Shared street space and nonprofit design

WorldChanging reports on shared space traffic management, which eliminates "most signals and lane markers . . . in a radical effort to force people to use common sense and courtesy when driving rather than relying on lane markers." Animating the movement: an understanding of the fundamental role of design as law:

The premise of shared space is that people pay more attention when they're not distracted by "highway clutter," in the words of its founder, traffic engineer Hans Monderman. Shared space relies on environmental context--in this case, a landscape unlittered by signs--to influence human behavior. "Our behavior in a theatre or a church differs from a pub or in a football stadium as we understand the signs and signals through years of cultural immersion," Monderman told an interviewer in 2006. "Likewise if we see children playing in the street, we are more likely to slow down than if we saw a sign saying 'Danger, Children!'"

Design plays a similar role in conditioning our perception of nonprofits in the marketplace. Traditional nonprofit environments--hospital, church, school--use a variety of techniques to transcend relationships of exchange and necessity, creating an image beyond commerce despite the fact that they are in many ways more business-like than many of today's so-called social enterprises.

What we are seeing today with the backlash against entrepreneurial rhetoric reflects a failure of social enterprise to respect the design logic of nonprofit form. We could view what's happened as shared space in reverse, eradicating cues in context to rely primarily on nominal signs. The problem: when the only thing visibly distinguishing nonprofit from for-profit is the word itself, the distinction becomes incoherent.

The core question, in short, is not whether nonprofits should adopt the values of the market. Such values have been their all along. Rather, we need to focus on how we can transform market relations into an identity beyond exchange. Then, and only then, will nonprofit social enterprise be sustainable.