I'd been invited by the South West Design Programme, to help out on a workshop they were running. I was one of four designers drafted in to help create storyboards, as part of a problem solving exercise in the workshop. Each table had a specific problem to address, and 30 minutes to come up with a solution. Here's my table in action...
But the highlights were the presentations. There was too much to put into one post, so I'll give you a few highlights:
John Elkington
John Elkington is the man who created the term 'triple bottom line', and is global figurehead for sustainable thinking. There was a lot of interesting stuff - which I'm sure I'll come back to on future posts - but I'll stick to The Phoenix Economy. It's a report by Volans for the Skoll Foundation and it identifies 50 global pioneers in the business of social innovation. There are some challenging concepts to come to terms with, regarding what the future global economy will look like.
Marie Harder
Marie was looking at what we mean by 'design' and how we can apply it to processes as well as products. One of her messages, through a number of case studies, was that if you want to find the solutions for the big challenges in the world, start off by solving the small challenges. When you have a process that works, apply that to the big challenge. It sounds obvious - but makes things seem much more achievable.
Alastair Fuad-Luke
Alastair's presentation was the highlight of the day for me. Again, loads of things to pick from, but the concept of co-design was what really resonated with me. When you combine that principle with the opportunities that social media provides I think you'll find yourself in a really exciting place.
David Wheeler
David closed the afternoon, and left me with some really interesting thoughts to take away. His theme was the role that sustainable thinking has to play in the economic recovery (and that, arguably, there will be no long-term recovery without it). I'm no economist, but there were some really interesting ideas that I want to look at in more detail (and that's not a sentence I thought I'd ever type!). But what I found most interesting was his checklist for developing a green economy in the South West through sustainable business 'clusters' - more about this in another post I think. The other point I wanted to mention was the fact that company 'values' were identified as key to developing businesses ready to exploit the green economy. It's another example of the role brand can play in delivering financial value to business.
It was a great day, and one that leaves you feeling that there are solutions out there - but we need to implement them quickly, because time's running out very fast.
