TALK with Marco Steinberg

About Marco Steinberg . He is a strategic designer inserted in the public sector development and the CEO of Snowcone & Haystack. More about him on http://snowcone.fi/

“Today’s problems will not be solved by the logics that produced them” _  Albert Einstein.

Marco Steinberg opens our morning at the USC studio with the following question: “Improving the past or designing the future?“ Provocative and wise alike, Marco suggests that design should not only be limited to the forming of attractive and functional containers for human lives, but also to the shaping of decision-making in government and society in general. 

It is an inspiring talk that leaves us impressed by his clarity in communicating the potential of strategic design. Marco argues that “…innovation begins by asking the right questions” – underlining the relevance of framing problems before finding appropriate tools for action. His recent work, which introduces design thinking to the public sector, links systems and institutions that have so far been working without coordination, and provides services that quickly respond to people’s actual behaviours and needs. “Can we design as a fact the thinking around what are the preconditions for success in the public sector?”

With particular attention to the future spatial conditions of ageing and health care that we are confronted with during this semester, Marco encourages us as designers to connect emotionally to the problems. This is intended to avoid solutions that answer the “wrong categories of issues” due to the natural human instinct to rationalize. This implies avoiding a statistical approach to people as they are not statistic data. Marco invites us, in these terms, to think about design projects as ecosystems that include as much architectural as behavioural, environmental, energy, planning and economical propositions.