Designers Are Risk Takers
The hazards of the technological matchmaker
When we fall in love we take a risk. The only reason we would chance something as terrible as heartbreak is that love makes us do things we never do otherwise, and entertain consequences we would normally never go anywhere near.
“While fulfilling their function, technologies do much more; they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. And in doing so they contribute actively to the ways in which we live our lives.” –Peter-Paul Verbeek, from his essay Moralizing Technology
When we fall in love with a technology we take another risk. Technology defines ritual, rituals define customs, customs define a culture. Technology transforms a culture irrevocably by erasing the rituals it supersedes. We love technology but I believe it is ambivalent, and has no regard for what came before or the qualities than make us human, it is unable to love. Just as when we fall for a person, there is no going back, and this coupling often results in broken hearts.
Design’s role as the matchmaker in the process of technological adoption means that as a designer if you accept this role you must also accept the role of risk taker. In the same way that you put someones heart on the line when you take the plunge, when introducing a new technology you irrevocably erase (be it good or bad) what came before. The consequences of technological adoption can be physical (as with cigarettes and other carcinogens), environmental (as with plastic filling our oceans or the internal combustion engine warming our planet), and cultural (as outlined by Verbeek and myself above).
The cultural effects of technological adoption are most insidious and can have the highest price. I think some part of us realizes this and the negative reception of new technology (video games, cell phones, social media) is a sort of unconscious cultural defence mechanism; individuals act as agents of the larger social entity they are subject to but under the illusion that they are voicing a will entirely their own. I feel that simply rejecting new innovation is not a productive response but it is interesting and perhaps symptomatic of the larger issue of the hazards posed by technological adoption.
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows. –Plato, Phaedrus 275a-b, talking about the cultural effects of the adoption of the written word.
We are all struggling with the cultural consequences of technology we have blindly adopted. This story which has repeated itself throughout human history is now being told on an unprecedented level: China is now trapped by its dependence on cars and coal, plastic fills our oceans, and social media has us in the grip of apathy. These are situations in which design and culture took a risk together in which culture paid the price.
When the decision is made to manufacture and present a car big or small, fast or slow, we decide whether we proliferate hulking gas guzzlers or quietly harmonious urban transport. The objects we introduce and proliferate will act in the same way that cars have, shaping us, our cities, and our culture.
The Fischer Price Revolutionary Device is an examination of the potential hazards of contextualizing a technology. In appropriating a buzzword to sell a new iteration of the same post optimal object every year we take an ecological and cultural risk, a risk for which our children may pay the price.
The Fischer Price Revolutionary Device uses many of the mechanisms common to a discipline known as Critical Design. Critical Design uses design to tell us stories about who we are, revealing the invisible forces the designed embodiments of technology exert over our lives. Its cousin, Speculative Design, tells stories about who we could be, allowing us to identify and steer ourselves towards a desirable future using an embodiment of technology which does not yet exist.
Using design to tell stories and raise awareness about who we are or who we might be is certainly valuable in its own right, however I believe there are practical applications to both of these schools of thought. If the opportunity exists to drive or guide cultural values through design then it might be possible to direct a culture, perhaps global culture, towards a better future. When a designer introduces a technology they have the opportunity to contextualize it not only with who we are, but with who we might be. What if by designing for a better world we were able to make the world just a little bit better?
Critical and Speculative Design is a discipline first introduced to me by professors Helene Day Fraiser, Keith Doyle, Craig Badke, and Garnet Hertz at Emily Carr; the book Hertzian Tales elaborated further on the former discipline, and Speculative Everything on the latter. If you are interested in how social and cultural forces shape technology I recommend Andrew Feenberg’s essay “Between Reason and Experience” in which he makes a compelling argument for this process, something he calls “democratic rationalization”.
Thanks for reading!
