Design thinking and a new way forward for humanity.
What is design and what does it mean?
This simple question has plagued the design community for decades, in reality no one can really come to a full agreement. I guess you could say there isn’t one “well designed” definition of design, thats not to say none have tried. There are many different, unique and quite good definitions of design, throughout this article I will elaborate on mine.
Someone might say design is “the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system.” While that is the textbook definition of design it doesn’t encompass or even begin to touch on the importance and prevalence of design in our everyday world and the role it has on shaping human behavior. Design is much more than how something looks, to me and a lot of other designers design means efficiency, design means sustainability, design means including all factors of a product, system, service or building and incorporating that into your bottom line and sticking to it. Design is much more than a field of study, to me design is essentially a way of thinking about the world. An enlightened take on problem solving if you will.
“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
I have heard the concept of design and the associated thinking that comes with it summarized most eloquently when said simply: “Design means….beautiful solutions”. This is another way of stating design as an enlightened take on problem solving. When something is well designed it produces beautiful results, if the results aren’t beautiful then you know its wrong. A well conceptualized design should include all the fundamental necessities of a product, system, or service and work to solve the problem by creating the best experience possible. Sustainability is also a huge buzzword in the design world, the term we now know of as sustainability started its life as a way to think about the future. A United Nations Commission report in 1987 cemented the term sustainability in public consciousness as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
This type of thinking about the present world as inevitably linked to the future got its start at a national level in 1969 with the creation of the National Environment Policy Act a.k.a (NEPA) whose mission is “to foster and promote the general welfare, to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of our present and future”. Sustainability may be approached in a number of ways but the three most relevant and pervasive ones are within the environmental, social and economic models of our world. Those are where such change needs to occur if we are truly to bring about a sustainable model of living for all life on this planet.
“The designer today should not help to produce more — he has to help produce fewer and better things. There is a beauty, an aesthetic and philosophy of the less.” — Philippe Starck
What is design thinking and how did it come about?
As we have seen design and sustainability are closely linked and both lend credence to the other. The synergistic quality and their ability to play off each other comes from the fact they are both based on mechanisms of thought and thinking about our natural world and potential solutions to the problems that occur therein. This brings us to what many designers, architects, inventors, philosophers and even business professionals study today; called Design Thinking.
Design thinking is the natural cognitive practice we use to judge and find solutions to problems in our natural world. Basically its the ideology and principles of good design applied to a cognitive process that we can use to solve problems. Much like the scientific method design thinking has steps and methods to better prepare you, your system, product, building or service to meet the challenges of the real world without compromising quality or emotional value. Much like the scientific method it begins by thoroughly defining all parameters of a problem to create a solution. Where Design thinking differs from the rigorous demands of the scientific method is when it becomes iterative, meaning intermediate “solutions” are also potential starting points of alternative paths, including redefining of the initial problem. Design thinking is seeing the big picture with all factors included and applying those principles to the systems and ideologies that surround us every day to create a better world for all. Think of it like solution based thinking.
“We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.” — R. Buckminster Fuller
As a longtime fan and student of design I believe we have to be conscious of the designer’s responsibility in our world; I feel like I have a sacred duty to use the design process to bring about social change. Im focusing my career around design because I believe the field of design…like no other academic area of study has the potential to bring about radical social, environmental, and economic change that has the possibility to eradicate all suffering our inefficient systems create and produce on a daily basis.
How can design play a role in creating a better future for all life on earth?
When we begin to design whole systems from the ground up to be beneficial to all life without compromise we will create an exponential growth of higher consciousness and will push us into the future of technological progress and abundance we always dreamed of and were promised as kids. This is beautifully encapsulated by yet another Buckminster Fuller quote where he surmises where society has gone off the rails:
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller
One can distill this philosophy of human centered design into the term known collectively as social design. Wikipedia defines social design as “design that is mindful of the designer’s role and responsibility in society; and the use of the design process to bring about social change”. If every type of person and business outside the field of design took this approach to everyday life and the social and economic systems they perpetuate everyday we could really change things up. Imagine a government that thinks of human suffering, poverty, pollution, and war not just as necessary evils or burderns but as totally and utterly unacceptable. Imagine whole industries focusing their hundreds of billions of dollars on making their model of development sustainable and beneficial to this earth and all life on it. Imagine how human consciousness would change when people see their environments and the people and systems surrounding them all of a sudden putting them and their fulfillment first and foremost, treating them as the companies bottom line. What we need is a revolution of principles to bring about a social, environmental, and economic paradigm shift in the way we approach moving forward as a species. I whole heartily believe design can play as that great equalizer.