Machines For Living

Obama's Stimulus Planners: Design Jobs lead to Green Collar Jobs

President-elect Obama's much anticipated Economic Stimulus Plan is in danger of prolonging out-of-date economic ideas, with its anachronistic search for "shovel-ready" projects.  Governors and Members of Congress are telling Obama that, if the purpose is to stimulate the economy, then the Stimulus should be spent on "shovel-ready" projects that create jobs in the short-term.  Missouri, for example, has said it would spend all of its money on highways, and none on St Louis mass transit. Environmental and smart-growth advocates are warning that this focus on traditional transportation projects will result in "roads to nowhere" that only deepen our dependence on foreign oil and increase greenhouse gas emissions, all while transit budgets are being slashed even though transit ridership still breaks new records despite falling gas prices.

It's precisely because traditional roads projects invest relatively little in design that they are "shovel-ready".

Expansion of Service Economy is About More Than Business and Personal Services

Most literature on the expansion of the service economy asserts, correctly, that the primary source of economic activity in the U.S. has shifted from manufactured products to services (a shift as significant as the previous shift from agriculture to manufactured products).  However, analysis of that shift tends to focus on business services (IBM and GE used to be product companies, now most of their revenues comes from business services) and personal services (hospitality, food, your morning mocha latte).

But what about services that are replacing products?  This seems to me to be the next major area of growth in the service economy (and to the authors of Cradle-to-Cradle and Natural Capitalism).  These product-replacing services result in:

(1) Happier customers (see Natural Capitalism quote at bottom of post)

(2) Less pushing (er, advertising) of manufactured products with their long life cycles

(3) Less waste in manufacturing processes (fewer steps that are unrelated to customer benefits, like packaging CDs) resulting in higher profits

(4) Less consumption of energy in manufacturing processes, with the related environmental and national security benefits

Essential Design Concepts: Ergon

Design as a discipline gets so bound up with particular domains (architecture, software design, product design, industrial design, urban planning, ergonomics, quality management, etc) that fundamental concepts of design can sometimes get obscured.  One of the most fundamental design concepts is ergon, which is a Greek term meaning work or activity.  You probably guessed that the word ergonomics is rooted in this term.  But ergon is not limited to workplaces, as is ergonomics.

An ergon is an activity or function essential to any person or thing.  It is a concept as old as Aristotle, who wrote that just as a knife has an ergon of cutting, so a flute-player or sculptor each have a distinctive ergon.  

Good design always requires first analyzing activities to find the essential ergon, and then designing artifacts (e.g. buildings, software, processes, etc) that don't inhibit or distract from this ergon, but  that get out of the way and enable one's ergon to be done well.  The key concept in ethics since Aristotle, virtue, is defined in his Ethics as "excellence in performing one's ergon".  So, whereas a virtuous, quality knife is one the cuts well (it performs its ergon well), so the virtue of a flute-player or a sculptor is to perform their distinctive ergon well.  The designer is thus in the business of enabling people to flourish by performing well the activities and functions essential to them, and sustainable businesses are built on products based on such designs.