How can I make better design decisions? How do we design for the good of humanity? + Design Principles Critique (11/16 & 11/18)
We’re nearing the end of semester! This week, we had a lecture and a presentation with critique. We started on Monday with Silvana leading a discussion on design sustainability. Her lecture focused on the fragility of the world and emphasized that in some ways, we are alone and it’s our responsibility to take care of it. As the only inhabitants of our planets, so how can we keep this mind when we imagine and design for the future?
The above slide is a popularized method of understanding sustainable development. While this definition is not perfect (it particularly refers to development), it addresses intergenerational justice and the idea of how we are alone in helping the world for future generations. This definition of sustainability was put forth by in the late 80’s after years of related discussions. An earlier step into these types of discusssion within our field was started by Victor Papanek and his Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change.
Silvana mentioned a few other books to study the history of sustainable design over the last twenty years. The last book she brought up was Design Ecology Politics, as shown above. We can see here the different aspects of systems and dynamics — what is the hierarchy of these systems? On the diagram on the right, the left triangle shows that we can see that society sometimes focuses on a market-driven economy, but in fact, it should be the opposite. With nature, we would not have a habitable world — therefore can we design a future so that ecological is first, social second, and economic, third?
Sustainability challenges are wicked problems. These problems are defined by people and are societal problems. We can focus on changing these systems into socio-ecological systems to include nature and ecology. Instead of viewing designers as people who are constantly solving and resolving problems, they can be people who create possibilities to identity different pathways for humanity. (Walker, 2007) Here, the designer’s role is a changemaker, catalyser, and facilitator.
One concept of sustainable design has to do with a refocusing on balance in human production and impact, instead of a dogged focus on growth. Kate Raeworth aligns this new way of thinking under the idea of Doughnut Economics and is part of a larger movement towards considering the biosphere as a player in how we weight our societal decisions.
We can consider design as a practical wisdom — it relates to action. In this process, we can make judgments based on different values and morals we might hold. It is deeply subjective. Design in particular works at the intersection between applied knowledge and practical wisdoms, contexts, judgement and understanding.
Silvana & Donna ended the lecture with an activity to look at your project from a sustainability point of view. Using six “thinking hats” to represent different factors, we focused on our project from multiple lenses to shift our thinking. While we understood that this could be difficult especially when your project doesn’t directly involve sustainability, the activity forced us to think from different point of views and guided us on how we could do so. We can use these “hats” in other projects in the future!
Moving onto Wednesday, each team had present their project utilizing a few principles. It was great to hear from all of you and the projects are moving along well. We’ve updated the feedback sheet online for more individualized comments. We still have office hours if needed and we’ll see you again on Monday.
