Social Business
Resilio Studio is a social business. We are an issues-driven and solutions-focused design practice that embodies the positive, transformative change needed to thrive in the face of the immense challenges of the 21st century. We believe there is an urgency to this project and the time to start is now.
The Power of Design
At its core, design is concerned with solving practical problems and enabling the potential of people and place by providing function and utility; giving form and meaning to actions, objects, environments and the conversations that produce them; and providing a vision and direction for where we might like to head. We believe design has the power to transform and bring about positive change; that everyone is capable of design and that almost everything can be designed. We believe our role as designers is to use our passion and skills to feed and support individual and collective initiatives to bring about the transformational changes necessary to build a resilient culture and bioregion.
Regenerative Design
Doing less harm is no longer good enough, we must do good, and we must leave things better. At Resilio Studio we understand that we have a lot of ground to make up – as well as doing things smarter from here on in, we must actively rehabilitate the historic damage we have inflicted on the planet and our communities by increasing the ecological carrying capacity of the environment and building real wealth – natural, cultural, social, built, knowledge as well as financial.
Design is Changing
The modern design profession emerged out of the industrial revolution. From this context, the design profession has established an approach to design that responds to clearly defined parameters in terms of brief, budget, programme and outcome. The world has changed and new design practices are emerging. The contemporary design practice must respond to more complex projects that often come with much more loosely defined parameters and actors.
Design Activism
Resilio Studio is entrepreneurial. A core purpose of Resilio Studio is to participate in and lead changes in cultural attitudes and behaviours toward transformational change. We understand that positive transformations don’t simply happen by themselves, they require intent, vision, dedication and hard work. We recognise that design briefs for systemic change are either very rare or simply don’t exist, and that in many cases we will need to take it upon ourselves to create the transformational change desired.
Bioregional and Place Based Design
We believe that the ecological health and carrying capacity of the places we live are the foundation of the health and well-being of the people who inhabit them. We are dedicated to designing for and with the local – we place the health of the land and the people who live there at the centre of our design process. Resilio Studio’s small scale, our connections with other social organisations and our growing understanding of Aotearoa deeply roots us in place, and provides the platform for formulating contextual, place-based solutions.
Te Ao Māori
At Resilio Studio we are committed to building relationships, knowledge and design practices which actively acknowledge and integrate Te Ao Māori. We believe designers have a responsibility to the social and cultural contexts in which we work and are committed to bioregional and regenerative design that seek to actively integrate local matauranga Māori and honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi into the process and outcomes of all our projects.
Co-design
Design has the potential to help change the world for the better, but to do so it must itself change and become a widespread activity that everyone is involved in. At Resilio Studio we see ourselves as social actors who can foster collaboration among diverse disciplines and communities in a way that feeds and supports projects and initiatives in which everyone – design professionals and non-design experts alike – are involved throughout the process and have ownership of the solution. In a networked world, all design processes are collaborative and it has become clear that this is the only way of making sure that the proposed solutions will be socially and culturally acceptable and continually implemented.
Experimentation
We don’t have all the answers, we don’t believe anyone does. What Resilio Studio does have is an interest and willingness to try new things – to look at problems with new eyes – to experiment, prototype and test solutions, many times. We value a ‘fail quickly and learn from our mistakes’ approach to complex challenges. We strive to explore different ways of seeing, solving problems and recognize that radical innovations to pressing questions often generate new and different questions that require further exploration; and that this continued process of inquiry and action is an essential quality of innovative and effective problem solving.
Small, Slow and Simple is Beautiful
We believe that the immense challenges we face this century are not going to be solved through large-scale, top-down plans, but through a collective of many small solutions. They will be simple to apply and maintain, they will be labour and knowledge intensive rather than energy, resource and money intensive, and they will use local materials and support local markets. Small, slow and simple recognizes that the efficacy of systemic change is best leveraged from the ‘bottom up’. Rather than increasing influence by making something bigger or more complex;, small, slow and simple solutions are easily replicable and scaled in the same way that cells in the evolutionary process of life scale up – through replication, bifurcation and diversification.
Reflective Practice
We understand that reflection, which involves a wide range of methods for recording and critically reflecting on events, experiences, perceptions and/or feelings, is an essential part of the creative and problem-solving process and we integrate critical reflection into our organisational practices. It is an essential element of effective learning and a way of connecting theory and practice and forms the platform for creating new knowledge, theories and methods of working.
The Next Economy
Resilio Studio’s core philosophies and practices are shaped by our growing understanding of the world we live in – the challenges we are facing and the opportunities they present.
In 1972, The Limits to Growth study was commissioned by The Club of Rome and undertaken by a group of researchers based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The study was the first to utilise computers to model the converging interrelationship between population growth, resource depletion, food production, industrial output and pollution. Over the last 50 years, and despite multiple articles and reports dismissing its findings, The Limits to Growth ‘business as usual’ scenario has remained the most reliable explanation of the challenges we see today. This scenario suggests that industrial output and associated economic growth will peak sometime around 2020, shaping our emerging reality and inevitable transition into an age of limits and a post-growth economy.
Resilio Studio is consciously positioning itself to be effective in the next economy, and is excited about its role, together with many others, in shaping it.