I must say that when I first entered the design world I honestly had no concrete idea about what the word “design” encompassed. At the beginning I decided to enter into the “design scenario” searching to satisfy my creative needs. Then, during my last year of college I found myself confused. It wasn’t possible that graphic design was only about corporate image, branding, perfectly designed magazine spreads and Photoshop. I found myself in endless conversations about choosing the perfect typography, creating the perfect trademark and deciding for the absolutely perfect pantone. I was in crisis. I had always had an idealist soul and all those conversations about logos where really starting to make me sick. It was at this point when I discovered the social aspect of design. Design does have a deep side. There are some many gifted idealist individuals trying to improve and even change our world through design by designing processes.
Our world has reached a crucial shifting point. With all the problems we have been having lately like the economic crisis, climate change, environmental disasters and political conflicts among others, it is quite obvious that something is terribly wrong with the society we have built for ourselves. Along with these problems, our world has also reached a whole new era of design, creating a whole new role for designers, giving us endless opportunities to improve our society. Now designers have to be more concerned about creating design processes rather than a “design product”. This new role does not substitute the traditional one, but rather works side by side with it, creating and opening new field of activities. It gives us the opportunity to create networks with individual people, enterprises, non-profit organizations, local and global institutions that together generate tangible steps to sustainability. The idea of what a designer is in our day and age must change. We have to learn to view designers as social actors and as strategic planners that will create platforms enabling solutions.
There are pretty big egos in the “design world”. Every designer wants to be the best. Every designer wants to be coolest and the most innovative one. I think that it’s important to accept the fact that nowadays according to contemporary sociology, “everybody designs”. We have to recognize that the era of “design monopoly” is over when only “highly talented” individuals were able to create new things. Having said this, lets think about the role that design could play in our daily-life. It is crucial for designers to start thinking more about already existing scenarios that could be improved, emphasising the most interesting aspects and interpreting situations that arises from different cases. In other words, lets start thinking on how could a specific system could be improved using design-thinking as the key ingredient for its development.
Improvement starts in a local scale problem. We have to think that creativity is a diffuse attitude and it can certainly be used as a social resource. It is astonishing to see that the real driving forces of change are the “ordinary people” when given the right opportunities.
Take as an example the “Biblioburro” in Colombia. The Biblioburro is literally a “travelling library” powered by two donkeys named, Alfa and Beto and created by Luis Soriano. Soriano created a “travelling library” to distribute books to the most confined areas in Colombia that had been affected by guerrilla conflicts. His project started with only 70 books, but now has expanded to 4,800 volumes thanks to donations. Now, children have found hope and joy in literature that first had been restricted to them. As another example, take Fernando Llort in El Salvador. He is an artist than during the verge of the Salvadorian civil war, taught and inspired the small town of La Palma how to make a living through art by making workshops with local people. These examples show us that even the most “ordinary” things can transform people’s life into extraordinary ones.
Pretty cool, huh? So now my wounds are healed. We all have the power to improve and even change our reality. No great talent is needed; we all can do it. The only thing needed is the willingness and courage to actually want to do something.
