CONCLUSION

DESIGNING HAPPINESS

In all these years of work and study, in universities, start-ups, and corporations, I’ve always had the same dream: making something that touches people’s lives, generating a positive impact on the world. It’s a goal that I had as a child. I wanted to create something that human beings need, that people want, that in some way would provide them with some form of value. It could be an idea, a product, an experience. I didn’t know it back then, and I didn’t realize it for a long time, but what I was looking for was actually that sort of immortality that the production of meaningful value for people surrounding you, and for society as a whole, can give you. It’s a desire, a necessity, an instinct that in and of itself is placed at the very peak of Maslow’s pyramid, in the realm of dreams, self-realization, and transcendental aspirations.

Through these ideas, products, and experiences, we can live forever, even when we’re no longer physical guests of this world. This is why I’ve always believed in the generation of real, tangible value that is sustainable over time. In English, we have a powerful and concise word for this concept that we don’t have in Italian: legacy, a cultural inheritance that is more abstract than concrete in its substance.

When I left 3M to join PepsiCo, my heart was full of enthusiasm for the new challenge that was in front of me, but it was also heavy with sadness. I felt that I was leaving behind something unfinished. The project that I had begun ten years earlier in Milan, in a small office of a US corporation, to build a new culture of design-driven innovation, was not completed yet. But I wanted design to survive my departure; I wanted design to keep on growing under a new leadership. That was my legacy there.

Over the course of the years, I had tried to build an organization that could keep on going after me, but its journey to maturity simply wasn’t complete. It needed more time, other resources, further projects, new unicorns. When I told the company that I was leaving, I also said that I was ready to help them identify the best leader to take the reins of a capability that we had formed over the span of ten years. We had built a design center in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a physical space with colored walls, pink carpets, and eye-catching furniture. It was a space that we filled with brilliant, creative, and kind people who were pursuing their ideas, visions, and projects to generate material and creative wealth for 3M and for the whole world. Once I was already at PepsiCo, I spent time with 3M’s HR team to remind them about my theory of the unicorn so that they could apply it to their search. When Eric Quint—whom I didn’t know directly—contacted me through LinkedIn, telling me that he was interested in my previous position as chief design officer and asking me if I could put him in touch with 3M, I was more than happy to do so. He had also come out of the “Philips School” of Stefano Marzano. And when Eric was then chosen for the role, I wrote to him right away, congratulating him and making myself available to pass some time together in New York, to share with him everything I knew about the company, in the hope that I could give him the tools necessary to work successfully in that organization right from the start.

It’s been a number of years now since I left the Twin Cities, and today—looking at 3M from afar—I’m genuinely happy about how design has continued to develop and prosper in the service of the company; it’s precisely what I had worked toward. Eric has guided design at 3M into its new phase, continuing from the foundation that I had laid, and when he left in 2020, he passed it into the hands of a new leader, Brian Rice, who is bringing it into new territory and reaching for new goals.

And at PepsiCo then, from the very beginning, my aim yet again was to form an organization that can continue to create value for decades to come, whether I myself am there or not. This is the most important metaproject that I have been driving forward for years. It might seem like a noble act of generosity, but in truth it is the most direct consequence of another journey in which I have always been immersed: the intimate, constant, perennial journey that all of us undertake in looking for our own personal happiness.

Inspired by theories that have their roots in the world of the human sciences, over the years I have identified three dimensions in my life where I want to invest time, energy, and resources with a particular focus.

Me

The first dimension is that of personal realization, which manifests itself through defining our own identity in relation to others. This dimension is often reified in our own profession or in the results of our work—but it is not only developed in this way. It can also be reached in our private life through hobbies, commitments, and engagements of every kind. Are you happy with what you do, and does it represent you in the right way? If not, then the time has come to make a change.

Me and You

The second dimension is about our connection with others, especially with family, friends, and loved ones. This is a two-way exchange in which happiness is realized through the satisfaction derived from offering love, kindness, respect, passion, and inspiration and at the same time through the intense pleasure that one feels in receiving these from others.

Us and Everybody Else

The third dimension transcends ourselves: it is the search for something greater than us, something that moves on an exponentially greater scale than our own personal interest, creating value for a specific community or for society as a whole. This dimension is based on the gift of the self to the universe, without expecting anything in return. The range of application is vast, spanning from the generous sharing of know-how to acts of charity, from religious missions to political ones, to every form of generating progress and prosperity in the world through one’s own professional, social, and private platforms.

Translated into my professional context, these three dimensions have always driven me in three directions.

Who I Am

First, they have inspired me to define my professional identity in a precise, distinct, unique, and innovative way, suspended between design and business, between the United States and Italy, between rationality and creativity, between praxis and theory, between execution and strategy, immersed in the largest organizations in the world but always managing agile, flexible, streamlined groups, almost as if they were start-ups, at perfect ease in the discomfort of continuous change and constant evolution. My passion, my projects, my experiments, my successes, and my failures are the important pillars of my identity and my personal satisfaction.

Personal Relations

The second dimension, the one of personal relations and love, might seem to be a clearly private sphere, disconnected from the professional world. And for many people this is the case: they put on their jacket and tie in the morning, they get their keys and their badge from their nightstand, and they leave their love and their smile at home. And just like that, they go to work devoid of empathy, grinning and bearing it—“with a knife between their teeth,” as we say in Italy. They recover their positive emotions only in the evening, when they come home exhausted from battle, drained by their own internal solitude. My world has never been like that. I have built a team in which personal connections, deep respect, reciprocal kindness, and platonic friendships are foundational virtues. And they are also indispensable for generating value for the company, for the user, and for society as a whole. We spend the majority of our lives at work: voiding that world of personal emotions makes no sense—it’s the best recipe for unhappiness.

Personal Purpose

The third dimension is that of my dream, my cause, my purpose, which transcends me and gives me meaning. In my professional life I have always had two great missions.

The first is to create value for the world, generating design solutions that somehow respond to people’s needs and dreams, producing a tangible, perceived benefit. The second is to help reposition the design community within the business world, explaining it, giving it a new role, and growing its credibility, authority, presence, and impact. If you believe in the idea that design is a discipline based entirely on the production of value for people (or human-centricity), then you will understand how this second goal is entirely an enabler of the first one.

Over the years I have tried in every way to support the design tribe in this journey and in this battle for recognition of a role that has often been misunderstood. From the global stages of 3M and PepsiCo, I have cried out to the world that this professional community can offer much more than it has been allowed to do up until now. I have allied myself with the business world; I have dreamed, worked, and created with the people in that world, always thinking about how to offer new opportunities to the world of design, in every enterprise around the globe.

I have accepted the invitation to sit on boards such as those of the Design Management Institute, the International Child Art Foundation, and the Foundation of the university Politecnico of Milan. And I have taken part in TV shows such as America by Design, to reach the general public with our purposeful design message, and in initiatives such as the Design Vanguard, a pledge for creative leaders to leverage our resources and influence in service of creating a more just, safe, and beautiful world, promoted by my friends Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, and Tim Brown, executive chair at IDEO. I have been generous with my time dedicated to conferences, schools, and the media. I have put myself at the service of other chief design officers when they have taken on their roles, always with the aim of elevating the role of design on this planet.

But, once more, the final goal has always been that of creating value for the society we live in. I wanted to identify the needs and aspirations of the people I design for and to respond with relevant solutions made up of meaningful products, brands, spaces, services, and experiences. I understood very early on that the journey of searching for my own happiness aligned perfectly with the great metaproject of creating happiness for others through my projects—because satisfying those needs and desires is, in the end, the ideal gateway to collective happiness, individual and social.

Everything That Surrounds Us Has Been Designed by Someone

Everything that surrounds us, and that hasn’t been created by Mother Nature, has been imagined, thought up, designed, and built by a human being, by a designer, an innovator, an entrepreneur. Every single thing. The computer that I’m using to write these words, the clothes I’m wearing, the chair I’m sitting on, the apartment I live in, the airplane passing by the window, the cup of coffee (now cold) that looks at me with curiosity from across the kitchen table—even the packaging of the products that just arrived at my house and the ad campaign that they’re part of. Everything is designed by someone.

And thus collectively, through the products, brands, services, and experiences that we design, we touch the lives of billions of human beings across the world every single day. If our solutions are conceived in the best possible way, then we will end up adding value to these people’s lives, generating moments of positivity made up of security, comfort, utility, convenience, pleasure, style, beauty, enjoyment, meaning, and poetry. When our solutions are not designed well, we make people’s lives more complex, more difficult, less pleasurable, less enjoyable. If all the companies in the world, great and small, collectively followed the principles of meaningful design in their innovation processes—if they imagined solutions that would be sustainable from an aesthetic, functional, ecological, social, emotional, intellectual, and financial point of view—then those solutions would consequently become a myriad of precious fragments of a vast, universal, virtual metaproject, the most beautiful and important project that exists, the project for global, social, and planetary happiness.

As designers, innovators, and entrepreneurs, we thus have a unique opportunity in our hands and also an immense responsibility: to design products that favor a better future, that push our society in the right direction, that imagine and produce the well-being of an entire planet.

That doesn’t mean that every product we create will be perfect, that every company we work for will have this mission. It would be naive to think this—an unrealizable dream. The dream that I have, instead, is real, concrete, and feasible. We must insert this tension toward perfection into every product we create; we must try to create the most meaningful solution within the limits of the historical, social, technological, and business contexts imposed upon us, always redefining these limits, reimagining the boundaries of the possible and the credible.

Let’s Design a Better World

This means that in every company we work for, whether as employees, owners, clients, or consultants, we must push the principles of meaningful design to the extreme, in an unbiased way, interested only in producing a positive impact on the world. This effort, consequently, will generate immense value for those companies, too. What makes the times in which we live extraordinary is that this positive scenario is in many ways ineluctable. New technologies, globalization, and digitalization are breaking down many of the barriers to entry that have historically protected the mediocrity of so many products, brands, experiences, and services that surround us. But today, either you create excellent and meaningful solutions for people, or someone else will do it in your place. Sooner or later, it will happen. We are entering the age of excellence, a new world in which every company will always have a greater need for design-driven innovation—an entirely humanist type of innovation with a sincere, obsessive, unavoidable attention to the needs and wants of every human being.

We will innovate by bringing that human being with us, taking the user by the hand—that same person whom the business world loves to call the consumer. We will do so by thinking and acting as unicorns, because design-driven innovation without unicorns is a paintbrush without a Picasso, a pen without a Dante, a ball without a Ronaldo. It’s useless—beautiful, but useless.

We will do so by embracing the people around us. This journey will define us. We will find our identity in this journey; we will make friends, allies, mentors, and coconspirators. We will convert hostile persons into extraordinary sponsors with the strength of good ideas and a good heart, with empathy, generosity, intelligence, optimism, resilience, curiosity, passion, respect, and love. We will be people in love with people.

Let’s Design Our Happiness

The magical aspect of all this is that if we do it in an honest, spontaneous, coherent, and transparent way, if we do it without expecting anything in return, solely for the pleasure of generating progress for the world, then we will always nevertheless get something in exchange, a kind of positive collateral effect: our projects, thoughts, and actions will always represent a further step toward the accomplishment of our greatest dream and will bring us ever closer to the realization of our personal happiness. In a cycle that closes in a perfect way, the search for the happiness of others will be the key for reaching our own individual happiness. If we all thought and acted in this way, the interest of every individual, every company, every government, and every community would be perfectly synchronized with the interests of the entire planet. This is my dream, my life project—this is my life itself.