Coffee and meringues with John Thackara at Café Esplanad, Helsinki.

At OK Do, we have thought a lot about the role of design. What is your definition of design and its purpose?

I resist making definitions. Herbert Simon said: “Design is the first signal of human intention”. So, for me, it’s less important to define design than to figure out how we want the world to be – and how to achieve that.

You have said that design should look for questions rather than answers. Could you tell us more about your thoughts on this?

Designers have been trained to believe that their job is to produce artefacts – which can be a piece of print, a website or a product. The trouble is that these often have negative consequences for the biosphere. If you live in a culture that celebrates personal authorship and novelty, then you’re more or less committed to making new things. But that age is over.

How do you feel that the current ideas of a designer and design need to change in order to make the future good and sustainable?

Rather than thinking about the designer’s new role, it’s more important to engage in conversations with people who are actively looking for ways to organise daily life in more efficient and joyful ways. Working with those people will make your contribution as a designer meaningful. Introspection is boring. The pressure is for less, not more, stuff – of all kinds. We all need to avoid production rather than expand it.

It’s interesting to think what role education has in shaping designers’ goals. What kinds of emphases do you think are needed in design (and other) teaching?

I recently gave a talk in Helsinki to a group of people who are setting up Aalto University. I proposed that the university should stand for something more than “innovation” and “creativity” in abstract. I suggested that it should stand for an unconditional respect for life, and for the conditions that support life. It follows that design schools should be more open for interaction with the rest of the world. There’s a huge amount of design work to be done to achieve the intensive use of urban land, the redevelopment of brownfield sites and the use of wasted space – both public and private.

“A university should stand for an unconditional respect for life, and for the conditions that support life.”

As you have said, the transition to sustainability is no longer about messages, it’s about activity. Do you think we should communicate less?

The world is increasingly saturated with communication – so much so, that it becomes ever harder to make sense of what’s happening, or to make priorities. More importantly, communication impacts the biosphere. It’s not a choice between paper or digital because the life cycles of both print and digital media have positive and negative impacts. Both need to become more sustainable: http://www.sustainablecommunication.org/.

On your website, it reads that design schools should collaborate with grassroots and regional organisations, helping them to grow and develop. What is your message to the students who would rather travel to the other side of the world?

Doing things in the community you know best is more productive than traveling to the other side of the globe to “help poor people”. Locally you can get more deeply into the subject, and make a positive contribution to the community.

“Doing things in the community you know best is most productive.”

We feel like it’s an inherent quality in people (like us) to start their own thing. Then again, you encourage people not to start a new organisation but find a well-organised project with good local roots, and join that one. How would you encourage designers to hook up with others?

Setting up and running an organisation, even a small one, takes a huge amount of energy. My tip for you: find an issue that interests you and collaborate with people who are a source of positive energy. If the work begins to accumulate, then think about starting a more formal structure like a business. But do the projects first.

Our activities include organising seminars around topical design issues. What makes people attend your event, the Doors – how do you bring them together?

The most important thing is to pose a question that excites people, that seems meaningful. That question becomes a shared focus for a wide variety of people to join the conversation. We have stopped organizing Doors as a huge group of people sitting passively in a room listening to others talk. Our focus in recent years has been projects and events that become the occasion for a two-way exchange of ideas and experiences. This was the concept of City Eco Lab that we did in France last year, for example: it was all about real-life grassroots projects that included permaculture, mushrooms, spin-farming, open money, peak protein, alternative trade networks, dry toilets, sustainable urban drainage, alternate reality games, watershed planning, seed banks, de-motorisation and VeloWalas! In the event grassroot organisations collaborated with designers to improve their existing projects.

We’ve also heard you state that collaborative innovation is the way of the future – but it needs to be organised. Can you name examples of projects that have managed to do just this?

The Middlesbrough food growing project in Dott 07 is a good example of what I mean here. The idea was born out of my interest in food and cities. But it took David Barrie, our producer, to locate and talk to the town officials and a whole variety of citzens and persuade them to join the experiment.  The project was all about organizing people to grow food – a cultural intervention with a lot of help from a good city government, which enabled us to do bigger things.

Organising projects that involve people with different backgrounds can be challenging at times. How do you go on with communal design projects – what’s the design process like i.e. who initiates and how and what kind of methods can be used?

I don’t use a fixed method: I talk to people and ask what challenges they face in their project, and whether they would like some help from designers.  In my experience you can too easily fall in love with methods and stop talking to people!

“You can too easily fall in love with design methods and stop talking to people.”

Would you say that collaborative innovation builds on openness and what’s your view on the open sharing of design ideas in general? How and where should they be shared (online, “on site”, through the grapevine etc.)?

I never copyright anything myself. In my work as a newspaper journalist I quickly learned that yesterday’s story is old news and has little value, so journalists don’t worry about protecting their finished work. We go and look for the next good story. I think the same approach would liberate many designers. If you want to gain respect, put ideas out in the world. Some designers make money with authorship but it’s very dispiriting if that’s regarded as a norm. Openness is more fun.

Finally, we’d like to hear your views on the most important qualities a designer should possess?

Learn to ask good questions. Learn to listen well. Learn to look for real people who have ambition and positive energy. Learn how to coordinate mixed groups of people in co-design activities – or find someone else with that talent and make him or her your partner.  In summary, get out of the tent and get real!

See John’s further thoughts and recent work at www.doorsofperception.com.