Resilient Futures: The Stakes

The top 10 global risks posing a severe polycrisis threat to the world. Image: World Economic Forum.

As part of Design Observer’s Twentieth Anniversary coverage, we are inviting our partners to reflect on the urgent questions framing design in contemporary culture. From insights on business to studies of the environment to opinions on technology, art, and politics, these varied perspectives speak to design’s broader implications with regard to culture and citizenship, innovation and leadership, humanism, craft, and the critical values guiding our work. As ever, we welcome your comments. —The Editors.

For our clients, stakes are always tied to the bottom line. Businesses that don’t turn a profit don’t survive. For startups, it’s mostly about good trouble: they’re seeking the right product/market fit to position themselves for funding rounds, or to invite an initial public offering. For legacy companies, on the other hand, the stakes can be existential: sales have slowed, a customer base has shifted,  a new technology could be threatening to displace their market position or market share. There’s an urgency to articulate a vision that resonates not only with customers, but also brings a renewed clarity of purpose to the company itself.

If the stakes are serious, perhaps it’s because the consequences for those stakes are so daunting. (By way of illustration, this year’s “it” word at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum was polycrisis.) We are living in an all-headline, ALL CAPS news cycle of pandemics, bank runs, catastrophic weather, big lies, fake news, job-annihilating AI, distrusted supply chains, and enduring wars. Everything, everywhere. All at once, and on full blast.

Design provides an essential service at moments like these, in its capacity to offer broader, deeper, and more relational insights. We analyze marketplaces, evaluate competitive forces, and leverage research to achieve deeper understanding of the cultural and consumer shifts framing our work. (This is design’s Venn Diagram overlap with marketing and advertising.) But we also look at larger contexts, anticipating, speculating, imagining what the future might hold for our clients. (These are the stakes that really matter.)

As ever, context is key. The internal combustion engine, for example, ushered in a modern era of mass production, urban growth, and accelerated transport. It also changed the nature of work, and spawned all kinds of garbage, paving the way for suburban sprawl, disordered commerce, and traffic jams. With the mass burning of fossil fuels over multiple decades, such rapid-fire modernizations also served to shift the planet’s temperature, sending the world’s climate into crisis.

And now? Against the backdrop of accelerating climate change and colliding tipping points, design reminds us that our capacity to achieve resilience—the ability to bounce forward—is likely our most viable strategy for growth. We stand at a moment in history where almost everything needs to be rethought, reimagined and done different. Products. Services. Packaging. Materials. Business models. The stakes couldn’t be higher. And the opportunities couldn’t be greater.

But first, we must examine the importance of transformation: in our work, for our clients, for all of us.

Next: reimagining transformation