Piero Bassetti Domus Academy, master in Business Design 15 marzo 2012
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I.
The possibility of addressing a group of young, selected innovators is extremely thought provoking for someone such as me. In my role as President of the Bassetti Foundation, I and the Foundation’s many collaborators have worked for more than 12 years promoting responsible innovation, inviting both the business and power holding elite to apply the concept in a ‘glocal’ world. The Giannino Bassetti Foundation promotes research and debate on the concepts of innovation, responsibility and power especially through the Foundation's web-site. The Foundation (a non-profit organisation) is the outcome of a desire on the part of the Bassetti family heirs to honour the memory of Giovanni Bassetti, an entrepreneur of particular capabilities and merits. His commitment was characterized, above all, by his awareness of the moral context of entrepreneurial choices. Innovation is born when an exceptional quantity or quality of knowledge combines with technology, and finds an additional quantity of power that pushes it forward, taking it into the realm of history making. Our aim is to promote cultural and political activity that will foster responsible innovation, concurring to review and construct a sense of social, civil and political responsibility amongst people of culture, science and power so that, together, we can learn to live more responsibly.
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II.
Therefore, we at the Foundation immediately appreciated the merit of the Domus Academy (Andrea Tosi, Giovanni Lanzone) in educating new innovators. We had the possibility of a fruitful collaboration last year within the framework of the Bassetti Foundation promoted Design Project, something that I will speak about later. The project also incorporated two study bursaries. The young artists received funding in order to take the Masters in Business Design at the academy. The recipients - Avner Shaked and Manuel Garzaron - presented the results of a year of research at the Domus Academy at the Bassetti Foundation conference suite in November.
III.
The link between innovation and responsibility lies in the complex scenarios of tomorrow which include the consequences of today’s innovation. Everyone agrees it is important to cultivate and foster innovation, but the cultures and politics of innovation devote scarce attention to prefiguring adequate models to tackle its consequences – good or bad. Such models cannot be merely economic scenarios but must involve political, social and cultural scenarios.
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I go further, and I think that this should interest young designers like yourselves, we believe that a particular ‘poietic’ area of innovation exists, so much so that we have coined the phrase poiesis intensive innovation. Through
conversations
with
innovators
and
politicians, public meetings and events, publications, and the creation of a network of individuals in government, industry, and academia, the Bassetti Foundation has engaged with this question at the personal, organizational, and societal level. With our aim in mind, for some time now we have been involved in collecting case studies on responsible innovation. Some of these studies involve the insurance sector, allowing us to evaluate the impact of innovation upon businesses that deal with risk. Others investigate the deliberative procedures that surround nanotechnology and the neurosciences, and some look into the institutions that measure the impact of innovation upon governance, while also taking a look at the great design institutions. In this we were helped by our own Domus Academs scholars that I spoke about earlier. Rather than proposing some final answer, the Foundation explores how engaging with the question of responsible innovation may clarify research priorities for innovators and funding organizations, bridge the gap between innovators and policy makers, and reframe debates that have been gridlocked. Experience has taught
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us that design, in its evolutionary dynamic, is part of the area of human action that we can attribute a disruptive potential to (together with genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and computer science etc...); furthermore, design is ever more immersed in the parameters defined by places of education and instruction, by institutions (be they associative or representative), and by industry..
IV.
The responsibility of innovation, until recently a pioneering theme, has only now found its larger voice. We realized this through our recent participation in the Responsible Innovation Conference, financed by the Dutch government and involving participants from every corner the world. But why is it happening today? Although we would like to believe that «in an ideal 1
world power goes hand in hand with responsibility» , experience tells us otherwise. My generation experienced the atomic bomb, and we were forced into thinking about the problem of the goals of innovation. An entrepreneur tends to define his behaviour in terms of legal parameters: I don’t steal, I don’t kill people, I am just trying to make a profit. But techno-scientific innovation has now entered the field of play, and brings consequences that go well beyond
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The Bassetti/CSPO Prize for Responsible Innovation, Draft Project Plan
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the confines of written law. Just think about the debate in the United States surrounding the over the counter sale of home genetic testing kits, a debate that involves not only the medical community, but also politics and the media. Therefore,
at
the
intersection
between
understanding an act, and the potential of an act, the traditional concept of responsibility goes into crisis, particularly in the application of high technology. The mission of the Bassetti Foundation is to help those that take risk, to introduce knowledge and intelligence into the innovative process. But clearly defining the terms “responsibility” and “innovation” is difficult; the meaning of both is in flux. Just as an introduction, it’s helpful to think of innovation as an arc that stretches between basic research, applied research, commercial development, and general adoption. Although this linear model of innovation as a process with distinct stages leaves out various aspects of how new technologies eventually become broadly adopted, it is widely understood. We know that the decision to pursue or exploit innovation is taken by those who provide surplus of power with an eye towards the potential success of that innovation. To the extent that innovation shapes our individual and collective futures, all of us are stakeholders in the answers to questions about responsibility. What kinds of societal ills might be attributable to a lack of responsibility in innovation (or cured by an increase in it)?
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Because
of
this,
the
question
ÂŤwhat
is
responsibility in innovation?Âť can illuminate the nature of technology and society, law and ethics, economics and power, and can serve as an organizing theme for a wide variety of ethical questions about technology.
V.
2011 saw the birth and development of the Foundation's
Design
Project,
a
multifaceted
project
involving a large group of contributors, sponsors and events, and co-ordinated by the Foundation (Camera di Commercio di Milano, Camera di Commercio di Monza e Brianza, Cosmit, Domus Academy & Giovanni Lanzone, FederlegnoArredo, PDMA Southern Europe, Scuola del Design del Politecnico di Milano). Part of the project involved the commission of a theatrical performance entitled Mani grandi, Senza fine, first presented to the public at Piccolo Teatro in Milan on February 2011, and where it is on the program again next month. The performance represented the culmination of a year-long research and production effort into the post war history of design and designers in Milan. With this show we wanted to demonstrate that the mission
of
the
Bassetti
Foundation
–
to
promote
responsibility in innovation - requires taking design into account, and to look at the city that even today represents
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its heart in the international minds, while taking a situated point of view: We did not want to describe the status quo, but to open a window upon a scenario that goes beyond contingence, an improbable to achieve (Achille Castiglioni says: ÂŤIf design is to create something that does not exist, we need to be able to forsee things that are not visibleÂť1). Experienced in investigating the category of responsibility, we know that it sits in the relationship between knowledge and duty. It therefore implies the will: a) to specify the benificiaries of a responsible act. For instance: the youth, trying to find their position within a scene that proposes new problems, but within which tradition and innovation co exist together; or businesses in the design network, in an area that enormously transcends the administrative borders of Milan; or craftsmanship, challenged by glocalization; or technical institutes, ever more called upon to learn through synthesizing knowledge created by companies and society; b) To prepare oneself to control complexity. How can we react to the push of design centred innovation and the extension of the field of design centred innovation, a semantic of design
at
international
level.
Today
opportunities revolve around design not only as products, but also of services to raise the quality of life for the elderly, incarcerated,
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overweight etc, or to rethink the fruition of cultural
heritage.
And
environmental
sustainability (not just how, but as a project) has profoundly permeated the mentality of the protagonists of this world; it is they who take care of what comes both before and after the finished product: the materials to use, end of life recycling and disposal. In summary the entire life cycle of an object not just its use and consumption; c) the will to work as part of a network. Innovation grows from interactions between professional figures that are not all codified in the official almanack of design: from designers to machine operators.
It
modifies
the
role
of
the
professional designer in the creation of objects, images and services. I also believe that these protagonists on the front line of international design,
the
production
interaction structure
and
designers,
force
companies
to
renovate and renew ideas, and look to new technologies and scales of dimension.
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VI.
As you may have understood, The Bassetti Foundation would like to spur all those upcoming to think about the passage from private design to design of the polis, in the hope of raising a material culture to serve a new public space. We believe that this is a fundamental exercise for responsibility in innovation.
In particular, as the Bassetti Foundation’s Design project rolls into its second phase, its focus is on valorizing high tech arts and crafts through the interpretation and cinematographic representation of particular case studies. The transformations in the modes of production (with the implimentation of technology at a level that was not forseeable even a few decades ago such as fast prototyping) and mass culture, have scattered the cards, creating an environment that invokes previously unheard of levels of responsibility. Advanced design grows when a community has a collective conscience fed by tradition. A cultural and disciplinary intersection, a meeting of art and politics, the re combination of existing thinking into new ideas. Because of this the centre point of our project is the city, defined as parting from the network of design, and not design itself. Is
beauty
a
private
or
public
subjective
responsibility? In this era of the glocal, it would not be realistic to think like a hypothetic Lorenzo il Magnifico
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searching to concile beauty and usefulness. Power, culture, technology and culture cannot today be organized into Renaisance form, and from this assertion we must distill ‘the capacity of integration of knowledge, development and radiation’. And it is apt to think about it in a city populated by an incredibly dense number of editorial houses (half of all books in Italy are printed in this city) and many trade magazines such as Domus e Casabella, Ottagono, Modo, Rassegna, L’Arca, Stile Industria, Lineagrafica, Casa Vogue, Interni, Abitare. Cultivating design as social innovation oriented toward quality and open to the world (without that is raising the problem of how to speak to 1.2 billion Chinese) requires cultural adjustment from everyone. Design will have a future if it can see itself as a shape maker of the transformations in act in complex society. The unexplored geographic areas are energy, infrastructure, the primary challenges of fine mechanics, chemistry, biotechnology and agriculture and then the territory and services. The strategic places that provide these products – often in inelegant, difficult and artificial ways – their primary functionality: the schools, hospitals, public offices the spaces of intercultural relationships and the collective sphere. For the Bassetti Foundation all of this comes to life in a cultural provocation. We look at design as a new form of work. Among the questions that have driven our work for years is the hunt for ‘the subject or the manifestation’
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responsible for innovation, in the knowledge that in contemporary society it is not an individual phenomena, but
the
result
of
complex
intersubjective
and
interinstitutional relationships. And the company, the institution imersed in design is the crossroads of a process whose font is often internel and external to it:
Alberto Seassaro (founder of the Department Industrial, Design, Arts, Comunication of the Politecnico di Milano ÂŤIf we go to study management in Boston, information science in San Fransisco, design in Milan.... we acknowledge to cities and territories a cognitive patrimony created over decades of world leadership in their respective fields... a school and 2 a culture that are not easily replicableÂť .
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Alberto Seassaro. In 1999 he founded the Consortium POLI.design of the Politecnico di Milano, for the promotion, research, publishing and continuing education in design. In 2000 he is founder of the Department INDACO (INdustrial, Design, Arts, COmunication) of the Politecnico di Milano.
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