Resilient Futures: The Transformation

Seaweed-based packaging from Sway that replenishes the social and ecological systems harmed by petroleum plastics.

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.

Transformation isn’t an endpoint, but a process. It isn’t an add-on, but a built-in. Companies who have embraced a transformational mindset are able to evolve in ways that seem almost effortless to the outside world.  

This is the “think different” of Steve Jobs. His unique genius lay in seeing the exponential power of combinations: a smartphone coupled with an app store, for example, or a team of customer care geniuses doubling as brand evangelists. Often celebrated as a natural marketer, Jobs was also a natural systems thinker, applying the three core principles of integrative design to everything from products to sales channels to his own company.

Why integrative design? Where design thinking is a methodology for organizing priorities, integrative design is methodology for arriving at the best answers. Those three principles are as follows:

In the dozen years since Jobs’ death, Apple has never stopping evolving, and remains ranked among the most valuable companies in the world. But it’s not unique in its ability to adjust, adapt, and transform in concert with the pace and consumer demands of contemporary life. Interface, a company that manufactures office carpets, is another example. In the 1990s, its CEO, Ray Anderson, was determined to make the company a leader in sustainability. In so doing, he also transformed an entire industry, showing its competitors what was possible. Over the years, the company has pioneered the use of environmentally-friendly materials for flooring: “Project Positive,” extends this focus to the landscape surrounding the company’s headquarters, applying principles of biomimicry to transform it into a mecca for biodiversity.

Environmentally-compatible practices are just the start. Municipal bus companies are partnering with electric utilities to transform battery banks into virtual power plants, bolstering the grid during periods of peak demand. Sway, a recent winner of the Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize, has developed an alternative to petrochemical plastic bags made from seaweed. Startup C16 has a replacement for palm oil that can be grown in a bioreactor. Working from the mushroom substrate known as mycellium, Ecovative—a company devoted to pioneering alternative methods of material manufacture—has introduced sustainable (and licensable) alternatives to everything from bacon to styrofoam. In the spirit of Rachel Carson, these companies are creating products that are not only better for us, but better for the planet, too.

Every business has the potential for a resilient future. Many—the ones who understand how a transformative mind-set can unlock the adjacent possible—are already well on their way. But to move forward, we’d be well-advised to move beyond the myopic and (merely) human-centric, past the constraints of design thinking. There will be new ways of making things, new methods for doing things. There will be clean materials and clean energy.

Might we consider an upgrade, trading Homo Sapiens (wise humans) for Homo Imaginativi (imaginative humans)?

Over the last two centuries, the human population has grown from one billion to eight billion. At the same time, our planet’s natural bounty has declined, and the global climate is quickly approaching a point of no return. Our job as designers is to work with leaders who understand that what happens now matters. This is about doing different—and doing better. Because what happens next depends on it. And it depends on us.