Defining Metadesign

An idea under shared, ongoing development

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Hubble telescope picture, courtesy of Spitzer and NASA

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The task ahead

Species are disappearing faster now than for 63 million years, and many experts agree that that a major climatic catastrophe could happen this century. However, democratic governments are unlikely to deliver the paradigm change we urgently need. This is because their methods (e.g. targets, taxes, penalties) are too indirect to change hearts and minds.

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What alternatives do we have?

We believe that designers should be commissioned to work at a higher level of engagement. Paradigm change requires radical thinking. We need more comprehensive, 'joined-up' ways to feed, cloth, shelter, assemble, and communicate. Designers are trained to attract behavioural change via products, services and images. This approach complements fiscal and legislative approaches.

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Are designers ready to meet the challenge?

Possibly - if design can be re-directed as a ‘metadesign’ approach. The scale and complexity of the task are beyond what we know as 'design', which emerged in the 19th century as a set of specialist skills and practices. Changing human behaviour at the social level is therefore beyond its intended purpose.

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Re-designing design

Metadesign is a self-defining framework that helps designers to change paradigms. This cannot be achieved by design, as we know it. Habits fiercely resist change because, like all paradigms, they are part of a complex web of economic, cultural, aesthetic, psychological and other forces that reinforce one other. Metadesign has to be a team-based practice intended to bring about a more synergistic global society.

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We need metadesign

Instead of designing discrete products, brands, or services, metadesigners would orchestrate 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' initiatives. They would broker effective, non-fiscal solutions for communities and their governments. We might, therefore, regard metadesign as a mode of politics.

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Metadesigners seek synergy

We achieve synergies when we combine two, or more, existing resources to create a third. In effect, finding a new synergy means getting something for nothing. The origin of synergy is ‘difference’. Many differences create diversity (biodiversity, cultural diversity, etc.), which can, in theory, be turned into a 'synergy-of-synergies', i.e. a new order of prosperity.

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Towards a ‘synergy-of-synergies’

Instead of combining resources we can even combine ‘problems’ to create an additional, unexpected synergy. These synergies may eventually be combined into a vast ‘synergies-of-synergies’.

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‘Languaging’ paradigm change

As Einstein noted - ‘we cannot solve problems using the language that created them’. It is important that metadesigners try to re-language new concepts and to create possibilities that go beyond what was previously ‘thinkable’.

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see 10 aspects of metadesign
see the Wikipedia entry for metadesign

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return to / go to Glossary
return to / go to 10 Principles of Metadesign
return to / go to homepage

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