The Ultimate Design (2020)
On Design Education and the Human Species
What’s the last design we can do while we’re alive on earth?
It began with endless reflections.
I know. It just happens. All. The. Time.
Amazing how much two years transformed me through reflections.
Here’s the story I wrote in 2020.
Two years ago (2017–2018), I was looking within, trying to reach what’s next for me to grow as a designer. I felt that my expertise would be a waste if only shared within a closed circle, limited applications of science and business. I’d been looking for the fourth one, after first learning to be a designer, then designing for users, then designing with multi-culture-disciplinary people. What’s next?
I then stumbled upon Design Won’t Save the World by Jesse Weaver in 2018. The subtitle “Human-centered design is great for mops and phones, but it won’t solve society’s biggest problems” intrigued me very much. I thought the author was simply criticizing how HCD is mainly used in commercial products. In order to illustrate the various constraints of design and what designers could actually contribute to the world, I immediately responded by including two diagrams below:
There’s a part in the article that I highlighted, because it resonated much more with me than just thinking about what designers could do to save the world.
“it’s about getting rid of our culture of competition and creating a new culture of collaboration. If we start ignoring the corporate and political silos separating us, we can collaboratively combine lots of focused solutions, allowing us to knit them together into a single tapestry that truly covers an entire problem.”
The problem is not in the constraints. You can design for the ecological sustainability and still encounter the above political silos.
The problem is also not in the applications. You can design for the noblest cause like healthcare and social impact and still encounter those, too.
The problem is actually in the humans who perform all the acts needed [fill in the intermediary steps here] to save the world. Oh, the irony that the article is now behind Medium’s paywall.
In less than a year, I saw a tweet from Alan Cooper, which made me reflected on my experiences again toward the next thing I wanted to do as a designer. I responded:
Subsequently I took a look into Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus. And yeah, it’s indeed dangerous to let humans be the center of design.
From that tweet, it looks like I decided what I wanted to do as a designer: helping others to return to who we really are. We can’t design humanity, but we could definitely do something about humanity. Hence, continuing the conversations among HCD practitioners regarding the move from “designing for” to “designing with”, I added “designing about”.
After another period of less than a year, I found a talk by Andrea Mignolo at 2017 Leading Design Conference. She shared two profound quotes. The first one below.
I recalled my observations of the unhealthy so-called professionalism that sanitizes work from emotions, avoiding emotions like germs. We were taught from early in life that being emotional is bad, let alone at the workplace. Some cultures do it more than others (according to my experience, Asian cultures tend to accept displays of emotions at work).
The display of emotion is only a sign that it exists, waiting to be processed. Since the display is condemned, we try to suppress it. There is no opportunity to acknowledge the underlying emotion before processing it toward an empowering action. We became narcissistic, arrogant, manipulative, holier than thou, which are inauthentic behavior.
There, the “authenticity” topic in Andrea Mignolo’s talk!
Being authentic with our emotions is important for a designer, because we cannot be creative without accepting all types of emotions. But first, why do I get bothered when other people cannot be authentic?
First, thanks to my neurodiversity I could recognize inauthenticity in people. It’s based on the subtle vibrational mismatch I feel in many occasions throughout my not-so-short life. Second, I need creativity in daily life i.e. to make decisions on how to respond to others, which gets disrupted by that subtle vibration patterns I get from inauthentic people. Therefore, authenticity is important for creativity in any endeavor, not just for designing.
To cope with inauthenticity, I can only do my best in recognizing the here and now. I try to be mindful about what’s going on around me and how I respond to it. Let’s go to the second quote from Andrea.
She found it (especially the bold part) beautiful.
Referring to Buchanan’s Four Order of Design, she said, “…maybe there’s a fifth order of design: the designing of being.”
There you go. Designing about humanity. To help all of us to return to who we really are.
It’s the Ultimate Design.
A lifetime quest.
Related Concepts:
- Designing in the Anthropocene by Ben Reason (consultant): on designing toward ecology-centered instead of human-centered
- The Connectors by Fariz Rahmansyah (corporate management): on the need of a breed of polymaths with certain characters to connect within organizations
- Design Education 21st Century by Don Norman (academics): on educating designers in addressing complex (humanity) problems
This draft was written at the beginning of 2020, just before the pandemic. The author discovered the real need for this ultimate design during the pandemic, and since 2022 has been contributing professionally toward such initiatives.
