict prevailing wisdom? Perhaps it’s in the numbers. With populations that generally tip the scale at close to a billion, the domestic market in places like Brazil and India serve up a sampling of users that encompass a hyper diverse range of needs, biases, and outright peculiarities. Let’s face it—the needs of Western Europe, North America and Japan are not exactly representative of the more basic needs that the rest of the world grapples with on a day-to-day basis. Designing for the disabled is no longer ‘elective’ in a population such as India’s where roughly 12 million are blind (20 million if you include the additional 8 million blind in one eye)*. Thelanguage of the consumer, either as a result of regional dialect, or the effects of illiteracy are no longer ‘shared’ in a market of such unfathomable dimensions, population density and historical diversity. What’s more, the transformative wealth and prosperity these nations aspire to, require some fundamental reconciliation with these ‘outliers’ if it is to be realized in a way that doesn’t invite social chaos. In China by comparison, economic transformation has been regionalized for years, so much so, that even in that tightly choreographed society labor inequality and social injustice threaten to slow its once boundless prospects for wealth creation. India and Brazil have a chance to pursue another path, one that’s a bit more equitable and less intrinsically volatile, and their cultural legacy suggests they just might do so in a manner that reconciles the extremes of their society more artfully in the process.
NARRATIVE
European Design and American Design, while arguably different are still ultimately birds of a feather. The hegemony of western design, even if it is more and more frequently executed in Asia, has remained pretty much unchallenged for nearly seventy years. It’s brought us some great things, fantastic ideas about individualism, mobility, technological accomplishment and, of course, beauty, the Porsche 911, Dieter Rams, Memphis Style, Philippe Starck, Apple, Nike, Herman Miller—examples of western culture’s apparent conquest of our shared visual landscape is vast. But to some degree, in all the years of its dominion, and right up to its present hurrah in Asia, western design has in many ways come to represent a somewhat dated narrative: one of supreme convenience for the individual. Sure, there are exceptions to this over simplification, but Dr. Dre’s Beats, 60inch plasma displays and the latest Bouroullec brothers meditation—while cool as hell, are in no measure about addressing the more contemporary needs of we.
My point here is not to judge the right of everyone who might aspire to have the latest gadget or luxury novelty, consumer culture is after all global. But as design spools up in emerging markets, where the cultural values of ‘the West’ are often perversely refracted, I can’t help but hope that an influx of new narratives and perspectives might lay just around the corner; ones that incorporate different social conventions, new aesthetic vocabularies and perhaps most importantly—new values. Think about it: What does ‘green’ mean in a nation where systemic poverty means every thing finds reuse—not through recycling, but through repair or repurposing? What does transportation mean in a country where roughly 370 people occupy every square kilometer?*
Context and cultural perspective make all the difference in how design tackles any given problem. Porsche didn’t invent the car, Apple didn’t invent the computer, rather these companies cracked the code as to what these products could mean. Their solutions, authored by German perfectionism on one hand and West Coast counter culture on the other, became exemplary because of how powerfully they blended technical proficiency with a point of view informed by national character. Looking forward I’m willing to bet that as the unmet needs of consumers in emerging markets come into focus, the Western perspective will increasingly find itself having to keep pace with a host of domestic ones that bring fresh insights to long standing problems. The designs that emerge from these markets as global success stories will, like their predecessors before them, excel by infusing a common need with a singular perspective that transcends international boundaries while simultaneously exporting national values.
Design is a dynamic process—a living activity that evolves day on day, hour by hour. Today more so than perhaps at any other time in its short history, more and more people encounter design as a formal activity; one that is no longer viewed as haphazard or episodic, but rather as the result of people actively contemplating an opportunity and using their skills and actions to deliver value around a given problem. The west has had a prolific run delivering solutions that democratized convenience. Asia took a page from that playbook and geared itself toward scaling design and production to keep pace with a global market’s rising desire for more of the same. Today that equation, scaling convenience, shares the stage with new concerns, ones that entail notions of community, sustainability, and the reconciliation of individual needs with the common good. To tackle those types of problems, emerging markets will need to add new pages to design’s playbook. In its short history Design has amassed a considerable war chest for working this new class of problem, and in this regard emerging markets will invariably build on the successes of their predecessors. But to surpass them, and create an enduring place for themselves in Design, they will need to temper those tools with perspectives that are undeniably their own and which transcend definitively the western perspective. And that’s where culture becomes an advantage.
Reflecting on all this, I can’t help but think —in spite of myself—how much the mechanics of global trade and cultural export mimic another well-worn path in the cause of economic advancement: immigration. If the parent immigrates in hopes of a better life, abandoning all they have for the prospect of a better future. The child of the immigrant, in their efforts to acculturate entirely to the norms of the new country, is generally all to ready to reject any notion of that past. They master the style, the values and—in the surest sign of their ‘belonging’—achieve mastery over a language their parents struggled to attain competency with. But then comes the child of that child. Who, liberated from the burden of their ancestry, actively seeks out ways to regain it anew. Seen in this light, the achievements of China and South Korea, who have so completely embraced and to some degree exceeded the accomplishments of the west, strike me as analogous to those of the immigrant’s child; they have mastered the language and the culture of design production as it was defined by the west. I sincerely hope that the next wave of emerging markets will build on the successes of their ‘parents’ and wear their cultural heritage with a bit more ease and lot more self-confidence. If they can, their design solutions will be all the more compelling. Returning us to an era where the export of design didn’t just satisfy a need, it invited us to contemplate and understand. In a shrinking world with a growing number of shared troubles and tensions, I can’t imagine a better by-product of design and commerce than that.
* Seely Brown, John and Hagel III, John. “Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia.” The Innovator’s Cookbook . Ed. Steven Johnson. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011. 133-135. Print.
* by comparison the US comes in at 32/ km2 and Western Europe 73/ km2