Scott Matter and Samuel Yu
Our presentation focuses on work in progress to use human-scale development (H-SD) as a guiding framework for contra-innovation. Our goal is to reorient value in design, innovation, and development toward human and planetary well-being. In the context of a dominant paradigm of design innovation for consumer capitalist growth, we see a hopeful alternative in the explicitly political aspirations of H-SD to nurture community self-reliance, promote collective human flourishing, and rebalance relationships among human and ecological systems. H-SD provides a powerful tool to diagnose current situations, propose preferred futures, proactively assess the potential consequences of innovation, and explain why some interventions produce unintended and unexpected harm.
This presentation will draw on a review of the literature and our practical experiences in teaching to introduce the H-SD approach and explore its potential. We will situate H-SD in relation to critical discourses in design scholarship, such as defuturing, design futuring, autonomous design, ontological design, Transition Design, and pluriversality. Then, we will present insights from our recent experiences teaching with H-SD in under- and post-graduate programs and with design, research, and innovation practitioners.
We will discuss how we’ve iteratively adapted teaching activities and materials to introduce and enable learners to apply key H-SD concepts, namely the distinctions between and systemic relationships among needs, satisfiers, and economic goods; how specific satisfiers can impede (as destroyers, inhibitors, or pseudo-satisfiers) or promote (as singular or synergic satisfiers) realisation of fundamental needs; and the complex relationships among needs, satisfiers, capabilities, poverties, and social pathologies.
Finally, we invite and hope to engage in further discussion about the adoption of H-SD in practice, particularly around the pragmatic and political considerations involved in shifting innovation, design, and futuring paradigms.
KEYWORDS: human-scale development, design innovation, design futuring, sustainability transitions, ontological design, planetary well-being, teaching and learning
RSD TOPIC(S): RSD: Learning & Education, RSD: Methods & Methodology