Change agents which influence today’s design

Identifying the change agents in our discipline

“We designers are change agents’, Isa Ludita Casanota says in the 299th episode of Diseño y diáspora podcast. And, at the same time, there are plenty of factors which influence the area of design. In this article, after having done more than 310 interviews to workers in the area of design, I intend to break down which change agents influence todays’s design.

There are some change agents that are conditioned by the context, by our planet and the socioeconomic situation of our practice. In this article, I put these agents aside because, even though they are fundamental to understand our practice and ‘design is always design in context’, I prefer to leave this analysis to other specialists.

I’m deeply interested in understanding how designers can influence our practice and democratize design. How can we be change agents in order to democratize this discipline? Which are the change agents that could democratize this discipline? To me, democratizing design means to make it more accesible to new contexts and performers, to set up a dialogue between disciplines and knowledge.

The true design potential arise from transdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary knowledge, when it accomplish to be articulated with other fields of knowledge. This articulatión doesn’t come from nowhere, but from our need to take into consideration the design particularities and the impact that it can have in the different fields of knowledge.

Mapping the change agents in the design ecosystem

I define the change agents as the key performers that outline the attitude and the designers imaginary regarding the labour market and the scope. Our labour market constrains the design space, not only specifically, but also in the collective imaginary. Designers are not convened in certain areas. If they are, their scope is limited by an operative work nature: they are technicians, not ideas creators or strategic decisions makers. Therefore, defining the design space outlines what designers imagine in relation to their labour practice and what society understands about the role and purpose of design.

When I was a university student 25 years ago, there was an idea established in the collective imaginary regarding success. In order to be a successful designer, you needed to have your own studio and/or work for great corporations or known brands. This definition of success constrains and limits the design scope.No one would ever imagine that they could do researchs in design and ask for international cooperation founds, or to establish a cooperative to support public initiatives. The scenarios and action spaces were limited by the fantasy of a star designer, who had original and creative ideas and less social commitment. The dream was winning a design contest to do an exhibition in an international space, a product that probably would not be ever produced, but if it was actually produced, it would not solve a complex problem, but a trivial issue. For example, a chair or a lamp.

Expanding the imagination of designers and our society in respect of the scope of design is something that we can take part into. Designers are part of the change agents that can influence the design ecosystem. I map this agents to understand this system, where design and designers are involved in.

These change agents are:

- Formal education institutions
- Informal organisations that provide courses, certificates and trainings
- Museums and exhibition spaces that show design
- Formal and informal investigation about design
- Brands, certificates, scholarships and design contests
- Communication including design publications from commercial and independent sources. It covers social media
- Networks and communities of profesionnals as Chamber of commerce, design agrupations and students, conferences, etc.
- Designers in active practice.

Between these agents there is a flow and many interceptions. They are not fixed categories. For example, I consider podcasts as a communication channel about independent design that influence especially in design professional permanent education. However, according to our investigation, there are more than 20 universities in Latin America that use our podcast as a part of formal education. Students use episodes as a part of their investigations and podcast help them to create networking or the podcasts are networks themselves.

A podcast about social design as a AGENTE DE CAMBIO and MEDIO DE EXPLORACIÓN

At the moment, Diseño y diáspora is the only podcast about social design in Spanish and Portuguese and the most listened podcast in Latin America. It was launched in December 2018. There are 13 series about different topics as health, education, activism, government, gender, immigration, cooperatives, original communities, among others. The podcast is out every Monday and Thursday. We reach the 10.000 plays per month, being the biggest group of plays the one formed by the people who live in Argentina: 22% plays. It can be listened on Spotify, Itunes and other services.

I create this podcast with a team of people: two sound editors, a community coordinator, a musician and about eight external collaborators for varied tasks. We share the same purpose and values in this project. My role is choosing who will be interviewed, to investigate what they do in order to prepare the interviews, interviewing them and creating all the material for the dissemination of the episodes.

Making content in these languages is a political statement itself, and a way to democratize the access to great quality material about design. The construction of an oral archive of design stories in podcast format is part of a design decision which tries to understand the different dimensions of the design contribution to a society articulated in our languages.

The podcast enrich and provides a context to the conversations about design in Spanish and Portuguese, since between designers who don’t speak English, it is actually heard “espanglish”. The ubiquity of espanglish is a proof of the impoverishment of our language in the design field. Choosing the right words is enriching our discipline and that’s why we have to ask ourselves constantly how could we name those processes and the design methods in our languages. This podcast contributes to that meaning-building. Sharing design projects and describing the practice in Portuguese and Spanish. It goes beyond linguistics and territory borders, helping us to undestand how a method was denominated in other country miles away. The construction of a solid and profesional language is a change agent that allows an accesible and regional dialogue with synergy (not only design workers who are English speakers can access the conversation). The commitment of many design communicators as podcasters, investigators and journalists, is to contribute to the language construction as a fundamental tool to expand the understanding of design as a social transformative element.

Simultaneously, the accessibility proposed by the podcast is related to the inclusion of professionals in the diaspora. Both for me and my other Spanish and Portuguese friends speakers living in the diaspora it’s hard to talk about our work in our mother tongues.

Here in Finland, where I live, we work in Finish and English. We build a profesional vocabulary in those languages, so we are tongue-tied when doing a presentation in Spanish. This podcast is a way so that designers in the diaspora practice our mother tongue to a profesional extent, giving back the knowledge to our regions and amplifying the content of quality about social design. Nowadays they only produce whispers.

Juncturs of life open new ways of exploring our discipline.

The young people who start studying design are more flexible and avid to understand the scope of their career. For that reason, institutions (like universities) have a decisive role in the creation of the collective imaginary related to understand the role and the scope of their job. They also are the biggest consumers of the informal and permanent education in design, in which podcast, libraries, learning communities, and online information can be included.

Another active group are the ones who change their profession, in other words, they have studied other disciplines before and then they moved to design. Many of them look for a certificate to prove their professionalism in the design area. Those people who have decided to change the direction of theis career come to design with an attitude of learning and motivation for nourished from listening to other people. They have an impact and they help to expand the scope of design too.

Finally, I would say that the discontent with a commercial and poorly sustainable design practice, which clashes with the designers values, also inspire to search for new action areas. They, who disagree with a joven focused on increasing the sales of a producto or service, decide to learn about design as a way to get closer to a more alligned with their interests or values practice. Being comfortable with their own practice is what generates new approaches of understanding design, and with that, they are able to explore methods to become change agents of design.

Change agents are our design decisions, too.

A podcast itself is not a change agent, but it can be. It depends on how we think about podcast and its content. For that reason, I tell some design decisions that makes of this practice some change agents.

Practices identified as change agents are:

- Including other languages
- Giving our time to the goal work
- Expanding the area of action in the own labor space through informal investigation.
- Concretizing by showing finance mecanisms.
- Encouraging transdisciplinary work and cross-disciplinary knowledge.
- Making the little performers in new disciplines visible.
- Motivating a participative practice prompting other voices and curators

I interviewed change agents that belonged to different groups. Some groups are overrepresented by my own personal interest. I work as a service designer in the Finland’s Ministry of Interior, therefore I’m specifacilly interested in interviewing designers who work in the creation of public politics, innovation laboratories in the government and the legal design. It is a non academic investigation tool that allows me to think in other language and to make the goal work of reevaluating my practices and perspectives. Enriching our way of thinking from using the language or languages that we speak and give ourselves the time to the goal work as a practice that motivates the change.
At the same time, I use this podcast to expand my knowledge about certain design investigation areas that I am very curious about and which I don’t have access to. For example, I made a series about design and future. For now, my role in the Ministry isn’t connected to thinking about the future. Nevertheless, it is a knowledge field I would like to study. Investigating who are the key performers in the area, interviewing them and making content in the podcast form enrichs my work. After listening to other experts, I can articulate better my thoughts about why I could be working in that and how could this contribute something to the discussion about the future of the organisation to have the perspective and the methods of design. Expanding the area of action in the own labour space through the informal investigation is a practice that promotes change.

I interview many designers in cooperatives, due to although I am a civil servant, I’ve always dreamed of design being done in a collaborative way, inside projects, and also in the ways that can organise ourselves, to suggest less hierarchical relationships than in other workplaces. I constantly ask how are the projects financed because I believe that social design can’t be done with a volunteering only, but it needs to show procedures and specific models to make the social design viable. Concretizing and showing finance mecanisms is key to change.

I interview designers who work in areas that mix unexpected disciplines or unexplored. For example, I have a listo f designers working with agricultura. Many times in those cases, the podcast is not only listened by designers, but agricultures too. Promoting TRANSDISCIPLINARY WORK, and making the Little performers in new disciplines visible by doing a transformative job, or learning from other cultures and knowledge means opening the spaces of design action.

I publish special series with other investigators and designers about their specialities, as a strategy to make the podcast a space more opne and participative. In these series, collaborators choose with me the interviewers and we actually interview them together. This enrichs the content and suggest new collaborations.

Discussion

In this article I expose the change agents, as a way to describe the factor that increase the labour market of designers, el action field, the design space and the design imaginary in our society. These change agents are not only for people, organisations, mecanisms, media, communities and networks that form part of the design ecosystem, but our situation in life, our practice and design desisions in our scope too.

The methodology consisted in evaluating the podcast statistics, interviews and messages from the listeners that show how different situations in people’s life make them change their attitude against change and looking for new elements that expand their knowledge, and consequently their field of action. Analysing my own practice in the podcast making, I suggest that design decisions that I make to define the content are also change agents.

The identified practices that promote change are:

- Enriching our way of thinking from using the languages that we speak
- Give ourselves the time to the goal job
- Expanding my field of action in my own workplace through informal investigation
- Concretizing and showing the finance mecanisms
- Promoting the TRANSDISCIPLINARY work
- Making the Little performers in new disciplines visible by doing a transformative work.
- Motivating a participative practice that brings out new voices and CURADURÍAS is a practice that promotes change at the same time.