1. Design,
as essential as the air we breathe!
Foreword:
This article has been published in the Finnish Design Year Book 2012-2013: Design
Embedded. Edited by Anne Veinola, Design Forum Finland. More details on this link.
Should you ask anyone about what is important in life you will probably get at least three
prioritized answers : health, work and family. As a design manager I would rather focus on
the terms of love, space and time. “Love” firstly because it refers to our perceptions,
feelings, emotions and connections to our family members, colleagues, neighbors, or the
next person we will meet by chance in a couple of minutes... “Space” then underlines the fact
that we are fully dependent on our planet’s resources to build desirable, comfortable but
respectful and sustainable places to live in. Lastly, our personal interactions with “time”
appear to be the most complex dimension to take care of. The “Time” concept embodies
various questions related of course to our own life schedule management, the issues of
education and health such as our legacy after death. Furthermore it emphasizes also cultural
topics, the nature versus nurture debate, just to give some starting food for thought
More than ten years of design management in several sectors have provided me with
evidence that love, space and time represent key angles from which designers are able to
observe our lives. Herein might lie the first clear reasons explaining why design may be
embedded into materialized objects everywhere such as services. I am furthermore
convinced that this is especially true in Finland. Based upon time that I have spent in Helsinki
during the last three years, it seems to me indeed that several “E’s” may definitively prove
why and how Finland is embedding design in life…
Empathy , Expertise and Experimentation
On the first hand our ages may be frightening to some points of views. Financial troubles,
ethical topics, raw materials depletion, water and energy scarcity…the numbers of basic
issues tend to increase from day to day enlarging worldwide unfairness. But on the other
hand, who has never been surprised by wonderful emotional details that sometimes bring
some kind of magic and positive thinking in our lives?
In such controversial circumstances we may ask ourselves how designers may be positive
contributors to foster our societies to re-invent themselves continuously towards preferable
ways of living. Beyond their well-known abilities to shape our world, designers share a few
humble but efficient skills such as observation, curiosity and passion for holistic
assessment and positive criticism. But to avoid creating new utopias one of the most
powerful assets towards relevant design may be empathy.

2. Empathy enables us to enter into living situations in detail. While overwhelmed with
information coming from various media including the internet, designers are keen enough to
access knowledge and know-how directly by listening and discussing with a wide range of
people. To design effective scenarios asks for inclusion of not only lead-users or a
company’s employees but also of a lot of experts involved in the success of sustainable
solutions. Empathic designers are able to quickly visualize data in a more friendly and
intuitive way for project teams to identify hidden core issues and help reframe the questions
and priorities to address. Empathy remains a key starting point for open strategic design to
deliver fair proposals.
We have to bear in mind of course that designers keep developing their own expertise
from raw material knowledge to artistic skills, from ideation to final drawing, from the
legacy of arts and crafts to design management tools ; an amazing example was the
internationally-acclaimed Finnish architect Alvar Aalto who was a pioneer with his plywood
designs of timeless chairs…
In addition, we may stress the early conviction of Finnish people that we need to experiment
into real conditions scenarios that are still under construction. I remember that the network of
“Living labs” was part of the Finnish presidency’s program of the European Commission in
20061
.
Empathy, expertise and experimentation carry out a promising full-bottom ability to tackle
with the basics, from food to housing, from education to health….a lot more than a means
to differentiate some plethoric existing offers on a market, design for all can contribute to
identify essential solutions. It also seems to play a mediating role to boost new scenarios’
creation while mitigating risks for stakeholders.
Environment and Efficiency
A country like Finland urges people to live under hard and variable climate conditions
between summer and winter. I wonder if such a context is the reason why the first word
which comes up in my mind to define Finnish Design is “environment”? Even if V. Papanek
has been the advocate of “natural design for the real world” for decades, it seems to me that
Finnish designers take particular attention to both environment and social respect. And it is
quite obvious that the future of design deals with playing with technologies’ potentials,
minimizing raw materials consumption, water and energy uses all along the life cycles
while increasing social interactions and improvements for all and at various scales.
To foster design as a driver of change invites us to go far beyond the four visible and evident
criteria such as form, function, environment and money. For sure a lot of us always intend to
compare corporate brand evidences, industrial patents, both technical and use innovations or
sales successes to short term financial margins. But what do sustainable returns on design
investments really mean for organizations, companies or any communities? Next to the
common key performance indicators we might hope that we would be able to open our minds
on some (currently) invisible dimensions of design efficiency dealing with desires,
1
For
more
information,
visit
http://www.openlivinglabs.eu/

3. commitment and essential needs. Why not replace the GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
metric by a not-yet-invented “Good Design for People” indicator? Indeed, effectiveness
might be seen as a result of a concrete political action to empower and involve people to
drive individual changes, to render them widespread while assuring returns on investments
for each stakeholder for an adequate period of time.
Embedded design
Sometimes striking as the emerged part of an iceberg, clear design actions stay generally
invisible to common people. Embedding design in life sounds to me as a everyday
combination of empathy, expertise, experimentation, environment respect and efficiency.
These ingredients should really help us to challenge our existing models. Our democracies
surely need more data visualization to shake Maslow’s hierarchy of needs2
upside down and
take into account essential needs to design a preferable future. Hence what seems suitable
is to take care of balances between conviction and mediation, emotions and functions,
environment and technologies, individualism and communities, user centered and
design driven processes, exploration and solutions and finally between optimism and
realism…
Creating the world of tomorrow means playing with desires, looking for simplicity,
digging into each details and questioning our relations to time with respect…That is
deeply what design sounds today, as Essential as the air we breathe …
G. Rougon
EDF R&D Design Manager
30/11/2011
2
More
details
in
A.H.
Maslow
article
“A
Theory
of
Human
Motivation”,
Psychological
Review
50-­‐1943