Why we need new visual frameworks to help us think optimistically about the future
part 1 of 3
This series, of three chapters, will address a topic dear to myself as an optimist and designer of services aiming to make our lives better and more meaningful. How, in a world of rising pessimism and negativity, do we stay positive in our outlook towards the future of humanity? We are all dreadfully aware of what is being presented to us in the news, in our research communities and Hollywood. I’m referring to the fatalistic view of climate breakdown, activist expressions around changing the world order and our economies, as well as mass media contributing to our rising state of anxiety. All of this is hitting us like a steam train, a seemingly insurmountable wave. So what can we do about it, as designers?
I hope to add some optimism in the mix through this series. I have recently been inspired by a talk called ‘Another World is Possible’ hosted by the RCA with thought-leaders Clive Grinyer & Sir Geoff Mulgan as well as a talk by the powerhouse and popular economist, Mariana Mazzucato at LSE on ‘Collective Value Creation: a New Approach to the Common Good’ (incidentally they both run the IIPP at UCL). In both their talks, they call-to-action the need for creativity, collaboration, imagination and the role of designers to help us navigate the biggest societal + environmental challenges that lay at our feet.
In both talks they argue that poets, writers, designers and artists in general should feel empowered to; speak up, contribute, think, visualise and project possible better futures. In one of Mazzucato’s slides, she mentioned the need for different stories, (challenge) framing and processes of how we work together. In addition, Sir Geoff Mulgan adds on to this topic of story telling by reminding us how it’s important that the intangible things don’t get lost in these narratives; how we imagine future democracies, (public) services, systems, social values and moonshot missions such as Net Zero. He highlights how humans tend to default to thinking in terms of tangible material objects (think forest fires or techno-utopias with flying cars and drones) that we can more easily imagine; easier to see and touch. Therefore, if this is our natural bias — it’s our responsibility, as (service) designers, to think about how we visualise and communicate the intangible and amorphous. More importantly, it’s to tell these untold and hidden stories of value.
To kick-off this series, let’s go into what many argue is fundamental in our attempt to do just that. It’s how we make sense of the world, how we perceive — and only by being aware of our influences (conscious and subconscious), can we open new doors to unlock future optimism.
Where to start?
Following this thought of visualising the ‘intangible’… let’s assume the following.
By attempting to clearly recognise how intangible complex (social) systems operate, we can avoid unintended consequences. And with this knowledge, we may start to question our own approach and break the cycles that may be keeping us from making positive progress.
To make the case, I’ll invite us to think of cities. They are a plethora of interactions and real-time decisions, made every second by individuals, contributing to this complex web of interactions. The nature of the city makes it impossible for it to comply with our own made up concepts and scientific (or economic) laws. As John Holland, a pioneer in complexity science, describes this in his book Emergence: From Chaos to Order; ‘much coming from little’, a nod and opposition to Mies van der Rohe’s maxim “less is more”. Meaning, on a city level there is a dynamic of complexity and emerging properties we must understand.
This series will specifically look into how visual models or diagrams are used to capture and represent how we make sense of the world and thereby alter the way we design. I imagine this as a scratch pad for thinking, connect and learn from you readers.
To facilitate this exploration, in my experience, I find it helpful to think in three facets. These facets all pertain to perceptions of thought and its influence on how we think, act and design. Firstly, understanding how complexity shapes our perception of society (Chapter 1), in specific the relationship between complexity and networks. Secondly, mental models of perceiving systems (Chapter 2), which discusses the old economics models being upended by a revolt from new economists such as Mariana Mazzucato. Lastly, unfolding a way forward with a geometric design perspective (Chapter 3), we’ll imagine how new geometries of design and recent advances in technology may open new doors to design for our future societies and planet.
Chapter 01 — Perceptions, Systems, Determinism and Complexity/ Interconnectedness & Changing Perceptions of Society
This chapter explores how design is affected by our conceptual metaphors. New conceptual metaphors over time (due to continuous developments in sciences, philosophy and technology) shape our individual and collective perceptions of society. Specifically in recent decades the rising sensitivity towards complexity theory, and the relationship between complexity and networks have been a prominent factor influencing design processes, tools and mental models.
This art installation by Tomás Saraceno, “On Space Time Foam”, uses visual poetry to make us think of this societal interconnectedness with ‘space’. Similar to how service designers map stakeholder relationships to understand the “gravity” or “weight” of interactions to better inform the context in which they are designing within. Similarly, Sir Geoff Mulgan reminds us that society is all about relationships, immaterial consciousness, or more simply — about how people think and feel. That’s much harder to embody, but where film, poetry and the arts can help.
“[…] Space does not exist until you enter it with your own body. When there are two people on one layer, they press it below, when two people are in the same space they curve the layer. That means things start to fall, and things gather together into the same spot which in the ends is hard to escape.
It plays with the idea of proxemia; the distance between what you communicate with one another; if you get too close, you get trapped; into this quasi social black hole. And it is very difficult to escape…you have to find a way to separate, very slowly one from each other. The perception of the other person; you become very aware of each other, and each other’s movements, each other’s behaviours and responsibility around how you live […].”
Culmination Points, Centred Systems and Determinism in Design
The idea of proxemia and being trapped evokes this emotion or feeling. Saraceno makes us ponder the relationship between communication, proxemia and culmination points. Culmination of ideas and models of living, leading us to think about heterogeneity and homogeneity in our contemporary society; systems and hierarchies; energy and matter flow.
For us to evolve out of culmination points, we must identify centred systems their hierarchies and pre-established paths. If we are not cautious, as designers we may slip back into these culmination points. We may default to the ideas and models that lead to the status quo and ‘business-as-usual’ without achieving our higher goal to set in motion real positive progress. We gravitate towards ‘social black holes’.
The Million Dollar Blocks is an example of such “social black holes” or failures coming from the effects of culmination points in our current systems of organising people. Million Dollar Blocks is a study by the Chicago Justice Project describing urban blocks where the American public is paying $1 million per year on incarcerating the block’s residents that are found in low-income neighborhoods of Chicago. The concentration on specific areas is so unapologetically clear, that a Washington Post article called it “a war on neighborhoods”.
This example of mapping and using data to inform systemic failures can help educate policymakers and open dialogue to understand the failures of local piecemeal initiatives, and as designers we should first identify and then address these culmination points. However that does not often seem as simple, and we cannot erode the existing complexity that exists in reality with our thinking, our conceptual dogmas and our buzzwords.
If we are to evolve out of our current culmination points, we should perhaps consider challenging the “arborescent model” of thought (which will be discussed in future chapters). In short, against tree-like hierarchical thought that is prevalent in philosophy and (un)consciously shaping our perception of the world. This arborescent thinking can lead to overcoding, or as referred to above as culmination points. The danger of this, may lead to centred systems with deterministic outcomes.
With a realisation that we may be more influenced by arborescent thinking, which has resulted in more determinism in the way we design; this gives rise to a need in understanding how we can escape this perception of the world or our society.
So where do we find arborescent thinking in how we design? Think about one of the most popular maxims; Form Follows Function.
“ Form follows Function” or does it?
They teach us now, as they did then, that there is such and such a relation between this thing and that (…) But these are merely names of the images we substituted for the real objects which Nature will hide for ever from our eyes. The true relations between these real objects are the only reality we can attain, and the sole condition is that the same relations shall exist between these objects as between the images we are forced to put in their place.
— Jules Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (1905)
With computer aided design as a rapidly expanding field for innovation (think data-driven, GPT-4, machine learning models or simulations) we may still fall into the same centred systems that is the dogma of functionalism. Or as Clive Grinyer rightly points out; the danger of AI in enhancing our current pre-existing biases.
As an alternative to functionalism and its Aristotelian (process oriented and functionalist, using our senses to observe and derive) and Platonic methods (objects as symbols for referencing a conceptual form that we cannot observe directly) of interpreting form, it is worthwhile considering alternatives such as structural realism before we ‘drift towards determinism’. Looking back at history, we are familiar with Louis Sullivan’s modern functionalist ideas of architecture and design “form follows function”, however we know that this implies that form may be influenced by other factors.
Yet throughout the twentieth-century and the rise in optimisation in engineering studies, we have seen the obsession with measurable performance and to define design specifications. Furthermore, driven by industrial processes, “form follows production” carried over and is still influential in design.
You could even go further to say, the root of it all is the emergence of the free-market and welfare state, where market-driven industrialised production (of design and architecture) optimise for cost; “ form follows profit”. Leading to the predominant industry of low-cost design.
Digitalisation now gives us a new opportunity to seek the relations between objects that make up reality as Poincaré proposes. Think of image recognition, advancements in audio processing and natural language processing where non-functional contributors to form are included; contextual meaning, semantics, symbolic meaning are indexed. These emerging descriptors, signals and semantic labels can account for reality that is only accessible by means of topological order.
Whether I am fan of this trend or not, is beside the fact. What I am trying to say is, we may wish to start looking at relations rather than predefined, top-down specifications as a starting block for design. Which may challenge the performance oriented functionalist approach, and move from “form follows function” to “form follows form”.
That’s also…not easy!
This train of thought, would benefit by learning from Christopher Alexander, a thought-leader in the field of systems design and design patterns (who incidentally indirectly sparked the imagination and invention of object-oriented programming).
Again, going back the typology of a city, he urges us to compare the nature of the city to that of a complex abstract structure called a ‘semi-lattice’ rather than organising our cities artificially as a tree-like structure:
‘Greater variety is an index of the great structural complexity a semilattice can have when compared with the structural simplicity of a tree. It is the lack of structural complexity, characteristic of trees, which is crippling our conceptions of the city…the semilattice, by comparison, is the structure of complex fabric; it is the structure of living things’
With this Alexander means that there are a great number of interactions of systems that live within and shape cities. The risk of designing cities as a tree-like structure means that you predetermine only a select few systems; and ignore thousands of other systems. In later chapters we might explore the failures that can come when thinking of cities as a tree-like structures (haven’t decided whether to include this yet!). His book ‘City is Not a Tree’, is a good read especially for those service designers out there designing within/for complex systems.
To summarise this chapter, we were asking ourselves how complexity is shaping our perception of society. In specific, the relationship between complexity and networks and how we should approach our thinking related to this complexity. How would we do this?
A start could be for us designers to identify and then address these culmination points. In whatever context you are designing, I will go ahead and boldy state; you will find these. Think about the Million Dollar Blocks, where new digital tools and activism, directly informed new policy. For us to evolve out of culmination points, we must identify centred systems, their hierarchies and pre-established paths. Moving towards thinking about (social + environmental) fabrics, relationships, complexity and semilattices. Visualising, mapping and confronting ourselves with hidden voices, narratives and ‘data’.
Digitalisation now gives us novel opportunities for these proposed approaches. Looking at relations rather than predefined specifications as a starting block for design. We might see these capabilities translate to work of design, with which we may challenge the performance oriented functionalist approach, and move from “form follows function” to “form follows form”.
All whilst being conscious not to ignore the living systems that exist, and defer from tree-like arborescent design. Ultimately to avoid harming intangible hidden value, social fabric, habitats and our own progress as a society towards a better future.
Coming up next…
Chapter 2: Economic Renewal — New models for the 21st Century and why designers should be part of this conversation.
