The Answer to Everything

A BICYCLE SALESMAN ON TENTH AVENUE AND FIFTY-EIGHTH STREET in Manhattan offers practical wisdom to customers who walk into the store to buy their first serious bike. His body speaks with road-tested authority before he does, with quadriceps the size of footballs and calves that look as if they were blown up with a bicycle pump. Tutorials include demos on changing flats, adjusting seats, working gears on tricky hills, and getting out of toe clips in time to avoid toppling sideways toward the pavement, bike in hand.

"I'll give you one more piece of advice," he says. "You're going to be inclined to stare at the pothole or the curb or open cab door when you're out on the streets, thinking that's the best way not to hit it. Don't. Look at the space beside it, no matter how narrow. Because what you look at is where you'll go."

Somewhat more eloquently, the philosopher William Irwin Thompson said that, like fly-fishers, "we cast images in front of ourselves and then slowly reel ourselves into them, turning them into reality." The point is pretty much the same whether you're riding a bike, catching a fish, or trying to imagine a future for humankind.

But it's the concreteness of the bike salesman's wisdom that makes it brilliant, the specificity of it that connects our pothole-level reality with the loftiest universal ideals.

Instead of staring into the dismal picture put out by twenty-four-hour-a-day media and entertainment, trapping ourselves in an endless inventory of what's wrong, can we picture the reality we want to see? That vision would be of a civilization with its best years still in the future: a world in which everyone who wants useful work has it and more than a handful of people have money and power, a world where industries aren't fighting over the remnants of extracted resources and we don't poison ourselves with toxic chemicals. Where we live in a state of mutuality with each other and with nature, not a frenzied destruction of her. Where the reasons to trust outweigh the need to protect.

This is not Oz I'm describing, or a naive vision of utopia, or blindness to the difficulties inherent in maintaining a species as ubiquitous, acquisitive, self-centered, and frequently violent as our own, but a vision that accepts our inherent character and channels its collective creativity in mostly benign, productive ways.

It's a civilization that would have a shot at first prize in any intergalactic design competition.

Unlike the traditional design processes that have formed so much of our modern society, social design is a methodology for changing the human condition. Not changing the world, as so many like to say, because the world itself is not in need of change. Social design is a system, first and foremost, for designing fundamental changes in ourselves: a shift in who we think we are, how we perceive and treat each other, what we believe is possible and can work together to create. It instills a belief in human agency and creativity and builds the capacity for communities to reimagine new stories and new realities for themselves.

"Social design" is a term that entered the lexicon around 2006. The name can be interpreted literally as the design (or redesign) of societies, at either ultralocal or large scales. It incorporates both the physical and the intangible, the human relationships that create communities and form societies.

Within the army of people already working to address social issues of poverty, equity, and their kin, the question inevitably arises (with varying degrees of suspicion) as to how social design is different from what they already do, and exactly what, at a pothole-specific level, it is.

Design has always been in service to what's next and, sometimes, to what is really needed. Social design is, in one way, simply design's evolutionary trajectory in relation to the effects of technology. Yet it is revolutionary. Almost nothing about it is new except its organization into a system and its application to human relationships instead of only artifacts. Yet that has never been done before. It's a particular combination of activities performed in a certain order, informed by a set of principles, and mastered through a combination of hard and soft skills. Yet it turns the established ways of working upside down.

There is nothing magical about it, although some like to make it seem that way. All those willing to invest themselves fully can learn to do it, and while much of it seems like logic too simple to merit study, significant rigor, discipline, and time are required to do it well. It doesn't guarantee success, but it does increase the odds of making things work for more people instead of only a few. Most of all, it changes anyone who practices it: social design puts us in touch with our own creativity, resourcefulness, and purpose.

Unlike designing with physical resources, social design is often intangible, disappearing into the evidence it produces — the polar opposite of making a fancy new car or phone, where there's a solid artifact for all to judge or admire. Yet the invisible forces that are the materials of social design control the way we think, the things we make, the way we act, and whether or not we'll succeed in finding a viable way to live and work together.

Nearly a quarter century ago, David Orr wrote Earth in Mind and called us out on the shoddy design of our industrial civilization. It's an understatement to say that for now, the situation has not improved. Not for lack of awareness, though, since the evidence is everywhere.

The drinking water in Flint, Michigan, poisons the city's residents. The air quality in Beijing poisons citizens there. Five hundred children under the age of five die every day in India from issues of contaminated water and poor sanitation. Babies are born with opioid addiction, costing billions of dollars in health care. Two out of three adults in the United States are either grossly overweight or obese, and the richest 1 percent are wealthier than the "bottom" 90 percent combined. Terrorists drive onto sidewalks in an effort to kill pedestrians. The Amazon jungle is being destroyed at the rate of one and one-half acres per second, and half of all the 22-million-year-old coral reefs on the planet have died in the past 30 years because of climate change. Without radical modification, our current trajectory leads only...