Year 2000: deconstructing and reconstructing
Story #1 of 16-part chronicle: ‘The evolution of my social design craft’
It’s the year 2000. I’m in my foundation year studying for a BA in graphic design at Notre Dame University in Lebanon. I remember it as a busy year where we had at least three projects going at any one time, with every project lasting no longer than two weeks. Lots of sleepless nights (or ‘nuits blanches’ as we used to say) and a diet of crisps, chocolate bars and Diet Pepsi as I spent hour after hour sitting at my drawing table doing various arduous activities such as building complex polyhedrons out of paper, cutting up trainers and enhancing their design with metal objects, drawing blindly, and designing and painting hundreds of abstract layouts using lines only, dots only or both.
I (as well as other students on the course) just could not see what any of these projects had to do with learning how to design advertising campaigns (at the time, that was my limited understanding of what graphic designers actually do for a living). Every time we would ask the Foundation Year Lead Linda Selwood Choueiri what exactly we were learning, she would reply with: “I’m helping you unlearn how you’ve been taught to think and see, so you can discover new ways of thinking and seeing.” It took me many years to finally understand what Linda meant, and to appreciate that the purpose of these hours and hours of work was to train my brain (a sort of brain gym) to strengthen the creative bits that would have become lazy after 18 years of traditional schooling, and to (slightly) silence the analytical bits that tended to dominate. It really didn’t matter what the final output looked like, and that was certainly not what Linda was assessing us against.
Retrospectively, I can now see that regardless of craft or medium, there was often a common skill required across a number of different briefs: and that was deconstruction and reconstruction. We deconstructed lines, objects, shapes, photographs and images, and reconstructed them to create something new — a layout, collage or sculpture. The deconstruction process needs an analytical mind; understanding how things work, look and feel by breaking them. In fact, this is key to many scientific practices. For example, the reason we understand all that we do about animal anatomy is because many scientists spent lots of time deconstructing (a.k.a. dissecting) lots of animals to figure out how their bodies work. The reconstruction process needs a creative mind, building on what we have understood and putting things together in playful, unexpected, sudden and uncertain ways to create something new and better — such as tech implants that enhance our anatomy.
In 2003, and in my last year on the BA, I was interning at Saatchi & Saatchi in Beirut (why and how I got there is the subject of another story in this chronicle). We were given the brief to deconstruct the design process that the agency followed, and to reconstruct a more effective process. So I shadowed meetings and activities that were happening at different levels of the agency, from briefing to project evaluation. I documented how designers worked, how clients felt, and how long things took, and re-designed the process to make it better for everyone — the clients, the creatives, and the business. Little did I know back then that what I was doing was ‘service design’. In fact, it would take another 5 years for me to first come across the term when I join Zoe and Mary at Uscreates in 2008.
I now deconstruct systems, processes, and services nearly every day to re-imagine and rebuild them for the better. Here’s an example. In 2015, I was excited to direct a project for Policy Lab to design new ways to support people with long-term conditions to stay in work or return to work. I worked with Ruth Edmonds, Francine Bennett, Cat Dew, and Laura Malan to firstly deconstruct the problem space. This was done through a mixed-method approach: looking at big data and what it can tell us about what type of people are most at risk, and then complementing that with deep data from ethnographic interviews to get real-life insights on the experiences that these people go through. This deconstruction process helped us learn so much about what is happening and why. We learned that people who earn less, have been in a job for less time, or live alone are more at risk of leaving work when faced with a health issue. We also learned that line manager relationship has everything to do with the likelihood of people leaving or staying, that mental health issues remain a stigma in the workplace, and that support services are disjointed (a GP can advise on health, a Job Centre advisor can advise on work, but often these conversations need to be one and the same).
Armed with this new understanding, we started reconstructing a better picture through collaboration and prototyping with different parts of the system; policy makers, citizens, employers and services. This led us to propose the Well in Work Service, where people struggling with health or disability get support early on as soon as they go on short-term sickness absence, and where that support is delivered holistically and consistently by a work and health coach who is closely connected to other specialist services locally. This work helped make the case for a £40M work and health innovation fund to support joint working across government departments.
Linda Selwood Choueiri continues to be my design mentor and very good friend. I am grateful for the steep learning curve she has nudged me along through these years.
Other stories:
Read story #2 — Year 2003: risk and persistence after failure
Read story #3 — Year 2007: curiosity and questioning
Read story #4 — Year 2009: reframing and solving problems
