12 Dic Applied simplicity: A trip to progressive
On the third floor at the London Design Museum, there’s this plain quote of Bruno Munari, the great Italian futurist industrial designer: «Progress means simplifying, not complicating». Compared to many other cities in Europe, let’s say for example Barcelona, London really seems to be a place that intends to live up to the Munari axiom. Let’s look at three apparently unconnected examples.
First let’s take, trip planning from Gatwick airport to London Victoria: At Easyjet.com you can directly buy your 2-way Gatwick Express tickets. If you then leave your mobile number the booking is confirmed immediately by SMS and once you’re on the Gatwick Express train where they welcome you in 5 different European languages, you just show the SMS to the conductor. No cash, no paper involved! Have you tried to take the airport bus in Barcelona recently? The bus company’s policy says «No 50 Euro Bills Accepted» -but this is something you will only find out when you are already on the bus, able to read Spanish, waving a 50? note to the driver. No pre-sale machines, no credit cards, and only small change accepted!
Or take something completely different, like child care: Let’s suppose you are a father who is on his own taking his little kid to an exposition and you urgently need to change nappies. At the Design Museum in London, one of the 3 pictograms on the door of the men’s bathroom is a «baby», facilitating that here in a public space any «modern» father can actually change his baby’s nappies. Let’s face it: how many men’s restroom doors in Barcelona have you seen with the «change nappies» sign on it? You’d see that stuff on the women’s side. (photo bathroom’s door).
And last but not least, female access traditional male-dominated industries, like the IT sector. The UK Internet portal womenintechnology is a dedicated information portal which offers, via its advertising partners (accenture, Citygroup, JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, etc.) access to a range of IT employment opportunities with companies who have an open and explicit commitment to inclusive recruitment policies. I am not a «pro quota-feminist» but how many of let’s say the last 5 IT conference panels you have seen in Spain were really gender-balanced? Currently, are there programs that simplify a more general female access to traditional male areas in this country?
Maybe those are just some random impressions from a trip to London but then I started to think about Leif Edvinsson’s conclusions in his opening speech at the Copca Future Conference in Barcelona 2 weeks ago. He mentioned two critical factors in the battle for attracting intellectual capital for communities in the future: (1) The ability to «insource» the necessary talent in order to compete with other regions (like Greater London, Scandinavia or the new mega cities in emerging China) and (2) the creation of «social innovation spaces». Although he said Catalonia is well prepared for the race, I found London is a good reference model of a «social innovation space», one reason is because to me, it’s a city of applied simplicity, especially for foreigners, modern dads and tech-savvy women.
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