So, let's call this episode: "But why Designers? What's so special about Designers?" And the reason I use that title is because when I look at some of the major problems in the world that we are trying to address, and I take those problems from the United Nations, which has a list of 17 Sustainable Development problems, that are extremely critical
– actually, it's a list of 16 problems because the 17th is gathering together all the different kinds of talents needed to solve those other 16. Those are not new problems; they're well known: problems like hunger, education, universal healthcare, housing, santitation – there's all sorts of issues there that many, many very talented people
have been trying to solve for a long time; many governments, the United Nations itself, many foundations. So, what can designers offer? Here's what we can offer. Almost all of these systems have *failed*. They've spent billions of dollars, taking decades of time. And most of the time, they fail; and even when they do succeed, they only succeed for a small part of the problem, and usually taking many, many more years than they had expected
and costing two or three or four times as much money as they expected. And I'm talking about money measured in billions of dollars. So, what's the problem? The problem I think is – well, there's a book by a man named Easterly called "The Tyranny of Experts". Let me describe what I mean – or what he meant – by that. It's that when you have a major problem, what do you do? You call in the experts.
And the experts look at the problem. They may spend a few years studying it: "Oh, we see why you don't have pure water in this area. And here is a solution." And they recommend a solution. And the experts are good. They are truly expert at these issues, and their solution is a sensible one. And, as a result, foundations come in, the governments come in, the United Nations comes in, and puts in lots of money. And they start a multiple-year, a multiple-decade program. And it *doesn't* work.
Why not? Well, because the problem with experts – and this was the fundamental point of the book by Easterly – is experts have a wide range of knowledge, and the reason they can take that knowledge and apply it to all sorts of problems is they *generalize* it; they can bring it to an abstract level, so you can see how: "Oh, yes, this problem in Africa is very similar to the problem we face in India, which is very similar to the problem in – I don't know – South America.
They're right. What this ignores is the *people*. It ignores the *cultures*; it ignores the *capabilities*. For that matter, it even ignores the *environment*, which is very, very different in all of these places. And so, a solution that in principle is to be correct has to be done differently in these different communities with different cultures and different environments and different capabilities. So, that's one problem.
And the second problem is the approach of trying to solve it all at once. These very large projects fail. And here's one reason they fail: They are so big and so expensive and involve so much disruption that it leads to a big political problem because any project that big and that expensive is going to have opposition because, first of all, even if you may help huge numbers of people,
there are some people who might be harmed. You might have to move their homes; you might have to change the way they live. There are things that are going to happen that can't possibly help everybody. So, the ones who are displaced or inconvenienced or even harmed: They legitimately complain. Second, when you have so much money, well, people might say, "That's a lot of money! I mean, don't we have *other* needs that we should be spending on? Why are we spending it here?" So, it becomes a big political issue; and then, on top of that,
because it can take a decade: everybody's behind you and it gets going, and the first couple of years are going well, and then people say: "Nothing's happened. We spent all this money! Why is nothing happening? Nothing is changing." And it doesn't matter how many times you have explained that it's going to take a decade before you see things, oh, no – people lose their patience. So, these are all the different kinds of problems, in addition to the one – these are abstract problems with abstract solutions.
They don't often take into account the real lives and the real people who are living in the communities. But here's an interesting result – a side result. One thing that's come out of all of this work, of all the failed projects around the world for so many decades is a new industry, and it's called: Writing books to explain why we have these problems, and there's a book on this and a book on that and a book on this, and there must be 50 books and reports that detail
– and, actually, there's a lot to be learned by reading these books. But reading the books about why we failed, that's good to learn from... but we also need some books about why we succeeded. But we can't write those books until we actually have done so. And that's where the work begins. So, what designers can do is designers, first of all, are used to working with all the different experts in many different fields.
They're used to bringing them together to try to figure out what is needed from each discipline and put it together into a solution, because design is *not* a field of analysis. Design is a field of *synthesis*. That is to say, we're a field of *doing*: actually doing something in the world. So, that's not your normal university discipline. Most university disciplines are all about studying the problem and having all sorts of wonderful theoretical results which gets published in all the scientific journals.
No. What we're trying to do is actually solve the real problem on the ground with the people who are being affected. So, we bring that approach – a focus on the people – and we work within the cultures. In fact, the best way of doing that is that we don't do it. We find the people already living there, who're already starting to address the problem. They understand their culture. They understand what is possible and what is not possible.
And let *them* drive the system – what we're calling *community-driven design*. But what we are able to do – most of the community-driven design approaches are actually solving the *symptoms* – and what we're able to do is help them get to the underlying causes, and also to bring in the *system approach* because individuals in small groups, they aren't capable of doing the very large work to think of this as an *entire system* where everything has to come together – many, many different disciplines.
And, for that matter, the *economics* of the country are very important in solving the problem, and the *politics* of the country, and even world trade – the politics of world trade. These are all important. But designers have that skill by finding the right problem, bringing together the systems and always a focus upon the people or, if you like, upon *humanity*. So, that's the power that designers have... *if*
— here's the "if": Are you a designer? If you are, are you capable of working on a problem like that? Most designers are *not*. They can learn, but they weren't trained to do problems of this sort. And that gives rise to another topic for another video.