We used images, books, prototypes and components from different projects as windows to our thinking and development processes, and wrote a brochure that was given to the visitors during the exhibition. We also created a wall from post-industrial waste from furniture factories, with a rough side that evidenced the origin of the scrap pieces, and a flat, polished side that showed the potential of waste as raw material.

One of the ideas we tried to convey was that design should create pilot projects that point towards a better, desirable future. The public was invited to share their projects through the blog A-seis.

The vast majority of objects produced today are deficient, toxic, unpleasant, dysfunctional or frankly harmful. What kind of industry – and what kind of designers – produces these objects? One whose only consideration in bringing them into existence is how convenient they are. And convenience translates as financial gain: only objects that are good business get manufactured. To put it another way, the sole valid criterion for assessing a design is whether it will create shareholder value.

We believe that this is a stupid model for design, revealing, as it does, a lack of parameters to assess performance that is unrelated to money.

As a counterpoint to stupid design, we would like to propose a definition of design that takes other criteria for action into account; we propose that what we refer to as better, good, new, intelligent or informed designed should be:
Environmentally regenerative
Socially fair
Functionally innovative
Politically active
Economically equitable
Symbolically progressive
Technologically inventive

It should not be necessary to have to argue too strenuously in favour of a change in the way we make, consume and dispose of things. It should also not be necessary for us to be professional designers in order to envisage how our actions impact ourselves and our surroundings. However, the reality is different. Diseño Piloto is a small sample of projects where these criteria have been put to use. The projects have not only received awards in Mexico and abroad, but are also successfully produced and sold, demonstrating that it is possible to design outside the for-profit framework, just as it is possible to buy outside it.

Fortunately, we all have a say in this problem. More and more designers and consumers are creating new ways of interacting that are forcing a correction of the old paradigms once and for all. This is an invitation to think of design as a personal tool, a social goal, which is adjustable to day-to-day circumstances subject to constraints we can no longer ignore. Design is a means for change, and we firmly believe that it has the potential to create a desirable future at the same time that it creates ethical and historical awareness, with an immediate positive impact.

Diseño Piloto is divided into two parts: the first documents seven projects, along with their design, manufacture, consumption and disposal processes. The second part is a bibliographic reference resource that contains works intended to help us understand design decisions and their relation to other disciplines.

The work and the notions presented do not claim to be the definitive solution; they merely represent a few of many measures that can be adopted to produce effective change. The invitation is open at: www.a-seis.com/piloto