A design attitude to approach the week
The way I make sense of the world is often through the act of drawing or writing. Of making my thoughts visible to myself so that I can share them with others. As we come out of a fairly strange weekend, with pandemic updates on a constant loop on my phone, with stories of selfish behaviour, but also beautiful acts of kindness (for example the 300+ Covid Mutual Aid groups), I’ve wanted to write something down to focus me and the Design Council team for the week ahead.
At Design Council, we are clearly adapting our own processes. Many of us are privileged enough to be able to work from home, and although our office remains open to anyone who wants to come in, digital working means that we can function pretty well remotely. We’ve been checking in with staff, and are thinking hard about how we can as a team feel connected while working apart. There are tons of helpful guides online for this (for example here and here), some in response to this, and others because for some companies this is not new.
A lot of our work focuses on bringing people together. We do this either to use a design process to help people from different backgrounds reach a shared and reframed understanding of an issue and provide their perspectives on how to solve it; to build capability around user-centred or inclusive design and citizen engagement; to provide advice and guidance on applying design principles to their work (from building a new development to developing regulatory policy). We also do research and storytelling. Here, digital and remote working can help. It is something that many of us are already comfortable with. We’ve seen a huge rise across the UK in video calls, conferences going online and universities moving to remote teaching. And future trends point in the direction of enhanced virtual experiences and shopstreaming and remote companions.
But not everyone can work remotely, and do we really want to live in a society where the majority contact is through a screen? My neighbours and friends work in the NHS, and are undeterred, going into work everyday to save lives. Carers are looking after those who cannot look after themselves, now more than ever. And delivery drivers and cyclists will provide essential services for many over the next weeks and months.
But for me there are more fundamental questions around the role of design in reshaping our society. Design has always been good at iteratively improving what already exists, making services easier and quicker to access, making products more inclusive for more people to use, making places healthier and attractive to live in. Design and innovation can also be disruptive, understanding an untapped user need that can completely transform a sector, whether it be city accommodation, live streaming or food deliveries.
But how does design respond to a disruption not of its making? Over the last few months, we’ve been holding a loose enquiry into systemic design — how can design be used to really transform systems to healthier, more equitable and sustainable ones. Here the role for design might not be to provide all the answers but to suggest a range of alternatives that help people question their current activity, such as the speculative design work of Bruce Sterling and Anab Jain in her brilliant essay ‘Calling for a more human politics’, both of whose work proposes futures where isolation or adapting to more limited resources are the norm. This is design has a way of helping us consider a range of possible alternatives (wild card ones, which now don’t look so wild card), and provoke conversation and action now to move towards the futures we want and avoid the ones we don’t.
But design also has a role in helping to create and embed new behaviours which are kinder to each other and the planet. Sometimes things have to break apart to be built back up again in a better way. And design, in the way it can be empathetic, collaborative and iterative, can play a role.
This pandemic — and its effect on us across the world — is unprecedented. We don’t yet have the answers as we’ve not been asked for them before. We need to come together, across nations, to find solutions and open them up and share with others, from vaccines to ways to support people to get the food they need, to create healthier transport systems, to develop radically alternative income models. 10 years ago, Design Council ran a challenge called Designing Bugs Out. What are the current questions that need asking and how can we support designers work with non-designers to respond?
Design cuts through overwhelming situations by making a move, trying something out, seeing what happens, and improving on that. And that is the attitude with which I move into this week.
