Ezio Manzini: 'Lightness' -- balancing fast/slow in design

I was trying to put together some ideas and it was not so easy, because the task that theoretically I have is to take some or all if possible, of the many interesting proposals we had and try to enlarge a little bit the interface to what could be the activity of the design. That is a very complex task to put together some pragmatical aspects with some cultural aspects in a very positive way. In any case I will try to do it. I will mention some things, what I do not mention is only because I have not the capability to put it in my presentation, not because it was not important.

The first general feeling is that given the title of this conference is 'speed', somebody looking from our side could think that this will be the new Futurist movement beginning. I think that this is not, that we are surely not the beginning of a new Futurist movement. And I feel that more or less, in a different way, the majority of people that made presentations here have some doubt about the idea that faster is better.

There have been many different ways of articulating this doubt, but I think that this is one for the starting point. We have discussed how to articulate the idea of speed and the idea of acceleration that is behind the idea of speed in our days.

There are two main reasons to have problems with speed. The first one is very clear and very simple. Maybe there is nothing to discuss here: that acceleration in a final system is impossible in the long term. So clearly there is something that does not work inbetween accelerating and living a very fragile ecosystem. The second point is: what are the consequences of this acceleration? We can talk about the social cultural sustainability of what we are doing. And here there is a lot to talk and the point of view can be very different and has been very different.

In any case I will say that in my view to solve the problem of speed facing the limit of the planet, you have in any case to pass through the second part - what we think about our social behaviour of what culture in relation to, this much more cultural and social aspect.

In my view, if we are thinking about what can happen in the future, the only thing that we can state for sure, is that the only future that we cannot imagine is the past. This is very important, because frequently we try to look in the past at something that is very important to do, if we try from the past some idea for the new. But what has to be clear is that we cannot come back to the archaic village of the past.

So what are some social consequences that have also been presented in our speech yesterday and today? I think that many persons, maybe all, stated that we are passing through a period of radical change. Maybe it is more than a radical change, more than a cultural change, it is an anthropological change. But it is maybe also true that the anthropological change is not necessarily a catastrophe. In the history of humanity we passed through other anthropological changes, very deep, and very important. And in any case the quality of our humanity remains. So the differences between today and the past is that we are passing through one of these very deep anthropological changes, knowing that this is happening. We are the first generation to have this strange opportunity. We know that something very deep is happening, but we do not know where we are going. And this can bring anxiety, of course, maybe frustration, because we thought we could control our future and we see that we are unable to do it.

But at the same time if we are able to go over this anxiety, maybe we can also discover this as a very challenging period. It is a period in which something can happen and also if nobody can think of designing the future as the future will be, everybody can design something in his own life, in the life of the people with whom he has a relationship. To give more possibility to a certain future that is completely open.

If we try to put the term 'speed' inside this framework, there are two kinds of speed that have been talked about. One could be said the way in which things are moving around us. It means how much our physical and social environment is changing. And we can say that we are living in a period in which everything around us is moving very fast. And how much we are changing in relation to our physical and social environment, so how much we are moving faster.

Those two speeds sum up one with the other in a vectorial way and so the overall speed of our perception of what is happening is, as at least two people yesterday stated, to look outside from the window when the train is moving very fast with the impression of not recognizing anything any more because the speed is too fast. Also in my view if we try to say what we in general as people, living in this moment, or how we as designers can do, facing the way in which things are changing and the way in which we are changing in relation to things.

]The first one, probably nobody can do anything real in large, meaning that there is such a huge system that is moving, that nobody really can think to stop. But at the same time things are moving, because all the people are moving. What we can perceive as a change in the environment around us, is a result of a multiplicity of choices of other people, that have decided to move. And so I come back to what I have said before. Also if something happened to be so big that nobody really can influence what happens, what really happens depends on you, on me, on everybody and on what we will do. In any case, this big huge system is a human artifact. And being a human artifact, what will happen depends on us.

And, if we can discuss that this speed in change of environment is good or not, if we can discuss if it would be better or not to try to slow it down, in any case what will happen is open but depends on what we will do in our own movement. That is, it's a speed that we can try to accelerate or decelerate with regard to ourselves.

So, if we want to enter a little bit more into this concept of personal speed, I think that for somebody like me, talking from a western background, we have to talk about speed in relation to two other major keywords, that are mobility and freedom. And if we want to discuss speed we have to discuss in some way also mobility and freedom. And this is very complicated, very difficult, because freedom, personal individual freedom, mobility and speed are linked together and are very deeply rooted in our culture.

So, it is possible to break the equation: freedom = mobility = speed. Can we discuss freedom, personal freedom? Many people say - and I agree - that one possible definition of the modern age is the western culture, is it is the only period in which people believe they have the chance to design their own life. That means that people are able to choose how to organize what will happen in the future. We can discuss that, we can discuss the fact that we could reduce freedom, this kind of freedom. Some people say yes: the religious fundamentalists, some green fundamentalists say that there is too much freedom around. Personally I say: that is not possible. I do not know if there is an anthropological change that once we have formed the idea of individuality we cannot go back.

But in any case, for myself, I will do what I can to maintain this kind of freedom. Because although it may be frustrating sometimes or it may make you anxious, I think that this kind of freedom is very related to some aspects of our way of being as humans. And so I think that I will not try to discuss if we have to be more or less free.

Now, what about mobility? When we talk about mobility, we talk about changing things, and if we have to be free, it means that we have to have the possibility to change the state of the things around us, or to change the position in which we are in space. And so there is clearly a link between freedom and mobility. But we can upgrade, we can re-discuss when and how we have to talk about mobility. We can talk about physical mobility, that is very important, and we could assume what Wolfgang Sachs proposed yesterday: that is, that we in some way have to re-improve the resistance of space and time.

But how best to do this? He proposed that maybe somebody could put some limit to mobility. He said for instance that having cars that can only go 100 km/hr. Somebody else could propose: let us pay much more for mobility, let us pay the real cost of going from Milan to Amsterdam and back and not as it is now, that is not the real cost. This can be done, but first of all it is something that is not so directly related with design. In any case it is not up to the designer to decide if or not we have to put some limits on the speed or to increase the cost of mobility. We can vote, this we can do as citizens, but as designers this is not our job.

Secondly, both the solutions are within the framework of the command-and-control attitude and probably there will be also the necessity to utilize command and control. But as designers we have to prefer to make people change by choice and this means that we have to offer the possibility to people to change and in this case to be less physically mobile, because they find it better to stay more stable, not to move so much, or to move only when it is really necessary to do this.

Can we create some solution? What can we propose to present a solution in which people can change the idea of physical movement? I suggest utilizing a term of the European Administration and Bureaucracy, that is the principle of subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity more or less says: do not take decisions at a higher level if you can take them at a lower level.

Translated in our field of interest now it would be: do not do far away what you could do near to the place in which you are. That means that it is not impossible that you can move far away, but you can find all that you need near your home, near the place in which you are. And so you could be free also to go somewhere else, but you have not the necessity to do so. And this clearly is something that asks for structural changes to make some precise choice. If you put people in the position that to take the children to school or to do the shopping or to go to the doctor, they have to take the car and travel many kilometres, you cannot ask them to move less than that. You have to offer the physical, real possibility of finding what they need in walking or bicycle distance from home. I think that this is not sufficient.

It is not sufficient to propose a physical solution. I think the enabling platform (to utilize the terminology that Jogi Panghaal used this morning), but we have also to create the imagery of this way of living. And this is a problem of, as somebody said, an aesthetic of this selected slowness. And we can have some idea of what could be then. I would call it for instance a 'connected village', that is not the ancient village, that personally I could not have set any more. And it is not the global village in which we are in connection with anybody anywhere without any special relation with space. The connected village is a place in which people meet, but that is open also to connection to the rest of the planet.

For what regards social mobility, it is a very complicated and large issue, we can say something in relation to product and services. Juliet Schor proposed for instance a sort of program in relation to this group of people known as downshifters.

But I am not sure that that program that was designed as 'let's something less expensive, less design with less symbolic over design of the product, let's make things more durable'. All this together could not be done, but it is not an aesthetic or something new. It could be a program for a marketing activity toward this new possible marketing niche of the downshifters. But I think that we have to find something that is stronger in terms of aesthetics.

To finish: to create a new aesthetic in relation to slowness and speed we have to make another step inside the idea of speed. And we have for the future movement what we call the sensorial speed. But the sensorial speed is something related to risk control, related to a sort of aesthetic perception, that we can create without any reference to the real physical speed. It does not depend if I am going at 100 km/hr or 40 or 200 km/hr, because if I go by horse at 40 km/hr I have a very strong idea of speed. If I go by Fiat 500 I have a strong idea of speed at 80 km/hr. And to have the same sensorial idea of speed with a BMW I need to go 200 km/hr.

So we can design many gadgets that permit people to have this kind of feeling and this can be done without any problem. For instance, I like a lot to go by motorcycle and with my motorcycle at 80 kilometres/hour I feel like I am a champion. There is the real meaning of speed in a much more technical way if you want, but there are some very important aesthetical aspects.

Speed is the relation between some change that has to happen and time. So in some way it is a form of time efficiency. And efficiency is another important word in our modern society. And we have learned how to criticize efficiency. So we could try to criticize in the same way that we criticize efficiency, this idea of speed. And the critique of what is the goal, because it is not new to be efficient if the goal is not interesting. And what is the path to the result. And this is a very important issue: not always or maybe most of the time the goal is not important, it is the path to the result. If I have to take a ticket for a bath in a machine, clearly the only important thing is to arrive quickly to the result. But if I have to eat or if I have to make love, the real important thing is the path. So we have to design for an aesthetic of this path, of this way that we have to pass through, to arrive to a certain goal.