I attended the “Better World by Design” conference in Providence, Rhode Island USA from Friday 7 to Sunday 9 November. The conference was held at the campuses of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design and it was jointly organised by a committee of students from both institutions. I would say the conference was a phenomenal success, with a line-up of influential and knowledgeable speakers together with useful networking events and a couple of fun parties.

The aim was to bring together a community of designers and other professionals to interact and engage with students through a joint discussion of the potential for design in its broadest sense to advance the cause of sustainability across the world. We were encouraged to think big and keep an open mind. After 3 days, I came away with a lot of great new contacts and a stack of new ideas.

Better x Design

Better x Design is a blog, a networking group and a conference. I’ll be writing a series of articles on our blog in the next few days, reflecting on what I learned at the conference. It would be great to see more of this sort of event, from time to time, in the UK. Greengaged at the Design Council runs along similar lines but Better x Design raised the bar for big-thinking sustainability gatherings with a world view.
Read more »

Pli has just started using a wiki-based knowledge management system to gather together our materials research, project development and conceptual thinking. Charlotte Arvidsson has pulled this project together brilliantly and has created a simple, elegant platform for us to preserve and evaluate what we know and what we do. The materials database part of the wiki will be made available to the public soon, with the aim of providing our practical know-how about sustainable materials to anybody who may benefit. Other parts of the system are available to partners in order to assist our collaborative product development.

MediaWiki

We selected the MediaWiki free wiki software package because it’s the software Wikipedia runs on, so everyone is already familiar with the look and feel. Charlotte has been really careful to keep to the maxim of Ward Cunningham that a wiki should be “the simplest online database that could possibly work.”

The great thing about this way of organising our knowledge is that it allows us to pull together the information we acquire in our day-to-day work, with virtually limitless extendibility. So project schedules, concepts, contacts and data loop through each other in a way that reminds me of Douglas Adams tongue-in-cheek assertion of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things“. The only way to make it work is to keep it simple.

We have now set up a Pli facebook group with the intention of creating an open forum for product development inspired by Cameron Sinclairs talk on ‘open source design’ which can be viewed in a previous post. Social networking can be a very effective tool for connecting designers with end users and so we aim to create a space where everyone can share views and ideas on Pli’s products. This could involve what people like about what we’re doing and what they feel could be improved as well as discussing product development, choosing colours/finishes and coming up with concepts for completely new products. The move towards a more collaborative design approach where consumers aid decision making right the way through the product development process is yet another step to improving our products.

Please feel free to join our group and post any ideas or thoughts you have to kick off our new open forum design group. To start off we’d like to know what colour frame you’d like to see on the Reee Chair? Choose from any of these RAL Colours and we’ll render and upload a chair with your frame.

A screen shot of Pli's Facebook group page