Small, Local, Open, and Connected

As part of the Walker’s presentation of Designs for Different Futures (on view now), we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019) exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Small, Local, Open, Connected
Ezio Manzini

The only certain thing about the future is that it will entail a profound break in continuity with the ways of doing and being that we are used to. Everything else about this vast phenomenon—how it will come, when it will come, and what it implies—is open and will depend on a combination of many factors. In light of this, it might seem contradictory to suggest generating images of the future, but this is not the case. It depends on what we mean by “images of the future.” If we mean visions of what will be, the intention is totally impracticable. If we mean visions of what might be, then the intention is not only practicable, it is exactly what is needed today.^{The concepts touched on in this paper are more extensively presented in my last two books: Design, When Everybody Designs (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015) and Politics of the Everyday (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019).} More precisely, what is necessary today is to build shared visions of futures that are different from the present, dominant, unsustainable ones. 

If we accept this premise, a question then arises: Where will these new, divergent visions come from? In general terms, we know that new visions of the future stem from previous actions capable of producing “facts with a future”—events indicating that new possibilities are available. Consequently, the different visions that we desperately need today should emerge from events telling us that, beyond the mainstream trends, other directions are viable and sustainable futures are thinkable. At this point, a new question arises: Do facts with a future pointing in this direction exist?

Coexisting Realities 

We can now say with certainty that ongoing, dominant trends have led us into a catastrophic trap. The environmental disasters we talked about in the past as a future possibility are here. If we do nothing, they are here to stay. Moreover, the neoliberal ideology colonizing the minds and dictating the actions of policy makers and many other social actors worldwide has concentrated enormous power and wealth into just a few hands, creating growing unemployment, underemployment, marginalization, and, as a reaction, the antidemocratic involution that we are seeing today in various parts of the world. In addition, by trying to relegate every aspect of life to the realm of competition and economic efficiency, neoliberalism has exacerbated social disaggregation, the desertification of all that is public and relational, and the commercialization of common goods.

Nevertheless, pervasive as neoliberal ways of thinking and behaving are, they are not the only stories to be told. A careful scrutiny of contemporary reality shows us a composite and dynamic social landscape in which different ways of thinking and acting coexist. Those that interest us here—that is, those that we can see as facts with a future—are driven by creative, enterprising people who, when faced with a problem or an opportunity, come up with new solutions and put them into practice. These solutions may range from mutual-help groups to care communities, from small-scale distributed production to local food networks, and from community gardens to new forms of collaborative living. Such initiatives tend to (re)connect people with each other and (re)connect people with the places where they live, thus (re)generating mutual trust and the ability to engage in dialogue and create new kinds of communities—groups of people who collaborate in order to achieve results that have value for each of them as individuals, for society as a whole, and for the environment. 

Prototyping the Future

The initiatives noted above are examples of social innovation. They can be seen and discussed from various perspectives.^{A good definition of social innovation can be found in Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice, and Geoff Mulgan, Open Book of Social Innovation (London: NESTA and the Young Foundation, 2010), 3, available online, youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/The-Open-Book-of-Social-Innovationg.pdf: “We define social innovations as new ideas (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations. In other words they are innovations that are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act.”} Here I propose to look at them, first of all, as prototypes for possible futures—initiatives showing that ways of thinking and doing that are different from the mainstream are not only thinkable but also practically possible.

Beyond that, it can be observed that these social prototypes, as is the case with all prototypes, when successful, evolve over time, moving toward higher levels of maturity—that is, toward a kind of new normality. This evolution, too, must be understood as resulting from social innovation and can contribute in a meaningful way to the creation of alternative future scenarios. That is, every social innovation implies somebody who imagined an alternative mode of doing something and found a way to make it real. Those first to embark on this path, in the face of much adversity, are a particular kind of activist, social heroes who devote themselves to this activity, driven by a burning passion and commitment to doing what, until then, has not been done. Thanks to the efforts of these activists, unprecedented initiatives take place, becoming prototypes of new ways of being and doing—in our case, prototypes of possible alternative futures. 

Subsequently, if the idea is a good one, it passes from the embryonic, heroic state to the mature phase, in which the proposal is turned into practice for a greater number of people, who adopt this way of life and thinking into their normal routines. In short, through its increasing growth, successful social innovation may become the new norm. 

Anticipating the Future

In the innovation trajectory from early prototype to maturity, the original idea and practice may branch out, taking different routes. In particular, it may maintain, shed, or go completely against qualities linked to the original reasons for its existence.^{More precisely, experience tells us that successful ideas evolve and transform. That they may maintain some of their original characteristics, as far as social significance, is only one possibility and not a trajectory that can be taken for granted. Rather, without constant, careful redesigning and step-by-step reorientation, it is probable that an innovation trajectory will take the direction that today appears easiest: toward productive efficiency, in the process annulling or negating the initial social value (Uber and the whole sharing economy were, at the beginning, based on ideas endowed with social and environmental values).} Let’s consider the first case, in which, thanks to sensitive design action, the innovation trajectory brings about mature, highly accessible solutions still endowed with meaningful social and environmental values. After more than a decade in which we have witnessed several waves of social innovation, today we find many places in the world where you don’t have to be particularly committed socially or environmentally to be able to work for a couple of hours a week in a community garden, do your shopping at a farmer’s market, use a bike-sharing program, or participate in a collaborative living initiative. Yet when we do these things through our “normal” choices, we are co-creating local systems in which the sense of community grows and the rules of the game—and the balance of power—are changed. These locally transformed systems indicate the possibility of a different future, making visible and tangible the prospect of a world in which the roles of real-estate agencies, agri-food industries, car producers, chain stores, and local institutions differ from what are, in other places, still considered their “normal” roles. 

These cases can be referred to as “transformative normality”—ways of thinking and doing that become normal in a given context (that is, they are normal for those who adopt them) but which are far from normal in other contexts. Transformative normality is therefore a local discontinuity, contrasting with the dominant practice in the wider sociotechnical systems in which they collocate.

There is no need to state that these cases of transformative normality are important in building sustainable future scenarios. In fact, we should not imagine a sustainable future as the sum of social prototypes but as the enmeshing of transformative normalities in which, following their innovation trajectories, these prototypes will evolve.

Emerging Scenario

Social prototypes and the resulting transformative normality, in their diversity, have some common characteristics: the initiatives they propose collaborate in building communities that are localized, relatively small, and, at the same time, connected with and open to both horizontal interactions (with other similar communities) and vertical interactions (with institutional and noninstitutional stakeholders). 

Considering these characteristics, a promising scenario arises. We could give it various names. I refer to it with the expression the “SLOC scenario,” where SLOC stands for small, local, open, connected. These four adjectives work well in defining this scenario because they generate a holistic vision of how society could be. At the same time, they are also readily comprehensible, since everybody easily understands their meaning and implications by looking at the prototypes and the transformative normality on which they are based. Finally, connecting the dots between them, what emerges is an image that could become a powerful “social attractor,” a shared vision capable of triggering and orienting the future-building processes of a large number of social actors—that is, an image capable of catalyzing a collective design intelligence and making this vision of sustainable futures real. ▪︎    

EZIO MANZINI has worked in the field of sustainable design for over two decades. His interest in social innovation as a driver of sustainable changes led him to form DESIS, an international network of design schools active in this field. Manzini is distinguished professor at ELISAVA, Barcelona; honorary professor at the Politecnico di Milano; and guest professor at Tongji University, Shanghai, and Jiangnan University, Wuxi. His most recent publication is Politics of the Everyday (2019).

The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago