Insights: Lisa Ma
On the occasion of our participation at Lift15 in Geneva in February 2015, we asked Lisa Ma, Régine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art) and Nicolas Nova (Near Future Laboratory) to tell us a bit more about their works, methods and share the experience they get from them. This is the second piece of “Insights” a series of three interviews crossing the themes of thinking, activism and speculation through design.
Hi Lisa, can you please introduce yourself?
I am Lisa Ma. I am called speculative designer, but I socialize activism, that is my speciality. A lot of this involves designing dilemmas.
What is your background?
I went to college doing design, I worked as a designer afterwards, doing industrial design for people like Pentagram. Back then, my dream was to design things and services that people were using. Then I became rogue! I went to a place called Royal College of Art in the department called Design Interaction. I still remember, going to the interview and saying and dramatizing: “I am really against technology because my dad left me to pursue his research in artificial intelligence! I felt like, as if I was left behind for technologies!”. He went from China to the UK when I was 2, I followed at 8. Although I am not really against technologies , I think we need to reflect about technological systems.
How would you describe your work?
Socializing activism! I describe it as unlikely social events that can be seen as activism but function as services. In a way, it is so new that I am trying to discover this myself. How to find a title for it? Because I don’t want people to have presumptions, but otherwise it is hard to explain the work and to give the whole story. This is the problem within an emerging field.
How your background as a designer is supporting your work in social activism?
Designers make things happen. One big thing is that I always design a question whereas traditional design is about answering questions, about solving a problem. I am a troublemaker because I always find the problem and ask about it in the first place. Nowadays, design is growing a big field and is overlapping into incredible areas; there is design research, researching in different communities though design perspective, designing empathy, designing how to tell this emotional stories afterward; social design, to design a system around a network paradigm; and of course critical design, to debate the application of design and technology, speculative to make people ask “what if…” and seeping into fields of practitioners that do not call themselves designers. For example, someone like James Bridle talks about how the general public are unabled to process fears or priorities when it comes to technology since it is too complicated. Designers are very good at digesting complex systems. It is important make them accessible.
Does the fact of having two cultures, British and Chinese, have an impact on your work?
I am taking comfort now in being an outsider. Some people have this outsider complex, but I think it is such an advantage. Designers have to leap outside the world anyway. I have worked with different communities, and there is always this question coming: “Are you one of us?”, and I am always saying “I’m an outsider” . This is a very basic discipline to be able to see it from a bird eye perspective and then to dive in.
With Chinese, I am really interested history, mythology and society. I am really curious in this change between Confucianism to Catholicism and then Communism. I am fascinated by all of those ideas. If I was “fully Chinese” in mentality, I would probably throw out many of those ideals right away because I would be too immediate. My outsider perspective helps me pick out parts to rethink rather than dismiss the whole topic for being ‘obvious’. There was a really interesting Chinese sociologist who mentioned that culture is made by communities that can communicate and have a time of separation. The separation is really important so that they go in different directions to return later for new combinations. It is the same in the UK. I grew up in Leeds, North of England, and I am a bit alarmed that lot of the ideas when I approach people are very Northern, eventhough I place my home in London.
I recommend all designers to live and work in other countries, even if nowadays travelling is of no shortage. More than anyone, designers should have a wide knowledge perspective. The process of being in a new place and learning is very humbling, and designers have often a danger of becoming arrogant.
How people are reacting when you are showing them the problem? How do you get people on board of your proposal?
It is all about the context and about how you explain it. I design the experience. I’ve learnt the hard way about making sure people don’t jump to conclusions too early. For example, once for a UK magazine is that they wanted to shoot me eating a squirrel. In Flanders, where I proposed in the mayoral office an urban movement of instead of poisoning invasive species, an individual saw the UK magazine and really liked the idea. So in his Flemish restaurant he jumped to immediately serving squirrels shipped from London. By the time I heard about it he had to bring down the menu after a week because of the death threats received and eventually involving news crews and the EU commissioner. Touch wood, I’ve never had this problem, and it is definitely related to the context. In design processes, I’ve learnt to make sure I explain it in a step by step way and research, iterate, make arguments. Design is a considered process with intended experiments.
In the speculative design, you learn to deal with jargons to talk at the same level with people, especially experts. We work with very in-depth knowledge. ou have to know the background, so they respect you enough to let you in. Personally, I believe in investing actual time to be on ground and understand these perspectives, not just to observe, but participate and understand the stories.
Research has a lot of importance in your work as well as building things. You have this very interesting stance: deploy or die, can you explain it?
“Deploy or die” is a new motto that the MIT has based on the previous “demo or die”. It means that you can’t just have concepts or papers, that clients and the public need to see and feel this technology before it’s been made. Nowadays, as technology has become cheaper, technological innovator has to “deploy or die” or someone else will do.
I see parallels with the world of design and activism. For decades in design, we made people feel, we made people see, we made people think. But we didn’t really make people “do”. In the same way with activism: they demonstrated, they campaigned, they advertised. Right now, it is getting cheaper and cheaper to symbolize, and it’s inciting skepticism. A couple of minutes ago, we were speaking about those people who are becoming cynical to design and those clichés that we have designed. Similarly, people are very cynical about the word activism because these symbols can become cliché very easily. So, people don’t really engage with the level of depth that they should do when they invest so much into a movement, a protest, a change… People do it because it matters to them, so if we don’t fully understand it, then maybe that is not the right way. We need new forms for tech innovation, design and activism that are more direct and yet unconventional.
Which kind of impact are you looking for to have on people? Do you want them to think or do you want to push them into action to change things?
A bit of both. I push by framing questions. In the example of the vegetarian town, I don’t have enough persuasion power to make a vegetarian eat a goose if I don’t present the logical perspective. Through this process, they are exploring with me wider system of consequences, which in turn initiated the citizen innovation program that rivals any startup community and was able to broadcast over a period of 9 month with the national TV station. Traditionally, design fixes things, sells things. We talk about users and consumers. When we talked about humans and citizens. This makes partipants of locals, chefs and nutritionists, scientists, hunters, the Mayor himself and is a very different process.
Do you evaluate the impact of your work and if so how do you think it is relevant?
I think the fact that these extraordinary events can happen is proving a new role for design in the field of activism and activism in the business of innovation. To see the long-term traction, it takes a bit longer to quantify feedback. If it’s the immediate social media and science impact, it is easier because people are pinging and referring to each other and you see where the data goes. With traditional media and politics it takes longer and the spread is really humbling. We’re seeing some fascinating developments with the socialisation of my previous work, Farmification, which spread from a community reflection in technology factories into a wide-spread quiet form of activism in property development, urbanization and steel manufacturers.
According to you what are the limitation of speculative design and social activism?
For me speculative design is in danger of becoming very exclusive. If it is very museum based, how does it involve people? Speculative design is a very new field, it is a curious one. It is very new, but it also closes questions. For example in this conference, if someone comes to me and asks me: “What do you do?”, and I answer: “Speculative Design”, the person will feel stupid if he or she doesn’t know what it is. How do you engage in those conversations? I think it is the problem with all things that are new. It is not to be condescending, but to provoke interest at the same time. It can be very tricky. Designers have always to think for people, then how to not be like: “I am doing all the thinking and you do the doing”? All of these are the challenges, especially when we have star thinkers. How that also not become a cliché? I have the feeling that cliché catches up with the design world faster and faster these days probably because there is just a wonderful mechanism to publicize them very quickly without engaging and making it becoming the new hit thing. How does it really penetrate people’s way of thinking and working? How does it penetrates into companies? How does it penetrates into policy makers?
Do you think Speculative Design is design for the design world?
I think design for design is a reaction to the time. Now, I think it is easy for us to critique it and say it is elitist, but at the time no one was designing for designers. It is also something that they did in architecture, and critical design is catching up with what architecture had for decades. It was a way for designers to change their role within the system and to show that they weren’t just selling or making things pretty, but they had a thinking role. Today, we go back to these questions, are these mechanisms accepted? What is the role of designing for designers? This is why we are becoming more cynical about it. I think there needs to be a spectrum. Once it reaches a maturity, speculative design can be very helpful and open doors for designers. The rest of us enjoys the privilege to explore other ways based on that. In the end, it is good that it is rooted in that just simply because there is no way to describe a discipline without its context.
Another way to look at it would be to consider us from a different background. We would have a very different conversation if instead of being of the design background, you would be from the social innovation background. There is a slight difference lying in the lack of design knowledge. Even if I would really enjoy those kinds of conversations, I really appreciate the skills I possess from my design background.
What are your next steps or next projects?
At the moment, I am working on this project Bioludite. I am very excited and obsessed about it. I am really interested in creating a dialogue in this wider community. This is why I am coming to those conferences where I have a chance to interact with non-designers. I am also interested going beyond films and medias. Every work involves a different collaborative community as an end product.
There are a lot of things to do: I need to find a better title for what I do because “social activism” makes blank as well. I really want to push this thing for activism into education. Something that I really like and is necessary is to take myself into a logic that is beyond what design is used to do. Then it is strong enough as a thing to pursue. To me, the gallery context is giving people a mental context before you’ve mentioned the work. The gap is filled by me finding ways of explaining it. Another side is about making people educated about activism and the different ways of doing it. The important thing is not to dodge around the word. I had a lot of well-meaning suggestions like “activating community” or “social movement”. I thought all of those were becoming cliché. I think we’ve used all the ones on the list, but the last one that is quite the elephant in the room. I think people are terrified of it because it resonates with violence. Let’s start teaching what other ways there are. We taught a very bad basis of it in classes: we always talk about how to become the face of the next Facebook millionaire, but we are not thinking about the morals. We are just learning how to code, to design. This is all very good, but I think there are other ways to contextualizing it. Once, in a conference in Barcelona, they asked me if I thought we should have speculative design in schools, and I said: “No, nothing would ever get done”. This said, I think education should talk about implications rather than applications far earlier.
Discover more of Lisa’s work on her portfolio.
