Designing Beautiful

to all design strategists, and those interested in its potential, a metaphorical view on current challenges

The manmade world is not perceived as beautiful right now. Beyond wars and changing world orders we are facing climate change and social urgencies. To innovate at scale for the passion of improving things, also beyond these big challenges, depends on budgets on hold. We continue to evolve and adapt Strategic Design, raise visibility and work to find new ways to connect to industry and governmental bodies to address our most burning issues. It requires resilience, and like so often in design history, there is a lot of talking and little action until our potential to turn challenges into opportunities is finally understood and integrated. Even though there is no time, it feels like a long-lasting period in-between.

Living ex-nuovo

I became a carpenter because I like to make things. I studied design because I wanted to make them beautiful. As design evolved, I have been earning a living with designing strategies, systems, and processes for organisations, how they function and appear, produce, and distribute. To balance this abstract and not thing-related work, together with my wife I have been restoring houses in various countries (Vanity Fair): 16 moves altogether, in 2023 we bought our sixth place after we sold our house in New York.

After over 20 years we moved back to Italy, which continues to be a bizarre experience. We have been away from a country we know very well for a long time; we see how it evolved in a different way than those who assisted the evolution. We changed as well, and so did our perception of what we thought to know. This sixteenth move has been a difficult one.

Italy is associated with beauty. In fact, nature is varied and stunning, it has brands and designs that are famous worldwide. Italy has also sides that are not that beautiful, of course. It can be hard to detach and move beyond the past at times, maybe because the cultural heritage is so beautiful, while the present reveals to be more complicated. When we started in New York City we gladly lived in a rather improvised way for many years, but here in Italy a sense of insecurity in our attempt to re-integrate made us desire for a place where we feel safe and at home soon. We did not find anything in crowded and overpriced Milan, and for a fraction of what a decent place would cost there, we found an apartment in a 14th century building at the Lago d’Iseo which we restored completely.

It is curious how even a small activity in a remote place reflects challenges of our times: binding past, immigration, and climate change. Technology enters an old building that together with complicated insulation efforts should make it energy efficient to respond to upcoming EU regulations. The integration of new experts in established work cycles but also previous state of the art craftsmanship replaced by rather lost new workforce made this our most challenging renovation thus far.

In this change process moving from the US to Europe and from academia to consulting have been unforeseen challenges and downturns, also health problems which impacted the guidance of this restoration through my wife and my work. I have been asking myself how much change we can afford, how many variables and moving parts we can stand, and in what time. We need to see what we want to go right to succeed but by doing so we underestimate what could go wrong. Striving for what we pictured kept us going.

Fighting for design

Strategic Design is not a common discipline amongst the leadership of organisations. While our economic systems adapt to new circumstances, many strategies that address related change processes are rather dry and grey. They evidence what needs to be cut or increased, and seem to forget that any change process involves people. It should be food for us, but numbers get in the way. Design and Innovation are the first part to get cut during recessions, it’s not the first time that we experience this scenario.

It is a vicious cycle: Strategic Design is associated with distant future, like it had been before the here and now, when strategic initiatives could have prepared for change and unveiled opportunities instead of facing it all as a last minute urgency. Economists have the lead, they control what matters now. A long battle follows until all of a sudden everyone is becoming customer centric, thinking like a designer, and so on. Right now, we find ourselves in a period of integrating new contents and applications of evolving design and there is potential to have much greater impact than we had with Interaction Design and design thinking.

It is precious time, like these days now between the years. However, we can mainly see a push for more or a bit less of anything, seeking to keep the comfort and commitments of the past. The longer we wait to support change the longer it will take though. There is no logic in waiting for immediate results.

There are always risks, downturns and delays, but as designers we can picture the outcome, we can also scale back from our ideal solution and by doing so envision paths of smaller steps for greater goals. A goal must be beautiful amongst its challenges, it is humane that we give a lot if we can picture where we go. Strategic Design is crucial for any change process, not replacing, but joining leadership in navigating change. Organisations make numeric assessments of how they impact Sustainable Development Goals. Something much bigger is underway though, and it is people’s perceptions and unpredictable reactions on the circumstances that we are experiencing.

So far environmental concerns were put on people’s shoulders expecting them to adapt their behaviour. This scenario flipped, and industry is increasingly made responsible. At the same time, we are facing the immediate need for new workforce due to the demographic change and the necessity to design integration processes for immigrants. With decreasing availability of energy, purchase power and workforce, growth is still seen in increasing numbers without putting light on new reasons and ways for economic growth.

Strategic Design has no one big answer for immediate solutions, but important smaller ones, also for short term needs. We have the capacity to connect many of them to visualise strategies that form while they evolve and that take people, the source of our reasons for design, with us. There is not one example, but many smaller initiatives, and many of them are unseen, unheard or fail. But that does not matter, they all build together inevitable change.

Christopher Clark, a historian, not a designer, describes how changing epochs had preceeding periods of failures in his new book “Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848–1849” explaining how all attempts and failures finally led to a completely new world.

(Abigail Green for the Times Literary Supplement: “Christopher Clark’s extraordinary new history of 1848 shows us something different, right from the cover illustration… Not colour, but a brooding, hazy, sepia-tinted world in which the protagonists are barely discernible. We know they are there, but we can’t see them, not quite; yet, if we look really closely, we can see that everything and everyone was in motion”)

Look closer. We are assisting a period of substantial changes right now. We are failing into something new. While we are attached to the past.

25 years ago was the last time I moved back to Italy and built together with colleagues offices in Milan and Munich, integrating the design approach which was evolving at that time. One of the publications (Costruire 08/1998) wrote that we would “propose a multidisciplinary approach still unknown in Italy”. What has not happened since then.

to be continued in January .. thank you for reading, have a beautiful 2024.