Notes on good design, part 1
At Arup we have been meeting and chatting with our design community about people and the planet. Here are some of our ongoing thoughts.
Your design may be good — but does it do good? — Space 10
The popular “Useful Objects” series, which ran from 1938 to 1948 at the MoMA, championed functional, affordable, and handsome everyday products and taught consumers how to shop with more holistic considerations (source: MoMA’s new “The Value of Good Design” exhibition provokes a reassessment of how and why we buy things)
In 1941, Eliot Noyes, first director of the Department of Industrial Design at the Museum of Modern Art, added a special exhibition section on Good Design, where the work displayed was characterised by its simplicity, gracefulness and functionality.
But what does Good Design look like today?
Good design today seems to be an ethic rather than an aesthetic- to reuse the words of British architects Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1950’s when they associated it with the rejection of any waste and the direct presentation of the facts.
Good design should be a surprise. It invents a novel way to reduce any excess in the making, distributing and using of things. [..] Good design looks like good design. — Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design
Good design today wants to answer questions like: Is it going to last? Is it sustainable? What is is made of? How is it made? Good design is inclusive and accessible to all. But, most of all, it is responsible and critical; in the wake of a climate emergency, over the past few years design has been called to seriously engage with a conscious review of its methods, processes, and thinking.
There is a sense that design as a discipline should take on the task of coming up with solutions regarding the survival not only of humanity but the planet as a whole. And in doing so, we as designers came to realise that the anthropocentric approach adopted in a variety of design disciplines (the same one that made design good in the first place) has remarkably shaped a messy and less bright future than envisioned, uncovering greater systemic challenges at first not plain to see.
As Mike Monteiro puts it:
The world isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed to work. And we’re the ones who designed it. Which means we fucked up. ― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It
There are two ways that design has been asked to make a change:
- Firstly, design disciplines have been asked to reconsider their role in the creation of artefacts that may have damaging effects on people, society, and the planet.
- Secondly, these disciplines are being encouraged to come up with solutions and contemporary design thinking that can support and benefit all living systems that it interacts with.
We have designed our way into this mess — can we design our way out of it? — Space10
There is clearly a shift in the design culture that aims to critically analyse the impact of the design choices made both vertically (time) and horizontally (space/relations): that means how design practices and outputs have changed systems throughout time, and how they continue to presently affect all systems synchronically/globally.
The essence of an object, reminds us R. Barthes, has something to do with the way it turns into trash. (Roland Barthes — catalogue essay 1971)
As a variety of design disciplines and industries, we will have to identify the mistakes and impact of past design decisions made (interesting projects that tackle that : Consequence Scanning + Tarot cards of tech ), learn from them, and work towards a better understanding of the complexity of these relations, acknowledging the second-order effects of these past decisions and tertiary impacts.
In an article titled Beyond Human-Centered Design, Danish Research and Design Lab Space10 suggests that this change should begin by redefining what is and should be the focus audience for designers. By shifting the focus from the user to the planet, it becomes obvious that our common research approaches have proven to be too narrow of a view when considering how complex the coexistence of technical and eco-systems really is.
In the pursuit of frictionless user experience, we have prioritized usability over everything else — including our health, and the well-being of our planet. — Space10
The question is what happens to all the backlog infrastructures, systems, and processes that our design solutions have created? These continue to enforce and inform ongoing and future design decisions. Understanding the impact of these infrastructures is the first step in a complex process, and there is a need and opportunity for design to reshape these to be more socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable.
As Arup, we have been following and engaging with the ongoing conversation for some time now. Designers from different fields within the firm are already treating data, objects, and nature as users. Is that enough though?
Yes, we need an approach that addresses users, customers, visitors, but that’s not enough. We need to further recognize their role as humans, community members, citizens, and yet: this might still be not enough. As designers and thinkers, we need to see all of the aforementioned fellow humans –as well as us ourselves as part of a fragile ecological web that sustains our very existence. And we might be less removed from it as we wished for in the last decades and centuries. Quite the opposite: in a way, everything around us will eventually become a ‘user’ of what we create, in one way or another, either now or in a million years, in all scales from the cellphone to the city. Sounds a bit ambitious?
( Agostino Nickl is a strategic designer for Studio, Arup. You can read Agostino’s full article here)
Ambitious or not, it should be thoughtfully considered.
As of this month, we have started a series of critical and explorative discussions around our approaches in design matters. Our understanding of why we should change these approaches is becoming increasingly informed. The next step in the process is how we could go about doing that as a collective, redefining our design thinking and making it in the light of this ongoing conversation. We should also aim to explore how we best contribute (that is in an innovative way) towards a more ecologically sustainably designed future. This also translates into: how do we as a design consultancy respond to the need to provide alternative and innovative solutions while still maintaining a coherent and consistent message towards our clients?
We started by exploring our position around the use of terminologies (and their relative approaches) like UCD (User-Centred Design), HCD (Human-Centred Design), SCD (Society-Centred Design), People + Planet — all of which have developed a specific manifesto and list of actions for designers to take forward. However, we understand that it is not about choosing a label as much as it is about acknowledging all these different perspectives and actively developing a critical view on the conversation; they all quite often have their own relevant place as part of a more technological and ecological systems-based oriented approach.
As we bring more people to the table, and as we address the firm’s needs of a client/market-facing provision of services, we recognise that we can only engage with change if we bring everyone with us in this journey, by developing a common language around newly discovered approaches together with the client.
Design is an attitude. [..]But it has no hope of fulfilling this role unless it earns the public confidence and political support required for it to be accepted as a worthwhile part of critically important reforms. — Alice Rawsthorn, Design as an Attitude, 2018
Arup’s unique perspective and experience in deploying this method are evidenced on a range of projects of varying scales and proportions, globally, for a range of clients. This remains a powerful opportunity to test ideas out and produce solutions that work for a variety of stakeholders and ecologies.
Moving forward, in our attempt to dive deeper into the conversation, we appreciate that there is a need to nurture a design culture within the firm, that encompasses all disciplines and specialisms, one that is built on the foundations of curiosity, ethical design, inclusivity, and sustainability.
This is a moving playing field, towards which we look forward to bringing an open-minded approach, and to continue defining what good design looks like.
[..] For we have realized that only intimate integration of the various parts or the various disciplines will produce the desired result. — Ove Arup on Total Design, Key Speech, 1970
Irene Albino is a Digital Designer in Arup’s ADE Software team and an Associated Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, UAL, working towards more inclusive and accessible design.
Resources:
- Does ‘Good Design’ still matter today? (article)
- Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It, 2019
- Space 10 — Beyond Human-Centered Design (article)
- Agostino Nickl — Venturing beyond Human Centrism (article)
- Society Centred Design
- Roland Barthes — catalogue essay 1971
- Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design, 2017
- Alice Rawsthorn — Design as an Attitude, 2018
- Ove Arup — Key Speech
- Ethics For Design
- Can you design a website on a (very)limited energy budget? An interview with Gauthier Roussilhe (article)
