Designing for Degrowth
or thoughts about the true role of Design from now on
Although I’ve been involved in sustainability projects for quite a few years already, I personally despise the word: no, our current lifestyle isn’t sustainable, but humanity rarely sustained its ways anyway: we are built for change, and climate change will force us to change (or kill us all, well, on a planetary scale, it doesn’t matter).
So what is happening RIGHT NOW, and what has design do with it?
Fewer resources, higher prices
When you think about “carbon-free energy”, think about “much more expensive energy” — oh, wait, what? You already paid a lot for heating, despite sleeping in jumpers so that you could set the thermostat for 19, and think twice to turn on air conditioning even if it’s above 30 in the flat? (Numbers in Degree Celsius). Exactly this is what “carbon free” means for the next 100 years, as simply put, we can’t build “net zero” houses fast enough.
I’ve heard that some of you couldn’t afford tomatoes in May, neither could I.. makes sense, given tomato season is in August at the part of Earth I grew up. Maybe you even had to change your diet a bit because of that — well, this is what some “green” people were talking about all along: it’s not that beef would disappear, it’s just that it gets much more expensive compared to your budget.
In short: during degrowth, we will all feel poorer.
Degrowth will make you concentrate on what matters, you don’t have to “will” it
Yet what this means for business is that people will have less “free” money floating around: it is unlikely that we should build another entertainment application. Investments are a big question (and likely their financing might change), but some users will still have money for what does them a service.
We always dreamed about getting rid of the “economy of superfluous things” — well, this is how it is done: simply once people don’t have the money to spend they stop spending it on needless things. The only side effect is that they are less likely to invest into useful improvements as well.
Personas will remain the same, journeys might change
If there is one tenet of Harvard negotiation which fits here is this:
Interests remain the same even after a deal is struck
Degrowth will surely mean compromises: this is the whole point! Of course I’d love to have a tomato salad in March as well, but I won’t be able to afford it and given how water-intensive tomato is, it might not even exist in a decade or two! But I will have to understand why do I want to have a tomato salad, and based on the ocassion I might need to replace it with something else.
It’s easier to understand in the terms of water: in most European countries, consumers use drinkable water for everything, including shower, toilet, dishwashing, but also irrigation of grass, flowers and vegetables, filling up the pool in the garden… some of these activities will continue to need drinking water, but others use it only because of availability, ease of use and universalness. Once the inevitable economic needs will arise, we will have to find an easy way to replace drinking water with a worse quality substitute, which is still suitable for the task.
That said, the needs and goals of people will remain the same: they still want to drink and cook, clean themselves and their environment, but the journey of how they will execute this inevitably changes: toilets might run on water recycled from showering, which in turn might become the water used for irrigation of grass. That will likely need more compact and dense sanitation network though. What about NASA inventions for the ISS?
Our job as designers will be to find these core needs, and invent solutions that satisfy them in a less resourceful, but still enjoyable way. We will really need to understand what people do with their resources, what people need exactly, and what hidden goals are behind these needs in order to make them meet once the need itself can’t be met.
And last but not least: we have to know ourselves, our true needs and goals better as well.
Africa as a source of inspiration
In order to solve these challenges, we will need design patterns, “best practices” matching our new, adverse conditions. While we (perhaps wrongfully) spent years on “white person going to Africa to fix it” scenarios as designers, we will use them as source of inspiration: simply put, where are people handling the situation of lack of water the best? Obviously where it’s been missing for centuries: the deserts.
So once after all, people will go to Africa not to teach, but to learn: I’m not saying the continent can’t benefit from the fusion of ancient knowledge and modern technology, but this time, they will be the experts.
Of course the same can be applied to other “third world” countries, out of this resource and another. I’m not saying that based on the lack of sand, the slums of Mumbay or the Brazilian favelas need to be the next model of suburban architecture, but human creativity perhaps helped some of their architects to overcome issues most architects will only face in the next decade.
That said, perhaps no slumdog millionaire would build without sand in case they would have the ability, but none of us (except for the millionaires) will have access to it soon, and as buildings tend to prove their worth(lessness) only after a few years, better learn sooner than later.
Prototypes of catastrophes to come
When I first heard people complaining about paper masks and staying at home for a few months, I was dazzled: how come we complain with hyper-fast internet, enclosed to our own homes with delivery organized from food to medicine, when just a generation or two ago we were all preparing for a nuclear fallout?
Your home is not a bunker, an FFP respirator isn’t a gas mask, nothing compares to a nuclear winter, and covid (with vaccines and in the right age group of the typical Medium reader) is mostly less severe, than radiation poisoning. Yet it was still a good prototype of something which might come: as long as there are nuclear weapons, we are never entirely out of the danger someone pushing a button, initiating a chain reaction forcing all of the remaining people to bunkers.
In a lot of sense, what we see are what I like to call, “prototype catastrophes”: it’s a learning opportunity on how mass of people will behave once something really sinister happens. I do feel sorry for the Syrians and Ukrainians leaving their home, but knowing that they are just a few percent of what mass migration expected between 2025–2035, I’m glad that they are already here so that we can learn how to treat them well, and how can we build cultures (think of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton) where immigration is the norm.
The true role of design in the 21st century
No, design does not have to be the “change agent”: don’t give roles to it for what it was never “designed” for. Change will be inevitable as the lack of resources will pressure us to change for all of our survival, not just as species, but (as our wallet tells us now) as individual beings.
The role of design will be the same: emphatize with the needs of users and the context, understand available technology, prototype, test and scale solutions which will work for a changing world, for mass communities.
Only this time, change will not be about abundance, as it was for the past 20–30 years during which UX Design / Service design grew up, but instead, it will be the opposite: the change of dwindling resources, and instead of working with the newest technologies, the focus will be on substituting lost (or economically infeasible) ones.
Good luck to us all, let’s save ourselves!
