What are some examples of more meaningful measures? Well, there are a lot of them. The United Nations, for example, talked about ways of measuring the quality of a nation by other means in which we talk about the quality of life. There are some nations that are already trying to measure the happiness of their people. There are research scientists all around the world who are developing new ways of categorizing the goodness, the quality of life.
One important part is that we often take these very complex things like the quality of a nation – we measure it by a single number like the gross domestic product. Well, not only is gross domestic product a bad idea because it measures the good along with the bad, but it's also just a bad idea to take a single number to summarize the quality of an entire country. A group of economists at Oxford University in England used
what they call the Doughnut Economy, a way of demonstrating how you can graph this and make it very easy for people to understand the meaning of what their country is doing. So, take a doughnut, which has an outer circle and an inner circle. On the outer circle they list exactly these very same important variables that the climate scientists have said are what's critical for addressing the climate crisis.
And therefore they can plot on each of these points how well the *country* is doing in addressing these issues. On the *inside* of the doughnut, they show the societal issues like education and health and hunger and famine, and how a country is dealing with those. And so, when you look at this wonderful doughnut, you can see on the outside how we are dealing with the ecological issues and on the inside how we are dealing with the societal issues. So, instead of a single number, we can look at that; we can say, "Oh, this country
is doing really well in combating the carbon problem, and climate, but it's not very good in health care." Or, "It's very good on education, but it's not so very good in equity in their country." Or, you can see – you can go through and you can look and you can compare how well the country is doing, which is much more meaningful and important. So, that's just one example of many that we can do to make our lives
much more meaningful and understandable. So, what has this got to do with design? Well, come on; think about it. The problem is a design problem, and that solution is a very clever design solution. It's a way of demonstrating something that makes a complex set of issues understandable. Now, it wasn't done by professional designers. It was done by economists. I don't care who does a problem.
I don't care who solves it. What I care about is that we address and get to the right problem. So, you might even ask, "Well, how come it took the economists to do this? Why couldn't the designers have thought of this and done it?" Good question.