Jon: Bruce Sterling’s really done it this time - he’s claimed that not only are technologists full of hot air, so are designers. Recently I was at the IxDA conference in Vancouver, and the buzz was all about our ability to affect behavioral change at a cultural level. Robert Fabricant, Dan Saffer, and even John Thackara all claimed the designers role in pursuing massive change.

Is this all just a lot of hot air?

Richard: I certainly hope not. We’ve discussed this in a couple of our previous cafe meetings, and I wholeheartedly endorse Elaine Ann’s arguments in this issue that design has a major role to play in bringing the world out of the financial crisis.

Roger Martin — Dean of the Rotman School of Management and someone I’ve often referenced in our discussions — agrees. During his appearance at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last November, I asked Roger to tell us how greater use of “design thinking” might have prevented the world financial crisis. A part of his response was that “designers” would have looked at the big picture and designed a mortgage system that was “wholistically elegant,” unlike the one that failed. The creators of the existing system turned a blind eye to very stupid features of the system to wish them away; “designers” would not have done that.

Jon: That’s all well and good, but - specifically with the massive change or wicked problems type of argument - our government (in the U.S.) doesn’t seem to care, or see much value in design or designers. It’s a bunch of lawyers and lifer-politicians, and there’s not a lot we can do to get any sort of non-linear, abductive thinking in the mix. I’m wondering if all of these huge issues, many of which were brought about by large corporations, are going to be left to the large corporations to fix on their own.

Richard: There is good reason for pessimism. What would you need to see happen to become at least a little more optimistic than you apparently are?

Jon: I believe in the transformative power of design, but I’ve also watched “design thinkers” take an exceptionally reductionist view to difficult problems. Climate change simply isn’t something that’s going to be “solved”, in the same way that poverty isn’t something to be “solved”; as wicked problems are defined by Horst Rittel, they are a class of social problem that is not binary. To be optimistic, I need to see an indication that the larger “we” - designers, on a global scale - can actually do this type of work and pay our mortgages. Because that’s ultimately what’s stopping the designers I know and associate with from diving head on into design of this scale; they can’t pay the bills when they stop building widgets.

Richard: In this issue, we’ve published articles calling for the abandonment of obsolete conceptions of usability and user-centered design. This is consistent with a shift occurring in the world that we’ve documented in previous issues: a shift towards service and sustainable design — a shift which, because of its nature, (should) involve designers in work that takes a broader view while enabling them to pay the bills.

In upcoming issues, we plan to focus more on something I address a lot in my work and teaching: how to change the roles design and designers play in companies, and one of the contributions of this nature is to come from Roger Martin.

Maybe that isn’t about designers diving into design of the full scale we are discussing, but it is a good start, no?

Some have called for Obama to create cabinet level positions focused on innovation and design, or for companies to shift their focus to “transformation” rather than innovation and design. Do such proclamations do any good? Should you and I take some sort of related stance via interactions, or by doing so, would we only be adding to the hot air?

Jon: Yes, I suppose that would be just more noise. We need real action - activist work, the type of work Tad Hirsch talks about, or gaming work as described by Andrew Hieronymi. More and more, perhaps, I’m coming to the conclusion that we can’t take the wickedness out of social problems, because humans are inherently as complicated as the problems we’ve created. As such, perhaps we should set our sights much lower - and focus on the banal, the comical, the thoughtful, or the beautiful. These design opportunities are more immediate, and are more immediately “solved”. Bruce Sterling ends his piece by quoting Charles Eames, “Design is a method of action”. I’ll quote Eames too: “Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability, and that way you might change the world”.