Credit: Kulturmødet
Bason recommends:
Three things to explore in October
11. Oct 2021
This month, our CEO Christian Bason recommends three design-related pieces to explore. You can step into the year 2050, find out what Bill Gates thinks we should do about climate change, and read an article that makes Bason state that he believes “a new class of thinking in consulting is needed”
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Four futures of design education and research
As a member of the Board of the Danish Royal Academy of Architecture, Design, and Conservation, I recently had the pleasure of experiencing their scenario installation ‘The Future is Now!’ on Holmen. Using four full-size shipping containers, students and staff have curated four wildly different future worlds of how the school may be like in 2050. It’s equally inspiring and provoking and will surely fuel a very creative process of shaping the Academy’s new 2025 strategy. The exhibition is public and anyone can drop in to see and listen to the future.
The exhibition is open till October 30th, 2021, from 11-17 Monday to Friday.
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The Economist Sustainability Week: Countdown to COP26
What does Bill Gates think we should do about climate change? In just a few weeks the UN climate summit COP26 kicks off in Glasgow, Scotland. As the world’s leaders and policymakers gather to respond to the urgent challenge of climate change, The Economist hosts an ambitious set of talks and panel discussions, including a panel with us at the DDC. I’m looking forward to hearing what Microsoft founder Bill Gates will say. It’s worth looking at his signals, not least since he commands one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations with an increasing focus on the energy and climate space.
The Sustainability Week took place from October 4th-7th, but the content is available on-demand till the end of October. And new events keep coming! Sign up and dive in here.
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How McKinsey destroyed the Middle Class: A call for a different kind of consulting
In this extremely interesting piece in The Atlantic, Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits argues that the rise of management consulting in the 20th-century has effectively destroyed the US middle class. Markovits suggests that with the advice of professional service firms such as McKinsey & Co. the role of business became the sole pursuit of profit – leading to a never-ending quest for efficiency and downsizing. But in today’s world, is that position still viable? Must good business advice not factor in a much broader range of parameters, such as human experience, creativity, quality, great design, or indeed sustainability? I believe that a new class of thinking in consulting is needed; one that takes a broader view of value creation, that engages employees and stakeholders at all levels, and that above all is focused on the long-term sustainability of the firm in the context of society and nature. Will creatively led, strategic design agencies – including our home-grown ones like Designit, Manyone, and 1508 – step up to this challenge?
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