led the designer to abandon their capacity for reflection and political orientation6 in favor of a process of continuous production of innovations.
Taking into account the unsustainable nature of the happiness offered by the consumption of innovations, combined with the fact that a consumer society is now more concerned with stimulating the desire to buy than providing individuals with “useful” consumption, has resulted in a gradual questioning of innovation in a context marked with:
– ecological urgency. The recent IPCC report has clearly sounded the alarm about the emergency we now find ourselves facing (IPCC 2018);
– an abundance of critical writings on the limits of innovations, since the 18th century, new reflections about the limits of progress beyond which we have as much to lose as to gain (Diderot 1829), and critical reflections on the development of technologies that appeared in the second half of the 20th century (Wiener 1959; Ellul 1990).
However, the latter should not be read in a negative way because, in reality, its benefit for innovation itself is substantial.
Indeed, initially, this questioning brings to light a narrow vision of innovation that would be essentially technological7. However, this is indicative of a misconception of innovation because it is not only technological (Forest 2017). Secondly, it highlights the fact that contemporary disenchantment with innovation is closely linked to the fact that “innovation does not, as in the past, tie itself to a moral and social purpose” (Ménissier 2011, p. 17), or, to put it another way, that the question of the relationship between innovation and society is not asked, since the illusion of the meaning of innovation has led to the eminently political question of knowing what innovations we want for what society being underrated. It is precisely this observation that has an “advantageous” effect on innovation.
Advantageous because it allows us to understand that the issues are not related to innovation itself but its lack of meaning. We must therefore be wary of throwing the baby out with the bath water too quickly, especially since, as we are forcefully reminded by the global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (COVID-19), which first appeared on November 17, 2019 in the city of Wuhan (China) and which we are going through at the time of writing, we will not solve the major contemporary challenges without innovating, whether in the way we produce and consume, in our lifestyles, but also in our ways of thinking, which act as restrictive frameworks for innovation.
Indeed, the time we are living through is strangely reminiscent of the apocalyptic paintings that often inspired painters, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. However, we should not forget that if the word “apocalypse” is today associated mainly with the idea of chaos, the term borrowed from the Latin apocalypsis8 actually means “revelation”. But what the current situation reveals to us is humankind’s extraordinary capacity for innovation to combat this unprecedented crisis, which has resulted in the emergence of new forms of solidarity9 (while others have had to reinvent themselves), the deployment of new pedagogical modalities to implement the distance learning continuity project requested by the French government, an unprecedented organization of collaboration between medical services in the city, in hospitals and private clinics to deal with the wave of severe cases, or the creation of new technologies for the rapid detection of COVID-19 in people suspected of carrying the virus, to name but a few examples.
Welcomed innovations are not only technological but also social, organizational and process-related. In his speech on March 12, 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, hailed caregivers as “formidable innovators and mobilizers”, on March 27, 2020, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, for his part, praised teachers for their “remarkable work, imagination and inventiveness” in trying to guarantee the pedagogical continuity called for by the Minister of National Education and Youth.
These innovations largely approved because inaction is not an option in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. A dam has to be built, to use the terms of the French government, and this is reflected in the multiplication of calls for innovative projects, such as the €10 million call for projects launched on March 19, 2020 by the French Ministry of the Armed Forces. This call focused on the search for innovative solutions (which could be “directly mobilized” against the virus) related to the automation of tasks for sampling, room and equipment cleaning, mass production capacity for decontamination solutions and detection of the virus in the environment, or following the example of the call for projects from the “Coalition Innovation Santé – Crise Sanitaire” (“Health Innovation Coalition – Health Crisis”)10, aimed at designing innovative solutions (information, home care, patient monitoring, medical care, etc.) to help to relieve congestion in the healthcare system and enable patients with chronic diseases to continue to receive care. This public acclaim for innovation is far from being unique to France. It is global, as evidenced by the 73 calls for projects launched by States and private players from around the world (United States, Great Britain, Germany, Brazil, India, etc.) to find innovative solutions against COVID-19 over the period from March 20 to May 31, 202011.
These were innovations whose mobilizing force12 lies precisely in the fact that they are charged with a political meaning, the term political being understood as we have indicated in its primary meaning of “that which concerns the citizen”. For example, the aim is to ensure the health of all, to take care of the most fragile people, to improve relationships between people or to improve the management of health risks related to the fight against the COVID-19 crisis previously mentioned. This is precisely where the second advantageous effect of questioning innovation lies since it opens up a new conception of innovation that acknowledges that innovation must meet the inseparable objectives of creating value for the user and society13, and advocates that innovation in the 21st century should be a political14 innovation. In this way, this questioning, rather than leading to a fearful retreat that sets up a state of paralysis leading, for example, to inaction among engineering students who are extremely concerned about environmental problems because they fear of contributing further to environmental degradation, gives meaning to action.
1.4. In search of lost meaning
If we accept the idea that the question of the political meaning of innovation needs to be rehabilitated, the question then arises of how to reconfigure ourselves intellectually to achieve this; during the 20th century, we lost our ability to give meaning to our actions, too busy developing and implementing “efficient” design methods aimed at rapidly producing a continuous flow of effective innovations, such as methods of functional analysis, innovative design, innovative project management or even eco-design. Indeed, while the latter makes it possible to reduce the environmental impact of products, it leaves the question of the meaning of innovation in the shadows, as we will see.
We defend the thesis that innovation in the 21st century implies getting rid of lazy thinking reduced to the application of methods for innovation, which, while they freed the designer from thinking about the political meaning of innovations, prevented them from demanding and creating real innovations. It is in this perspective that we have developed the above-mentioned Penser le Sens de l’Innovation (PSI) approach (Chouteau et al. 2020).
The PSI approach emphasizes that the question of meaning must be considered from the dual point of view of its direction and significance. Direction, which, if one dares to draw an analogy with the development of a tree, corresponds to a branch of the tree. It refers to a principle of a possible solution (concept) and recalls a characteristic of the design process, namely that there is no single solution to an identified problem, but a set of solutions that refers to the idea of fields of possibilities. The deployment of a direction depends on the capacity of the imagined concept to make sense for the user. Does any creation of value for the user automatically make sense for our society? Nothing is less certain! Just take the example of Instagram. It is a tool that allows users to take a photo, edit it and then share it online with their network, and whose social dimension has often been highlighted. But what kind of society are we shaping when we design devices that stimulate the cult of the image and the perfect body and make people feel that they do not live lives as rich and exciting as others