As monocultures continue to spread sameness throughout the human and natural world, Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter set out ways that designers can ensure they maintain creative diversity.

Intentional or not, the modern era has been, in many ways, a quest for sameness: globalised markets, monoculture crops, standardised protocols.
We need some sameness. It's efficient, it puts food on the table, helps people coordinate and helps ideas spread. Standards can be useful. It's convenient that within countries and regions the shape of power outlets is the same, and then glaringly annoying when you bring an electronic device overseas and need to find an adaptor.
Monoculture is popping up everywhere
But sameness also spreads trouble, and at an alarming pace. In the last 300 years, biodiversity has plummeted and we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction of species in the last 500 million years. Cultural diversity has nosedived alongside and a language goes extinct every few weeks. And "ideadiversity" ? a new word we made up to capture flexibility of thought ? may be at an all-time low as present-day politics and policies cement us into binary choices and media becomes a copy-paste perpetuation of borrowed memes and knee-jerk reactions.
As our cultures become reduced to fit into a global context, the diversity of our designs suffer too. We become stuck between runaway design ? where immediate utility is valued above long-term wisdom ? and a monoculture of design ? ...