“With great power comes great responsibility” when we co-create futures
As a designer who also researches and teaches design, I often worry how design can be really, really good at selling itself to affirm its own value to businesses and society. Who says no to ‘good’ design? Design expresses social priorities and carries cultural values; where these values are often invisible and yet become pervasively inscribed into the design. Design’s impact might not be known until many years later, because it is not only distributed but also mobile and networked, used creatively in various contexts that we, as designers, may never know at the outset. I’d like to highlight questions and concerns when design, consumption and marketing intersect, because these fields share power to shape ideas, change behaviours and create future visions for what the world could be. As Spiderman is alleged to have said, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. This power to influence and intervene demands that we remain cautious of embedded assumptions and reflexive in the contributions these fields are making as we continue with our work.
Critiques I hear about design is no longer so much about its intensely commercial practice, but rather the way it is also accelerating material consumption by continual innovation of new products and technologies, and how these resource-intensive activities are depleting natural resources and harming the well-being of the planet and its ecologies. For example, my ‘good’ design mobile phone that many of us touch, derive pleasure from and depend upon every day are completely enmeshed and implicated in the well-being (or not) of distant communities, livelihoods, sentient beings and environments. The power that design, marketing and consumption have does not need further affirmation but rather an increased scrutiny and interrogation.
When societies are demanding businesses to consider more critically about cultural, social and environmental conditions they are contributing to, design too, have been addressing these concerns as ‘social design’. Its interest for designers, researchers, educators alike have been growing over the last 50 years where Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, is commonly attributed as a significant publication that heralded this movement, while some may suggest its roots go far back to the Bauhaus in 1919 that infused art and technology to create social utopias through useful, functional, transparent objects as modern design.
Over these years, various ethical questions have led social design’s evolution, ranging from examining the designers’ and organisational responsibility to adopt a principle-based approach, ways to consider a variety of existing stakeholders and future users, and also explorations to enable people’s collaboration in the design process. Emergence of terms like ‘user-centred’ or ‘human-centred design’ during the 1980s, coinciding with researching the usability of the human- computer interface, marks a significant shift in the social design movement, crystallising methodological enquiries to understand people in more complex social settings. The breadth and depth of complexity of such sociocultural settings, through significant incorporation of knowledge from ethnography, psychology and sociology, have created more specialised methodological approaches such as co-design, participatory design, design for social innovation, service design, transition design, design anthropology to name a few, that all fall under the broad umbrella of social design. While the brief summary of the shifts identified here captures the historical transitions that have been made from a focus on designing tangible objects alone, towards enabling intangible services and experiences at increasing scales of organisations, cities and communities, the underlying ethos of social design means that the interrogation of design’s contribution to society remains alive and much needed in today’s world.
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[Excerpts from Akama, Y. (2017). ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ when we co-create futures. Journal of Marketing Management, 33(3–4), 272–279. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2017.1284433
