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Strategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life
Summary
The infrastructures of everyday life shape how we live together, and what we're about. They might be housing or transit, wifi or civic apps, playgrounds or forests, streets or markets, libraries or health services, participation processes or parking spaces, energy grids or e-bikes. All of these things are designed, of course, though often by disparate design disciplines that have rarely collaborated coherently, and often without integrated or coherent approach to wider governance, either. And all have assumptions, beliefs or motivations embedded within them. Over the last decade, Dan has been helping shape the practice of strategic design, as an integrated, holistic approach to shared societal challenges, By sharing some of his recent work at Vinnova, the Swedish government’s innovation agency, as well as elsewhere, Dan will describe what it might mean to reorient around social progress, climate resilience and public health, rather than unequal economic growth, poor health, social injustices and environmental degradation. The work suggests various 'battles' for the infrastructures of everyday life, a genuine engagement with the technologies around us, and with new ways of thinking and acting about public and civic sensibilities and structures, participation and practices. Unpacking his concept of ‘dark matter’ in this context, and drawing from multiple projects, Dan shows how traditional lenses of design — from architecture to interaction design — might be trained on these big picture challenges. Recently appointed Director of the Melbourne School of Design, the graduate school in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, Dan draws from his wide-ranging career in design leadership roles at the Swedish government's innovation agency in Stockholm, Arup in Sydney and London, the UK government's Future Cities Catapult, the Finnish Innovation Fund, Monocle magazine, and the BBC, roaming across interaction design, service design, architecture and urban design — and ultimately strategic design.
Key Insights
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Historic shifts in urban design, like 1930s car dominance, drastically reshaped social life in cities, often to their detriment.
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Strategic design requires questioning the purpose of urban elements before technological solutions are applied.
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Multi-stakeholder collaboration, including rarely consulted groups like justice systems, is crucial for systemic urban projects.
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Oslo's bike share program exemplifies integrating public data sharing and social reintegration through prison labor.
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Designing streets as adaptable, garden-like systems encourages ongoing maintenance and evolution rather than fixed endpoints.
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Uber and similar services increased congestion despite promises, revealing failures to consider systemic urban impacts.
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Energy microgrids in shared buildings require social as well as technical design to avoid conflicts and improve sustainability.
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Indigenous practices demonstrate millennia of successful multi-scale, interconnected design thinking for ecosystems.
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Strategic design differs from tactical responses by addressing root causes before crises, exemplified by pandemic prevention.
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Scaling urban solutions needs changes in overarching policies, such as parking laws, rather than isolated interventions.
Notable Quotes
"Those days are over this new big tech is coming in so time to move on."
"We need to step back and ask what's the question behind it?"
"If we put traffic into the street, we'll get traffic; if we put gardeners, we'll get gardens."
"Strategic is what you do when you don’t know what to do, when there’s nothing to do."
"Design the chair inside the room inside the house inside the city plan — see those as connected nested things."
"Uber and Lyft increased traffic congestion by 40 to 50 percent in cities like San Francisco."
"The streets were full of social life, conviviality, commerce, and human-centered mobility."
"We need to design the street with ongoing maintenance and care, not reduce it."
"In Oslo, recently released prisoners maintain the bike sharing fleet, helping reintegrate them into society."
"Indigenous Australians practiced multi-scale interconnected design for 60,000 years — that's extraordinary machine designed by humans."
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