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I really enjoyed making things

but I was getting really tired of making other people’s ideas

and I was getting very cynical about the world of advertising.

A lot of the work we were doing was

making TV commercials

to try to sell products I don’t particularly like very much.

So age 29 I applied to

the Royal College of Art

to do a course called Design Products.

Ron Arad the architect and designer had just taken over

the professorship of that course

I was offered a place and started there

and that introduced me to,

I guess, the kind of work we still do to this day:

critical design,

using design to question technology,

building a lot of interesting products that

would do that instead of using the written word,

using objects and designed artefacts to

change the way we think about things,

to encourage to think differently about

technology and technological products.

You have a device where the signal comes in

but then that broadcast you

a low frequency into the mouth

and it translated into

a vibration

into the inner ear and it’s perceived as

sound streaming, a streaming sound.

The possibilities are endless,

prime ministers could receive secret guidance from their special advisors,

football coaches could pass tactical instructions to their players

and no one will ever know.

Imagine the guy on the stock market,

if he’s in the theater, if he’s in the cinema, if he’s sleepy in bed, if he’s on the beach

the stock rumors information about a companies collapsing and so on

could reach him immediately and he could react to it.

I’ve started thinking about Mo's project of energy independence

and I’ve starting looking at the madeiran landscape.

You can’t see it too much throught the way the lens is pointing

but where I’m looking I can see these huge cliffsides,

Madeira is extremely vertical.

So I started wondering what Mo's project could be in Madeira

and very quickly came up with this idea of the gravity battery.

So essentially in a nutshell, the gravity battery,

it’s a device that works as a storage medium

so you still use your solar panels or wind turbines,

any renewable energy generation technique, but that energy

is generated if it’s sunshine often when people are at work or away from home,

when they don’t need the power.

The only solution to that right now is to sell it back to the grid,

so that’s the owners of the infrastructure,

and year on year on year they’ve been reducing the price that they buy back for, making it unviable.

With the gravity battery what we allow people to do is to use this solar energy to lift a mass

into the air and with a lot of the cliffsides in the madeiran communities that can be

anything from 10-14 all the way through 500 meters of verticality.

So the more height you have the more time you have to drop the mass and the more energy you can essentially store.

So you lift the mass during the daytime and then when you need the energy you come home from work,

it’s dark, there’s no sunshine anymore you can release the mass it falls through space,

via a gearbox, turning a generator to generate electricity.

It’s all open source,

so we’re removing the role of big corporations of large manufacturing plants,

we're making it quite easy to build, so the current version is using a motorcycle engine

that we found in a local breaker’s yard, it’s very cheap,

so we’re appropriating the motorcycle gearbox

because they’re very accurate and already made

and then we just play around with the gearing and play around with the mass,

play around with the drop speed and we can adapt it to many differents domestic products.

in Nimes we have coined the term "inhabitability" of a world.

We say that design can attempt

to maintain or augment

the world’s "inhabitability" for its inhabitants, men and women.

We interpret the verb "inhabit" on several levels.

The primary level is obviously material,

meaning inhabiting a space sheltered from weather conditions, etc. I won’t dwell on this level.

Then you have inhabitability from a vital perspective,

where you need to stay healthy,

so in a way the inhabitability

of your organic

and biological body.

Then we speak of psychosocial inhabitability,

where you need to live with other inhabitants, men and women,

and here again it is not always an easy thing to do.

Lastly there is an ultimate interpretation of inhabitability I sometimes call spiritual or cultural,

which means: really inhabiting as a human being and not as an animal

and therefore it is the human being’s ability to create a cultural world

that is pleasant to live in, grow in and flourish in,

and so it is at that level that we interpret inhabitability.

My name is Laura Pandelle, I work as a designer for an association called La 27e région

and we define ourselves as laboratory for action-research on French public policy.

By public policy we mean all the artefacts, services and all the processes that are

put in place by the public power, i.e. the state and local authorities,

to help citizen’s lives as citizens.

This mission dates back to the creation of the association

which aims at holding surgeries, immersing ourselves in a public facility, which could be a school, a train station, a hospital

and we live there.

Our team being made up of sociologists, architects, designers and sometimes artists.

We live on site and we try and understand what is not working in that public facility

what the problem is.

Are there situations when people become aggressive or violent in some facilities,

are there stressed people or complaints,

are there tensions between professionals, a lack of understanding, of signage.

We need to live there, meet with people, spend time with them and ask questions to all local stakeholders

and then, once we’ve made the diagnosis through this experience

and through our questioning of user’s expertise rather than that of decision-makers,

we can act, suggest and test some solutions while being on site.

This table started with a detail.

I discovered a small metal part

in the courtyard of my grandparents

and that metal part was turned

to give more stability to a specific function.

So normally you have a metal,

a metal part that is just straight like that,

it brings no stability in this direction

because it’s like a paper, a sheet of paper which is like that

but a lot of stability in this direction,

and if you turn it,

it brings three-dimension, it becomes more stable.

*Works that Work* is a magazine,

my background is design and I noticed that I don’t read many design magazines,

for various reasons.

I think the biggest reason is that they often stay in a bubble,

they’re written by designers for designers

and they exclude a larger public.

You can really see that the most-specialised magazine becomes the more elitist

or excluding other public

and designers think that their work is relevant to wider audience.

Designers believe that their work can change the world,

they believe that their work applies to all level of society and different walks of life

but in practice discussions in design remain very isolated.

So I wanted to see if there was a possibility to create a publication which was about design but not for designers

that talks about the virtues,

that talks about the purpose, that talks more about

ideas than appearances.

I have to say that the magazine succeeded for me because my brother reads it and he finds it relevant,

he finds that

it doesn’t contain jargon, it doesn’t talk about how things look like

but it talks about very simple basic things:

how you can improve a quality of life on differents places,

they are very practical things, like how one can solve traffic situations without

bringing traffic signs,

really basic things like how

globalisation happened because of simple

improvement of logistics.

When we started *Works that Work*

it was clear that we wanted to find the most direct way to get to the readers

to cut anything which is in between

and also the magazine is really funded by readers not by someone else

there’s no external sources of funding.

*Works that Work* wants to examine often ignored areas of design.

In the spirit of this aim we also intend to bypass traditional distribution networks

which typically take the largest part of the cover price,

as well as control where the publication will be sold and at what price.

Instead we would like to deepen our relationship with our readers

and make them partners in this enterprise, we call this social distribution.

So we have a so-called readers clubs where people will just get stacks of magazine,

for their friends,

and in return we can give them the magazine for the price which is normally for the distributors,

so they’re getting it for half-price

so it’ a win-win situation.

We created the most direct connection with the reader

and they get rewarded because we bypass all the distribution chain.

Designers are not just about creating a new object or a new product or a new service,

it’s thinking about this object in the context of people’s life

with consequences, with problems, with limits, with opportunities with drawbacks

and the more the designers anticipate those things

the better it would be because they would

realign or re-adjust their projects.

Well, Refugeye is a project I developped internally

it’s a very simple project, it’s an app

that works from a smartphone and which enables simplified communication between refugees

citizens and organisations, charities etc. through pictogrammes.

The interface is very simple, it’s an interface in which there is a group of pictogrammes, of symbols,

I can search in lots of different languages, in farsi, english

cyrillic and russian, you name it.

And then I can drag the pictogrammes I have chosen onto my phone and they show up in big,

I can number them in order of priority, I can circle them, crossed them out, write over them.

And that way, without words,

I can explain concepts that can be difficult or sensitive, about censorship, fleeing one’s country

sexuality, torture etc.

so quite a lot of concepts that can be difficult and complex to discuss.

I financed it myself, I conceived it from insights, user-tests etc.

so I really followed a specific process

and then I transferred everything to an open-source platform, I freed the project as much as I could

and to day it is being used by refugees,

I think they use it on SOS Mediterranee

and Bibliothèques sans Frontières also installed the app alongside their other tools.

So that’s how I work, I develop and disseminate something,

either it gathers interest or doesn’t, I’m just testing things out

and if it doesn’t there are a thousand other projects to develop.

So that’s the kind of things I’m trying to develop increasingly.

I think I have been a bit of a maverick my whole career,

I’ve always whether it’s in architecture, not enjoying

or believing any economic models to which we built

whether it was commercial projects I was given in industrial design and

working around these briefs.

I think I’ve always been

motivated by the lack of something in the world

that I felt I should, you know, the need for

privacy and security are issues that are or have and always will be important.

But we are at a time where we have more and more

devices, products and services connected to the internet,

more organisations connected to the web as well

and there’s more personal data being produced and collected

and right now we are in a position where,

as users we have little to no control of any of that.

There is an opportunity I think

for design to come in and to rebalance some of that,

to start thinking about how we can design services that empower people.

So I’ve started IF

really out of frustration that privacy and security were not being looked at

in any meaningful way

in organisations a few years ago,

now I think the landscape has changed quite considerably,

I think the political landscape has pushed some of that,

but more and more when I talk to people about what I do

rather than them going:

“why would you do that”, “why is that interesting”,

they’re like “that’s so important I’m so glad to find someone who’s actually looking at this”.

Privacy is a cornerstone of freedom,

without question the digital era in

communication technologies will heighten concern

about the sensitivity of personal information

that can be collected or disclosed about individual citizens

and the ever increasing pervasiveness

of such data collection.

In any job you’ll find some people go too far,

we speak of aggressive therapy in health

that’s a professional act going too far,

are there similar excesses in design?

Of course there are, designers are no more perfect than anyone else,

therefore they are subject to the same temptations.

The main one being the artist’s temptation,

the artist’s temptation to be arrogant,

the temptation to sign their name,

the temptation to be on the glossy cover of a magazine,

the temptation to be a celebrity, nothing less.

This notion

that great designers can be celebrities

because they're putting more shit into the world,

yes, design is for me a very problematic industry.

What other industry makes celebrities of people

designing things only a few can afford.

Designer as an author

whose

perspective is just great and should

do their work out of their genius creativity.

There is all sorts of myths about designer’s creativity that

leave the designers interested in people, in field research kind of

partly out of the picture.

It’s not necessarily true for all the designers but

I think there is a tendency

for a lot of commercial designers to not be interested in

actual people but more about their perspective and the myth about people.

About the dangers related to Design,

I think it is

the empowerment of design.

Well the things that could affect design is design answering to marketing

or to other types of forces.

A bit like when you talk about green-washing,

I’m wary of design that would be used as human-washing,

where all of a sudden all companies, even the worst ones, become ethical, social, politically engaged, altruistic, etc.

And if design colludes with this type of highjacking

then I think design becomes a weapon to manipulate others.

Gosh I think design has got a lot of challenges

because for many organisations they don’t even realise that design should be at the table for these meetings, right

So not only you’re talking about ethics, you’re also talking about design should be here,

like we have a legitimate reason to be

in this conversation, as part of this decision.

So we’re in many places still

not being considered as important in these companies.

Having said that,

when you bring ethics into the conversation

I think the challenges designers face is that

technology has been moving incredibly quickly,

if you’ve not been keeping up, yet,

like you need to start looking at that right now

because you’ve got a lot to learn

and I think that’s not meant to sound scary or, like, threatening,

if this means something to you, you need to dedicate some time to it and you need to

get talking to people who understand:

backend systems, how that works,

get talking to economists about the information economy,

form some opinions, form some useful opinions anyway

about that stuff.

So I think there’s challenges

this world has been moving and changing very quickly

and if you’re not keeping up it’s quite a gap to jump.

It’s the only way we can practice responsible design I think

is through understanding the complexity of the world in which we’re operating.

The problem with design at the moment it reduces that complexity,

it simplifies it and makes it banal,

because it has this very very simple goal of making good products.

Define good is the problem,

design better is the problem

and I think this is the problem with design,

it’s got a very naive view of what it’s good and what is preferable.

We use these two words often but do we really know what they mean?

Morality focuses on absolute right and wrong,

it defines what is forbidden, encouraged or permitted.

Of course, it always depends on the era and social context,

for example, Christian morality was not the same in the 11th century or the 20th century

and varied between European countries.

Ethics is the fundamental thought behind what it means to act well

for you and for others.

This means that ethics does not say what is right or wrong,

rather, it shows you the road you should take to live better.

There are three main theories to explain an “ethical” act:

Virtue ethics, says that if man has virtuous characteristics such as honesty, wisdom or courage,

he will have good intentions and so will act in an “ethical” way.

Deontology focuses on the conduct that should be followed for an action to be “ethical”,

independent of its consequences.

For example, medical deontology obliges doctors to treat all sick patients

whoever they may be.

Consequentialism determines whether an act is “ethical” by evaluating its consequences.

It judges actions based on their observable results

rather than on the intention of the actor

which would be more difficult to know or to prove.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish ethics from morality

as the two are intrinsically linked.

We can say that ethics tends to be universal

but is constantly reinterpreting what is the best way to live

for you and others.

Morality defines a group of rules and norms

which are only relevant to an individual or social group at a given moment.

First and foremost I think of Ethics as a process,

I think it’s a process by which we

we sort come to understand the way the world ought to be.

So I think science tells us this is the way things are in the world,

I think Ethics tells us this is the way things ought to be.

And so I think it has a lot of resonances with design,

but I think design tells us what we can do even what we want to do

but it doesn’t tell us what we must do and I think this is the unique

purview of Ethics.

On the question of ‘good’, we know that a computer programme is a good one,

because a good programme is a programme

that correctly executes its code,

doesn’t bug,

works smoothly.

However if we had to define a ‘good’ programme from an ethical perspective

what would it be?

What would be the criteria for this

and how would we evaluate those criteria?

Would a good programme,

a good software, a good app

help increase the well-being of humans?

And what would the criteria for this well-being, in which cases?

What would be the criteria from a technical perspective

to increase

well-being, open-mindedness, creativity, user’s autonomy?

So my first question was “can Ethics be computable?”

and at some point it was more… so I did a project about autonomous vehicles

where I was trying to find,

I was confronting different vehicles to the trolley dilemma,

some kind of trolley dilemma.

So if the car is confronted to a car crash

there’s not really a proper solution to it.

Let’s say you have to choose between 3 people or 2 people,

so which Ethics you have to apply to them?

And here it was more a design question

because you have to ask what kind of ethics you are going to implement in this car

and who is going to decide for which ethics should be inside this car,

knowing that this car will work for

a lot of different people with different cultures and so on.

And after even the problem was more complicated, let’s say if this car

is manufactured, let’s say by BMW,

as a car with ethics that work well in Germany

but BMW exports a lot of their cars, let’s say in China

so all the ethics will adapt to a context like China.

So this was for autonomous vehicles but

if we look at products as a whole it was more like

how something as subjective as ethics can be

implemented into a generally manufactured good

and how it can adapt to different contexts.

Eventually I think that in all these tendencies related to design

there is something that’s very potent

and that’s the need that leads companies to that stage.

The role of the designer is to follow or influence this tendency,

certainly not to be submitted to it.

So each time we have been led down a particular path

we have always tried, not to change path and create a rupture,

but to say ok, you think that’s the need

but if we push things this way, are you ready to go there or not.

What I find amazing is that

over the last 3-4 years the profession has changed completely,

our teams have changed completely

because if you want to do good design in an organisation whatever its sector or its size,

I think you need to have

this ability to deal with services, UX, architecture, training,

to work with the cultural side of companies, the economic side of cultural institutions

and to be a lot more global.

It’s a huge opportunity because we find ourselves at certain levels

of responsibility on projects that are exactly what we were looking for.

If you look historically at the role of design,

design is a service-based discipline

and that’s why designers do where the money is coming from,

if someone hires them to do whatever they’ll do it.

And very often it’s to stimulate business,

it’s to stimulate economy,

and lot of ideas like designers can potentially have

they can bring social change but in practice

they’re hired to sell more stuff,

to increase consumerism.

Most of designers who work on new products,

they’re not bringing something new but they try to increase sales of something new,

they’re bringing, you know, psychological obsolescence of objects is built into objects.

The reason why we need

new cars, new shoes, new clothes to make you feel like the old one is inadequate

which is often not the case,

like you don’t really need to replace everything all the time.

The idea that technology improves our lives,

I’ve mentioned this point a little while ago but,

design is really at the heart of that.

So if I work for a company and I’m developing a new product,

that product will be better than the previous version

and the lifestyle that I will have as a result of owning this product will be

a more pleasurable lifestyle than the one I would have if I didn’t own this product.

So it becomes impossible for anybody developing a new product

to say this product is gonna be great but it could go wrong in these ways.

When I was working at Google in the US

I had this realisation that

there is more technology in my life than ever before

but for some reason it felt harder to do all the things I wanted to do with myself.

I felt like there was something fundamentally off in that situation

because if technology is for anything

it seems like it’s for helping us live better, do the things you want to do better

achieve our goals, live by our values.

I’m thinking of Bruno Latour, who was describing

several ways in which technical objects prescribe our behaviour.

You have the objects that force you, that will force you to act as do the underground turnstiles,

you have the objects that will persuade us to act like speed cameras on roads

and the objects that will seduce us or influence our behaviour without any rational reason.

For instance a road that is straight for kilometers on end will incite us to drive faster,

this is not a rational influence on our behaviour.

You can see now I’ve no hands on the wheel,

so it does not require a constant nag or anything like that.

Like if you go to a secondary school right now,

everyone out of lessons is like this,

and scrolling,

and the endorphins people experience from

the rush of likes they get for a selfie.

I mean I’m being really critical and also I’m broadbrush about it

but someone designed that

and someone designed the experience that they’re going through,

someone designed the likes.

And they have been in board meetings, and presentations and user research sessions,

understanding the effect that has on people

but yet that’s the kind of design work we’re pushing out right now.

In the political…

in the political situation we find ourselves in right now,

I think it would be wrong for designers to continue,

designing experiences for digital solipsism,

this idea that we are alone in the world with our piece of technology and we have no impact.

For instance

in infinite newsfeed like on Twitter or Facebook,

what the psychological mechanism there is the same that is used with slot machines.

It’s a kind of randomising of the reward,

because if you think about an infinite feed it’s just a constant never ending stream of rewards to be had,

informational rewards

and when you scroll down, pull down the refresh, you’re sort of pulling the lever on a slot machine.

Basically by sort of privileging our impulses over our intentions,

things like infinite feeds,

they select for us a certain set of impulsive reactions

and I think in politics outrage is a huge one.

But of course they are others that are eventually positive like I think the feeling of awe

or cuteness, or cute kitty photos,

but I think it’s not the question will we be outraged or will we be

having experiences of awe.

It’s more about like will those be moving us towards what you want to be moved towards.

Will they, as Aldous Huxley put it, helping us be irrational in a reasonable way.

Is the system fundamentally on our side is the question ultimately.

Actually right now I’m working on projects that are totally

against my own ethical,

what I studied before.

One of the recent projects I had to work on was a robot delivering pizza,

in Pizza Hut+ in Shanghai.

You develop this robot or you participate in its development,

you know it will affect a lot of people,

a lot of people in China cannot afford to have good studies

and they rely on

to feed their families, on small jobs such as waiter.

And you know that this robot,

when it will go on the market it will make people lose a lot of jobs

but then if I don't do it myself I don't get a salary.

And that’s why it’s an important thing about ethics,

a lot of designers speak about ethics,

sure maybe they have some kind of ethical belief and so on but

how far are you going to sacrifice yourself to really apply your own ethical belief,

and that’s I think a big issue in the design field.

Perhaps the canonical example here is the bench

that is supposed to prevent people living on the streets to sleep on.

When I did this project about designers and ethnography

I interviewed a designer working for the public transport company in Paris

and he told that “yeah I had to design that bench,

I was asked to design a bench on which people could not sleep

so the're wouldn't be bums on the benches”.

Ok that’s kind of tricky in terms of your ethics,

what do you think about that?

“So yeah well I had two options either

I did it or I was just fired”.

That’s the kind of boundary or extreme limit

in which where do designers sit,

can they exert their strategic perspective

or are they just not allowed to do much more than

saying yes ok I’m gonna do this bench.

It’s a hard choice, again like it’s easier for me now,

of course in the beginning it’s more difficult because you’re more dependent,

we have enough work now so I can be more selective.

In the beginning I was lucky that

we’re coming from cultural sector where there is less difficult choices,

now over time I can make these choices now after 15 or 17 years of working

because you built a position to be in this place.

I think every choice you make kind of comes back to you sooner or later,

if you engage with some kind of strange product

it will come back to you as well, you’ll get more of it, the simple principle is that,

whatever you do you get more of it.

So if you start doing something you don’t agree with it

you’ll probably get more of the same questions to do it again and again

and people become experts in doing this kind of things.

Then there is also the whole process

of taking a step back and of being able to say no

or to reformulate commissions that we judge non ethical

or contradictory, or not helpful to citizens.

And when that’s the case I’d say each designer will know

where they position themselves between their economic survival

and their desire to… or rather their professional activism,

and whether they will focus more on the commissioner or on the user.

Design so often happens in this vaccuum,

where we spend all of our time thinking about form,

materiality, of function, of how we interact with a thing

but always almost in this bubble.

We think about very really rarely what’s outside of this bubble

about the real lives, about the real systems in which people live

and as a consequence this is where problems lie.

Because we have to think about the world in which our products exist

and there is as much complexity that we can possibly cope with

because they’re incredibly complicated.

And I came across this very recently this exact problem

in a conversation with

probably one of the most talented designers I know, product designers,

he’s been practicing for a small company in London

since we graduated from the RCA, we were in the same year.

He’s just taken a job at Amazon as a kind of higher product designer

and I was just talking with him about this idea of ethics and responsibility

because I’m slightly

concerned about some of the things Amazon is currently doing.

Alexa,

would you lie to me?

I always try to tell the truth,

I’m not always right but I will never intentionally lie to you or anyone else

For him he was shocked that I could be questioning

the value of what he's doing.

He thinks he’s contributing amazing things to the world

but he’s thinking on this scale,

he’s thinking about the beautiful products that he makes

and this is the danger within design.

If you rethink things from the bottom

then you could completely do something different

and the magazine is at the,

the financing, the distribution, the production, everything

it felt like ok if we’re doing a new magazine,

we don't have to inherit any existing old platforms or plans,

we can just do it from scratch.

I find it’s very important

to make designers understand the value of the humanities and social sciences

by showing for instance that if you look at history

of technologies for instance, of this sort of products

it can show you that things have been different in the past.

So by using this understanding what has been different in the past

it’s a way to make designers aware that things should be different in the future

and that you can maybe adapt more ethical choices.

So that’s for history,

anthropology, it shows that in different cultures,

in different places, in different territories in the world,

there are different ways to live and by showing that

that’s also a way to question a design brief, question product, question existing services.

So I take this kind of example of history:

how things have been different in the past,

anthropology: how things are different elsewhere,

as a way, well, as a sort of metaphor

to think about how design education should

open mindset and not necessarily make designers

answer to the client question in a way

it would be a sort of status quo.

We need to have like an open mind if you want

to live in a more habitable near-future world.

We do need I believe

more organizations to start talking about and opening up

some of the patterns that they are exploring and creating,

because we’ve got a window of opportunity right now to come up with some ethical patterns

whether that be about privacy or security or transparency

for people, for generations to come to copy.

Like if you think about a payment window for credit card on an online service

you never really see a different version of that, and if I ask you right now to design me a credit card service

you’ll picture the one you used last week and kind of copy that.

Designers are really good at copying each other

but when it comes to ethics I don’t think we’ve got any blueprints to copy.

So I think we have a window of opportunity, a very exciting opportunity,

to make some of these patterns and guidelines for people to follow

so I think that’s a really big challenge because without these patterns,

it’s more expensive, it’s more time-consuming

to bring ethics into your work

and that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it

but it’s just that the barriers are there

and there’s more obstacles to get past.

And I think that the more difficult the context

the more resistant to a critical approach to design

the more interesting it is.

Because if you manage to influence a large company

which is very difficult to negotiate,

if you manage to influence them 1% or 2% in the first year,

in five years time you’ve done that much,

that’s huge, and you feel that with a little bit of influence

you can do a lot to a big outfit so I find this interesting.

So what happens if design starts to happen locally

the way we’re talking about consuming energy locally.

So this is the principle in the gravity battery, the energy being something local,

being through the wall, so you can see the energy that you’re consuming

but also to design a product that can be done locally.

So local manufacturers, local skills,

using local crafts people perhaps,

it’s very much the whole idea of open source hardware

of sharing knowledge,

a lot of the maker labs or maker spaces are talking about this stuff.

You know I think there’s a number of things designers can do,

one of the first thing is kind of just awareness

that there is a problem.

There’s is a lot of optimism in the tech industry,

a lot of it is well justified,

but a lot of it is I think

not as sensitive to

what in economic terms you can called externalities of the design.

So things like distraction would be one of these things

whether that’s a minor annoyance or

a habit that you develop over time that keeps you from being able to reach your goals.

The reason designers don't really see this it’s we don't measure them,

it’s kind of like pollution was in the environmental movement.

We knew that stuff was getting dumped into rivers,

we knew there was some kind of harm to the environment

but it wasn't until we started measuring it and quantifying it

then we could actually talk about it and hold

the people doing the polluting to account.

And I think it’s a similar situation here

where we kind have a vague notion that there is something wrong

in a deep way with distraction

and the way in which we get habituated into

being how we don't want to be.

But I think we’re still at the very beginning

of figuring out how to talk about that and measure it,

but I think once we do

I think the goal ought to be doing for

our mental environment what we did for the physical environment

with the environmental movement.

So I think that involves then

new responsibilities on the part of companies and designers

to not just measure the value that they’re getting

but the value they’re giving to people but then also

the potential harms or negative effect that the design is causing.

At first sight

there doesn't seem to be much relationship between farming and industry,

but industry produces pollution,

and pollution affects crops,

so a change in industry affects farming by pollution.

The man-made world consists of a whole complex of subtle relationships like that

change one thing

and it sets up a slow and complicated chain reaction.

Understanding is really, is in a way the key,

like if you understand things,

you respect things,

and if you respect things then,

you take care about things

and then everything's not fine

but better.

Virtuous ethics revolve around the qualities

that a good designer

should integrate

should control or

should apply

in order to do a good job,

except of course the virtue of professional competence and mastering design practice,

these are important

but not sufficient.

I have difficulty framing recommendations for others,

again it’s the same with any piece of advice,

I think the best piece of advice is like to be sceptical of other people’s advice

because I think nowadays there’s too much information available everywhere

and everyone is providing clear-cut answers

like how to do things, there’s books on how to do that how to do this.

You can see ten tips to improve whatever,

from your sex life to your design skills to whatever,

I think people should stop paying attention to these things

and start paying attention to themselves.

So I think developing sceptical attitude

towards other people’s advice because it’s not relevant

is a key.

The main quality, which has been there since the beginning

and stayed throughout all the various steps Sismo has been undergoing is dialogue.

And even more tomorrow

with all these tools for everyone which keep isolating us,

the role of the designer is to create dialogue, that’s the only thing that works.

The more people the more we need to talk,

to hear each other, to learn to argue with each other

and the role of a project is sometimes to simply create a dialogue.

It’s not the result,

it’s what type of dialogue I managed to create

around this project

and I think that the value of dialogue is rising compared to the value of production.

We went from

the value of design, i.e. the number of parts you will be selling at the end,

I think that tomorrow the value of design will be

how important was the dialogue you managed to create,

between how many stakeholders,

with which social and cultural differences,

on what proportion of land.

I would say inquisitiveness, first,

remembering that we are

an experimental subject

which might have disappeared in a few decades

and therefore you must really enjoy yourself,

test ideas and be bold enough

to mix methodologies and approaches.

That’s it, professional inquisitiveness

and the ability to work with non-designers,

it’s a very important

virtue.

I think honesty,

now I feel I’m not.

For example I’m working on projects that are against my own ethics,

so I don't want to go to designer conferences to speak about my research

because I don't feel…

It was right to speak about it at the time I was doing it

but now I don't feel it’s right to speak about it

when I’m actually doing the opposite of

what I believe.

On the blog we’ve got

it’s almost a manifesto but Philippe Starck features in one of our challenges,

it’s to get rid of vacuous design bullshit.

So Philippe Starck talks about the Juicy Salif lemon squeezer as,

this juicy salif lemon squeezer is meant to,

it’s not to squeeze lemon, it’s to start conversations.

This is the line.

It’s a lemon squeezer I don't know what kind of conversations he’s expecting or hoping

to start with that particular object.

So I don't know if this is the most important virtue

but it’s one that is really important to me right now.

I think designers who are interested in ethics

and who are

wanting to better their practice,

the virtue you should have or you could learn is to be open.

I think we have so much to thank open source communities

that have built so many of the infrastructures we rely on

but also,

really right now,

to bring ethics into digital products

which is my world of ethics, it’s really digital,

there is so much work to be done

if we

do brilliant work and make it closed,

it will have

a limited effect on any design we see around us.

I mean I suppose one of the most important virtues for a designer

to cultivate will be care,

care for the user.

Because you know you can be the best designer in the world technically

but if you don't care about the person you’re designing it for,

their life and their success,

your really effective design

might be effective in the wrong direction, it could make their life worse.

I think of ethics,

a lot of people thinks of ethics as a brake pedal on innovation,

they say it’s just another box to tick on a document,

it’s an other committee,

but I think of it less as a brake pedal and more as a steering wheel

and if not an accelerator even sometimes.

You know it’s like a tree I just try to grow

and as more as I grow,

the more space I take but not for nothing,

I take more space also to cover other things.

It’s pretty much like

in nature in the end.

technical direction and development
Sylvain Julé
art direction and graphic design
Clément Le Tulle-Neyret

direction, production and animation
Gauthier Roussilhe
translation
Elise Leclerc

audio post-production and mix
Miroslav Pilon
voiceover
Victoria Stephens
music curation
Sébastien Robert

music
S.A.M. - *Baby I'm Sorry, Alone In A Crowd, Two Hearts In Doubt* - DJ Sports - *Phases Of Winds, The Secret Jog Life* - Trux - *Aziol*

Thank you for your time.