The Fantasy of Change

It's important to be critical with at least myself or ourselves in our company, and interrogate what we are doing, and ask if we are really producing change or just fantastic projects.

At Funky Projects we have a big frustration. We do these projects and we design them, but there is no follow-up on the projects we do. Once the commission is finished and the budget is finished, we drop them because we take another commission. This is very unsustainable.

Most of our customers are public institutions or under a public umbrella, and even if we try to train our clients themselves to go on with the projects, it’s not happening. And it could be something that is like that only in Spain, but I don’t think it’s only in Spain. It’s all over the world.

Maybe we have to stop thinking of ourselves as authors of something and become leaders or silent leaders and ourselves be the entrepreneurs – in the sense that we take the projects on our shoulders and we do it with our own resources –if we really want to produce change.

If we just want to design projects, we can go on like this. But maybe we won’t produce any change, only the fantasy of producing change, as we keep coming to conferences like this one where we can present our projects and publish books and case studies.

We ended up the year 2009 with good revenues, but it was still frustrating to be wondering why we don’t get enough legitimacy from our clients. We see other consultants get much more attention than the attention we get. The joke was maybe we should buy very boring suits and cheap computers instead of using Apple computers.

So I really like the idea of being ‘transvestide’ [transformed] and ‘transvetiding’ (transforming) myself as a grey consultant in that sense.

It's important to be critical with at least myself or ourselves in our company, and interrogate what we are doing, and ask if we are really producing change or just fantastic projects.

Founder and director of Funky Projects, an ideation company for strategic creativity, service design and experience design. Asier holds a degree in Fine Arts and postgraduate from Nantes Arts School. He worked as an artist until 2002 when he set up the company. Funky Projects mission is to develop projects to produce socio-cultural transformations from fun, creativity and complexity to abandon boredom, social conventions and narrow minded views. He is a regular lecturer in different universities and organisations and focuses on how social participation takes place and the knowledge produced by these processes.