How design shapes our systems of value and knowledge

A revision of ‘Designers = Meta-epistemologists? Questions of practising design in the spaces of beyond-knowledge and the not-yet’ by Fukuuchi, Yang & Dalladay-Simpson; Goldsmiths, University of London; IASDR; 2009

Photo by Mohdammed Ali on Unsplash

What happens when we see design as an act of world-making? In other words, to go beyond the simple shaping of things that exist in the wider world, by participating actively in the co-creation of shared meaning and knowledge. In ‘world-making’ one would see that our collective designing has left its mark on the world. Together we would have shifted the systems, values, and boundaries around us, for better or worse. Rather than participating blindly, how can we better understand our effects to become fully active participants in shaping our futures?

To understand this better, we need to go on a journey that starts with reflecting on ourselves as individual practitioners, then thinking about how the design industry is shaping the world today. Finally, we will explore ways to redesign design as a catalyst that addresses the key global challenges of the 21st century, from social care to climate change.

The Self-reflective Designer

“On my business card, my title is designer. I have been known as a designer in the public and I have introduced my self as such to people I’ve met. I have done something because I am designer and at the same time I was doing something to be a designer.

While I was pretending as a star designer in front of some clients, I was using specific words like a serious artist. In the name of a designer, I am performing as a designer.

So, I’ve learnt the designer’s role through my surroundings and an endless loop. Yes, I was a designer. I am a designer and maybe I will be a designer in the future… I might know it all, but what have I done with this, and what have I to do with this?” — Hyaesook Yang, 2009

In her reflections as a professional designer, Hyaesook feels that she is playing a role, with a stage, script, props, and an audience. And this role is defined by what she does and says, as much as those she does it for. She becomes aware that her identity is the result of an endless loop, that iterates, recursively, as acting out a role for the benefit of others.

Her value as a designer emerges from how she interacts with society, and how people respond to her. In managing how she plays the role and with whom she plays it, she endlessly redefines it and, ultimately, shapes the future.

Asking oneself what have I done and what have I to do with this, brings us to our first dilemma. In the act of playing a role, how do we (re)define the boundaries between our personal and professional responsibilities? Beyond simply participating in it, how can we incorporate ethics within the recursive loop? How do we find purpose in the various layers of intention, expectation, action, and response?

Problems of Prospecting

In ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing’, Nigel Cross says that the practice of design is typically regarded as problem-solving, yet it often deals with ill-defined problems [4]. He refers to an idea by the design theorist Donald Schön that, to develop knowledge of how to work with these ill-defined problems, we must reflect on how implicit artistic and intuitive processes help us to navigate uncertainty within our practices [3].

In design, we often reframe ‘problems’ into tools to explore a landscape of possible solutions. This reframing helps many designers to deal with the uncertainty of making changes in complex systems. It positions us to better understand the value of the many alternative paths of change we could take. Transforming problems into tools could be seen as ‘cognitive scaffolding’. Just as we might imagine using a tree branch to fashion an axe, so we can harness aspects of our predicaments and environments to have a greater impact over them [2]. This might also be a key way to address some of the biggest challenges we see in the world today.

By framing problems as tools, instead of just trying to solve the problem directly, we permit ourselves to explore possibilities. This helps us move beyond the managerial logic of problem-solving, and to claim a space in which we can ‘design’ in the web of diverse meanings and values that are inherent to our shared experiences of the world.

Traditionally, as designers, we need a pre-defined purpose to undertake our practice effectively. In this sense, design is an act of shaping the world for others, to make their lives better, whether the motivation is altruistic or mercenary. It, therefore, must be an empathetic act to be effective [2]. This means designers are often busy gathering, understanding, and addressing other people’s needs and challenges, while also exploring how to create changes in systems that will be effective in addressing those needs. From this professional perspective, it could be argued that designers are uniquely experienced and qualified in addressing the increasing complexity of ‘world-shaping’ that is needed today [8].

Over the last hundred years, designers have developed ways to address a broad range of needs and challenges. This has produced a diversity of design languages, approaches, specialisms and practices. As the nature of design is to question and challenge the existing systems, it also seems to change and to redefine itself, too. Whether user experience (UX) design, service design, automotive, industrial design, interior, or product design, in each case, the new field has emerged from a tacit consensus that was developed over many years of collective attempts to change our worlds for the better.

When we add purpose to our possibility-finding, we begin to engage in a process of prospect-offering. When we re-align parts of a system for positive impact, we haven’t just solved a problem, but have unlocked value and created new meaning. Even if only in a small way, we have changed the fabric of the world.

John Wood takes this idea further with his ‘win-win-win-win’ model [12]. By trying to align the incentives of designer, client, society, and environment, we have a framework that offers benefits for clients and stakeholders, including those on the periphery.

Shifting values

We have shaped our world via our intentions. This includes everything that surrounds us, including the lifestyles we lead and aspire to; from the urban jungles to countryside farms; from the way we commute to the way we use money. In these dreams and habits, the tangible and intangible mingle together as a co-creative flow of ‘cultural value’ in society [10].

Since the first professional outing of design, over a century ago, one of the biggest shapers of global change has been economic growth. Designers have, therefore, been paid to focus on developing increasingly profitable approaches to problems. As a result, the designer’s ability to uncover, and to address, peoples primary needs has become a key factor in fuelling habits of consumption. Corporations, therefore, tend to see design as a magical way to win in the competition of satiating the hard-to-define desires of modern consumers.

“Design has placed itself more and more at the direct service of private interest” — Clive Dilnot [5]

As a result, business success is primarily associated with profit, rather than assessing the overall or total impact. Unfortunately, this has come at a significant cost to the environment and has also affected the quality of life, and social wellbeing, of consumers and producers alike.

Because of increasing public awareness of environmental and social issues, today’s designers must also seek to incorporate new and additional factors into their work, to keep up with the capricious desires of millennials. It can be difficult to balance the profit and ethical impact motives, as they often seem almost diametrically opposed.

Designers are expected to ensure that offerings have the right ‘feel-good’ factor for prevailing market tastes. They need to be instinctively aware of what is perceived to be valuable to succeed in a given market, yet participate in a covert process of re-shaping habits. This is a process of remaking socio-cultural value.

We can look at the act of design as a timeline that binds our intentions into a future that we shape. The designer starts by reflecting on their experiences, then projects certain aspirations into an imagined future. Once they have a vision, various design techniques are used to reverse-engineer aspects of that future, so that they emerge into the present. They negotiate visions by calibrating them with constraints recalled from the past. This process goes back and forth until they have manifested the desired change in the world. A consequence of bringing about that change is that it also changes the shape of possibilities going forward.

In attempting to create any change, we both use, and recreate, parts of the world and its meanings and values. In summation of all design activities around the world, we collectively shape socio-cultural potential.

Design ethics

We believe that designers can play a more positive role in the world. We hold that we have a hitherto untapped collective potential for shaping the world. We can use this potential for bringing about benign and affirmative futures.

“To design is no longer to increase the stability of the manmade world: it is to alter, for good or ill, things that determine the course of its development.” — John Chris Jones [8]

The scale and complexity of the global challenges we face today mean that we need a paradigm shift to build and sustain a prosperous future for us all. We need to fundamentally shift in our socio-cultural value systems. To do this, we need to rekindle the ethics of design across our global community.

As design philosopher Tony Fry points out, design has equal potential for both futuring and defuturing our world [6]. The more that designers are aware of how their activities are shaping futures, the more they can steer us towards prosperity and away from disaster. As we share a planet and a future, how can we take collective responsibility for how we reshape the world?

Common futures

We all share the future we build, and we all have skin in the game. We need to see ourselves as ‘not simply beings in the world, but beings of the world’ [7]. With the serious challenges we face to future prosperity, collective futuring might be the most vital purpose for designers today. Tony Fry’s notion of ‘futuring’ can give us a framework for collective action. Simply put, to ‘future’ is to stop trying to sustain the unsustainable. It is an ethical guide to reshaping socio-cultural values for a more viable future or sustainment.

To engage in collective futuring, we first need to shift our perception of ourselves-in-the-world, via a change in the language. We might, for example, move from the singular passive ‘I am’ to the collective active ‘we can’. Designers use models to understand, learn and share how insights can be turned into realities [4]. And, as with different languages, different models emerge from different cultures of practice.

Similarly, the languages we use are also models that help us to understand, learn and share our experiences. They are a living record of socio-cultural consensus. Although ‘hardened’ over time, they still reshape the way we experience and understand the world [1]. Our mental models are strongly linked to the structures of our native language, and the value system it embodies.

“Language is a manner of living together in a flow of consensual coordination of coordinations of consensual behaviours, and it is as such a domain of coordinations of coordinations of doings. So, all that we human beings do we do it in language.” — Humberto Maturana [9]

By changing the words we use, we also change the way we think and experience the world. And, as we see with design models, we can use language as a framework to change the way we understand and realise changes in the world. If we share our new languages with others, we can build a consensus around new possibilities and ways of thinking. This is what the biologist Maturana called ‘languaging’, a living system of understanding shared and sustained between its users.

Languaging is a key tool for our collective futuring. Novel words can be used as containers for creating and sharing new understandings and perspectives, ideas beyond our current system of knowledge. Actively languaging helps us talk about potential futures in new ways, and discuss new paradigms of value.

So could we move beyond our current understanding of design?

Beyond knowledge

Moving beyond current understanding of design practice, how might we seed and grow new modes of shaping the world, and build a collective futuring practice.

If our collective designing is reshaping the world, then by re-designing design we can re-direct how we make our future. We can weave into our socio-cultural fabric new values. We can nurture the systems that remake those values, whilst moving away from ones that reduce them. We need to introduce four new concepts to help us:

• Apoietic— the space and conditions needed for something unknowable to be brought into existence. From the Greek poiesis, or the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.
• Purposing— to engage in designing new purposes, rather than solutions or services. To explicitly share those purposes with others to bring about changes.
• Wisdoming — reflecting on virtuous practices and insights to better shape other practices. Changing the adjacent practices around it, beyond its original scope. It seeds ethics into our future practices
• Languaging — crafting language as a specific design tool for ways of thinking that are not widely understood or shared, and easily communicating it for others to understand.

Designing purposes

When we move beyond seeing design as simply recreating the world as we know it, to actively seeding future value, we need to build a new framework of ethical expertise. As we are seeing change, we must understand the role of ethics in the emergence of new systems of value, and how those systems reflect and remake our values.

By designing purpose, the designer starts to become a metadesigner, they start redesigning their design. Purposing is a form of seeding values into potential futures. It allows a metadesigner to reflect upon how their actions impact values in the world and comparing them to what they value. It creates space for self-awareness, allowing them to shift from thinking with universal truths to understanding how to enact their values [13] to catalyse change.

We stop seeing the act of design as an outward shaping force. Instead, we see an iterative process of both outwardly shaping the world while inwardly remaking the self.

It is in this emerging space of awareness that the metadesigner, with experience, guidance and practice can become prudent. They start the journey towards becoming an ethical expert, a new system of understanding themselves and the world [11].

Ecological growth

To catalyse value change, a metadesigner may realise that they are seeding a process of ecological growth, rather than designing a fixed outcome. Due to the participatory nature of systems, the seeder can’t control the outcome, only initiate the change.

The resulting flows created by purposing, rather than just designing, will be shaped by the participants and eventual users of it. The growth of the new idea cannot be predicted without being enacted. It is a process of organic realisation that must be alive in the world to observe and learn from.

“Metadesign is a needed extensive, holistic, consensual, ethical, eco-mimetic practice of design” — John Wood [12]

Building eudemonia

When we understand how systems of value are created by acts of design, we move from an observed, theorised understanding of the world to a more embodied, ethical position. As metadesigners, we become proactive and aware participants in the making and remaking of value systems. This challenges our traditional understanding of design, because the more traditional ‘observed’ approach distances participants from the awareness that their everyday routines, choices and actions are part of a process of remaking possible futures. We need to shift how we understand the nature of our world.

Designers have been trained to focus on the efficacy of their products and services as their primary contribution to society. However, as designing is, fundamentally, a practical activity concerned with influential actions, metadesigners would now reflect more deeply on how they bring about forms of change. How, for example, do they apply their ‘knowledge-in-action’, to become more aware of their values, and how might these become embodied, then transmitted through their design practices?

The old Greek term ‘eudemonia’ meant acting for, and with, ‘good-spirit’. It not only presumes that such actions will bring about some future happiness but, also, that it encourages a ‘will-to-happiness’. We believe that the appropriate kind of prudent design will enable the practitioner to become a driver of eudemonic change. If we are to scale up this idea to the level of the design industry, we will need to nurture and encourage the sharing of this virtue across all design professions. This probably offers the greatest world-changing potential.

In summary

Our journey started with an invitation to designers to reflect upon ourselves as individual practitioners. Because design is shaping today’s world, designers need a deeper understanding of how, as practitioners, we make choices that shape possible futures. We discussed the need for ‘futuring’, then explored ways to redesign design as a catalyst to much needed global change.

We hope that the ideas we have identified offer some interesting questions for our practice, as well as reminding designers of their responsibility for facilitating better futures.

References

1. Abram, D. (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world, Random House, New York.
2. Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. (1998) The Extended Mind, Analysis, 58, 10–23
3. Cross, N. (2001) Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline versus Design Science, Design Issues, Vol. 17, №3, pp. 49–55.
4. Cross, N. (2006) Designerly Ways of Knowing, Springer, London.
5. Dilnot, C. (2008) The Critical in Design (Part One), Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 1.2, 177–189.
6. Fry, T. (1999) A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.
7. Fry, T. (2009) Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, Berg Oxford.
8. Jones, J. C. (1970) Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures, Wiley-Interscience, London, New York, Sydney, Toronto.
9. Maturana. H. and Varela. J. (1992) The Tree of Knowledge, Shambhala, Massachusetts.
10. Tonkinwise, C. (2004) Ethics by Design: Or the Ethos of Things, Design Philosophy Papers, Vol 2:2, Team D/E/S Publications, Syndey.
11. Varela, J. (1999) Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and cognition, Stanford University Press, California.
12. Wood, J. (2007) Design for Micro-Utopias, Gower Publishing Limited, Hampshire.
13. Wood, J. (2008) Auspicious Reasoning, The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Vol. 1, Issue 3, 2008.