The
Humane Village
Journal 1

The New Story

Earthly Paradise is a perfect place characterised by the total absence of architecture, objects,organisational planning, etc. For paradise is existence without.

Alessandro Mendini

Lester Brown •

Taking part in the creation of a sustainable society will be an extraordinarily satisfying experience, bringing a sense of exci-tement that our immediate forebears engaged in the building of fossil fuel-based societies did not have. In effect, we have embar-ked on a shared adventure, the building of a society that has the potential to be an enduring one. This awareness could begin to permeate almost everything we do, imbuing it with a sense of excitement &endash; one that derives in part from the scale of the undertaking, which has no precedent, as well as from full know-ledge of the risks and consequences of failure.

Erich Fromm •

Assuming the premise is right &endash; that only a fundamental change in human character from a preponderance of the having mode to a predominantly being mode of existence can save us from a psychologic and economic catastrophe &endash; the question arises: Is large scale characterological change possible, and if so, how can it be brought about?

I suggest that human character can change if these conditions exist:

1. We are suffering and are aware that we are.
2. We recognise the origin of our ill-being.
3. We recognise that there is a way of overcoming our wellbeing.
4. We accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life.

Lester Brown •

To the extent that the transition does bring civilization and nature into harmony, it could unleash a torrent of initiatives and innova-tions in science and the arts. With the human spirit unleashed, we may even find that many problems will be solved more quickly than we anticipate. Contemporary problems seem seamless, interconnected, and thus difficult to address in isolation. But this seamlessness has another side. If progress is made on some fronts, it is likely to translate into progress on many others.

Lester Brown •

Values are the key to the evolution of a sustainable society not only because they influence behavior but also because they determine a society's priorities and thus its ability to survive. Over time, values change as circumstances change. If they did not, society would not long endure. Perhaps some among the now extinct Mayans recognized that the foundation of their society's strength was eroding with the soil from their fields. But their value system did not adapt in time to turn the new information into new values, priorities, and programs.

Will ours &endash; now that we know that we too are on an unsustainable course? Before us now is the opportunity to adjust our values according to our changing perceptions of our world and our place in it. Of necessity, the path to sustainability will be littered with cast-off values. Materialism, planned obsolescence, and a desire for large families will not survive the transition. But they will not leave a void. Frugality, a desire for a harmonious relationship with nature, and other values compatible with a sustainable society will take their place.

Lewis Mumford •

If we want to improve the regional environment, we must also improve ourselves, that is, we must change our objectives, advan-cing from a money economy to a life economy: in many matters we must acquire new values, new sensitivities, new interests,

new goals that will ensure a self sustaining, many sided life.

Ezio Manzini •

No true, profound aesthetic renewal can take place without being based on a value system.

Lester Brown • 

The prospect of creating a sustainable society is an exciting undertaking, one capable of commanding fully our loyalties and our energies. Every person, every organization, and government at every level will have a role to play. Be it Third World villagers combining energies to organize a local firewood plantation or affluent suburbanites organizing a comprehensive materials recycling program, every effort can make a difference. Achieving

a sustainable society will not be possible without a massive reordering of priorities. This in turn depends on political action by individuals and by public interest groups; much of it may come from the bottom rather than the top. If we fail, it will not be because we did not know what needed to be done. Unlike the Mayans, we know what must be done. What we will soon discover is whether we have the vision and the will to do it.

Social Models

Club of Rome • 

1. Population is stabilized by setting the birth rate equal to the death rate in 1975. Industrial capital is allowed to increase natu-rally until 1990, after which it, too, is stabilized, by setting the investment rate equal to the depreciation rate.

2. To avoid a nonrenewable resource shortage, resource consumption per unit of industrial output is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value. (This and the following five policies are introduced in 1975.)

3. To further reduce resource depletion and pollution, the economic preferences of society are shifted more toward services such as education and health facilities and less toward factory-produced material goods. (This change is made through the relationship giving 'indicated' or 'desired' services per capita as a function of rising income.)

4. Pollution generation per unit of industrial and agricultural output is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value.

5. Since the above policies alone would result in a rather low value of food per capita, some people would still be malnourished if the traditional inequalities of distribution persist. To avoid this situation, high value is placed on producing sufficient food for all people. Capital is therefore diverted to food production even if such an investment would be considered 'uneconomic.'

6. This emphasis on highly capitalized agriculture, while necessary to produce enough food, would lead to rapid soil erosion and depletion of soil fertility, destroying long-term stability in the agricultural sector. Therefore the use of agricultural capital has been altered to make soil enrichment and preservation a high priority. This policy implies, for example, use of capital to compost urban organic wastes and return them to the land (a practice that also reduces pollution).

7. The drains on industrial capital for higher services and food production and for resource recycling and pollution control under the above six conditions would lead to a low final level of industrial capital stock. To counteract this effect, the average lifetime of industrial capital is increased, implying better design for durability and repair and less discarding because of obsolescence. This policy also tends to reduce resource depletion and pollution.

Gianfranco Zaccai • 

What is required is a new economic model for both designer and the producer, a new 'design moral'. A model which is based upon fulfilling consumer needs in ways which are both economically and environmentally sustainable.

Dieter Rams • 

The basic problem of our product culture may be that products are bought. We could think of an alternative scenario, where consumers pay for the use, not the possession of a product. This would save resources and minimise waste. It would also lead to a deep, fundamental change in the way products are perceived.

Club of Rome • 

Technological advance would be both necessary and welcome in the equilibrium state. A few obvious examples of the kinds of practical discoveries that would enhance the workings of a steady state society include:

• new methods of waste collection, to decrease pollution and make discarded material available for recycling;
• more efficient techniques of recycling, to reduce rates of resource depletion;
• better product design to increase product lifetime and promote easy repair, so that the capital depreciation rate would be minimized;
• harnessing of incident solar energy, the most pollution-free power source;
• methods of natural pest control, based on more complete understanding of ecological interrelationships;
• medical advances that would decrease the death rate;
• contraceptive advances that would facilitate the equalization of the birth rate with the decreasing death rate.

As for the incentive that would encourage men to produce such technological advances, what better incentive could there be than the knowledge that a new idea would be translated into a visible improvement in the quality of life?

Erich Fromm •

The function of the new society is to encourage the emergence of a new man, beings whose character structure will exhibit the following qualities:

• Willingness to give up all forms of having, in order to fully be.
• Security, sense of identity, and confidence based on faith in what one is, on one's need for relatedness, interest, love, solidarity with the world around one, instead of on one's desire tohave, to possess, to control the world, and thus become the slave of one's possessions.
• Acceptance of the fact that nobody and nothing outside oneself give meaning to life, but that this radical independence and nothingness can become the condition for the fullest activity devoted to caring and sharing.
• Being fully present where one is.
• Joy that comes from giving and sharing, not from hoarding and exploiting.
• Love and respect for life in all its manifestations, in the knowledge that not things, power, all that is dead, but life and everything that pertains to its growth are sacred.
• Trying to reduce greed, hate, and illusions as much as one is capable.
• Living without worshipping idols and without illusions, be cause one has reached a state that does not require illusions.
• Developing one's capacity for love, together with one's capacity for critical, unsentimental thought.
• Shedding one's narcissism and accepting the tragic limitations inherent in human existence.
• Making the full growth of oneself and of one's fellow beings the supreme goal of living.
• Knowing that to reach this goal, discipline and respect for reality are necessary.
• Knowing, also, that no growth is healthy that does not occur in a structure, but knowing, too, the difference between structure as an attribute of life and "order" as an attribute of no-life, of the dead.
• Developing one's imagination, not as an escape from intoler- able circumstances but as the anticipation of real possibilities, as a means to do away with intolerable circumstances.
• Not deceiving others, but also not being deceived by others; one may be called innocent, but not naive.
• Knowing oneself, not only the self one knows, but also the self one does not know &endash; even though one has a slumbering know- ledge of what one does not know.
• Sensing one's oneness with all life, hence giving up the aim of conquering nature, subduing it, exploiting it, raping it, destroying it, but trying, rather, to understand and cooperate with nature.
• Freedom that is not arbitrariness but the possibility to be oneself, not as a bundle of greedy desires, but as a delicately balanced structure that at any moment is confronted with the alternative of growth or decay, life or death.
• Knowing that evil and destructiveness are necessary con- sequences of failure to grow.
• Knowing that only a few have reached perfection in all these qualities, but being without the ambition to 'reach the goal,' in the knowledge that such ambition is only another form of greed, of having.
• Happiness in the process of ever-growing aliveness, whatever the furthest point is that fate permits one to reach, for living as fully as one can is so satisfactory that the concern for what one might or might not attain has little chance to develop.

Tucker Viemeister •

The changes that we are seeing today are fundamental and revolutionary; changes so dramatic and radical that the next century won't be anything like this one. ...To survive we must re-engineer our design profession and our businesses. We have to brake the frame, recognize our potential and live up to it...We must also improve the quality of designers so we will be smart enough to do, undo and not do.

If the economic and political spheres of society are to be subordi-nated to human development, the model of the new society must

be determined by the requirements of the unalienated, being- oriented individual. This means that human beings shall neither live in inhuman poverty - still the main problem of the majority of people&endash; nor be forced &endash; as are the affluent of the industrial world &endash; to be a 'Homo consumers' by the inherent laws of capitalist production, which demand continuous growth of production and, hence, enforce growing consumption. If human beings are ever to become free and to cease feeding industry by pathological consumption, a radical change in the economic system is necessary: we must put an end to the present situation where a healthy economy is possible only at the price of unhealthy human beings. The task is to construct a healthy economy for healthy people. The first crucial step toward this goal is that production shall be directed for the sake of 'sane consumption.'

Design Models

Gianfranco Zaccai • 

What is needed is a shift from the design of the object to the design of the experience of a comprehensive service system to the Consumer. The object would become just a component in the provision of a desired service. Such shift would be economically beneficial to the Producer/Supplier; would result in constant improvements to the quality of life of the Consumer; and would minimise environmental damage by encouraging designs which are re-usable, upgradable, etc. This implies an increased role and social responsibility for the designer, as he moves from being the 'architect' of the physical object as an end in itself, to being the 'choreographer' of both the physical components and their associated service systems.

Dieter Rams • 

The type of design which can contribute to an ecological product culture is technologically oriented design. This design is capable of developing new product concepts and structures, and of making it possible to use new materials and production tech-niques. It optimises the function of products and helps bring about aneconomical longevity. A design which is merely an aesthetic decorative variant on an existing product design has no place here.

Decorative design is, in contrast, one of the causes of the environmental problems which are facing us. Technologically orientated design can have an impact in two major areas: firstly, to create fewer products in the future; fewer, but better. The switch from quantity to quality will bring true prosperity which does not have to be bought with environmental damage and will also lead to a higher quality of life. The second area of influence will be to contribute to the environment soundness of products or to develop products which will help solve the environmental problems.

Within the context of a pursuit of improved social eco-efficiency, differing but complementary proposals for 'consumption scenarios' are possible. Although complementary, they are based on different degrees of transformation with respect to today's dominant 'culture of consumption'. In synthesis, they can be described as follows:

• 1. FROM CONSUMPTION TO CARE

This scenario implies going beyond the misunderstood notion of the 'functional' which has led to the acceleration of consumption and to the world of 'disposable' objects. Design will have to develop products with the technical and also the cultural capacity to survive over time: products which require care, with which the user can establish an emotional relationship.

• 2. FROM CONSUMPTION (OF PRODUCTS) TO UTILISATION (OF SERVICES)

This scenario implies going beyond the notion of possession (and, therefore, of personal consumption) of products, reaching a concept of 'utilisation': in other words, of a 'non-destructive' and 'non-individual' consumption of product-services. This is a scenario in which a higher level of social eco-efficiency can be achieved by orienting the 'demand for results' toward new services which offer high efficiency in terms of the use of resources.

The task of the designer will be that of developing product-services with high environmental potential and, at the same time, a high level of social approval attraction.

• 3. FROM CONSUMPTION TO NON-CONSUMPTION

This scenario is obviously the most radical, and that in which the operation can only take place at a cultural level. Again in this context design, viewed as the 'culture of products and services', can play an important part: it can generate scenarios, criteria of quality and value judgments in which the 'reduction of needs' can be experienced as an 'increase in social quality'.

Arbuckle, Burns, Kyupers, Manu & Perianen •

• A compassionate design value system recognises that artifacts and environments do have strong human, cultural and ecological qualities and their impact on the society and nature goes beyond mere form.
• Artifacts play a role in guiding their users towards the development of social contexts; compassionate design thus helps create humane contexts.
• Enterprises and institutions re-evaluate their principles and strive for creating equal value for both the human and natural economies.
• Ways of learning should be re-structured to promote integrity, wholeness, creativity and the celebration of life on this planet.

Angelo Cortesi •

We need to take new roads and prize what history has most reviled. We need to isolate situations in which humanity can hold its head up proudly and to create landmarks that can be considered monuments to our times. If a sacrifice in the present means greater benefits in the future, then areas blighted by mines and quarries need to give top priority to large-scale environmental art projects which local people will be involved with and will take pride from.

For what concerns Design as an Economical Instrument:

1. Reduction in the number of components;
2. Reduction in weight and amount of materials used;
3. Reduction of image;
4. Reduction in bulk;
5. Reduction in effort;
6. Dematerialisation &endash; and a perfect symbiosis between shape and technology; products can be made with less use of material and with a greater use of intelligence.

Deane Richardson •

The future will involve industrial designers in the new arena of 'situation design' &endash; or the design of the activity, task or event itself. The product that supports the situation or task will thus be of less importance than in the past. The opportunity to tailor our design solutions to local cultures, ethnic groups, niche markets and even to the individual consumer, will create a more irregular shape to industrial design. But it will participate in roles not previously known and with more depth.

Erich Fromm •

Our only hope lies in the energizing attraction of a new vision. To propose this or that reform that does not change the system is useless in the long run because it does not carry with it the impelling force of a strong motivation. The 'utopian' goal is more realistic than the 'realism' of today's leaders. The realisation of the new society and new Man is possible only if the old motivations of profit, power, and intellect are replaced by new ones: being, sharing, understanding; if the marketing character is replaced by the productive, loving character; if cybernetic religion is replaced by a new radical-humanistic spirit.

Urgency

E.F. Schumacher •

Our most important task is to get off our present collision course. And who is there to tackle such a task? I think every one of us, whether old or young, powerful or powerless, rich or poor, influential or uninfluential. We must thoroughly understand the problem and begin to see the possibility of evol-ving a new life-style, with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption: a life-style designed for permanence.

Club of Rome •

Society will need better means than exist today for clarifying the realistic alternatives available, for establishing societal goals, and for achieving the alternatives that are most consistent with those goals. But most important of all, long-term goals must be specified and short-term goals made consistent with them.

Ivan Illich •

As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose the vision of a convivial society. A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favour of another member's equal freedom.

I choose the term "conviviality" to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realised in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members. Present institutional purposes, which hallow industrial productivity at the expense of convivial effectiveness, are a major factor in the amorphousness and meaninglessness that plague contemporary society.

Ezio Manzini •

It is necessary to present new settings suggesting the possible existence of a world in which a new ecology of the artificial environment may be accomplished; a world in which the discovery of limits no longer appears as a reduction of possibilities, but as the source for new ones.

Club of Rome •

It seems possible that a society released from struggling with the many problems caused by growth may have more energy and ingenuity available for solving other problems. In fact, we believe that the evolution of a society that favours innovation and technological development, a society based on equality and justice, is far more likely to evolve in a state of global equilibrium than it is in the state of growth we are experiencing today.

Lewis Mumford •

In an attempt to control the disintegrating forces that are at work in our society, we must resume the search for unity; and to this end, we must explore the historic nature of modern personality and the community in all their richness, variety, complication and depth, as both the means and the end of our effort.

Ivan Illich •

I believe that society must be reconstructed to enlarge the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups to the total effectiveness of a new system of production designed to satisfy the human needs which it also determines.

Lester Brown • 

The transition from an unsustainable society to a sustainable one will lead to materially different lifestyles. In the former, lifestyles are centered more around the pursuits of self-interest and gratification, but in the latter they will be infused with a sense of action and of common purpose. If our attitude toward nature changes, as it must if a sustainable society is to evolve, we may find our attitudes toward each other altered too. In effect, the value changes that lead to a more harmonious relationship with nature may also lead to a more harmonious relationship with each other. If we abandon our exploitative relationship with nature, we may be less inclined to exploit each other.

Lewis Mumford •

The balanced economy we must now seek will place its emphasis not on the horse power it consumes but on the manpower it releases: it will translate energy into leisure and leisure into life. It will discover the ratio of the life-preserving functions to the life-fulfilling functions.

Club of Rome •  

THE EQUILIBRIUM STATE

We are by no means the first people in man's written history to propose some sort of non growing state for human society. A number of philosophers, economists, and biologists have discussed such a state and called it by many different names, with as many different meanings.

We have, after much discussion, decided to call the state of constant population and capital "equilibrium." Equilibrium means a state of balance or equality between opposing forces.

•

What criteria can be used to choose among the many options available in the equilibrium state? The dynamic interactions in the world system indicate that the first decision that must be made concerns time. How long should the equilibrium state exist? If society is only interested in a time span of 6 months or a year, the world model indicates that almost any level of population and capital could be maintained. If the time horizon is extended to 20 or 50 years, the options are greatly reduced, since the rates and levels must be adjusted to ensure that the capital investment rate will not be limited by resource availability during that time span, or that the death rate will not be uncontrollably influenced by pollution or food shortage.

An equilibrium defined in this way does not mean stagnation. Within the first two guidelines above, corporations could expand or fail, local populations could increase or decrease, income could become more or less evenly distributed. Technological advance would permit the services provided by a constant stock of capital to increase slowly. Within the third guideline, any country could change its average standard of living by altering the balance between its population and its capital.

What would life be like in such an equilibrium state ? Would innovation be stifled? Would society be locked into the patterns of inequality and injustice we see in the world today?

Discussion of these questions must proceed on the basis of mental models, for there is no formal model of social conditions in the equilibrium state. No one can predict what sort of institutions mankind might develop under these new conditions.

Lewis Mumford • 

The theme for the new period will be neither arms and the man nor machines and the man: its theme will be the resurgence of life, the displacement of the mechanical by the organic, and the re-establishment of the person as the ultimate term of all human effort.

• Cultivation,
• Humanization,
• Co operation,
• Symbiosis: these are the watchwords of the new world enveloping culture.

Every department of life will record this change: it will affect the task of education and the procedures of science no less than the organization of industrial enterprises, the planning of cities, the development of regions, interchange of world resources.

Jan Kuypers •

What we need today, and in the future, is a life-confirming consumption which no longer dictates or even controls the people.

Life confirming consumption is based on a value system which respects life. Life confirming consumption is comprised of everything which improves life quality and supports the growing desire of the people to optimize their lives. Behind the desire for a better, more beautiful life there is but the dream of the lost paradise.

John Stuart Mill •

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement.There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for im-proving the Art of Living and much more likelihood of its being improved.

Helena Norberg-Hodge •

One of the most critical failings of conventional development is its reliance on a narrow, short-term perspective dominated by quantitative analysis. Counter-development would move beyond specialization and fragmented expertise to reveal the systemic underpinnings of industrial society. It would draw attention to family and community break-up; it would show up the hidden subsidies of a society based on fossil fuels; it would place environmental damage on the debit side of the economic balance sheet. In short, it would expose the escalating costs of our industrial way of life.

Club of Rome •

Technological policies are added to the growth-regulating policies of the previous run to produce an equilibrium state sustainable far into the future. Technological policies include resource recycling, pollution control devices, increased lifetime of all forms of capital, and methods to restore eroded and infertile soil. Value changes include increased emphasis on food and services rather than on industrial production.

Neil Postman •

A reasonable response to the problem of living in a developing Technopoly can be divided into two parts: what the individual can do irrespective of what the culture is doing; and what the culture can do irrespective of what any individual is doing. You must try to be a loving resistance fighter. By "loving" I mean that, in spite of the confusion, errors, and stupidities you see around you, you must always keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols of our civilisations.

Helena Norberg-Hodge • 

Rather than more development, we need what I call "counter-development." The primary goal of "counter-development" would be to provide people with the means to make fully informed choices about their own future.

Using every possible form of communication, from satellite television to storytelling, we need to publicize the fact that today's capital &endash; and energy-intensive trends are simply unsustainable. Ultimately, the aim would be to promote self-respect and self reliance, thereby protecting life-sustaining diversity and creating the conditions for locally based, truly sustainable development.

Club of Rome •

Now that we are seeking a 'better' result, we must define our goal for the system as clearly as possible. We are searching for a model output that represents a world system that is:

• 1. sustainable without sudden and uncontrollable collapse; and
• 2.capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people.

Peter F. Drucker •

The habit of community co-operation, which always operated to prevent change and to forbid initiative, must now be directed toward promoting change and spurring initiative. The innovation lies in making the old traditions of the peasant the very means by which he acquires the vision and the power to do new things. This last example brings out, I think, wherein social innovation differs from our old ways of producing social change: reform and revolution. Unlike reform it does not aim at curing a defect; it aims at creating something new. Unlike revolution it does not aim at subverting values, beliefs and institutions; it aims at using tradi-tional values, beliefs and habits for new achievements, or to attain old goals in new, better ways that will change habits and beliefs.

But it also tries to do something neither reform nor revolution could do: to give us a method for defining both the new that is possible or needed and the things that can be done to achieve it.

We need social innovation more than we need technological innovation. The new frontiers of this post-modern world are all frontiers of innovation. Neither reform nor revolution can solve these great problems; only genuine social innovation can do the job.

Lewis Mumford •

What we need today is a large-scale transfer of interest and personal talent to the fields of community and personality; to achieve a balanced economy, to make possible a world civilization, man must understand his real condition and formulate a fresh ideal of life.

To recover life and health again we must find a benign method of simplification. We must find a method that will assert the primacy of the person and that will re-endow the person with all its attributes, all its heritage, all its potentialities.

Club of Rome •

Whenever we use words such as 'better' and begin choosing among alternative model outputs, we, the experimenters, are inserting our own values and preferences into the modelling process. The values built into each causal relationship of the model are the real, operational values of the world to the degree that we can determine them. The values that cause us to rank computer outputs as 'better' or 'worse' are the personal values of the modeler or his audience.

Club of Rome •

The final, most elusive, and most important information we need deals with human values. As soon as a society recognizes that it cannot maximize everything for everyone, it must begin to make choices. Should there be more people or more wealth, more wilderness or more automobiles, more food for the poor or more services for the rich? Establishing the societal answers to questions like these and translating those answers into policy is the essence of the political process.

Lewis Mumford •

If anything should be plain by now it is the fact that man must build his culture about the complete human personality.

Club of Rome •

Achieving a self-imposed limitation to growth would require much effort. It would involve learning to do many things in new ways. It would tax the ingenuity, the flexibility, and the self-discipline of the human race. Bringing a deliberate, controlled end to growth is a tremendous challenge, not easily met.

Uwe Bahnsen • 

While 're-educating' designers on a broad level is quite a task, at least we are talking by and large the same language. The toughest will be to 're-educate' manufacturers, as they have just been &endash; and still are &endash; in the process of being 'educated' to listen to the consumer, to produce products the consumer wants and needs rather than producing what they think is right to produce. The most import-ant target group for 're-education' are the educators, at all levels and in all domains. People turn to educators to learn ; they are the most important 'multiplicators' of ideas, thoughts, philosophies and knowledge.

Lewis Mumford •

The ideal personality for the opening age is a balanced personality: not the specialist but the whole man. Such a perso-nality must be in dynamic interaction with every part of his environment and every part of his heritage.

He must be capable of treating economic experiences and aesthetic experiences as the related parts of a single whole, namely, life itself. His education, his discipline, his daily routine must tend toward this wholeness.

Jan Kuypers • 

Today's basically passive consumer culture must become an active, participating culture in the future. The principle of unlimited consumption must always be questioned when it shows compulsive characteristics and threatens to simply suppress personal emptiness and boredom. The change from passive, constant consumption, to an active, conscious consumer behaviour can only be achieved on a long term basis through research, information and education, where the difference between life promoting and life suppressing needs is made clear. Perhaps in an ideal world - The Humane Village - there is a residual obligation after the 'deal is done', extended responsibility beyond the deal. If I know the maker and the trader and know that I can assign responsibility &endash; moral more than legal &endash; then perhaps this can be attained. But for now, my responsibilities as a designer are more than limited: they are minuscule. And I can't extend these responsibilities within a framework that does not acknowledge claims or obligations or, for that matter, extended responsibilities.

Robert Henri •

When art has attained its place, surfaces will be infinitely less broken. There will be millions less things, less words, less gesture, less of everything. But each word and every gesture and every thing will count in a fuller value. When we have attained a sense of the relative value of things, we will need fewer things.

Stefano Marzano • 

Design is in essence communication, and that includes the communication of cultural value and identity. And to know what others want to communicate we need to be sensitive to their concerns and reflect them in our designs. Form and function are not enough: our designs must have content &endash; content which is meaningful for the user.

If we do this, if we make sure that our designs are meaningful in this sense, our products will also be ethical, in that they'll truly reflect the user's own ethic, the ethos of his or her own individuality and personal ecology. And by designing such relevant products, we shall ourselves be acting ethically, producing objects which enhance the consumer's quality of life.

Stefano Marzano • 

What does 'mature quality' mean in terms of consumer products? It means that products must become relevant to specific needs. We must not fall into the trap of designing products with more and more features which most people simply can't understand or don't need anyway. What we can do instead - and this is where we should be competing - is to give these products cultural significance or value for their use, meeting the user's need to express his or her personality identity as part of the quality of his or her life as an individual. As designers, we play a vital part in this.

Ezio Manzini • 

The change in designing, manufacturing and consuming habits, enforced by the onset of limits to the system, may only take place in two ways:

• - 'enforced' by catastrophic requirements
• - 'attracted' by new possible qualities

There are good and clear reasons to strive so that the transformation, which will take place anyway, may take place in the second way. If we are convinced of this, the only acceptable way to lay out a strategy for change within the present complex society, is clearly to look at the possible qualities of a well-balanced world.

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Ezio Manzini • 

From the point of view of environmental sustainability, it becomes obvious that the objective to be pursued can only be that of a society in which lifestyles are based as little as possible upon the consumption of energy or materials. To make such an environmental policy practicable it is necessary that significant changes in lifestyles take place, along with a socio-cultural innovation leading to new 'consumption scenarios'.

Jan Kuypers •

It is not without logic that designers, who are after all used to the process of transforming the glint in the eye of an idea into the tangible, feel that they can, and therefore must, spearhead a drive to turn our societal orientation from goals typified by the measurable, the material, the digitally precise, the pursuit of dominance on every market place and the exclusive aim for profit, towards goals that include in their values the immeasurable qualities of caring, of accepting responsibility as participants in the life of others, close and far.

Ezio Manzini • 

The theme today is that of how to direct the present power of technology in the direction of a sustainable society (and of a coherent model of development): the sustainable society requires products and services which make use of new techno-logies for the care of things, for intelligent participation, for a new social quality.

Dieter Rams • 

What we must re-learn is the importance of omitting every extraneous element in order to focus on the essential &endash; ultimately also for the sake of straightening out some of the chaos in which we are forced to live today.

Lewis Mumford •

An active knowledge of the social environment and of the behavior of men in social partnership, their needs, their drives, their impulses, their dreams, is just as indispensable for working out the new social order as reading, writing, and arithmetic were for those trained to capitalism. And so equally for the arts of society: the art of politics, the arts of enlightened behavior and orderly communication, must become the main field of new inventions.

Stefano Marzano •

We need to work towards quality; that less tangible, more subjective property which is so difficult to describe and yet so easy to recognise. In other words a higher-quality quality. A sustainable society requires this sort of mature outlook.

Tokyo Design Network •

We must base our work on an all- encompassing view of design which takes into account human concerns, technological and scientific knowledge as well as economical, political and historical perspectives. Central to this approach is the belief that design cannot be reduced to one of its constituent parts, but can only be conceived from the whole &endash; 'holistic', in contrast to the 'linear' problem solving approach characteristic of most twentieth century design.

Ezio Manzini • 

In order to be attractive any proposed future must not correspond to a scenario of deprivation. That is, it must not correspond to a notion of life within the same values and criteria of quality as those of the past, offering a little bit less of everything . Fewer motorcars, fewer disposable products, less exotic fruit are factors which can not only become acceptable, but even attractive, only within the framework of a new cultural scenario:

• a scenario in which cars are no longer as necessary because there are other, better ways of moving about;
• a scenario in which to rediscover the value of care for material things and the quality of things to be cared for, in which to appreciate the sense of the passage of time, the changing of the seasons, which is communicated by the variations in the fruit available for consumption.

Angelo Cortesi •

We have to look for increased respect for man's contribution of the built environment, a more efficient use of resources, a greater formal discretion, a more friendly relationship with the environment and lower levels of psychological, visual and material pollution. We must strive for a 'reductionist' design and production approach, one that can take on an aesthetic dignity and can open avenues that are still worth exploring.

Zbynek Vokrouhicky •

We must carefully reconsider our frames of reference; newly developed economies bring with them newly developed consumers, with as much desire to posses real, tangible products as their right to do so. While the move towards the ideological involvement of the designer in the consequences of its craft addresses the status quo as seen from the "West", the same position fails to account for the disparities &endash; in social, cultural and economic worth &endash; present in the world today.

Kenji Ekuan • 

To achieve its potential as an instrument for bettering the natural and the human condition, a new comprehensive and holistic design approach is required, with solutions that are at times beyond the scope of a single field of design expertise. The necessity for a World Design Council stems precisely from this need for solutions solved through the mutual cooperation of all design disciplines. By overcoming territorial, organisational and institutional limitations, such a council will facilitate the creative contributions of all design disciplines towards the development and implementation of identified objectives. They are:

• To discover common themes based on respective areas of expertise and to make joint efforts to propose actions for their execution.
• To share a broad point of view, incorporating different fields of design in the pursuit of a profound quality of life as expres- sed by products, services and environments.
• To promote enterprises with a concrete vision and contribu- tions towards the sustainability of life on our planet.
• To strive to slow down, stop and ultimately reverse the ecological predicament faced by our planet, by contributing tangible solutions, leading to the creation of a culture that holds environmental quality in the highest esteem.
• To promote the awareness that the nurturing of people must rate higher than the making of their artifacts.
• To promote research into and make proposals for a new sense of values that will determine the directions contributing to new corporate policies, reflecting a new sense of environmental and moral responsibility.

Ezio Manzini •

What is required today is to imagine innovative solutions with a high l evel of radicalness, proposing alternative paths to those of the past and present.

This objective might appear rather ambitious. But we should also point out that the aim is not to find "the" solution for all questions: the idea, more modestly, is to propose solutions which contain some spark of innovation, meaning a new way of behaving or of viewing the world. In fact , the new model of development will not be born on a drawing board or around a conference table as a perfectly complete theorem; it will emerge in dialogue and conflict among a multiplicity of ideas, visions and proposals.

It will come into being thanks to a widespread atmosphere of innovation involving all social actors. And designers will indubitably play a part in the process.

Dieter Rams •

In the future design will have a definite task ahead of it: to create products which meet the needs of mankind without endangering the environment upon which we depend for our survival. There is no alternative to a fundamental restructuring of today's product culture.

Designers must recognise the meaning and the urgency of this momentous task, and must set out to find the solution. It is only when design will make its redeeming contribution to society that society will recognise design as vital for the development of nations.

Victor Papanek • 

Doing gigantic research is only one third of the job that needs to be done to come to grips with the needs of the world. The second is the immediate pre-empting of presently wasted design efforts, and the redirection of these efforts towards short-range practical design needs. Designers and design offices could begin turning at least one tenth of their talents and working time towards the solving of those social problems that may yield to design solutions. Furthermore, it means as that designers refuse to participate in work that is biologically or socially destructive.

Ezio Manzini • 

Design can play a fundamental role in the definition of this scenario (or, better, of many such scenarios which, in a complementary or competitive manner, lead in this direction).

In order to do so, design will have to re-examine the very basis of its culture: in it should not be forgotten that design was born and developed within the context of the development model in crisis today. Fundamental concepts such as form, function, client, user, market must be revisited and the same is true for the role of technology, aesthetics and design itself.

Lewis Mumford •

There is no easy formula for this renewal. It is not enough for us to do all that is possible: we must do that which seems impossible. Our first need is not for organization but for orientation: a change in direction and attitude.

More immediately we must demand: What is the purpose of each new political and economic measure? Does it seek the old goal of expansion or the new one of equilibrium? And what is the nature of this or that industrial or social achievement &endash; does it produce material goods alone or does it also produce human goods and good men?

If we keep this standard constantly in mind, we shall have both a measure for what must be rejected and a goal for what must be achieved. In time, we shall create the institutions and the habits of life, the rituals, the laws, the arts, the morals that are essential to the development of the whole personality and the balanced community: the possibilities of progress will become real again once we lose our blind faith in the external improvements of technology alone. Without that change, no great betterment will take place in the social order. Once that change begins, everything is possible.

Club of Rome • 

In any equilibrium state the relative levels of capital and population could be adjusted to assure that human material needs are fulfilled at any desired level. Since the amount of ma-terial production would be essentially fixed, every improvement in production methods could result in increased leisure for the population &endash; leisure that could be devoted to any activity that is relatively non-consuming and non-polluting,

Lewis Mumford •

Only those who daily seek to renew and perfect themselves will be capable of transforming our society; while only those who are eager to share their highest goods with the whole community &endash; indeed, with all humanity &endash; will be capable of transforming themselves.

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