Ecologies of Design
An exploration of Design, Ethics and Intent at Scale
“Design is the rendering of intent”, says Jared M. Spool, and I haven’t found a better definition since. Every day people encounter design in their lives and assume intent. Whether it’s your banking app, or your city’s utility bill payment system, design is everywhere.
How do we design complex massive systems at scale?
I suppose this question began nagging me as a question a few years ago when I was designing products for large distributed systems. I was working on problems that were literally planet-scale design challenges.
I couldn’t even find the entire team responsible for making my product, let alone get them together in a way that I could show them user research effectively. There were simply complexities too large to account for by any one human working on a limited budget.
Designing Systems
If design is the rendering of intent, what is the intent of a system?
People in companies around the world, and in their own free time, design new products and features every day. It’s part of being human. We love to create, to express, to conquer challenges, to generate revenue, to solve problems.
As systems scale, governance can become difficult to manage, sometimes even impossible, requiring large investments to re-write legacy software or decompose massive integrated systems into smaller more manageable chunks.
It turns out that in a system, there are exponential consequences for getting it wrong.
Sometimes a system breaks.
A github outage can take down work for hundreds or thousands of developers at a time. And when it does break, we come frustrated with those responsible for the system we have put demands on. We understand fundamentally that there is someone on the other side of this thing that is broken, who can either fix it, or who has broken it in the first place.
Sometimes, when a system breaks, it can be for non-technical reasons. Recent news-headline uses of Twitter as a platform for “foreign policy,” or the lack thereof have shown us where the gaps in accountability are. This is a design problem. It may not be an interface problem directly, but there are ways that design could account for that.
Not everything humans want is ethical, or good.
I assure you few — if any, people designing Twitter saw it or designed for a case where it could be used as a tool for making credible threats of nuclear war. It turns out that in a system, there are exponential consequences for getting it wrong.
We should all be asking: In what ways could this hurt someone? In what ways could this hurt the world?
Beyond Human Centered Design
There are other consequences in design though, and some are far less apocalyptic but just as important. For example: What is the carbon footprint of the new generation of on-demand delivery services that have cropped up?
We have designed a world of endless convenience. A world where at the push of a button you can get dinner, hail a ride, or start a diplomatic crisis with two foreign powers in the course of an evening. HCD has its limits. It’s not evil or bad, it should not however be taken as gospel for everything we do.
Not everything humans want is ethical, or good. A quick survey of human history, the history of advertising, or criminal justice can reaffirm that.
The Disney/Pixar film Wall-e is a great example of HCD run amok. If you haven’t seen it, it’s the story of a world where humans have done massive damage to themselves and the world due to an endless stream of frictionless convenience. Just because users crave convenience does not mean it should be given to them. A frictionless gun means no safeties.
Empathy can help you understand some human needs, it may even provide billion dollar insights, but not their ecological impact.
As designers, we have responsibilities. I love the work done by Mike Monteiro at Dear Design Student. In focusing on ethics, Design is opening itself back up to questions of right and wrong and what comes next. This is all part of what it means to mature a technology.
Ecologies of Design
When it comes to design, the question I’ve begun asking is: “What is the ecology of this decision?” What trade-offs am I introducing to the world, to this product, to the user, by making this design decision? How will it impact the world?
Systems are by design massive, impersonal and complex. They are built to help humans overcome problems too big for a single person or group of people. But systems are demonstrations of intent too. Sometimes that intent is just keeping it together. Sometimes, it is profit. Sometimes it is cost reduction, or safety incident reduction, or increased speed in manufacturing. Systems, like products are expressions of intent, but at scale.
The opportunity to inform that intent and improve massive systems keeps me up at night; I can’t help a good puzzle. But, I also see the consequences of not designing for complexity. A lack of design thinking for catastrophic failure caused the worst industrial pollution ever seen in the Gulf of Mexico.
We designers have a responsibility to the world, because design isn’t just what it looks like, it’s how it works. Every engineer responsible for designing the Deepwater Horizon was a designer, every business decision impacted the design. The lack of failsafes for a deep-water rupture with massive ecological consequences was as much a design decision as an engineering and business consideration.
As designers we didn’t discover human-centered design, we re-discovered and rebranded it from mass industrialization
Empathy can help you understand some human needs, it may even provide billion dollar insights, but not their ecological impact. Empathy can be really good for individual experiences, but it sucks at designing systems of scale. Empathy unchecked, a human-centered world, can easily lend itself to the paradigms we inherited from mass industrialization. One could even say that as designers we didn’t discover human-centered design, we re-discovered and rebranded it from mass industrialization.
When design is how it works, it turns out that the entire system is the designer. Everyone involved in making a product, a feature, or a service happens is enlisted to shape that experience, and how it lives and functions in the world around it. The individual designer’s role transforms. iThe designer now becomes a crucial facilitator, helping clarify and align intent, facilitate leadership, and voice the impacts of decisions. The designer is the moral and ecological compass of how we should express intent at scale.
We designers have a responsibility to the world, because design isn’t just what it looks like, it’s how it works.
Design has a direct impact on the natural world, taking from it, and producing something that renders meaning, fancy, intent. Design is not a neutral player, but rather the way we achieve the rendering of intent. In other words, design is always opinionated, even if it doesn’t count the cost of those opinions.
We may assume an intent is apolitical, but every design has consequences. When you begin to look closer you can see how intimately design is involved in how the world works. The more designers understand risk, impact, and ecology, the more they can help shape better ways of providing products and services.
The designer is the moral and ecological compass of how we should express intent at scale.
You might be thinking: this sounds impossible.
Maybe.
But once upon a time, humans and their societies were forced to overcome the myth that the cosmos revolved around them. It was difficult. There were a lot of false starts on the adoption of that idea — but eventually, through struggle, our societies embraced that we were a small part of a grandiose and beautiful universe.
I hope to show in the explorations of the essays here that the time has come for humans and their societies to overcome the myth that markets, or design revolve around them. It is time for design to help us learn our rightful place among nature, not outside it.
This is the first essay of many exploring systems, design, and accountability.
Eli is a designer exploring the intersections of design, responsibility, and distributed systems. Ecologies of Design is an exploration of where these intersections meet, and how designers just might do better by the world if they think deeply about these issues.
Eli is entirely captivated by soon-to-be-wife Katy 😍. Together they enjoy Sci-fi, ice cream, and playing with two Corgi’s Hugo and Zelda.
Thanks to Maxim, Heru, and Rachel for taking a peek and helping with this piece.
