Introduction:
Global warming is the end of the world. Artificial Intelligence will rule over us. Big Data will bring the end of democracy. It is fair to say that all of these statements are terrifying prospects and force us to push these cataclysmic dystopias to the back of our minds as we envisage a future that continues the same narrative of the past 70 years. But once we realise that all of these doomer scenarios are well under way we’re able to view them as tangible, or as metadesigner John Wood might say, they move from impossible unthinkables to possible thinkables.
This effects the role of the designer in a complex and interesting way. As the discipline as a whole has grown toward a more holistic approach that touches on so many other disciplines it is easy to see that this role will change. To stop there, however, does no more good than to opine that the ‘world will end’. This change is already underway in many areas from new currencies to forest management. It becomes important to realise that in order to consider the role of the designer we must first zoom out to the big picture before seeing what micro changes can help reposition our role into a space that actively brings about good.
That good for the past two hundred years has been—not without criticism—to increase profits and encourage economic growth. In our hindsight we can see that this has led us into a position fraught with apocalypse. Now, design is at a crossroads. Not because of any internal revolution but because humanity, at the macro, is at a crossroad. If we are to push through and continue to flourish it is certain that we must redefine our collective understanding of what good is. As design has grown from a simple additional process to the very catalyst of our economic growth it would seem fitting that design is an apt place to begin our change, our transition into something new, our next chapter.
Chapter 1: It’s the end of the economy as we know it
Our predicament has been outlined and defined through popular culture and mainstream media as a need to make our world sustainable. The word has become synonymous with green initiatives that focus on the planet as what we need to be sustaining. Whilst this is far from a bad thing it only touches on the symptoms of what we are experiencing. Our transition to green energies and renewable practices is commendable—if a little late—but simply converting our economy into a ‘green’ one will not prevent the dangers we perceive.
Our economy is based on the capitalist-consumerist model. Everything we make is made to be thrown away. If it isn’t then businesses cease to exist; once everyone has a light bulb why would anyone bother to replace them. Unless of course, the light bulb were to blow? In fact, this was a huge problem for light bulb manufacturers around XXXX. Despite the bulbs back then being so highly inefficient they made remarkable efficiency of the materials they used, in that they would last forever. It is possible to witness this yourself as one of these bulbs has burned continuously for over a hundred years in a fire station in the USA. There is a webcam that streams the bulb to viewers across the world who wish to marvel at the miracle of this one bulb. Except this is no miracle, light bulbs were so well made that the manufacturers actually found their sales were slumping due to the fact that no one needed to replace them. This led to a number of these manufacturers meeting to find a solution. They discovered that if the bulbs were designed to break after a fixed amount of hours then their customers will be forced to come back to buy new ones. Thus, the act of consumption was born through the implementation of built-in-obsolescence. This designed-in feature has since spread across all industries and takes all sorts of shapes outside of engineering including seasonal fashions and product styling.
This relentless need to not only maintain a business but for year-on-year growth is what is fundamentally unsustainable (Thackara 2015). Yes, we will have an issue once we find our forests chopped down and our oil depleted but our greatest issue is that our economic growth will cease to continue. We have been on a constant and exponential upwards trajectory since the end of the second world war which shows no signs of abating. A company's success is rated on how many more products it sells than the previous years and more products means more resources mined which ultimately means more energy needed. All of these are finite resources, including renewable energies. As our economic growth increases, so does our need for more energy and “you can’t have an economy without energy. Energy does the work!” As Charles Hall, an American ecology professor stated (Thackara). These renewables must come from somewhere and these materials still come from the earth and are still finite. It, therefore, becomes necessary for us to position our new role for the designer outside of this unsustainable economy.
This is no easy task. How does one conceivably exist and sustain oneself if they are to exist outside of the flow of money? The answer may lie in the very polar opposite of what we need to change. By focusing on decentralisation and localisation we undermine the very reason for a growth economy. In our current top-down practice the aim is clear and singular. Once we move toward decentralised and localised structures, like those found in grassroots organisations, the aim shifts from an abstract task that encourages further economic growth toward the purity of finding solutions that fit the very real problems people are facing. For so long the narrative has been to tend to a consumer’s desires that we’ve eventually disregarded their needs. A decentralised economy by default steps out of competing for capital into seeing clearly the locality that it is situated.
Chapter 2: The role of expert design
The expert designer is so due to their deep knowledge and understanding of their discipline. Whilst an ‘expert’ can fit into many structures, the modern designer fits neatly into the traditional structure of hierarchy found in top-down business. In the traditional method of design the agency may work as both a consultant to a client as well as the executor of the outcome. This may take form as advertising or branding. The client presents a problem they face and the design agency works to find solutions to these problems.
This relationship has gradually changed the role of design. Within the Arts and Crafts movement and prior to this the designer worked very specifically from reference books that would dictate the style of the era. This pretension and dogma toward style created a very strict attitude as to what was considered ‘good taste’. Typefaces such as Baskerville were so heavily derided at their time due to their subtle deviances from what was considered good taste that they struggled greatly at their introduction. Despite this these typefaces are now regarded as classics for breaking out of the boundaries that society set in place. Before using this as an analogy for an emphatic call to break out of our contemporary society’s boundaries it is worth noting that these boundaries were a good thing for the time—very specifically that time. They worked because change was slow. Ideas and aesthetics took time to develop, centuries passed before new movements took hold. With this slow change it goes without saying that the problems they faced from macro to micro developed slowly and could be dealt with in much the same way.
Fast forward into the 21st century and we can see that our rate of change has grown exponentially. This has propelled the designer from a mere additional veneer on a product into a profession that shapes the way we see the world. This has been felt within the industry already and we can see the transformation of the role of the designer through the adoption of human centred approaches. Although these approaches have been documented for decades it is in recent years that they have moved into the mainstream. IDEO has pioneered the popularization of human centred design both through their successful implementation of it in their work as well as sharing their methods for free with the world. Their Human Centred Design Toolkit has been downloaded over XX,XXX times. The great success in this approach is how they treat the users of their products as humans with needs rather than an amorphous consumer market to sell to.
IDEO demonstrated this famously in 1999 when American television network ABC broadcasted ‘The Deep Dive’ (Myerson, 2004). In this thirty minute show the agency was tasked with having to redesign the shopping trolley in just a week. Their success was remarkable both for the speed that they finished the project as well as their innovation of such a mundane everyday object. They began by taking a deep dive into the the community itself. Asking everyday people what difficulties they have ever faced whilst using a shopping trolley. These responses were synthesised, prototyped and reiterated continually until they found their solution. The new trolley featured removable compartment-drawers that could be removed and lifted to aid individuals with less ability to lift; it had hooks for shopping bags so that they could be easily filled and transplanted into the boot of the car; the lack of a main cage would make it less desirable to steal; two seats for children as well as a drawing/writing surface that both children and adults could use; it featured a humble cup holder and even a futuristic scanner holster so that shoppers could scan items as they shopped to save time waiting in a queue to pay. The solutions to these problems were all discovered by expanding the role of the designer outside of the traditional walls of creativity and combining it with the insights of ethnography.
Thankfully, this has been welcomed into the industry as an opportunity for designers to improve their practice as well as the lives of the people they touch. Many agencies actively describe themselves as human-centred but it can also be seen to present a challenge; the role of expert is no longer solely the designer’s. They maintain their expertise in synthesis and execution but the expert of problems lies specifically with the public. We now recognise that it is the public who hold the answer to the success of a product and yet we continue to dictate to them what problems should find a solution and which shouldn’t.
This presents the issue of a rising epistocracy as one of the many critical crossroads that we now face as a society. Epistocracy means rule by experts (Tampio, 2017). In the West we enjoy the belief that we live, work and play in a democracy—the political regime in which the people maintain their collective power to shape state. However, many institutions are active in their pursuit to remove this liberty. A strange mixture of Big Nudging and artificial intelligence threatens to undermine and supplant our freedom to choose without having us even realise.
Big Nudging derives from the joining of Nudging, a view that experts should be able to build processes that guide a public to what they feel is good; and Big Data, the ever growing collection of private data provided by collecting our every action on the internet and social media. If this is combined with the complex algorithms found in artificial intelligence then individual autonomy and independence could be gradually eroded. A.I. will sift through the massive volumes of data we generate to continually direct our thoughts and actions (e.g. by manipulating what our searches autocorrect to and what our first results are) into any place that an elite may desire. Thus, it is necessary to combat this by limiting how powerful centralised institutions can get, by distributing these powers laterally.
One means of power distribution is for design as a ‘problem solver’ to integrate fully and collaborate completely with the public as the ‘problem identifier’. This feeds directly into the idea of being at a crossroad: Do we allow the expert designer to pick which problems they solve (epistocracy) or do we ensure that problems are viewed as equal as the people who experience them and all are solved (democracy). The question of this has brought about metadesign.
John Wood’s concept of Metadesign is formed by questioning how design fits within the current societal structures of our world. Wood argues that the problems we now face as a society are so deeply rooted in how our society functions that we can’t simply design our way out of it. The solutions we need can’t come purely from technological innovations; as design is part of the the structure that has created many of our problems it is impossible to solve it through further design. Therefore, we must approach it externally through metadesign.
Metadesign functions as a ‘synergy-of-synergies’, in that it focuses on creating unlikely connections to allow for greater lateral thinking within small teams. These unlikely connections are critical for success due to the hyper-specialisation of many disciplines. Oftentimes, an individual feels powerless toward the greater ethical predicament they find themselves in due to the limited scope of their profession. However, by bringing together these actors out of their individual viewpoints and collaborating with others they can then transcend beyond the limits of what they deem possible.
It is important to recognise that much of what we deem possible or impossible is largely dependent on what is conceivable—this is usually limited by language. Wood uses the example of the coining of the term genocide after the second World War that changed the way we view certain acts of war. Looking back through history it is possible to see numerous examples of genocide, however, it would appear that we never even knew it existed until it could be conceptually conceived and defined. This then allowed it to be discussed easily and led to many war criminals being brought to justice in the years that followed. Wood argues from this that metadesign should function to fill in further conceptual gaps in our society in order to be able to bring the unthinkable into the thinkable. Once a concept becomes thinkable by a society the concept increases in its attainability, moving it further from impossible into the possible, where it can then be acted upon and implemented.
To optimise this process it is important that it can happen outside of centralised institutions. If all of these processes were to occur at this level then it could create two very real problems. Firstly, the teams responsible are liable to exist within their own ‘echo chamber’ and confirmation bias as their process would be made in-line with the institution’s own agenda. Secondly, it would be difficult to disseminate their findings and changes into the local or regional culture. Overall, in a rapidly changing world that is continually increasing in its complexity it grows ever more difficult for solutions from centralised institutions to be successful (WDS).
It is important, then, to reflect on our society as a complex ecosystem where, just as in nature, the fabric of society is delicately balanced between different unique actors and processes. If one actor or process were to disappear or change within the ecosystem the entire system as a whole would be under strain if it cannot react quickly enough. However, while speaking of society as an ecosystem helps us to understand how society supports itself, it lacks any concept of community or relationship. Therefore, it would be better to start referring to our society as a system of co-sustainment (Woods, Video). This emphasises the communatorial processes that otherwise go unnoticed within a society. Instead of viewing oneself according to the Socratic idea of the individual, that became popular within the Enlightenment, as a self-defining and self-owning citizen we can begin to place greater value on the relationships we have between different actors and processes. This is similar to the South African concept of ubuntu, that ‘I am because you are’. Through this shift in our conceptual understanding of our society we fundamentally change nothing whilst allowing us to entirely review the construction of our society. The journey, process and collaboration toward a particular product or service gains greater inherent value than the product on its own.
This change must be acted through design due to its inherent process of creation. It is their processes that feed into the collective imagination of a society by enriching beliefs and attitudes by introducing new words and narratives that become taken for granted. An obvious example would be brand names becoming everyday verbs such as ‘Google’ and ‘Hoover’ but it also extends beyond that. Platforms such as Snapchat have changed the way we communicate and share what is happening to us. Their 24hr stories and self-deleting images have since extended into platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. All of which enhances the way our societies behave (Individualism).
Policy makers, on the other hand fail to generate this level of enrichment of the collective imagination. In order for them to generate change they impose regulations, bans or tax incentives, which are open to heavy debate rather than kindling imagination. An example would be London’s new congestion charge, known as the ‘T-charge’, that would benefit the city's residents as well as reducing carbon emissions on the globe, however, it directly affects the business of the local work people. If this change were to have become part of the collective imagination prior to an imposed regulation, the regulation could have been much more welcomed by those it affected.
We can see then the integral role that design has on our society. On the one hand it has driven us into the position we are now in today. Whilst, on the other hand, it’s inherent qualities for being able to shape a society offer us the critical tools we need to steer away from the direction we are collectively heading. In order to avoid such huge roadblocks mentioned previously, such as economic and democratic collapse, we must kindle our design thinking. Focusing this acutely into values such as community, relationships and sustainability. Whilst, also viewing the tools we have created not as artifacts that have brought us to this crossroads, but also as the tools that see us pass through comfortably.