I’m assuming that we can agree on one fact: Technology did give us more power as a society. That’s why big, top-down institutions are crumbling. That’s why a Rupert Murdoch is fighting for his old system like it’s his last fight (well, actually it is his last fight …) and to some extent it’s why we’re so deep in a financial crisis. We gained power and more control over our daily life. Freedom was always a basic need for every individual, technology just gave us the tools to actually get what we want.

Old established systems tend to react slowly and defensively to sudden change. The internet is still in its infancy. Compared to the global system that we’re living in, 18 years of existence is not even a blip in time. Still, this blip had an incredible disruptive impact. It gave us all something very, very precious: an unprecedented access to information.

Pranav Mistry said something in his TED talk that keeps popping up almost daily in my mind: “We humans are actually not interested in computing. What we are interested is in information.”

Information is knowledge and more knowledge leads to progress which we are experiencing on a daily basis.

So, despite this very short period of time, we’re experiencing something utterly new and it leads us to in anormous amount of information. And that’s a good thing, but we can and we will generate even more information. Current prognosis is stating that the amount of accessible information will double every two years. Yes, that’s pretty huge.

Some say that we can’t solve contemporary issues with solutions from the past and I think they’re right. But what is the solution? Do we have one?

I’m not an expert on this, but I’ve been reading a lot about ‘Design Thinking’ the last few months. There are many much smarter people than myself who agree that design and the right approach to it will play a much greater role in our future. That’s not an unnatural behaviour for a society that’s transforming itself from mass markets to niche markets. If everybody is a niche, how could a mass market design appeal to us? It can’t.

The last article I’ve read on this topic was: ‘Design Thinking for Social Innovation’. It begins with the following quote:

Designers have traditionally focused on enhancing the look and functionality of products. Recently, they have begun using design tools to tackle more complex problems, such as finding ways to provide low-cost healthcare throughout the world. Businesses were first to embrace this new approach—called design thinking—now nonprofits are beginning to adopt it too.

Now it’s time to bring both topics – freedom and design – together. If we’re – by default – determined to get the largest amount of freedom and assume that design should reciprocate our needs than why is it that so many products aren’t designed properly? Why are we still living in a world with so many closed products?

My thinking is that we just didn’t discover the fact that we can actually ask these integral things of the manufacturers. Asking for openness and freedom of choice shouldn’t be different than asking for fair trade products or a specific way of cultivation.

It’s a perception problem. We tend to think about our food and our cloth in a different way, because it’s something we can relate to in a different way. Technological involvement was very different before the internet and it will take time for people to adjust to the idea that they can use very easily accessible technology to transform and bend the world around them.

But just waiting is not enough. I’m sure that we will reach a point in time where everybody can and will ask for open technology, but we shouldn’t just wait for it. We should encourage people to take a different look at technology. Buying ‘green’ isn’t always easy or cheap, but it’s something that many people have agreed on and suddenly ‘green’ became something much more accessible to the masses. Shouldn’t that be possible with open and free technology?