Dr. Mark Breitenberg becomes the president to lead Icsid for the 2009-2011 term. He has served three terms on Icsid’s Executive Board, as board member for two terms and as President Elect 2007-2009.

In his first address to the membership on 27 November 2009, Dr. Breitenberg looked from past to future, encouraging further international and regional collaboration to create a world where design continues to enhance our social, cultural, economic and environmental
quality of life.

 

Friends and colleagues in Icsid,

It is an honor to be here today, addressing you as the new president of Icsid. When I consider all the past presidents who have held this position, all the people who have been part of this organisation for over fifty years, the great designers like Kenji Ekuan and Dieter Rams, and the remarkable contributions all of you here today have made to design, I can only say that this is a proud and humble moment for me.

As some of you know, my education is in the humanities: literature, Renaissance culture, philosophy, anthropology, art history, and critical theory. The world of ideas, mostly abstract.  But my life as an academic changed dramatically when I was introduced to design at Art Center College of Design ten years ago.  I saw quickly that design is about putting ideas into action, ideas that have an impact, ideas that can transform the world.  Designers do things, make things, out of ideas. I was hooked, and I have never looked back.

My education in art and design as ways of thinking and making has accelerated recently with my appointment as Provost of California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, a remarkably creative institution in one of the most innovative regions in the world. CCA was born out of the arts and crafts movement and still offers programs in the traditional (and now resurgent) crafts, but it has also invented new programs, such as our MBA in design strategy. The history and growth of art and design education over the last 100 years is written in the wide bandwidth of disciplines taught at CCA today.

And my own design education is also indebted to everything I’ve learned in my six years with Icsid. I’ve estimated that in this time I’ve traveled 342 days – almost a full year – and visited twenty-seven countries. Because of Icsid, my education in design has been international, and I have had some of the best teachers I could imagine – all of you. Through my work with Icsid, I have learned and seen the power of design to transform our lives, “to enhance our social, cultural, economic and environmental quality of life,” as our mission states. Seeing the impact of design changed my own career, and it continues to motivate my work as an art and design educator today.

Fifteen, perhaps twenty years ago, my background in the humanities would probably not have led to a career in design education, or the opportunity to lead an international design organisation. But as design has grown in scope and in the complexity of the problems it addresses, as design has begun to tackle problems in sustainability, urban life, health, hunger and poverty, it has needed to utilise knowledge and expertise from many disciplines outside design. Engineering and business have always intersected with design, but today it is difficult to find a field of study that does not traverse design in some way. And all these other fields are now discovering what design can offer – the translation of ideas into forms, a method of problem solving, visual communication – such that it is possible to say that design has become the lingua franca of our age, and designers, the very best at least, the Renaissance men and women of our time.

It is a great time to become the president of Icsid – we are a stronger organisation with greater resources than ever before. In my six years, Icsid has grown in many ways. The Secretariat in Montreal, a small but dedicated team, has become a powerful engine that drives our operations and produces creative thinking about our future. And the past 3 presidents here today have led significant changes in their terms of office: Luigi Ferrara, who conceived and directed our move to Montreal, a transformative moment in Icsid’s history; Peter Zec, who helped restore our financial solvency and led the development of the World Design Capital, a significant part of our portfolio; and my predecessor, Carlos Hinrichsen, whose leadership led to the growth of our regional networks and a new presence for Icsid in developing regions, especially Latin America. And he reminded us above all that we are a community with a big heart. Thank you Carlos.

In the next two years, as President, I want to learn from and extend the legacies of these past presidents. You have just elected a very talented and diverse Executive Board, representing nearly every part of the world. With their help, and with your involvement, I believe we can continue the growth, impact and stature of Icsid.

I would now like to introduce six themes that will guide my term as President and shape our goals and initiatives.

  1. Diversity. We will seek to build new partners and memberships, especially in developing design regions. Icsid members in countries with a longer and more established design history have the opportunity and responsibility to support (and learn from) emerging design cultures. Just as important is diversity of gender and generation – two of the keys to Icsid’s future, as well as diversity of opinion within our organisation, as we saw in the passionate debates this morning.
  2. Influence. We need to continue building new partnerships with non-design stakeholders around the world: governments, municipalities, NGO’s, business, economics, science and health, in order to influence their work and also to demonstrate the contributions design can make to their ambitions.
  3. Collaboration. The International Design Alliance (IDA) should become a powerful voice of design around the world through the joint congress in Taipei, and those in the future, as well as through greater collaboration on the projects each organisation leads. I look forward to working with our partners, Icograda and IFI, to define our unique disciplines and to build our collaborative strength.
  4. Regionalism. We should look for ways to strengthen regional involvement with Icsid through interdesigns, regional meetings, and the activity of our regional advisors. Icsid must become more of a grass roots, open-source organisation, with strong engagement from our memberships and the individuals within them. In a globally connected world, the unique knowledge, practices and challenges of different parts of the world are even more important. City Move, the interdesign led by Robin Edman, demonstrates the value of addressing a regional problem with global implications.
  5. Communication. This term we need to continue the development of the Icsid website as a destination for information, the exchange of ideas, best practices, displaying student work, and many other functions already available. It should become a virtual community for Icsid and a resource for the whole world. As we conceive it, the Design Impact Award will bring a lot of traffic to the website, and I thank you for your support and trust as we develop this exciting new project.
  6. Shape. It is increasingly important in our interdisciplinary age to shape and define the future of Industrial Design among the design fields. I firmly believe that as the design disciplines become more fluid, it will remain important for each discipline to maintain a unique skill set, expertise, and methodology. Design is simply too big for one person to own it all. Creative collaboration comes from what IDEO call’s “T-shaped people”: designers and thinkers who bring their own vertical depth but also have the capacity to work with horizontal breadth.

I think it is interesting to note that design thinking has emerged from the process and practice of industrial designers. Design thinking is a problem-identification and problem-solving process that, as we often hear debated, offers a methodology very useful in fields outside of design, especially the management of business and other organisations. Design thinking may have a wide range of applications, but in my experience it is best performed by industrial designers, who also think with their hands, make things, transform ideas into actions.

I would like to conclude with a well-known quote from Confucius:

I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.

Industrial designers do, and in doing, understand. That is what I want for Icsid – an organisation that acts, makes a difference, has an impact, and transforms the world. For that to happen, we need to work together. You must get involved, not just as members of Icsid but also as participants in Icsid.  Our organisation provides a set of tools, an array of opportunities, a global network of people with diverse skills and knowledge, for all of us to build a significant future. After all, as the saying goes, the best way to predict the future is to design it.

I thank you for your support and trust to lead Icsid into the future.

Dr. Mark Breitenberg

Tags: