Design and the crisis of collective action
It’s been a difficult week around the world and especially for my friends in the United States. I hope everyone is well. Thoughts are with you all. Kia kaha.
Reflecting on sitting at the table
I wanted to share some stuff that’s been on my mind about the direction the design industry is heading in, covering some of the dilemmas and difficulties that have emerged out of the increasingly abstract and workshop-oriented practice of the past two decades.
Lots of reasons for this. I don’t think there’s a neat and tidy explanation, but a huge part of it has to do with the rise of software engineering management as the dominant force in digital product development, sidelining the corporate influence of design but also massively amplifying the social impact of design and the harms that it can cause.
Part of me is also tempted to argue that it’s bullshit all the way down and as designers, we should drop all pretensions of status and world-changing influence to focus on the humble work of crafting small high quality objects without reification or epistemic arrogance.
But I like running workshops! And I achieve good results, as queasy and conflicted as I feel about a lot of it overall.
These thoughts are not yet fully formed and the whole situation could change drastically in the near future. But I do feel the main thesis of The Design of Everyday Things being repudiated by Don Norman himself is significant news and worth paying attention to.
Design thinking cessation
For a long time, Design Thinking (the capitalised form of corporate innovation theatre, native-born of Silicon Valley) could do no wrong, but as it has seeped into the worlds of public policy and education over the past decade, skepticism and questioning its prerogative has become increasingly prominent in the design industry:
That it privileges managerialism over craft and sidelines traditional design expertise.
That it is too vague and poorly defined to be taught as a universal method.
That it protects the powerful and preserves the status quo, providing cover for decisions that are really shaped by politicised social and economic forces.
An influential 2019 essay by Maggie Gram looked at the culture and discourse of design thinking through the story of a design-led transformation gone wrong in the city of Gainesville, Florida. In a perceptive 2021 article, Tricia Wang excoriated the widely-used ‘How Might We’ prompt as a disingenuous and overused activity that ‘limits the scope of visibility on systemic issues to a narrow spectrum’.
The discussion isn’t happening in a vacuum. With the emergence of computing and the splitting of practice into new fields like interaction design, UX, HCI and human factors, along with the popularity of disembodied methodologies like Design Thinking, a lot of everyday design practice has shifted from its modernist foundations in industrial products and communication arts, away from craft, style and aesthetics to embody a broad and holistic understanding of human needs and solving problems to deliver business results and social impacts.
First Things First Manifesto (1963): Not the first time designers have publicly grappled with the contradictions and ethical questions around their contributions to society.
Once upon a time, the drive to advocate for the user was effortlessly framed as beneficial by most of us working on or adjacent to it. Now, all around us are the signs of crisis and collapse of extractive industrial capitalism, so-called surveillance capitalism, rising fascism, the so-called crumbles. Mike Monteiro has argued that the world is working exactly how we designed it and that as designers, our social responsibility to society should come first.
All this has precipitated a major re-evaluation of some of the biggest and most influential ideas across multiple design disciplines.
Jesse James Garrett, one of the founders of UX as a distinct design discipline has questioned if realising user-centered values is even possible under capitalism.
Don Norman, the ur-figure of usability research and interaction design has recently stated outright that Human-Centered Design—the practices and principles outlined in his famous book The Design of Everyday Things—is no longer fit for purpose. Despite its humanistic ambitions and focus on accessibility and inclusion, Human-Centered Design has contributed to pervasive individualism that eschews the needs of communities and the broader impacts of design decisions on politics, society and earth systems. Like Design Thinking, it is often used to obscure power and preserve the status quo.
For designers to move beyond this tar pit, Norman proposes a shift in focus towards Humanity-Centred Design:
When we design for humanity, we cannot stop with people. We must consider the entire globe: all living things, the quality of the land, water, and air. The loss of species. The changes in climate. We are an integral part of the system called “Earth,” where changes in one component can impact every component.
This seems like a significant realisation and one that could go on to have a big impact around the world if educators and the wider professional community pay attention.
My main concern is how self-defeating it may turn out to be. So far, what I’ve read of Humanity-Centred Design shows deeply ingrained assumptions remain around ‘Solutions’ and problem solving. Even when emphasising community-led processes, it still subtly privileges the designer as the all important changemaker.
When expressed as a set of basic principles, it doesn’t substantially change or mitigate key exploits in the existing political economy of design. How do we stop a process aiming to use these new principles from being captured by powerful interests or bureaucratic intransigence and dragged back into the old theatrics of meaningless consultancy and co-design fakeouts?
There’s a lot that still needs to be worked through but I’m hopeful these emerging ideas and attitudes are a sign our combined design disciplines have reached a turning point.
I’ve been telling my students for a while now that the ‘industry standard’ design methods we play with in class workshops will be swept away over the next few years; ‘How Might We’ prompts and walls of sticky notes yielding to more grounded and democratic forms of collaboration and knowledge amplification.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, we already know a little bit about what this future of design might look like, guided by Mātauranga Māori and universal design principles for accessibility. Our main dilemma now is not only how we need to change and what we need to do, but whether we can do it quickly enough.