By Mark Wieczorek

This month in Copenhagen, more than 55 international economists, including five Nobel Laureates, will assess more than 50 solutions and assemble a list of priorities for everyone involved in solving the world’s biggest challenges. Will a group of experts come up with a better answer than a handful of experts or a single expert? What about the influence of group think - the kind of collective decision making that led the Kennedy administration to the Bay of Pigs fiasco? Is there wisdom in crowds or are crowds as dangerous as the economists tell us?

I believe the answer is “it depends.” There can be tremendous wisdom in crowds, if you ask the right questions and find a way to channel their answers properly. Put simply, if you ask 100 people a question, you’re about thousand times more likely to find one good answer than if you ask just one person. The trouble comes with sorting through all the answers to find the best one.

Anyone who’s been on the internet for a while knows that the internet is 90% people arguing about nothing in particular, 5% pictures of cats saying funny things, 3% emails from my aunt with pictures of cats saying funny things, and 2% actually useful stuff. Most of these people are smart, well educated, informed, and at least somewhat interested in what’s going on in the world. The trick is channeling people towards the stuff that’s interesting and productive - how can we turn everyday people into a Copenhagen Consensus?

This is precisely the sort of thing we try to do at DESIGN 21. Anthropologist, writer and lecturer Margaret Mead once said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” We believe that that small group’s passion can be amplified by being part of a larger whole and that by discussing issues & engaging designers we can come up with innovative solutions to problems.

Designers need information to do their jobs. We all do. Good information is paramount. Without a clear understanding of the problem to be solved, the constraints and so forth, you really can’t do a good job designing a solution. For example a recent article that my friend is fond of quoting shows that trading up from a Honda Civic (32 mpg) to a Toyota Prius (47 mpg) - a 46% increase in fuel efficiency would have just half the impact of someone with a Dodge Durango (16 mpg) trading up to a Toyota Tundra (23 mpg) - a 43% increase in efficiency. How is it that a 43% increase beats out a 46% increase? Simple - the 16 mpg Dodge Durango was twice as wasteful as the Honda Civic to begin with, so for every 100 miles the Dodge Durango drove, it was the same as the Honda Civic driving 200 miles. [ref]

In the United States, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations [wikipedia] currently exclude SUVs and light trucks over 8,500 lbs.

While, I don’t know the number of Dodge Durango’s on the road compared to Honda Civics, it may seem that bringing up the bottom may be a better use of design time than pushing the top ever higher. Perhaps serious engineering time should be spent making SUVs more efficient rather than making already fuel efficient compact cars even more efficient. This is exactly the sort of knowledge that must be promoted in the coming years if design is to address issues head on.

Design faces two serious issues as it becomes more conscious of its impact on the world. The first is how do you get the information from the people who have it - say, a new manufacturing procedure that produces less waste - to the people who need it, say, manufacturers. The second is, how do we, as designers, know we’re tackling the most important issues and not just the most convenient, or most popular issues. The answer to both of these questions is right here as you read this - the internet is doing an amazing job disseminating information and helping people make decisions. Over the next few articles, I’ll discuss how DESIGN 21 handles the challenge of herding the masses of witty cats and arrives at a consensus, what you can learn from it, and what we could be doing better.

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