The Idea of Environmental Design Revisited Yongqi Lou

The Confusion of Environmental (Art) Design China’s “Environmental Art Design (环境艺术设计 )” specialization was borne of the interior design discipline, mainly developed in the fine arts schools.1 The practice has grown to include environ- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 mental art, interior design, landscape design, and even some areas of urban design. After decades of development, environmental art design has become a large-scale discipline.2 However, teachers and students in China are often puzzled when trying to clearly define it. It is inextricably linked to urban design, architecture, interior design, and landscape design—but it does not belong to any of them. “The work areas of environmental art design involve landscape design, interior design and public art design. Environmental art designers… from the cultivation point of view, should be ‘generalists.’”3 In today’s era of globalization and collaboration, culti- vating generalists is a nearly impossible task. Going forward, trying to be all things to all people will not help environmental art design develop as a discipline of the future. Ten years ago, to better address the new opportunities and challenges, some schools in China started to seek the development of the discipline in the contexts of design and innovation, rather than in the contexts of art 1 This article was modified and developed and crafts. For example, the “environmental art design” discipline from Yongqi Lou, 全球知识网络时代 at Tongji University was renamed “environmental design” in 2007. 的新环境设计 [New Environmental The shift from environmental art design to environmen- Design in the Era of Global Networked tal design contributed significantly to reducing the wide-rang- Knowledge], Journal of Nanjing Arts Institute (Fine Arts & Design) 40, no. 1 ing ambiguity. In the rest of this article, I mainly focus on the (2017): 3–9. latter—on the design perspective—even while recognizing that 2 According to the Report on the evaluation the concept of environmental design is still a bit vague and loose. of Chinese universities and disciplines I can see two reasons for the continuing ambiguity. First, for a 2017–2018 by Research Center for long time, people were unable to clearly define its theoretical basis Chinese Science Evaluation (RCCSE), more than 500 universities and and research goals and hence were unable to clearly define its colleges in China are now offering an boundaries with regard to other, related disciplines. Second, the Environmental Art Design Program. job of an environmental designer has yet to be distinguished 3 Weiguo Hao, An Introduction to from the more (socially) recognizable design professions.4 Environ- Environmental Art (Beijing: China Con- mental design, as it exists today, does not have a clear core—the struction Industry Press, 2007), 172. 4 At present, architects, landscape archi- principal cause of the ambiguity that characterizes both its theory tects, interior designers, and fashion and its practice. The resulting confusion impedes the discipline’s designers are all recognized as design further development. professionals in the Chinese job market. However, what an “environmental designer” does is not as clear. © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00518 DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 23 New Perspective and New Opportunities Every academic domain has its own set of ontologies and methodologies. Through these unique lenses, researchers observe and study the world. Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, sociolo- gists, writers, and designers might see the same object but interpret what they see based on how they have learned to look at it. Because every discipline tries to explain the world in its own way—cross-disciplinarity notwithstanding—researchers’ perspectives will always vary. At the core of a discipline is the object of its focus and the questions it inspires: the whys, whats, and hows of the subject in the world. Each discipline expects to be able to explore the entire world from its perspective. Although any disciplinary field can be covered by various other specialties, the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 footholds and perspectives of different specialties are also different (see Figure 1). Environmental design, as a discipline, must ask and answer the fundamental why, what, and how questions for itself clearly. Understanding the environment is innately connected to the language we use to explain what we see. Notions, definitions, examples, and connotations are the result of linguistic interpreta- tion. Chinese language has a unique way of conveying the meaning of words based on symbol, pronunciation, radical, origin, and strokes. In this sense, the Chinese definitions of the word “environment” differ significantly from one another, which might explain differences in the word’s conceptualization. In English, the word environment comes “from the Middle French preposition environ ‘around,’” and “its most basic meaning is ‘that which sur- rounds.’”5 In Chinese, however, the word for environment is , 环境 which is composed of the words “surrounding ( )” and “condi- 环 tion ( ).” If we put these two characters together, means 境环境 “surrounding the conditions.” This definition allows for multiple interpretations of the two characters. Consequently, what is implied when environmental design is discussed, communicated, and implemented in the Chinese context can vary wildly, and this variance enriches and indicates new ways of thinking. Changes in the design field keep pace with changes in technological, economic, and social developments and needs. In partic- ular, the flattening of social and economic forms of organization and the global sustainable development movement infuse with new meanings our notions of what constitutes an environment. Contemporary institutional knowledge and occupations are offering inadequate ways to meet the new needs inherent in new ways of living. The changes in this era increasingly have exposed the limitations of the discipline’s conventional positioning—for example, in the professions related to architecture, interior design, and 5 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “environment (n.),” landscape design. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dic- tionary/environment (accessed October 30, 2017).

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Figure 1 Most of the design disciplines already mentioned—such as Relationships between the field of architecture—are defined according to the object of their applica- research and domain-specific perspectives. tion, and their methodologies and approaches correspond with the © Yongqi Lou. vocational training required by the job market. Over time, these disciplines form a more stable professional ecological circle, unburdened by the ambiguity of the discipline’s positioning. In this regard, environmental design has been in a rather awkward situation. Either the discipline is challenged for lacking subject matters of its own, or the practice is considered all-encompassing but ultimately without real substance. Perhaps what is required is for us to change our manner of thinking. If we abandon the practice of defining the discipline by its field of application and instead define it in terms of a mindset and a process, a more relevant understanding suddenly emerges. Let us turn away from design to discuss a seemingly irrel- evant career: the marksman. During the Stone Age, a marksman was the person whom everyone trusted to throw a stone accu- rately. Later, a marksman was the best archer, and then the best rifle shooter, and so on. In modern warfare, who is the marksman? He or she is the person who programs best. People in front of computers enter encryption keys and use game-like controllers to guide weapons, rather than squeezing triggers. Over the course of history, the task of hitting the mark with precision has not changed—but the specific tools, techniques, and methods certainly have.6

6 Yongqi Lou, “设计的疆域拓展与范式转型 [The expanding scope and para- digm shift of design],” Time Architecture no.1 (2007): 11–15.

DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 25 If we echo the original Chinese meaning of “environment” to convert the object—the mark—of environmental design from a physical space to a condition, then environmental design might be able to transcend its competition with other disciplines— especially architecture, product design, interior design, or landscape design. Environmental designers create, accommodate, facilitate, foster, enable, instigate, or restore conditions that interact with other conditions. In this way, environmental design can address more effectively the building of an ideal socio-spatial ecosystem—an undertaking that architecture-based disciplines are unable to address alone. In this context, the ambiguity that once dogged the efforts of environmental designers—and the development of the discipline as a whole—becomes an advantage. To Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 achieve this transformation, environmental design needs to explore new perspectives and methodology to better deal with the relational and connective aspects in a condition.

The Environment as a System of Conditions Environmental design has at least two meanings. It most often means designing for physical environments. In contrast, if the environment(al) is a mindset and a methodology, then environmental designers work to enable a certain system, condition, or system of conditions. “Condition” becomes the new object of environmental design, which means looking at the design and examining various relationships in the surroundings from a human perspective: the interactions between people and people, people and things, and things (other organisms) and things in the spatial–human system. If the places where human activity and space overlap— “life/spaces”—become the scope of environmental design, then its goal would be to create or facilitate “life/space ecosystems”7 that foster a vast array of relationships. This mission would extend environmental design from the physical domain to the design of meaning, interaction, service, experience, and way of living. Today, design has been elevated from its status as an artistic and technical discipline to one of strategy. The emergence of a variety of research directions—including strategy design, experience design, interac- tive design, and service design—has prompted the reconstruction of design systems theory and practice. These emerging research areas share a common feature: the tendency toward increasingly immaterial outcomes. Information and network technology—including the Inter- net, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI)— has rapidly developed into a highly interconnected cyber system that has gradually been extracted from the world of ordinary artificial things and has become a derivative of life entities that have 7 Yongqi Lou, Pius Leuba, and Xiaocun Zhu, 环境设 [Environmental design] (Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2008).

26 DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 Figure 2 Four systems: nature, human, artificial, and cyber systems. © Yongqi Lou. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021

intelligence. Interactions between nature (the first system), humans (the second system), artificial systems (the third system), and cyberspace (the fourth system) affect every aspect of human life and, as such, point toward a new and expanded direction for design—designing the interactions and relationalities of these systems (see Figure 2).8 To realize or encourage a certain condition has become the new way of thinking for environmental design. It includes the design of a condition itself and the coordination of various relations within the condition. Like the members of an orchestra play- ing a symphony, each actor and its performance in a system affects the whole. Although the skill of the individual players contributes substantially to the orchestra’s achievement, the overall success of the performance depends more on the tacit understanding of all the actors in (or implied by) the system: the composer, conductor, and musicians, plus the concert hall and the audience. A system view shifts our attention from the individual elements in an environment to the interrelationships among those 8 Yongqi Lou, “Opening Keynote-Crossing: elements—anything from the microscopic to the macroscopic and HCI, Design and Sustainability.” even to the ecosystemic. An environmental design ecosystem con- Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM tains multiple dimensions that are ecological, commercial, and Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. social. A comprehensive goal—for example, a sustainable or more ACM, 2015. human-centered living environment—thus involves restructuring 9 See: Ohlsson, Stellan. “Restructuring of a condition created by the complex social and technological sys- Revisited: I. Summary and Critique of the tem and processes.9 Gestalt Theory of Problem Solving,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 25, no.1 (2010): 65–78.

DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 27 A New Definition of Environmental Design At Tongji University, we have begun to synchronize environmental design development with the overall reform of design education. This new era is defined by new technology, new economy, new society, and new culture. If scholars and educators in the design discipline want to be a part of the changes, or even be the engine of the changes, the discipline should adjust itself accordingly. The change must encompass the values, missions, roles, scopes and approaches of design.10 In 2007, I started the reform of the environmental design program at Tongji University by offering a new definition: “Our environmental design focuses on using holistic, human-centered, and interdisciplinary approaches to create and a sustainable including experiences, com-

enable life/space ecosystem, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 munication, and places that optimize the interactions of humans with their surroundings.”11 According to our new definition, the core object of environmental design—the life/space ecosystem—has both material and non- material implications. Environmental design plays the role of improving the quality of the life/space ecosystem in two ways: both directly through design creation and indirectly by engender- ing the peripheral contexts in which creative processes can occur. Richard Buchanan’s framework describing the “four orders of design” explains that design has a variety of perspectives: sym- bols; physical objects; activities, services, and processes; and systems, organizations, and environments.12 A life/space ecosystem is a condition to host these four orders so that they co-exist. In this life/space ecosystem, human intervention is the key;

10 The mainstream in Chinese design edu- only when lives are involved is a physical space transformed into a cation is still largely built on traditional place. The focus of this new kind of environmental design is the material and craft-based thinking. Tongji interaction between people and the environment that takes place University was one of the first universi- after humans get involved. Beyond the “space,” and even the ties to translate its design education into “place,” we must consider how the new ways of living and produc- a more innovation-oriented approach and to better serve the new needs of China’s ing that emerge might, over time, affect the environment, and vice economic, ecological, and social needs. versa. And we also need to consider the ethics behind supporting 11 See Yongqi Lou, Pius Leuba, and Xiaocun them; now, sustainability is among one of the most important ethi- Zhu, 环境设 [Environmental Design] cal considerations. (Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2008); The design of various human–environment interactions, Yongqi Lou, “New Era, New Environmen- tal Design,” All Design 7, no. 2 (2011): along the different scales and for multiple purposes, involves mul- 6–9. tiple stakeholders and issues, and emerging relevant design meth- 12 See Richard Buchanan and Victor Margo- ods and tools will be on the new agenda of the environmental lin, Discovering Design: Explorations in design discipline. (See Figure 3.) Design Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 23–66; Richard Buchanan, “Design Research and the New Learning,” Design Issues 17, no.4 (Autumn 2001): 3–23; and Richard Buchanan, “Worlds in the Making: Design, Management, and the Reform of Organizational Culture,” She Ji 1, no.1 (2015): 5–20.

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Figure 3 Environmental Design Trends in China Design of various human–environment inter- In the past 40 years, China’s rapid development has provided an actions. © Yongqi Lou. unprecedented space for design. The emerging new challenges in this country and its greatest capacity of application scenarios for innovation make China an ideal laboratory for practicing new environmental design. Therefore, studying the trends of environmental design profession in China is significantly valuable in visu- alizing the outline of this emerging territory. I’d like to review several trends that are dramatically changing environmental design in China.

From Container to Contents As China’s urbanization process develops from a period of extensiveness to a period of refinement, people’s needs are changing. The focus on “hardware” (the built environment) we see in a shortage economy has given way to concerns related to content- ment and quality of life—both material life and spiritual life— in our current experience economy. Whether from a people or societal point of view, the “contents”—the quality and configuration of life—is becoming more important than the “container”— the built environment.

DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 29 Compared with the permanence that designers seek in the built environment, the human–environment interactions are often filled with the demand for diversity, variability, individuality, and effectiveness. The environment is the “field” where people’s lives happen and represents a tangible reference point for various invis- ible relations. When a way of living changes, what constitutes an appropriate environment changes accordingly. Thanks to advances in immaterial design during the past 20 years, relational design has made great strides. For example, retail design has extended far beyond the interior design of a physical space; now, it is always a key aspect of brand strategy. In urban public space design, how to use immaterial design—for instance, service, narratives, branding, user experience, and interaction Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 design—to reframe the physical elements, including landmarks, paths, nodes, edges, and districts, becomes a new way to improve urban quality.13 Micro design interventions and a content-driven strategy—people, places, interactions—help us meet the demand for having a better living environment without involving large- scale infrastructure construction.

From Objects to Experience Experience is one of the core logics that enable environmental design to better engage the human factors, whether they are physical or immaterial. Experience also helps environmental design to extend beyond physical objects to include complex social–physical interactions. Adjusting the form, configuration, relation, and process of the elements of the experience to create or enable a certain environment and reframing an environment to better host and facilitate certain activities are both key agendas for environmental design. Both enrich the body of methodologies, approaches, and tools available to environmental design. New design approaches, such as service design, experience design, and interaction design, can be interlinked with space design across the entire service process to secure experience quality. For example, “interface” and “touchpoint” are two of the key concepts in interaction design. But when applied to environmental design, they imply more than the touch of a finger on a screen. In a broader sense, an interface in environmental design can be any carrier that a system uses to present information to an audience. For instance, the success of a coffee shop chain is neces- sarily the result of a series of successful experience design—the tangible and intangible interfaces and touchpoints with which its customers interact when they spot the store on the street, and then when they enter the store, stand in line, place their order, pay, pick up the order, sit at the table, and so on.

13 See, e.g., Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press,1960).

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Figure 4 An attractive story is an important element allowing an The “Broken Bridge” in the West Lake, environment to shape an experience. A successful storytelling Hangzhou, China. © Sizhen Peng. offers clues that inspire people’s curiosity and enable them to interact emotionally with the physical environments. The “Broken 14 The Broken Bridge is considered by many to be the most romantic scene among Bridge,” in Hangzhou, has a connection to one of the most roman- Hangzhou’s Ten Scenes of West Lake tic mythological tales of ancient China—“The Legend of White heritage site (Zhejiang Province). At the Snake ( )”—and it became one of the most famous scenes of 白蛇传 stone-arched bridge, Xu Xian and his West Lake, named the Melting Snow Scene on the Broken Bridge.14 wife—who is actually a white snake— (See Figure 4.) first meet and fall in love in “The Legend of White Snake,” a famous Chinese folk- tale. After a snowfall, when the snow on From Specialization to Integration the more exposed side has melted, and Designing a life/space ecosystem is an agenda of systems de- the shaded side remains white, the sign. The relations in the system are more important than the bridge appears to be split in two, thus elements that enable them. As a result, optimizing the system is earning the scene its contemporary name, “Melting Snow on Broken Bridge.” the purpose of design. Given that humans are in the loop, the sys- 15 Involution refers to the development of tem becomes truly complex, and elements are abundant, entan- a certain culture in accordance with, but gled, and inseparable. not beyond, the height of its form. At this In this context, disciplinary overlap becomes inevitable. point, the culture approaches stability, Interdisciplinarity means integrating the knowledge of various and innovation is rendered impossible. In this case—as in the case of Gothic art disciplines and applying this combined knowledge for a certain in sixteenth-century Europe—only minor purpose. The “involution” induced by greater and greater disci- modifications to the fixed form can be plinary specialization has already rigidly stereotyped these performed to render it more refined and fields.15 The discourse system unique to each of the specializations more complex. Alexander Goldenweiser acts as a barrier prohibiting practitioners from crossing their used “involution” to describe this type of 16 continuous patch-like refinement under knowledge with that of other disciplines. This barrier might the given pattern, which only renders the delimit the borders of the discipline—but it also limits that disci- artwork more overblown. See Clifford pline’s development. Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia Berkeley (CA: University of California Press, 1963.)

DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 31 Environmental designs require input from many fields, including industrial design, architecture, media, management, anthropology, sociology, psychology, cognition, and the behavioral sciences. The goal here is not merely to cover all the bases, but to pick the multidisciplinary knowledge, methods, and skills to achieve and mediate a certain preferred environmental situation through design and creativity within a certain context. This goal requires design (or designers or design processes) to transition from actor to orchestra conductor, from an expert perspective to a multiple user perspective, from micro to macro, and from physical design to strategy design. Effective integration of the various elements is key. The conductor of an orchestra does not need to master all the instru- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ments but must assume the primary responsibility for interpreting the overall art piece and controlling the effects of the sounds produced by the musicians. Similarly, interdisciplinary design requires cross-contextual knowledge application. The focus of integration is to regulate the relationships among the material and immaterial elements across the entire ecosystem of social and cultural life. Addressing these relations inevitably involves economic, ecological, social, and cultural factors. To be qualified for this role, environmental designers must have disciplinary abilities, as well as the ability to apply knowledge across the contexts. But integration is more a test of horizontal skills. Various communication skills, leadership skills, collaboration skills, and cross-contextual knowledge applications are all important components of the integration effort.

From Meeting Demand to Sustainable Development Human activities in the natural world have put enormous pres- sure on environmental capacity. Whether human beings can con- tinue to survive in an environment comprising natural, artificial, 16 Anthony Giddens uses “disembedding” to describe the phenomenon that and cyber systems—and live well—has become the global sustain- social relations have been lifted out from ability issue confronting humankind. Almost half a century ago, local contexts of interaction and their Victor Papanek noted that design has inadvertently played the role restructuring across indefinite spans of accomplice to consumerism, and thus, “there are professions of time-space, in which expert systems more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them....”17 and symbolic tokens are two kinds of disembedding mechanisms. See Papanek understood that, considering the earth’s limited Anthony Giddens, The Consequences resources, design should shift its focus from meeting human of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford desires to assuming ecological and social responsibility for what University Press, 1990): 21. is produced. 17 Victor Papanek, Design for the Real Papanek’s perspective interrogates the way human be- World: Human Ecology and Social Change (New York: Pantheon ings live. For environmental design, this questioning seeks to inte- Books, 1971). grate the manner of human life with the physical world. If human 18 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. activity has pushed the planet to its limits, some choices must Meadows, and Jørgen Randers, be made.18 Sustainable development is a survival-based choice. To Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or a Sustainable Future (London: Earthscan Publications, 1992).

32 DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 leave the traditional model of economic development—development that comes at the expense of environmental resources—and establish growth and development that is resource- and environment-friendly, redesigning human way of living is of great environmental significance. A developing country like China must use humanistic thinking to critically reflect on the mainstream development par- adigms of today’s Western culture—particularly the view and values from the developing world. Now is the time to open up a new, “deep green” environmental design route and to achieve a para- digm shift by redefining the meaning and quality of life and implementing a restorative economy.19 China historically has main- tained the idea of even wealth distribution among all people as a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 socialist value. Chinese understanding of environmental design, as already mentioned, echoes these values by seeking to establish the corresponding economic, ethical, and cultural frameworks, and their associated boundaries.

From Closed Loop to Open Loop Environmental design of sustainable life/space ecosystems does not produce static works for material space alone; it seeks a balance between material design and immaterial design. This balance should change in accordance with changing local conditions. What the designer creates is not simply a static material scene but a use state that allows other elements to become components of the design. From this perspective, we can see two trends in environmental design pertaining to the transition from a closed loop model of development to an open loop. The first is the open loop of the process, in which the end product of the design is not a preset “optimized outcome,” but a dynamic and constantly “optimizing” state. Second, and more importantly, environmental design is collaborative design involving the participation of a number of people who share the same interest. This trend is a shift away from the simple, linear relationship of designers designing and users using. The boundaries between the designer, the per- former, and the user tend to blur. The expansion of design roles and design fields, the advent of the integration era, and the emergence of new design values all demonstrate that environmental design requires a more open mode of thinking. The new, innovative environmental design approach seeks to get more people—especially users—involved in the process of environmental improvement through social innovation. Open source design, mobile interconnections, revolutionary 19 John Thackara, “Design for a New business models, and the popularity of open design software and Restorative Economy,” Proceedings of tools ensure that this approach is no longer out of reach. For exam- Cumulus Shanghai 2010: Young Creators ple, the open source movement in the field of architecture and for Better City & Better Life (Helsinki: School of Art and Design, Aalto University, 2011): 6–10.

DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 33 urban construction uses technical platforms to achieve deep cus- tomization based on users’ individual needs. An open source methodology can be extended to the entire building process from planning and design to construction, marketing, leasing or sale, and property management. Certainly, realizing this vision depends on open source design of the entire industry chain.

Conclusion The life/space eco-system of the future is the core object of this new environmental design. Its methodological basis is the dynamic integration of “human to environment” thinking (from the perspective of human experience, including the knowledge of anthropology, sociology, cognitive psychology, and so on) with Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 “environment to human” thinking (from the perspective of sustainable development). Seamless integration of methods and skills from related disciplines and between material and immaterial designs become the hallmarks of the new environmental design craft. The practice of this new kind of environmental design requires knowledge and skills related to physical space, including product design, communication design, interior design, and architectural design. It also requires knowledge and skills related to immaterial space, including interaction design, service design, experience design, brand strategy, and systems design. For example, service blueprint, personas, storyboards, and systems maps— methods commonly used in product service system design—can be the new tools of this environmental design. The electronic, information, and computer network technology use and application—including Building Information Modeling (BIM) design/ construction/management, open source hardware and software design, generative design, algorithm design, parametric design, and big data mining/analysis/simulation/forecasting—are now new “hard” skills that environmental designers and their teams will need. The proper using of these skills in certain contexts depend on the fundamental understanding of human society and culture. In terms of employment, environmental design can address new demands that are generated by changing the ways of living and producing. These demands are constantly emerging in relation to residential, commercial, cultural, transportation, public, work, entertainment, and other kinds of multi-functional environments. But the role of the designer can also be extended from service pro- vider to a much more proactive one. Environmental design has always played an important role in disruptive innovations; consider, for example, Apple’s subversion of the traditional retail model, IKEA’s subversion of the traditional home improvement

34 DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 industry, and Airbnb’s subversion of the traditional hotel business. A saying in the venture capital market notes that the innovative- ness of a start-up company is revealed by its office environment. If so, then the value of the environmental design has been greatly underestimated. Rather than being a part of the cost, environmental design can be regarded as an initial investment for a startup. In this way, by joining the adventure of changing people’s way of living in an entrepreneurial way, environmental designers can go beyond pro- posing solutions and act to implement solutions. Likewise, the environmental design discipline should take the initiative to adjust and develop itself into an important driver of innovation in the era of the knowledge economy.20 In doing so, it might more quickly Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/35/1/23/1715991/desi_a_00518.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021

20 Richard Kimbell, Design and technology resolve the argument of whether environmental design is simply a and the knowledge economy,” Technol- discipline or an arena where different disciplines can play in their ogy 11, no. 4 (1992): 92–93. different ways.

DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 1 Winter 2019 35