I hate the term manifesto - it's too talk-oriented instead of being about action. Instead, I see this as an invitation to board a train that's already leaving the station to a destination that's more about perspective than destination.
Below is the introduction to Massive Change (bold is mine mine):
The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.
- Arnold J. Toynbee, English historian (1889 - 1975)
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on December 11, 1957, former Prime Minister of Canada Lester B Pearson quoted historian Arnold Toynbee, well known for his monumental A Study of History. The main thesis of Toynbee's work is that the well being of a civilization depends on its ability to respond creatively to challenges, human and environmental. He was optimistic about the twentieth century. He believe that the cycle of rise and decline was not inevitable, that the future is not determined by the past, and that a civilization could choose and act wisely in the face of recurring hardships. His prediction posed a challenge - and an opportunity - during the post WWII ear; it was significant enough for Pearson to reference it in the context of international peacekeeping during the Cold War era; it continues to challenge us today, into the twenty-first century.
Our world now faces profound challenges, many brought on by innovation itself. Although optimism runs counter to the mood of the times, there are extraordinary new forces aligning around these great challenges, around the world. If you put together all that's going on at the edges of culture and technology, you get a wildly unexpected view of the future. Massive Change charts this terrain.
We will explore design economies
Not since the age of invention have so many new products, processes, and services become available to the public. What we see over the last hundred and fifty years, and in a dramatically accelerated pace over the last fifty, is that design is changing its place in the order of things. Design is evolving from its position of relative insignificance within business (and the larger envelope of nature), to become the biggest project of all. Even life itself has fallen (or is falling) to the power and possibility of design. Empowered as such, we have a responsibility to address the new set of questions that go along with that power. At the same time, we acknowledge the hubris and inherent paradox of the new position we find ourselves in: We are designing nature and we are subject to her laws and powers. This new condition demands that design discourse not be limited to boardrooms or kept inside tidy disciplines.
As a first step to achieving this, we abandoned the classical design disciplines in our research and, instead, began to explore systems of exchange, or design "economies." Instead of looking at product design, we looked at the economies of movement. Instead of isolating graphic design, we considered the economies of information, and so on. The patters that emerged reveal complexity, integrated thinking across disciplines, and unprecedented interconnectivity.
We will tap into the global commons
Massive Change is about the power and promise of design. Design success equals global success. What makes this possible is the radical change in scale in the capacity of design to meet human needs the world over. Extraordinary projects are underway that are changing our world for the greater good. Many of the people we include in Massive Change do not consider themselves designers. But, if you listen carefully, they (and others like them) use the word design to describe their work; they speak about designing systems, designing organizations, designing organisms, designing programs. We must applaud and participate in the efforts of these thought leaders (and doers) - or risk losing them. There is an incredible story t o be told about human ingenuity!
The first step to its unfolding is to reject the binary notion of client/designer. The next step is to look to what is going on, right now. The old-fashioned notion of an individual with a dream of perfection is being replaced by distributed problem solving and team-based multi-disciplinary practice. The reality for advanced design today is dominated by three ideas: distributed, plural, collaborative. It is no longer about one designer, one client, one solution, one place. Problems are taken up everywhere, solutions are developed and tested and contributed to the global commons, and those ideas are tested against other solutions. The effect of this is to imagine a future for design that is both more modest and more ambitious. More modest in the sense that we take our place in what our studio's chief scientist Bill Buxton calls the renaissance team, a group that collectively develops the capacity to deal with the demands of the given project. More ambitious in that we take our place in society, wiling to implicate ourselves in the consequences of our imagination.
We will distribute capacity
One thing is certain: We don't need a thought police. We need discussion. We need thinking. We need critical faculties. We need to embrace the dilemmas and conflicts in design, take responsibility for the outcomes of our work. When we use the term "we," we don't mean designers as separate from clients, or as some extra-ordinary class of powerful overseers. We mean "we" as citizens collectively imagining our futures. It is critical that the discussions go beyond the design field themselves and reach out to the broadest audience, to the people directly affected by the work of designers. The effect of the new conditions is to distribute potential, or capacity, worldwide and allow contribution by anyone, anywhere. The future of global design is fundamentally collaborative. In this condition there is no room for censorship.
We will embrace paradox
Massive Change calls for greater public discourse and personal responsibility for designers and their projects; at the same time, it is thrilled by the open-source effect of the cultural project of design. The moment we came upon Toynbee's quote in Pearson's lecture, we knew we had our project because it included the phrase "practical objective"; it shifted the objective of the welfare of the human race from a utopian ambition - one that is by definition out of reach and will remain the realm of art - to a design project, a practical objective.
There is a proposal integrated into Massive Change for a right-angle shift in the axis of discourse defined by right and left, socialism and capitalism. The new axis is defined by advanced retrograde, forward and reverse. Plainly, Massive Change is a project that embraces the potential of advanced capitalism, advanced socialism, and advanced globalization. In that sense, Massive Change is obviously ambitiously positive, and might be misunderstood as utopian at first glance. But it is not futuristic. It is about what is already happening.
We will reshape our future
Between 1965 and 1975, r. Buckminster Fuller conducted five two-year "advanced design science" intensives and pulled together the results of the participants' research and analysis into several volumes of what he called the World Resources Inventory. In Phase I of the work, "Inventory of World Resources Human Trend and Needs," he wrote, "There are very few men today who are disciplined to comprehend the totally integrating significance of the 99 percent invisible activity which is coalescing to reshape our future. There are approximately no warnings being given to society regarding the great changes ahead. There is only the ominous general apprehension that man may be about to annihilate himself. To the very few who are disciplined to deal with the invisibly integrating trends it is increasingly readable in the trends that man is about to become almost 100 percent successful as an occupant of the universe."
This book is dedicated to all those with the discipline to comprehend the total integrating significance of the 99 percent invisible activity which is coalescing to reshape our future. This is a beginning.
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