The Philadelphia Design Experiment v 1.0

Ouch.

That’s right. Believe it or not, that was the original, working title for what would later become DesignPhiladelphia. We have the notes to prove it. Not to mention a logo to go along with it. And I can blame only myself for that clumsy beginning. Few bold initiatives avoid false steps, though upon reflection this one is especially mortifying. It echoed, I seem to recall, two other notable, local “experiments”: William Penn’s “holy experiment” (his plan for the city); and “the Philadelphia experiment,” a paranormal incident from Philadelphia naval history involving the teleportation of a Navy destroyer (look it up!). Why echo these…I’m honestly no longer sure. And “version 1.0”? It was a shallow and trendy-ish nod to the software industries that were animating our imaginations in 2004. Were it not for Hilary Jay’s good sense and a remarkable session with the late branding legend Alina Wheeler, we might not be here today celebrating 20 years of DesignPhiladelphia. 

Good ideas always take time and patience and a little luck. They start out gossamer-thin and immaterial. When Hilary Jay and Joseph D. Kelly and I originally put our heads together somewhere around 2003 to cook up a design event to emulate London’s Design Festival (Joseph had just returned from it), we could only dream that twenty years later it would still be here. The original formula was simple, and maybe even elegant in its simplicity: pick a week, let our friends in the city’s design community know to put on design events during that window, and publish it far and wide. There was a lightness to that original idea that I still appreciate today. Good design ideas are often lightweight—like creating bike lanes from nothing more than paint; or moving elections to the weekends. Though, of course, it took all of Hilary Jay’s organizational muscle and tactical brilliance to move the mountains that made this “light” idea into something substantial.

At that time, I was caught in the spell of self-organizing systems. Murmuring swallows, colony building ants, and open-source software production all demonstrate organizational properties that approximate what scientists call self-organizing or emergent systems They are leaderless—with no central brain to serve as a command-and-control center. And yet they display remarkably coordinated behaviors from the collective actions of agents who don’t really know what they are creating altogether. Could we, with this featherweight idea, help to catalyze a sometimes-dormant design community into a thriving, teeming mass of collective energy?  With this small push could we launch a cascade of activity that might give visible form to the extraordinary talent and dynamism that we knew existed all around us?

It was only a glimmer of an idea, but we had a deep faith in the community’s potential energy. Sure, it started with a mouthful. And there were a few missteps along the way. But who knew that this ephemeral experiment would be the spark that ignited our design community in ways that would light up the skies still today?