Ilkka Suppanen (b 1968) is one of the world’s most-loved Nordic designers. He was launched into the media spotlight in 1997, when he and three other young Finnish designers, having formed the co-operative Snowcrash, exhibited at the Il Salone furniture fair in Milan. Since then, he has won numerous international design awards, the most recent being the prestigious Torsten and Wanja Söderberg prize earlier this year.
Although a product designer by trade, Ilkka is interested in how design can solve more complex challenges. “Design,” he says, “is basically changing existing situations into preferred ones.” He believes designers’ skills have never been more needed. “Solving problems is a designer’s job,” he continues. “Designers today need to share their processes with the world, so that we can start the deep collaboration needed to make radical, incremental change.”
This conviction that design needs to change was crystallised when Ilkka travelled to São Paulo in 2011. He was invited by Dr Maria Cecília Loschiavo at the University of São Paulo to meet Coopamare, a self-organised co-operative of catadores, or urban recyclable-material collectors.
Maria had asked Ilkka to explore how design can help increase the income of these collectors, but he soon realised the co-operative needed more “design” work than a single product idea. The collectors work around the clock, seven days a week, to support themselves and their families, and many of them are homeless. But despite the obvious challenges, Coopamare is very organised. They are part of an established national network and have contacts in other waste-collecting networks in other countries. Any improvements Coopamare can achieve can be transferred across their network. As megacities increase in size, so does the “informal” economy of people struggling to support themselves outside the formal system. Ilkka saw that Coopamare is at the forefront of global change.
Coopamare’s members demonstrated their deeply specialised knowledge and wide range of skills for handling all types of recyclable materials, from the deconstruction of mobile phones and electronics, to identifying all types of metals and plastics. Every material you can think of that does not go to landfill passes through such co-operatives. They are grass-roots grids of co-creative, self-organised intelligence. However, although they are organised like the internet, they barely have any access to the internet. A huge opportunity is being missed: the social aspect of sustainability.
Ilkka called me to discuss what design should be doing. Theoretically, service design should help to increase the efficiency of the existing process, and extend the collection services to new customers, as well as lead to the design of new services. Product development could explore how low-value materials such as paper could be turned into a simple product, such as a packaging or insulation material, and sold back to existing business customers.
Communications design could get householders and other stakeholders to use their services, which in turn could increase recycling as a whole. Additional incentives could be designed into the system with the aim of meaningfully engaging local government, local businesses and global brands. Lawmakers also need more information so laws can support the collectors rather than hindering or even criminalising them. Industrial design got us into this mess. Transformation design can co-create the solutions.
Ilkka and I travelled back to São Paulo with Karina Vissonova, an innovation planner, to map out Coopamare’s process, as well as to offer suggestions for immediate improvement and work with Maria’s PhD students at the university.
Coopamare explained how they never used the words “waste” or “trash”, because so much waste is avoidable. They explained how, when a certain toxic blue dye is used on a fabric softener bottle, it cannot be recycled; how slightly reducing the thickness of the same bottle would dramatically reduce costs and waste; and how mobile phones are packed with lithium, gold and other valuable metals that could be easily reclaimed, but instead are being left to poison our environment.
“Please tell the companies,” said Coopamare’s members. One of them showed how he could list the characteristics of plastic or polymer just by listening to the sound it makes when crushed in his hand. Another explained that recycling mobile phones was their most lucrative form of income and wanted us to ask mobile-phone companies to send them old phones to dismantle. Another requested a simple machine that would help them disassemble aerosol cans for recycling.
There has been so much talk about design thinking in the past decade, but it’s design for the few. The world is suffering from a design divide: those who have access to smartphones and bottled water, and those who don’t. But design can help develop value networks that endorse meaningfulness, connectivity, value and identity for every stakeholder involved. The sum of all parts can easily enable incremental value for the network, and for society — if that is the shared vision.
Add information technology into the mix and the impact can be rapid and exponential. The key to genuine value generation lies in localised value-network innovation. As a network grows exponentially, so should new opportunities for mutual-value development.
With this thinking, Ilkka and I have gone on to set up the Club of Helsinki, a network of professionals working with innovation. Today, the Club of Helsinki is a non-profit organization offering strategic support for organisations that want to explore value-network innovation. The Club of Helsinki aims to connect networks together, support social entrepreneurship start-ups and raise awareness among organisations that are new to design services.
The Club of Helsinki continues its work with the catadores. Like angels, Coopamare and other recyclable-material pickers across the world help turn wasted trash into wanted resources. They perform an invaluable service to society, but just like angels, they are unrecognised and invisible.
Credits:
Words by Tanya Kim Grassley
Portrait by Pierre Björk