Sustainable qualities : powerful drivers of social change

Looking attentively at the complexity of contemporary society we can detect a variety of creative communities involved in sustainable social innovation. Behind each of these initiatives, stands a group of people who have been able to imagine, develop and manage something new, beyond the standard ways of thinking and doing. They succeeded in challenging the apparent hegemony of mainstream ideas about how problems need to be solved by providing valuable alternatives. A primary common feature of such creative communities is that most of them have sprung from the joint confrontation with problems from everyday life. Facing up to them, they conceived and practically enhanced new models of thought & action where everybody wins the individuals, society and the environment. A second common feature is that they produce and are, in turn, driven by new notions of qualities: new qualities of their physical and social environments. We can refer to them as sustainable qualities: qualities that ask for more sustainable behaviours in order to enjoy their benefits. The paper introduces and discusses these qualities, in particular the deeper underlying frameworks that define them, such as: the recognition of complexity as a value, the search for dense, deep and long-lasting relationships, the redefinition of work and collaboration as inherently human expressions and the human scale of the socio-technical systems and its positive role in the definition of a democratic, human-centered, sustainable society. The qualities that these frameworks generate are radically more diverse than the ones that the mainstream models have spread and emphasised across the globe in the last century. The paper concludes by asserting that these sustainable qualities clash with many if not most of the mainstream ways of thinking and doing and by indicating that, in this battle between cultural (and behavioural) models, several different social actors play a role. Designers who are or should b, influential players when the topic at stake is the quality of “daily life experience” are as such a very relevant group of social actors in a process that is shifting contemporary society from a paradigm characterised by individualism, consumerism and unsustainable behaviours to an alternative one, of which the contours are gradually emerging. Quality as a driver of change In 1989, Carlo Petrini founded the international Slow Food movement. Its manifesto begins with the words: 1 DESIS-Design for Social Innovation for Sustainability is a network of design labs based in design schools (or in other design-oriented universities) promoting social innovation towards sustainability. These DESIS Labs are teams of professors, researchers and students who orient their didactic and research activities towards starting and/or facilitating social innovation processes. Each lab develops projects and research on the basis of its own resources and possibilities and, at the same time, acts as the node of a wider network of similar labs, the DESIS Network, which enables them to exchange experiences and collaboratively develop larger design and research programs (www.desis-network.org). 2 Idem. 3 International Association of Universities of Art, Design and Media (www.cumulusassociation.org) “We believe that everyone has a fundamental right to pleasure and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage of food, tradition and culture that makes this pleasure possible” However, this is not the movement’s only concern. The manifesto continues: “We consider ourselves coproducers, not consumers, because by being informed about how our food is produced and actively supporting those who produce it, we become a part of and a partner in the production” In other words, Slow Food proposed a new way of looking at food consumption. But it also went beyond this intention and driven by the same basic motivation it operated equally on the supply and valorisation of food products that would have otherwise gradually disappeared, because they were not considered economically viable in terms of the economics of the dominant agro-industrial system. In other words, it has cultivated food awareness on the demand side. It did so through the actions of consumerproducer organisations: the Condotte, known outside of Italy as Convivia. Consequently, it created a market for high quality products. On the supply side, it also addressed farmers, breeders, fishermen and the firms that process their products. With them it has promoted local organisations (the Presidia) to support them by connecting them to one another and to their respective markets. Petrini and his teams who have set up Slow Food, have been drivers of a meaningful, radical social change. This operation was made possible by carrying out an extraordinary strategic design initiative. It managed to link its concrete local activities with far reaching visions able to bring people together, to awaken the best in them and to give render meaningful everyone’s actions, whether big or small. Petrini and Slow Food, generated a radically new vision on what an advanced, sustainable food system could look like. In coherence with that, adopting a strategic design approach, he created structures (the Convivia and the Presidia) to enable previously weak farmers to produce high quality products and find suited channels to sell their products at a fair price. In doing so, Slow Food set up what we, in design terminology, would call an enabling system: a system of products and services aimed at empowering the social actors involved. We can summarise what Petrini and Slow Food did in a design strategy based on three interdependent types of action: (1) Recognition of a real problem and, most importantly, of the social resources that might be able to solve it (people, communities and their capabilities). (2) Proposal of (organisational and economic) structures that could activate these resources, helping them to self-organise, endure over time and replicate in different contexts. (3) The building (and communication) of an overall vision able to encompass a myriad of local activities and orient them coherently. It is this vision of new sustainable qualities that we aim to discuss here. The starting observation is the following: the Slow Food venture did not start by criticizing the state of things but rather by recognizing the “right to pleasure”, meaning the right of access to “good, clean, fair” products. It went on to make both concrete and viable an idea of quality that contrasts the currently ruling one. The idea of quality that Slow Food talks about is a profound kind of quality that requires time in order to be produced, recognised, understood and enjoyed. As a matter of fact, the adjective “slow” in Slow Food refers to food that is of high quality (also) because it is produced and consumed taking the time that it naturally takes. This is a crucial point: the slowness to which Slow Food refers is not a quality in itself – nothing is good just because it is slow. But slowness reveals itself to be a necessary requirement for the production and appreciation of the profound quality Petrini focuses on, the quality of being “good, clean and fair” at the same time. This relationship between quality and time is both recognisable and extendible beyond the realms of food. The quality of all things basically cannot rise above, by producing them in a hurry. They cannot be appreciated without dedicating them some time. Profound quality is the result of a slow social process in which the ability to act and create goes hand in hand with the ability to recognise. In conclusion, the “right to pleasure”, which conveys a connotation of something pleasurable, desirable, brings along new notions 4 Petrini, C. (2007) Slow Food Nation. Why our food should be good, clean and fair, Rizzoli, Milano 5 Petrini, C. (2007) Slow Food Nation. Why our food should be good, clean and fair, Rizzoli, Milano 6 Jegou, F., Manzini, E. (2008), Collaborative services Social Innovation and design for sustainability, Polidesign Milano 7 Petrini, C. (2007) Slow Food Nation. Why our food should be good, clean and fair, Rizzoli, Milano of time, relationships and work, which stand in contrast to mainstream expressions of those notions in the last century. In the opinion of the authors, it is most important in contemporary society to promote this “right to pleasure” and the new sets of values it introduces. Slow Food’s ideas on quality prove insightful for the topic at hand because of several reasons. We will consider two of them: · as one of the world’s most successful cases of social innovation, Slow Food emphasises the relevance of the qualitative dimension. It shows how this qualitative dimension must be supported by a pragmatic one, hence rendering evident the double link between cultural and organisational issues. · In the Slow Food venture, neither Petrini, nor his main partners have been trained as designers (the Slow Food collaboration with designers is relatively recent) as such. Nevertheless, all of them can, to every extent, be considered great designers. The stories they can tell say a lot about what designers can and should do in order to trigger and support sustainable social innovation. Let us now enlarge our scope from the well known case of Slow Food, to a myriad of other cases of social innovation that are telling similar stories.