Making Stuff That Matters

Every morning i'm seeing increasing numbers of posts about conferences on designing the future. They're interesting and valuable, but without products that matter to flow through the system being designed they're as useful as plumbing in a desert.

For the last fifty years, advisory businesses from accounting to design have made excellent livings advising people who make things and helping them improve. We're at the end of that cycle. We've made far too much of what really doesn't matter and created a plastic economy.

Our shortage now is not advisers - we have shedload upon shedload of them. What we need are people who have ideas about what to make, and how to make it in a world that is in upheaval.

Products and services that will improve our lot, reduce inequality, help heal the climate, restore our ecology and make our souls sing rather than our wallets bulge.

You are out there. You are not head of a corporation, and neither are you likely to fulfil what we need working for someone else.…