Critical Response to Resilient Systems, and Sustainable Qualities – by Ezio Manzini
In 2013, four years after founding the DESIS network, Ezio Manzini felt the tides of the world were beginning to turn. Doing research on sustainable design beginning in the 80s, Manzini had already published seven books on the subject. In two years time he would publish his 8th book: Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation, which would serve as an overview of how design had and could be used to transition to more sustainable practices. In 2013, however, he laid out the foundation for the aforementioned text in the article Resilient Systems, published in the spring edition of Current, ECUAD’s design research journal.
In the text, Manzini depicts an increasingly unstable society, where localized catastrophes had broad repercussions across the globe. He terms such a world a “risk society.” One needs not look further than the ship Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal and the effect of that event on global trade, to appreciate the truth of the observation. In the face of an increasingly “risky” world Manzini turns to nature for inspiration towards resiliency.
In the natural world, Manzini observes, systems are able to survive due to being made up of a “multiplicity of largely independent systems.” Their resiliency arises from their diversity. He identifies a “contradictory dynamism,” between the increasingly fragile large-scale and centralized current system, and the emerging trend towards traditional agriculture and craftsmanship. Three “waves of innovation” allow for this emerging trend: information architecture becoming networked, distributed power generation, and challenging global production and consumption. These innovations are driven by the search for efficiency, the demand for self sufficiency, and a “quality of proximity” that arises when consumers and producers are connected at the local level.
According to Manzini, the results of this trend towards smaller localized systems, means communities are able to readjust their values, towards more sustainable ones such as: a recognition of complexity as valuable, the search for meaningful relationships, the redefinition of work and collaboration as central human expressions, and “the human scale of things.” While this article was published in 2013, the sentiment to build stronger, small communities is not new. In his 1981 book Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut tells young people the most daring thing they can do is “create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
Manzini summarizes the qualities of resilient systems in four adjectives: small, local, open, and connected. For those that value brevity over poetry, the acronym SLOC is also deemed appropriate.
The issue with the SLOC world is it’s feasibility. Manzini uses “local” and “localized” more or less interchangeably in the text but the difference in the terms highlights the problem. Car-sharing services are still owned by UBER or LYFT, and many small and medium businesses rely on Amazon Web Services or Facebook in order to operate. Despite the appearance of diversity and locality, the tech infrastructure that allows these businesses to operate reliant on some of the largest, richest corporations in the world. When facebook crashed, small business owners felt the brunt of it. My fear is that in our attempt to free ourselves from the volatility of our “risk society” we only hand ourselves over to new masters. True, these services have allowed for small businesses to thrive, but that growth is contingent on the continued and uninterrupted operations of the large corporations they rely on. If we are truly to build resilient systems, they must be SLOC all the way through, software infrastructure included.
Works Consulted
- Manzini, E. (2013). Resilient Systems and Sustainable Qualities. In Current: Design Research Journal, Emily Carr University Press, p10-14.
- George-Parkin, H. (2021 Apr. 21). The Fallout from the Suez Canal Ship Is Coming to a Store near You. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/4/2/22364278/suez-canal-ship-effects-ever-given-supply-chain.
- Vonnegut, K. (1987). Palm Sunday an autobiographical collage. Grafton Books.
- Molot, C. (2021 Oct. 5). Facebook Outage is Felt Acutely by Small-Business Owners. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-05/faceboook-outage-is-felt-acutely-by-small-business-owners