In case you missed it in last week’s journal article, we are gearing up for the exciting launch of a new handbook by Leyla that will be released on March 16, 2020, called Design Systems Change! This is the fifth in her series of handbooks she’s written about making change, with other series titles being: Make Change: A Handbook for Creative Rebels and Change Agents, Tips & Tricks to Facilitating Change, Disruptive Design: A Method for Activating Positive Social Change by Design, Circular Systems Design: A Toolkit for the Circular Economy, and now the fifth one in the series, Design Systems Change: How to activate your career as a creative changemaker and help design a regenerative, circular future.
This newest handbook, Design Systems Change, includes an in-depth exploration of agency-building tools for activating a life and career of creative changemaking. Packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future, by design, this handbook is also a workbook, complete with over 30 interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make positive change.
Leading up to its launch on March 16th, we are sharing excerpts from the handbook from each of the three main sections Design, Systems and Change. This week, we take a peek at the power of design in creating a circular, regenerative future and dive into what design is not. If you want to be one of the first to read the full 190+ pages, then you can preorder it here, and it will be sent to your inbox in a digital format as soon as it's launched!
Expert from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu
Design — It’s not what you think it is
Design is one of the most powerful and pervasive influencers of our lives. It is everywhere, from the bureaucratic processes that drive us all mad (often ad hoc and reductive design), through to the beautiful user experience of our treasured devices (often addictive and intentionally designed to steal your eyeballs away from other things).
There are the pain-in-the-ass-designs, like call centers that are intentionally designed to make you hang up before you can voice your complaint, stores that usher you past expensive items in your search for the basics like bread so you buy more, or my personal pet peeve: the airport security line that requires all humans to momentarily become a cow as they are herded through a maze of control. Cities, buildings, products, services, bus routes, election processes — everything that we humans created has been designed by someone or a group of people.
As a powerful social scriptor, design gives narrative; how you move around a city or the rules you obey or disregard, for instance, design influences your mind to create actions and form opinions. Our mind is activated in conscious and covert ways by visual signs and physical forms, wayfinding devices, restrictions, symbols and aesthetics.
From the moment we are born, to the day we depart this Earth, our lives are profoundly influenced by the designed world. And, despite the hugely influential far-reaching impact of design as a profession and a socially forming process, for some reason, as a society, we seem to succumb to reducing design down to the basics of aesthetics and function, rather than what it is really doing — influencing and forming the entire world as we know it.
Perhaps it’s through this mystique that it helps to perpetuate the systems of unsustainability that design enables in our extraction-based economy?
One of the things I think about a lot is the relationship between design and the social structures that also influence us all immensely. After all, we are social animals, and humans attribute their success to collaboration and the social connections we form.
Sure, we are riddled with biases and are as equally un-cooperative as we are collaborative, but we also look after our young intensely and form strong social bonds and smile when others smile at us, we work towards effectively getting along. We speak shared languages and operate under social expectations that condition us to behave in socially-beneficial ways and to value things in culturally appropriate ways. Objects and symbols are central to the forming of our cultures and interpreting the physical world we inhabit.
Designers in all their types and roles – industrial designers, fashion designers, furniture designers, architects, landscape architects, interior designers, user experience designers, service designers, graphic designers, even engineers – all work to create the services, products and processes that the world engages with. Why? Because people have needs that are met through the creation of things. Designers are thus charged with the task of converting these needs into things that meet them and doing it in unique and novel ways that beat the competition. Designers are value creates.
This system has incentivized many to come up with the desires before the products can fill them, but that’s an entirely different story to tell. Individually, we might want to stay connected to friends and colleagues so technology helps us do that, but collectively, we need to have a system of governance that keeps society in some sort of stable place. So, we iteratively design governments and legal systems with penalties for misbehavior.
Design thus operates on many levels to combine competing aspects, such as function, aesthetics, enjoyment, desirability, entertainment and control. The latter can be seen in many of the design decisions around shared communal artifacts, like street side seats or public buildings; there are often many aspects incorporated to deter certain types of people and engage others. The park bench is perfect for the office worker to sit for 30 minutes and each their lunch, but intentionally designed so that the homeless person can’t sleep on it or the skateboarding kid can’t grind her board against it.
Design may be the output of imagination and creativity, but it forms the structures that create our societies as we know them.
The one unifying factor of design is that the driving force behind it is to create something that meets a defined or intended “need”. We define this as functionality, and everything that exists can be defined by its core function. If a product or service does not fulfill a clear functionality, then it doesn’t function, and it’s often seen as lacking value or being purely aesthetic.
A chair with two legs that does not stand up is broken, a car without a drive shaft may look like a car but is unable to achieve the act of driving, a blunt knife or a bucket with a hole, a hat with no rim, a building without a front door — these are all pointless things as they don’t serve the core function that is needed for us to ascribe value and thus use them, desire them and keep them in our lives. Or more importantly, we may not part with money to own them. A government without a way of collecting money from its citizens may find that it is quickly unable to afford to pay for the services it intended to offer in exchange for votes, thus it is unable to function in terms of being elected or seen as governing.
All designs can have unintended consequences, such as creating perverse incentives, spillover effects or externalities. These are often not conceived at the point of creation and are thus dealt with after the thing has come into existence and the feedbacks of interacting with the world can be seen.
Design is therefore an all-encompassing human capacity that reaches beyond the known professions of industrial, fashion, graphic, user experience and interior design. There are also policy writers, researchers, scientists and administrative professionals who likewise employ design as a tool for enacting change. Absolutely everything that humans have conjured into being is, in some way. a designed artifact and thus, should be seen as a product of our constructed world. But perhaps the most important, unspoken thing about design is the fact that whatever we can make, we can redesign, which further opens up the opportunity for the idea us all being everyday citizen designers of the future.
The way we each make choices, move through our cities, select food, and act on our consumption preferences all create a type of design outcome, as every action has impacts.
By understanding the power of design, both as a profession and as an outcome of the choices we make in our daily lives, then we can gain the tools to redesign systems and unlock some of design’s potential to be an effective tool for enacting positive change.
Many designers are none the wiser to the impact that they have; with short timelines and demanding briefs, it’s difficult to find the time to adequately assess the impact of any one or combined design choices they make. But this has to change. We need to foster within the design community a collective code of conduct, a set of standards and ethical guidelines to ensure that what we create is not just serving a system of exploitation and extraction, but instead creating greater value than is being taken. This is what circular systems design is all about!*
Thus, if we are to design the world that works better for all of us, then our perception of design, what it does to us overtly and covertly — that reductive idea has to change. Instead of it being a fruitless contributor to the world of luxury, business and entertainment, we can leverage design to be the incredibly powerful social influencer that it is by default, as it can make or break elections, control societies, create change and dictate the future.
Contrary to all the design thinking rhetoric out there, ask any designer how they do what they do, and they will each give you a very different set of tools, processes and design practices that they use to get from a set brief to a solid outcome. Design thinking is one approach put forth by one set of designers who do a particular type of design work. There is nothing wrong with design thinking; it’s just that it’s not the defining process of design. There is no standardized design process, as design is an experiential act that requires many different tools. For example, an architect uses very different processes than a fashion designer or a UX designer.
Design thinking can be done well and certainly serves a purpose, but it’s not the only type of design approach and should be like everything else: questioned for its integrity and viability to solve the more complex problems we collectively face.
We can’t solve complex problems with simple solutions that don’t address the root cause of the issues within the system. We need depth of understanding and to embrace complexity. This is why applying systems thinking to any creative process is critical to coming up with solutions that fit within the complexity, rather than trying to design it away.
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Next week, we will share an excerpt from the Systems section, so stay tuned!
