这位荷兰设计师在帮助中国解决雾霾问题

丹·罗斯加德的使命是让人类“有未来”。他并不打算拯救地球，因为他说地球会自我拯救。人类则需要些帮助。这位来自荷兰的设计师没准会一不留神变成人类救星。

“我们面临许多问题，包括海平面上升和空气污染等等，对我来说都是糟糕的设计。”总部位于鹿特丹的设计公司罗斯加德工作室（Studio Roosegaarde）的创始人告诉《财富》杂志。 “既然人类造成了这样的现状，就要设计出解决的方式。”

罗斯加德提到的并非是传统意义上的设计。解决问题的办法不是让椅子更漂亮，倘若真是如此，罗斯加德就没有那么幸运了。他承认自己不是菲利普·斯塔克（工业设计大师——译注）。相反，设计是为人类的未来设定目标，并为实现这一愿景创造标准。大多数人称之为“社交设计”，但荷兰艺术家和企业家罗斯加德起了个新名字：Schoonheid。

“Schoonheid”

Schoonheid是个典型的荷兰语单词，并不容易翻译。因为有两层意思，如果讨论环境，意思是“干净”，如果讨论美感意思则是“美丽”。不过罗斯加德表示，把该词当成使命时意义更加确定。

“关键在于设定新价值，设定生活的新标准。背后的动力不只是金钱，而是清洁的空气、干净的水以及清洁能源等更符合人类价值的东西。”他解释说。

罗斯加德生活的国家总在跟自然抗争。荷兰大部分地区低于海平面，洪水是家常便饭。但荷兰人已经适应了海洋带来的挑战。早期统治者建造堤坝防洪，现代规划者在城市里修建水道和公园，洪水来袭时可以将水汇集起来。平时水道可用来划船，公园可以当篮球场。

“享受大自然，努力升级并改进，让某些地方适合居住，这些都刻在了我的基因里。” 罗斯加德说。

这也是设计师在作品中表现的特质。例如，Windvogel项目是用可发光的线连接风筝和地面上的发电机，从空中收获能量。风吹过风筝时，线的运动为发电机提供动力，将自然界的动能转化为电能。很难察觉的电能通过风筝线发光体现，直观显示从风中汲取的能量。

另外一个项目是工作室设计的雾霾净化项目，没那么诗意也更实用，起因是罗斯加德访问中国受到启发。他在中国也开设了工作室。项目的典型作品是2016年罗斯加德设计的烟雾净化塔，建在北京的一处公园里。该塔基本上是个巨大的室外空气净化器，可过滤周围的PM 2.5颗粒，在雾霾中保留一片干净的区域。

罗斯加德希望雾霾里的一小块绿洲能让人们相聚自由呼吸，创造机会偶遇并分享想法。其实理念核心在于发挥公共广场的优势，正是因为热爱该理念，罗斯加德才会远离郊区的家乡，前往城市生活。

“我开始质疑为什么人类要建造伤害自身的城市，思考问题的过程让人烦躁。”他说。“然后我把烦恼变成了解决方案。这就是现在的状态。我没有完整的答案，但可以努力改进。我可以设计，也可以付诸实施。”

Daan Roosegaarde is on a mission to make humanity “future proof.” He’s not trying to save the planet; he says the planet will save itself. Humans, on the other hand, need a little help. A designer from the Netherlands could be our unlikely savior.

“A lot of the problems we’re facing—rising sea levels, air pollution—are, to me, an issue of bad design,” the eponymous founder of Rotterdam-based design firm Studio Roosegaarde tells Fortune. “We have created this current situation, now we have to design our way out of it.”

When Roosegaarde talks about design, he doesn’t mean it in the classic sense. The solution to our problems is not to make chairs chicer and, if it were, Roosegaarde would be out of luck. By his own admission, he’s no Philippe Starck. Instead, design is about setting goals for our future and creating standards to achieve that vision. Most people would call that “social design” but the Dutch artist and entrepreneur has a different name for it: Schoonheid.

‘Schoonheid’

Typical of Dutch words, Schoonheid doesn’t translate easily. It becomes stuck between two meanings, indicating “clean” if talking about the environment or “beautiful” if talking about an aesthetic. But as a mission statement, Roosegaarde says, Schoonheid’s definition is more, well, definite.

“It’s about setting a new value, it’s about setting a new standard of life that is not just driven by money, but by human values like clean air, clean water, and clean energy,” he explains.

Roosegaarde grew up in a country at odds with nature. The majority of the Netherlands is below sea level and flooding is a fact of life. But the Dutch have adapted to embrace the challenge posed by the sea. While early rulers built dikes to hold back the floods, modern planners are creating cities with waterways and parks where the water can pool when the floods inevitably come. In the meantime, those spots are enjoyed as rowing grounds or basketball courts.

“I think this notion of enjoying nature while also trying to upgrade and improve it to make some place livable is something that is in my DNA,” says Roosegaarde.

It’s a trait the designer passes down to his work. Windvogel, for instance, is a project that harvests energy from the sky using kites tethered by luminous strings to dynamos on the ground. As the wind buffets the kite, the motion in the string powers the generators, converting the natural kinetic energy into power. This otherwise imperceptible harvest is reified by the glow of the kite strings, emulating the energy being leeched from the wind.

A less poetic, more practical demonstration would be the studio’s Smog Free Project, which was inspired after one of Roosegaarde’s visits to China, where he also keeps an office. The project’s poster child is the Smog Free tower, which Roosegaarde installed in a Beijing park in 2016. Essentially a giant outdoor air purifier, the tower filters fine particles, 2.5 micrometers in diameter, from the haze to create a pocket of clean air amidst the smog.

Roosegaarde hopes this oasis will become a place where people congregate to breathe freely, sparking spontaneous encounters and the sharing of ideas. It’s an ideal built on the virtues of the public square, a love of which enticed Roosegaarde away from his hometown in the suburbs and into city life.

“I started to question why we build cities that damage us, and that question turned into an irritation,” he says. “Now I’m turning that irritation into solutions. That’s where I am right now. I don’t have the whole answer but this is what I can do to improve. I can design and I can engineer.”

把垃圾带出去

在中国举办雾霾净化巡展项目后，罗斯加德回到鹿特丹的工作室，他在一位设计师的桌子上发现了一幅看起来像杰克逊·波拉克风格的照片。黑色背景上散落着白色斑点，罗斯加德立刻被一幅他说略带猥琐的画面吸引。

“画面里是空间垃圾，”他指出。“其实是地球周围漂浮着810万公斤太空垃圾的快照。”地球周围有超过20,000个有迹可循的垃圾。其中一些是废弃的卫星，还有一些是航天飞机上剥离的油漆碎片。未来几十年里碎片可能会非常密集，低轨道卫星将无法使用，全球电信业也将遭逢灾难。

漂浮在宇宙里的垃圾启发了罗斯加德工作室的最新项目，太空废物实验室，该项目正寻找在太空建造垃圾填埋场的解决方案。该项目的第一阶段即将结束，即一系列鼓励爱好者和专家提出解决方案的研讨会。第二阶段于1月19日开始，其中一项提案获采用并打造为具备可行性的产品。

“看着抽象的灵感变成有最后期限、实际预算和解决方案的项目，感觉特别棒。从个人角度真的很吸引人。”罗斯加德已经跟欧洲航天局（ESA）和美国国家航空航天局达成合作。之前欧洲航天局已经开展清洁空间计划，但罗塞加德提供了全新视角。

“并不是说我比美国航天局或欧洲航天局聪明，因为我比不上。”他声称。 “那些人真的很聪明。但我看到空间垃圾之后可能不会简单当成垃圾。也许可以用网把垃圾带回地球，做成人造坠落的星星，还能代替烟花。”

想法可能行不通，但在罗斯加德创作的“第一阶段”中，实际功用并不重要。罗斯加德讨厌刚开始就抱着怀疑的态度。罗斯加德设计过的唯一一把椅子叫“是的，但是……”，每次介绍初步创意时，如果客户表示怀疑就会受到电击。第二阶段才能提实际的问题。

Taking out the trash

When Roosegaarde returned to his studio in Rotterdam after touring his Smog Free Project across China, he spotted an image on the desk of one of his designers that looked like a Jackson Pollack painting. Just specks of white scattered across a black background, Roosegaarde was drawn to what he describes as the obscene beauty of the image.

“It was space waste,” he reveals. “A snapshot of the 8.1 million kilos of space junk floating around planet Earth.” There are over 20,000 trackable pieces of trash floating around the Earth. Some of it consists of disused satellites, other bits are chips of paint that have flaked off of shuttles. In a few decades the debris could be so dense that it prohibits the use of low orbit satellites, spelling disaster for global telecoms.

The cosmic clutter inspired Studio Roosegaarde’s latest project, the Space Waste Lab, which is searching for a solution to that great landfill in the sky. Phase one of the project – a series of workshops welcoming amateurs and experts to propose solutions – is coming to an end. Phase two, when one of those proposal will be taken and turned into a workable product, will commence on January 19.

“It’s beautiful to see how an abstract inspiration is becoming a real project with real deadlines, a real budget and real solutions. That’s really fascinating for me, personally.” Roosegaarde has partnered with the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA to pull off this feat. The ESA already had a clean space program in the works, but Roosegaarde brought a new perspective.

“It’s not that I’m smarter than NASA or ESA, because I’m not,” he claims. “Those people are really, really smart. But I can look at a piece of space waste and say maybe it’s not waste. Maybe I can attract it to the earth with a net and make artificial falling stars from it as a replacement for fireworks.”

That idea might not work, but in ‘phase one’ of all Roosegaarde creations, efficacy doesn’t matter. Roosegaarde loathes early skepticism. In fact, the only chair Roosegaard has designed, called the “Yes, but…” chair, gives clients an electric shock whenever they cast doubt during an early pitch. Phase two is when practical concerns are allowed to be introduced.

创造力即资本

电动椅应该被用来激发创造力，而创造力也是罗斯加德认为可帮人类自我救赎的特质，因为人类不仅要抵御气候变化造成的肆虐灾难、太空垃圾包围的威胁，还要进一步跨入人工智能时代。

“在我看来，没错，人类将生活在技术爆炸的世界，但这意味着人类独有的技能将更加重要。”罗斯加德认为。总之，人类技能就是创造力。罗斯加德表示，随着机器人承担更多体力甚至脑力工作，创造力将成为人类真正的资本。

世界经济论坛大体同意该观点。论坛认为，第四次工业革命中对员工来说创造力是第三重要的技能，仅次于批判性思维和解决复杂问题的能力。2015年世界经济论坛对成功所需技能排名时，创造力还排在第10位。与此同时，领英的年度理想技能榜单预测，未来一年里创造力将是最重要的“软技能”。

罗斯加德与首席执行官的私人谈话也证实了相关调查结果。公司需要有创造力的人才，人类也需要有创造力的企业。所谓创造力并不是说出色的图形设计能力或强大的用户体验部门，而是意味着企业要有使命感，要为员工提供超越薪酬的价值感。

这种想法并非新出现。硅谷就一直以崇高的理想而自豪，例如谷歌非官方的口号是“不作恶”。随着公司日渐成熟，该口号已经不在谷歌的行为准则里，但仍然能够引起很多员工的共鸣，过去一年中不少人签署请愿书并提交辞呈，抗议公司里转向“邪恶”领域的项目。

罗斯加德认为谷歌员工罢工代表着未来趋势。“我们将生活的世界里，如果企业没有目标或价值观，员工就会离开。给多少薪水并不重要。”

为此，罗斯加德希望设计师和企业家合作为未来规划路径，他认为企业才能推动变革，政府做不到。

“我们要为新想法努力打拼，才有机会实现。要重新定义目标和价值观，然后努力工作为之奋斗。如果我们开始接受设计的新定义，就会发现这才是人类值得享有未来的证据。”（财富中文网）

译者：冯丰

审校：夏林

Creativity as capital

The electric chair is supposed to inspire creativity, which is the trait Roosegaarde thinks will be humanity’s salvation as we not only fend off the creeping catastrophe of climate change and the threat of being encased by space waste, but as we also advance further into the age of AI.

“I think yes we will live in this hyper technological world, but I think that means that our human skills will be even more important,” Roosegaarde believes. In a word, those human skills are creativity. As robots take over more manual and even cerebral roles, Roosegaarde says creativity will be our true capital.

The World Economic Forum agrees, nearly. It ranks creativity, below critical thinking and complex problem solving, as the third most important skill employees need in order to thrive during the fourth industrial revolution. When the WEF ranked skills for success in 2015, creativity came in at number 10. Meanwhile LinkedIn’s annual desirable skills list predicts creativity to be the most in demand ‘soft skill’ for the year ahead.

Roosegaarde’s personal conversations with CEOs confirm the surveys. Companies want creative people, but people also want creative companies. That doesn’t mean companies with an excellent graphics or UX department. It means corporations with a mission statement that provides employees with a sense of value beyond their salary.

That’s not a new idea. Silicon Valley has always prided itself on its lofty ideals, such as Google’s unofficial slogan, “Don’t be evil”. That slogan has receded from Google’s code of conduct as the company has matured, but the decree still resonates with employees who, over the past year, have signed petitions and submitted resignations in protest of projects that they feel are drifting into the territory of ‘evil’.

Roosegaarde treats the Google walkouts as emblematic of the future. “We will live in a world where if you don’t have purpose or value, your employees will just leave. It doesn’t matter how much money you give them.”

To that end, Roosegaarde wants to see designers and entrepreneurs collaborate on chartering a course for the future, believing businesses, rather than governments, will be the drivers of change.

“We need to invest in new ideas to survive. We have to redefine our goals, our values and then we just have to get to work and invest in them. Once we start embracing that new definition of design we will see that it’s all a part of us being future proof as humans.”