Incomplete Design Thinking

Design Thinking, far from being dead, is at last being given the kind of scholarship that will allow it to make a real difference to the profession and discipline of design, rather than just being a rebranding of business-as-usual. Lucy Kimbell’s excellent historical account in Design and Culture, to be followed in the next issue by a Part II with a rich analysis of the place of design practice in design thinking work, appropriately locates design thinking within decades of research about design processes. Lucy’s scholarly and professional work, and PhDs in this area such as the one underway by Stefanie Di Russo should mean that schematic commercial 5-dot-point-versions of design thinking are dead.

In the middle of last year, I was asked to give presentations on the state of ‘design thinking’ at RMIT and UTAS in Australia as both institutions began to institute ‘design thinking’ as general education requirements of all their respective divisions. I argued that if Australian higher education was to adopt design thinking, it was important that it be a 2.0 version, one based on research of design and not just anecdotes. I argued that because Australia had forced research activity out of design when it was incorporated into the university system (with the amalgamations of polytechnics into universities in the late 80s / early 90s) it was in fact perfectly placed to develop that 2.0 version, allowing it quickly surpass the mere rhetoric of design thinking in the US.

For the last year, I’ve been trying to squeeze out some time to write up those presentations. This draft of “The Grammar of Design Thinking” is not yet finished and without any references. But I recently assigned it to an MFA Transdisciplinary Design Seminar, so I thought I’d put it out there for critique – I’m also looking for a communication designer of the completed version…

The first section has been made redundant by Lucy’s literature survey in her “Part I” Design and Culture piece. The second section attempts to ask critically what it is about the contemporary state of capitalism that might be causing design thinking to receive so much attention, but the argument is very underdeveloped. The third section attempts to sketch out what I think design thinking should be considered to be; in other words, it is an attempt to sketch out what it is about designing-at-its-best that might represent a real disruption to how we make and value product-service-systems. A fourth section still-to-come would review the argument of the third section in terms of the title of the piece – understanding design as the capacity to view the world in terms of gerundives, middle-voiced ‘-ables.’

A Short Guide to Neoliberalism for Social Designers

This is a proposed abstract for a talk at Design Ethos at Savannah College of Art and Design in April

 

Social Design is an exciting new kind of designing that aims to help people instead of just making more stuff for the 1%. By working in human-centered, participatory ways on wicked problems, the down-trodden of the world can gain access to the power of design thinking.

But beware! Did you know that Social Design can also be a form of ‘neoliberalism’? Neoliberalism makes people think that free markets are the only, and best, option. It makes people believe that they can only make a difference as hard-working individuals. It cleverly turns people into flexible and even free sources of labor.

This presentation will highlight some of the things that might tell you that your social design project is in danger of being neoliberal, such as when it:

- promotes small group Coping rather than social Changing

- promotes small group Resilience through crises rather than societal Avoidance of crises

- avoids systems that let people escape Money, especially Electronic transactions

- avoids systems that let people operate Anonymously or Collectively, preferably getting them to use a fixed Digital Identity

- aims at making people more Flexible in terms of employable Skills

- aims at making people more Mobile with less attachment to particular Places or Products

- encourages Participation only at lower levels of systems and only ever in matters in which participants have a Direct stake

- encourages Voluntary contributions in systems that nevertheless have not-collectively-owned components

- celebrates Individual freedom, especially in the form of Choice

- celebrates Elegant Design as a Universal taste

Keeping these things in mind when you social design will ensure that you don’t accidentally exacerbate the very problems you are trying to solve.

Spring 2012 Syllabi

Syllabi for two of the three courses I am teaching this semester at Parsons:

A seminar for MFA Transdisciplinary Design Seniors:
Transdisciplinary Design Seminar 2

And a university-wide lecture course called Rethinking Sustainable Design:
RSD ULEC Spring12 Syllabus
(which you could sneak into: Room 404, 66 West 12th, Wednesdays 12-1:30pm,
though I’ll be posting videos somewhere sometime)

Breaking through the Business of Sacrificial Trade-Offs in Sustainable Design

An Abstract for a Talk at EnsAD, Paris, March 16, 2012

Design problems often present themselves as a series of competing requirements that require ‘trade-offs’. Rather than solve such problems by ‘satificing’, Design, at its best, transcends those conflicts by reframing those problems or approaching them with lateral creativity.

Sustainable Design however, seems to re-impose constraints on design problems, such as the ones mentioned in the brief for this conference: that all creation involves destruction, that the diversity that comes from mobility risks the sustainability of the local. This presentation will explore the ‘trade-offs’ that sustainability seems to demand of design.

Part One will review a series of trade-offs that plague sustainable design and will never be resolved by Life Cycle Assessment, for instance, no matter how comprehensive:

• Toxicity vs Durability
  More toxic processes, when not deployed for merely aesthetic reasons (like chroming), tend to be justified by increasing the durability of the resulting products. Indeed, the life cycle toxicity of many products increases because many materials have longer durability than the use or symbolic values of the products in which they are deployed, with the result that these materials quickly end up, and then break down, in landfill. The trade-off can be negotiated only with strongly regulated production and disposal, which would add whole-of-life costs to such toxics.
• Durability vs Efficiency
  Sustainability advocates frequently exaggerate planned obsolescence as a supply-side cause of excessive waste. In some situations, powered products should be replaced before their use or symbolic value has been exhausted by more energy efficient product. Again managing this trade-off requires minimizing the embodied energy of the replacement products, and ensuring that there is an Extended Producer Responsibility take-back scheme in place for those products.
• Efficiency vs Rebound
  It has long been recognized that in a growth-based capitalist system, improved efficiencies are quickly reabsorbed into increased output: a factory that finds a way to run 20% more efficiently, does not run for 20% less per week; and households that save money on energy bills tend to reinvest those savings in increased consumption or travel, etc. There is a lag and diversification in these rebounds, but efficiency, like convenience, is always relative and never absolute.
• Rebound vs Equity
  An underpinning of most ecodesign today has been an ecological modernization argument, that reducing ecological impact reduction only happens when a household, company or nation is wealthy enough reinvest in retooling. To put it another way, money spent on increasing developed-nation domestic efficiency is money not spent on improving the lot of developing nations. This is why international environmental regulations have ‘clean development mechanisms’ encouraging sustainability measures in developing nations that off-set impacts in developed nations.
• Equity vs Local
  A major decarbonizing strategy is localization, one that also enhancers the transparency, if not the ownership, of the economies by which everyday life is resourced. However, because not everything can be produced everywhere, especially food, localizing is not an option available to all people. As a result, we will be looking at a future of major migration, with all the tensions associated with that. Efforts to transition to local economies will have to temper concern about sustainable scale with vigilance against chauvinism or xenophobia.

Part Two will argue that many of these sustainability ‘trade-offs’ can be transcended by shifting from ‘product design’ to ‘socio-economic design.’ There are two pathways: peer-to-peer sharing economies, and business-to-consumer product service systems models. The former is important as it attempts to re-embed economic relations in richer social contexts. However, for this reason, it is less designable (platforms can facilitate at scale but not guarantee at a granular level; the relations cannot be commoditized); and consequently, social systems that support peer-to-peer tend to be insular (‘people like me’). The latter – closed loop businesses of offering functional sales – are motivated to ensure that their products are appropriately durable to get more efficient and less toxic. They should also be cosmopolitan about who they serve at whatever sustainable scale – though provided customers can pay. However, this means that sustainable social system design presents another dilemma:

• Closed Loop Businesses vs Autonomy from Corporate Capital
  In a world of product service systems, all major ecologically impacting products would remain the property of the businesses that take them back at the end of their use lives. This might be last frontier of privatization, with businesses, for sustainability reasons, now owning the means of consumption in all households – not an attractive proposition in the era of Occupy Wall Street.

Part Three offers another way to reframe the trade-offs that lie at the heart of sustainable design. All trade-offs have a sacrificial logic: lose something (now) to gain something (later). There are two problems with this way of living. Firstly, it encourages a calculative approach to the world. Secondly, it fails to acknowledge that a sacrifice one believes in is not a sacrifice. It is either something that you do as a ritualized practice, or it is even a pleasure in its own right. What is sustainability when it this kind of un-trade-off-able (non-)sacrifice?

Tony Fry on Radical Design Education Futures

Tony Fry – advocate of sustainment, refuturing, and redirective practice – will discuss the Master of Design Futures he has established at Griffith University in Australia, and the Urmadic University Project that the first cohort of graduates have initiated.

Sunday, January 15th, 3pm
Transdisciplinary Design Studio, 12th Floor,
6 East 16th, NY, 10011

Email Cameron Tonkinwise to attend: tonkinwc {at} newschool (dot) edu

A Long Blurb for a Design Education Talk at AIGA Pivot In October

I just threw together the following set of assertions based on a running essay I’ve got going. Please feel free to let me know what you think, especially any counter examples:

Change Studies: Educating Designers in
the Possibilities of Intentional Social Change

Slavoj Zizek once decried that movies today seem to evidence that the only kind of social change we can imagine are ones forced upon us by material catastrophes like meteors, epidemics or deranged robots. This seems worryingly true of designers. They can imagine things looking different next season; they can aspire to improved technologies a few years ahead; but they almost never imagine significant cultural transformations. Progressive design programs might acknowledge that this or that technological trend leads to ethical dilemmas that should be pre-emptively explored, but the obverse – when social trends are leading to political dilemmas that will demand technological redesign – are much rarer.

From this perspective, it is more than ironic that whilst designers are trained to be future makers, almost no design school I know explicitly teaches future studies. By this I mean teaching designers tools and techniques for either:

A. describing likely futures with conditions very different from those of today in which rising professional designers will have to work – for example, conditions of Peak Oil (or Peak Water, Pensions, etc), changed climate, India/China global economic domination, end-of-/massive-increase-in migration

B. describing the futures likely to be the consequence of the designs, if successfully adopted, that rising professional designers innovate – I am thinking of social impact assessments based on various adoption scenarios: used extensively as designed, abused extensively, extended through combination with other platforms, etc; and then, with respect to mainstream North/Western middle class, global consumer class, bottom of the pyramid, in developed or developing nations, etc

Without these kinds of future studies, designers seem constrained by the frame of the present: the future is only ever imagined as being differently quantitatively: faster technologies, more of the current dilemmas, the same basic nuclear family + 5 day job + light capitalist market resourcing.

In response, this paper will present 3 approaches to what could be called ‘Change Studies for Designers.’

1. Types of Social Change (and the Role of Design)
Designers need to understand the different way larger scale change happens, whether evolutionary ecological change and analogous socio-technical regime change, or community organized social revolutions and analogous market innovation diffusion, regulatory policy changes and behavioral economics, the social psychology of organizational or personal habit change. These are standard social/management theory courses: what is always missing (though partially present in innovation diffusion) is the role of the material designed environment, the difference new technologies make, the constraints physical spaces have, the visibility that designs promote or conceal.

2. Things Weren’t Always this Way (i.e., History)
Most design students are required to take Design History courses, but in ways that are often ahistorical, as if designing has been this constant thing throughout the last century, just in slightly different cultural contexts and resulting in different forms. Designers today need histories that make them realize that the use of the term ‘design’ in 1930 is almost incomprehensible for designers today. Designers need social histories that show them it has not just been technologies that have changed within mostly unchanged (bourgeois) social conditions, but that all current experiences, especially cultural ones, are historically specific and relatively recent. Remember Richard Florida’s claim that whereas someone from US 1900 relocated to US 1950 would be shocked by the technological change but find the social conditions more or less the same, someone relocated from 1950 to 2000 would find only the social transformation shocking. The learning outcome of any history (or rather, historicist) course should be something like the realization that “because what is now has not always been, then everything is changeable.”

3. Fantasizing Social Change
Doodling is still a primary indicator of design inclination, the capacity for visual thinking. But even more important should be day-dreaming, the capacity to imagine utterly different ways of organizing society. Designers need to be retrained in the arts of imagination, especially story-telling alternative realities. As John Thackara has observed, what is needed is less ‘science fiction’ than ‘social fiction.’

The paper will conclude by arguing that there are three barriers to ‘Change Studies for Designers:’

• The Near-Anti-Intellectualism of Professional Design Associations
Design education remains tied to the imprimatur of Professional Associations, as it should. However, as professionally focused, and as often led by more senior professionals, questions of large scale social change, or even redirection of practice are not foremost concerns. Those associations with historical projects often, in line with their funding, tend toward the hagiographical and away from the historicist.

• Accrediting Bodies’ Distinction between Liberal Arts and Studios
Design education are accredited by not-very-forward thinking bureaucracies deploying 19th Century distinctions between knowledge-for-its-own-sake liberal arts and instrumental training studios. What is needed for designers to have a more thorough appreciation for social change are interactive engagements with social change theories and histories, and more critical research-oriented speculative design studios.

• Social Science Ignorance of Design
Design Schools can reach out to the social sciences and humanities for more sophisticated learning about social change, but until those disciplines have a better understanding of design, their histories and theories will be missing the role of design in social change, and their pedagogy will not insufficiently designerly.

Graduating into a Post-Truth World

This is a draft of a commencement speech I’ll be giving to New School Environmental Studies graduates. I’d love critical feedback:

I must begin by apologizing for not being a celebrity commencement speaker. I will be talking a bit about celebrity, or at least what it means to graduate in a world where celebrity, and its values, remain overwhelming priorities. But I am not a celebrity, just a professor who was not at the meeting when they decided on the commencement speaker.

I am professor of the design side of this uniquely triangular degree program (the others being science (ecosystems science) and policy (urban environment planning)). Design is weird, as perhaps some of you now know. Rather than being an attempt to understand the truth of this or that thing, design just makes things, or as Elaine Scarry once put it, it makes things up and then makes them real by pretending that they were never made. Design makes something true; from design’s point of view, truthfulness is something you have to construct. I want to talk a bit about what it means to graduate into a world with design’s kind of truthiness, what non-celebrities call constructivism.

Commencement speeches are occasions for platitudes. Something like: ‘To thine own self be true,’ for example.

I really hate that one.

I hate it because when I was at high school I was invited to participate in a prestigious competition – the Lawrence Campbell Oratory Competition. You are given a topic 15 minutes before making an 8 minute speech. I was selected to compete because I was a good debater. But I quickly discovered that there is no correlation between disputation skills and oratory skills. (I also discovered that you win by preparing a couple of speeches that could be easily modified to the kind of generic topics you get given at events like this.) My topic was ‘To thine own self be true,’ and I bombed. So that epithet is not going to be the one I give you.

And this is ironic because I now live in the land of ‘To thine own self be true.’ Self-knowledge seems to be one of the highest imperatives around here. Losers on reality TV shows are always declaring, ‘I didn’t come here to make friends, but I’ve learned so much about myself.’

Instead of this Shakespearean maxim, I much prefer the Ancient Greek one, from Pindar, but much worked over by Nietzsche: ‘learn to become who you are.’ There is something dynamic and othering about that phrase, with its emphasis on becoming, in the future, rather than merely knowing, about the present. It is paradoxical, containing the provocation that it is a challenge to be, to be in sync with your own existence – to be, you could say, sustainable.

This talk of truth and self, or authenticity, reminds me of an article I remember reading a few years back that really gave me a new way of seeing the world.

(I think that it is really important to always ask yourself when was the last time I really learned something from something I read; what was last thing I read that influenced me, that didn’t just add to my knowledge, but that caused me to change. Actually, you could say this even of verbal arguments. When was the last time that your mind was changed by someone.)

One of the pieces that did this to me a few years ago was by David Runciman in the London Review of Books. The article was specifically about two parallel succession fights, one in the United Kingdom, between Blair and his 2IC, the recently ousted Gordon Brown, and one in Australia, between John Howard and his 2IC. The specifics matter less than the conceptual distinction that Runciman makes, later expanded into a book. Runciman claims that political weakness today comes from being perceived as a hypocrite. This is something different from lying. In a strange way, lying, boldfaced, is something that, these days, gets read as being strong. Precisely because everybody knows that you are lying, because you apparently have the courage to lie, outright, you cannot be accused of being a hypocrite. By contrast, hypocrites are all about denying and concealing. They lie also, but with the pretense that they are not lying, concealing the principles that are actually organizing their work and ways of living.

Runciman’s article made sense for me of something that had been troubling me ever since I had finished my doctorate in 2000. Being a product of, and thus staunch believer in, the institution that is the university, I had enormous faith in the inherent power of truth. And yet, throughout the naughties, nothing seemed more impotent than truth. Whether it was Clinton and that woman, or Bush and Blair and their Weapons of Mass Destruction, or Howard and an Australian fear of ‘illegal immigration,’ lying seemed to have no consequence; the world seemed content to grant mendacity impunity. Runciman corrected my recent graduate naivety, explaining for me why truth does not have automatic agency.

Runciman’s theory explained a lot. It explained for example, celebrity. Performers are professional liars. And invariably, the most spectacular performers lie not only in their professional work but in their messed up lives as well. And they are loved the more for it – as long as they avoid being hypocrites about it.

And Runciman’s theory explains media phenomena like ‘climate gate.’ Climate scientists come out looking like hypocrites when neo-conservative pundits patently lie about climate change being some sort of liberal elite conspiracy; or Transport Commissioners look like hypocrites when faced with ridiculous lies about bike lines being part of a UN conspiracy to undermine the sovereignty of the US and drive (excuse the pun) the middle class back into urban tenements.

Now, while I hope that this precis of Runciman’s argument convinces you of never, ever being a hypocrite, I am obviously not advocating that now that you have graduated you should embark on a successful career of defiant lying. You have not just completed a business degree after all.

I am, I hope obviously, still exhorting you to be champions of the truth that your time at a university should have made you love.

But, Environmental Studies is an interdisciplinary degree program, one that combines science, policy and design in the complex context of urban environments. That interdisciplinarity is all about the fact that the ‘truth is NOT out there.’ It is the complex outcome of a mix of practices that is only ever more or less robust. You will see this now in the work of the seniors.

People can lie about issues of sustainability because there is no single extant truth to sustainability. It is rather a project, an ongoing project. The truth of sustainability is something that needs to assembled and defended. It is something that you have to commit to, something you have to become, something you have to be true to.

What this means in the end is best captured I feel by what Michel Foucault toward the end of his life was calling, following the Ancient Greeks, parrhesia. This is often paraphrased as ‘speaking truth to power.’ But I prefer, in the context of not-being-a-hypocrite, and in the era of facebook, to call it ‘speaking truth to friends.’ Here’s a quote from Foucault’s Fearless Speech:

So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority’s opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger.

I hope that your learning of Environmental Studies at the New School has made you sustainability parrhesiastes. Not people who look for the big glory political moment to speak truth to power, but people who, knowing that that spectacular arena of politics is increasingly irrelevant, look for the everyday opportunities to speak often about need for things to be changed so that they are truer to sustainability. Get micro-political about ecological sustainability. Live toward that truth, but moreso, speak often about that, making it true.

Let me leave you with two versions of this exhortation.

The first concerns what many of you know that I am most interested in at the moment: sharing. I am convinced that it is true that moving from an ownership society to one that is structured around use-without-ownership is the best way of reducing societal material intensity. But sharing, whether community-based or commercial, requires higher levels of cosmopolitanism. People need to relearn how to get along with people, especially people different from them. To find trustworthy people you have to start trusting; you have to take a risk.

I hope that all you Environmental Studies graduates, having been in New York for the past few years, are now, and will continue to be, no matter where you are, the sort of people who are forever starting conversations with strangers. While you wait for a bus, while you wait for your laundry, while you sit in a café, I hope that you will always be the sort of parrhesiastes, the non-hypocrites, who start talking about your sustainability politics to whoever. This reaching out is not just about proselytizing about sustainability; it is about relearning to become who we are, interpersonals.

Another final way to put this occurred to me when I once read a critique of higher education. It said that it is an indictment of most academic programs that their best students are the ones who go on to become teachers in those programs. The argument was that the best products of good teaching should be those who go on to practice what they have been taught, rather than turn around and teach it. But I always felt that this critique was an error in emphasis. It is true that we academics should not only value those students who become academics; but that does not mean that we should not aspire to all our students being in their own ways teachers, outside the academy, in the café or Laundromat or at the bus stop. We environmental studies faculty do, and I believe rightly, expect all our students to leave us reteaching the truth about what it means to live in interconnected but finite systems.

In my experience, this is what these Environmental Studies graduates we honor today currently are: they are kind of people who take risks to learn and teach about how to better our urban environments. May they continue to be true to that.