4. Could our local design approach get better?
Developing an in-place culture of design.
What is design?
Design is the process of making ideas tangible, making them work, and evolving them when constraints change.
An explanation from “What is design?” on the International Council of Designers (ICOD) website begins: “Concretely, most people’s experience of design stems from their daily interaction with physical objects, built spaces and digital environments”. This is a commonly held definition, and massively blinkered! Design at its core is the application of a disciplined mindset and process. ICOD’s definition expands to explain more:
“Designers are trained to analyse problems holistically, searching to understand not only the immediate or obvious problem but the system that created it. Designers approach the solution from the vantage point of the end-user, seeking to optimise for the specific needs and capabilities of that individual or group. Designers strive to ‘do more with less,’ they maximise economy (of materials, of investment, of energy, etc.) through creativity and ingenuity; this idea is central to design”
—ICOD
Melbourne design researcher Dr Kirsten Moergerlein’s illustration (above) captures an evolution of design practises from ‘object/service centred’ to ‘human centred’ to ‘Earth centred’. ‘Designer’ is not only a role certain creative people play when we want to flash things up, but a growing pool of thinkers that share a regenerative mindset.
This mindset, applied to placemaking, is well described by Regenesis in a series of four short videos.
What is design for public good?
I was recently re-inspired by a book published in 1990, acquired by the Wellington Polytechnic Design Library back when I was studying there. Graphic Design, World Views was a publication of ICOGRADA (International Council of Graphic Design Associations, the predecessor of ICOD) whose agenda was ‘Civil Graphics’ (Frascara 183). “Everyday designers of all kinds are becoming responsible for a greater proportion of man’s environment. Almost everything we see and use that was not made by the Almighty has come from some designer’s drawing board”.
The book’s member-contributors implored designers to “develop a sense of social awareness” (Frascara 15). The argument was that since the first idea was represented by an image, graphic design has held responsibility as a “builder of culture”. The authors opine that graphic design is routinely “pawned” or perceived as “a luxury that can be afforded only when the immediate benefits are obvious, such as in marketing consumer products or when governments or corporations are wealthy enough for extra expenditure” (Frascara 183). The relevance of this has stood the test of time.
“Designers — too long the servants of producers — better serve humanity as the ambassadors of the end-users: the citizens of the world.”
—Excerpt from the 2017 Montreal Design Declaration, ICOD
At design school I studied ‘visual communication design’. I learned the art of distillation. Out in the professional design world I learned this was a superpower for the manipulation of attention and opinion. I regarded my work as an object and service centred practice (on the left side of Moegerlein’s illustration).
I learned design can contribute a compelling form and a competitive advantage. It can bring out the best truth, and it can disguise the undesirable — if that’s the brief. Design can join forces with art, but is not art. Art centres the maker and sometimes an audience. Designers are trained to hunt and optimise solutions among many, often competing interests.
Moegerlein began in visual communication design too, and describes being deeply unsettled by the global ecological crisis and searching for a way to respond through design” (Moegerlein Abstract). Her practice has evolved toward Transition Design, an emergent design discipline based on the understanding of the interconnectedness and interdependence of social, economic, political and natural systems, in which solutions to global problems can be designed for local conditions. “Transition towards more sustainable futures necessitates different ways of designing and new postures and mindsets” (Moegerlein Abstract). In her illustration Transition Design is fed from underneath by ‘Indigenous World-Views’ and ‘solutions [that] grow from place’. It is growing under the canopy of ‘Design for Social Innovation’ and gives rise to ‘Transition Towns’.
Over time I’ve learned quality of design is determined by four ingredients: the values held by the designer(s); the shared understanding of what needs innovating and why; the regard of constraints as opportunities; and above all the commitment to a wide-angled design process, not a pre-determined outcome. The outcome could be an innovated thing, or an innovated method for doing something. If the values, brief and process align and include the whole community (not a selection of ‘stakeholders’) and the whole environment (not a selected ‘property’), it can become design for public good.
What is spatial design and why is it important for Whakaoriori Masterton?
Spatial design is a design discipline applied to the identification and determination of ‘place’. It considers the functions, qualities and interactions of built and natural environments to discover or create their intrinsic identity. Spatial design invites contextual lenses to be applied — geologic, biophilic, historic, climatic, social, cultural, etc — lenses chosen are a reflection of the values or priorities specified for the design process.
Spatial design aims to communicate experience of place (Pallasmaa). This can capture often overlooked but inherent parts of everyday life — time, atmosphere, movement along pathways, around and between sites, affirmation, obtrusion, the tangible melded with the intangible. With this holistic, experiential vision, spatial design can be used to inform spatial planning (which is a product of the spatial design process), and assess its effectiveness.
The Whakaoriori Masterton community’s default is to debate and design changes to our environment in nailed down terms: what the physical object is, what we’ll use it for, and the money it’ll cost and generate. We jump to conclusions. What we fail to consider is more difficult to express — our personal experience, moving through, triggered by environmental perceptions, associations and connections. Spatial investigations can broaden the scope and pull this contextual information in. How do we meaningfully process what we find out, and bring this through to implementation?
Returning to Massey’s School of Design to learn contemporary spatial visualisation techniques for this project, I assumed the most compelling way to visualise and convey spatial ideas for Whakaoriori Masterton would be hyper-real 3D immersion, like watching a movie set of your town. It was my task to grow these digital skills through a speculative concept design for the Oriental Bay boat sheds and marina in Wellington.
But I discovered this was a resource-hungry, mesmerising trap. Was it me telling the story or was it the possibilities and constraints of the software? Was this production over process? Would this be a practical koha to Whakaoriori Masterton, or a stunt?
“If you have an idea let your fingers do the talking”
— Mikkel Frost, CEBRA
I found quick, gestural, malleable sketching was a more generative and collaborative way to explore ideas and imbue my story in a place. CEBRA architect Mikkel Frost calls this “thinking by hand…the idea is if you cannot explain an architectural concept on a single sheet of A4 paper, you are either saying too much or it is too complicated” (Frost 5). He advocates for leaving the hyper-renders until the concept is agreed.
I later discovered a digital app that lets us bring quick sketches to life. Mental Canvas enables anyone who can pick up a pencil to mock up environments and build stories by moving through scenes. This is a non-threatening, low cost medium that could open communication channels from exploring development options through to finished design concepts. It presents a participatory alternative to the hyper-real visualisations that can railroad the designer and the debate. A review of Mental Canvas by Arch Daily quotes developer Julie Dorsey:
“[CAD modelling] comes at a cost. The cost is that one, you have to have a fully resolved three-dimensional model, even if it’s just a cube; second it’s very hard to edit a CAD model, it’s not fast and fluid like a sketch. At any given moment when you’re sketching, the designer or artist has full control over everything in that representation, but with a CAD model, that’s defined by the computer.
This is not abstract for Whakaoriori Masterton. We need to consider who is genuinely within our placemaking work and include accessible ways to contribute end-to-end. Our Future Masterton sought diverse contributions at the ‘insights’ stage (discussed in chapter 3). Our community was on the design team in the beginning. If, after initial insights are collated, we pare this down to a selective group, giving priority to certain voices, then we ask this selection to respond to rather than contribute to concept development and implementation, what design team representation remains?
Ways of coming at it
Damien Newman’s renowned Squiggle illustrates a designer’s process as a tangled doubling back, like solving a murder mystery, allowing insights to alter the direction even if we start with preconceptions. His sketch also illustrates, via an uninterrupted line, a connected process with the designer inside the work through all the stages. There is no neatly packageable moment between each stage where it makes sense for the designer(s) to hand responsibility on.
Architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander’s seminal A Pattern Language (1977) advocates for patterns that “together form a language” to guide urban development over time and “create a coherent picture of an entire region…with a million forms, with infinite variety in all the details” (Alexander xxxv). The book provides 253 comprehensively explored pattern designs based in urban experience…filtered light, paths and goals, sacred sites, courtyards that live, pedestrian street, and pattern #44: local town hall (Alexander 236). Pattern descriptions range from principles to prescriptions.
Eg: Pattern #54 Road Crossing:
“Where paths cross roads, the cars have power to frighten and subdue the people walking, even when the people walking have the legal right-of-way”.
“How can the designer help the pedestrian and driver perceive the crossing more equitably? At any point where a pedestrian path crosses a road that has enough traffic to create more than a two second delay to people crossing, make a ‘knuckle’ at the crossing: narrow the road to the width of the through lanes only; continue the pedestrian path through the crossing about a foot above the roadway; put in islands between lanes…mark the path with a canopy or shelter to make it visible” (Alexander 281).
This breaking down of urban space into circumscribed instances seems compartmental, but Alexander prefaces the pattern list by expressing their inherent connectedness. “No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is supported by other patterns…This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it” (Alexander xiii).
Whakaoriori Masterton has patterns. These are programmed in, repetitive practices evolving like a language. They gradually iterate our place day to day, year to year, decade to decade, accumulating to become our story. They reside in our District Plan, in economic development culture, in civil engineering culture, and in community assumptions. Could we purposefully develop a culture of design for patterns unique to our place, indigenous to Whakaoriori Masterton?
Te Korekoreka — Our Kawa for Māori Future Making is a Kai Tahu iwi-specific design protocol (kawa). It is a ‘whakapapa informed’ tool developed for whānau Kai Tahu designers “to reclaim the future-making mindset of our ancestors”.
“Te Korekoreka is a practical guide that can help you examine your present, to learn from your past, imagine a new future, and commit to a deliberate course of action that will enable you to shift from your current reality to a better one.” The iwi provides a spoken navigation through four realms, places we might recognise or take refuge in during a design process:
“TE AO TŪROA — Knowing/Doing/Reviewing
A physical, tangible, and material realm that we can see, touch and measure.TE KORE — Seeking/Reflecting/Understanding
Where we can connect with the past in order to understand the whakapapa of the situation we are working with.TE PŌ — Imagining/Designing/Making
Creative and regenerative realm where our visions start to become clear and new ideas start to take shape and become real.TE AO MĀRAMA — Implementing/Achieving/Completing
We find ourselves in a new world, with a fresh perspective, more energy, and new pathways to action.”
The guide is shared with Aotearoa and the world “to help us imagine and navigate towards a new future”, asking us to be guided by nature, not in spite of nature. Is this the core of indigeneity? Can we work with Whakaoriori Masterton mana whenua to devise our own kawa?
Will Whakaoriori Masterton develop its own design culture?
“New design discourses…acknowledge that design is not the exclusive domain for designers, but rather that ‘everybody designs’. This in turn, contributes to reshaping the roles that designers play” (Moegerlein 11). Design is a force we all use because we are all continuously building our world. How meaningful is design-of-place when we don’t prioritise in-place capacity? Can we own our unique future without equal and intelligent relationships with consultant urban designers whose delivered design isn’t the finish line, it is a new starting line. Before long, conditions evolve and intelligent pattern adjustments are required. As a community we could choose to step toward deeper place-based thinking for ourselves — an internal culture we cultivate.
Our Future Masterton (see Chapter 3) employed participatory planning methods to ‘design for social innovation’ (ref. Moegerlein diagram). Their delivered product was a package of insights and images for Whakaoriori Masterton’s future CBD. This was treated by local government as a finished product, but it’s value was the ignition of a local design engine, a proven-out example of what we could conduct here, ongoing. Could this improve Council-community communication? Could it help us better understand the wider, connectedness of our projects; whether the elements of our legislative and strategic context are aligned (see Chapter 3)? Could this become an engine for generating and regenerating the design of our transition toward a bi-cultural and climate resilient place?
