“Quality is a very powerful driver of change,” emphasized Ezio Manzini in this May 2012 talk at Social Innovation Generation.
Manzini is director of the Milan Polytechnic Interdepartmental Centre for Research on Innovation for Sustainability and will keynote the Compostmodern conference later this month.
Beginning at ~30:00:
My impression is that until now, the predominant, or the economic, managerial discussion that was in the mainstream has also been translated, in some way, to the alternative.
So we talk about alternative initiatives that are happening, mainly using the same language, the managerial, economic language. [And] if things are to work, the economy is important. …
But we have to open another level of discussion. This level of discussion is what I define as quality.
Here’s how he discussed this topic in the widely-circulated August 2011 Shareable interview:
Given the title of your magazine, Shareable magazine, I suppose that you think that to share is good. And I agree. But, what are the qualities you consider to give this positive evaluation? How do you discuss them? As a matter of fact you can share something in many different ways. We should be able to judge how much effective and economically viable each one of these different solutions could be. But also, and in my view, here is the major designers’ specific responsibility, we should have the criteria and the words to discuss different ways of sharing, endowed with different sets of soft qualities.
Image from Ezio Manzini’s slides on “Creative Communities and Sustainable Qualities“
