How to deal with a complex design problem: A Brief Generator
How can designers tackle a problem as complex as climate change? That was the question we were faced with when we partnered with What Design Can Do to do the research for their Climate Action Challenge this spring.
In collaboration with WDCD and their partners the IKEA Foundation and the Autodesk Foundation, we were to write the briefs and background information for the challenge, a global design competition open to students, start-ups and professionals who can win funding and an acceleration programme to realise their ideas.
Where to start?
WDCD and their partners wanted to focus on adaptation to climate change rather than mitigation (limiting the cause of climate change). That’s because reducing greenhouse gas emissions should be a given at this point, whereas there is still not enough attention on how humans can adapt to (and survive) a hotter planet and the increasingly severe disaster and weather events that come with it.
Climate change is global, it’s local, and it affects every aspect of our lives. It’s the most pressing problem of our time, but the consequences are so mind-boggling deep and broad that it’s hard to grasp. You can slice it a million ways — looking at how it will cause water shortages, or how it will increase refugees, or how it will disproportionally affect women, or what kind of foods it will make unavailable, or what it means for our diet, clothing, travel, or consumer electronics — and still only touch on a tiny corner of the problem.
Our job was to make sense of it, and to help designers understand the problem so that they could design solutions for it.
The central question for our research was: What can design do to ease the consequences of climate change? We wanted to cover all the areas most urgently threatened by climate change while making the challenge appealing to all kinds of designers working on all kinds of levels, from storytelling to the systemic. Finally, we also wanted to encourage designers to root their solutions in their local area, rather designing for unfamiliar places.
Our solution? A briefing generator.
From macro to micro and back again
Initially, we intended to design just five briefs, as we did for the previous year’s Refugee Challenge. But when we began to research climate change, and its consequences for every aspect of our lives and the systems that support them, we quickly realised that that was too few. With five briefs, we could only take either an extremely micro perspective (‘how can you improve the health of soil in rural areas in Malawi?’) that would only appeal to a handful of designers, or such a general one as to be meaningless (‘how can you ensure that no one is affected by either droughts or floods?’).
To resolve this, we identified the most urgent areas for climate change adaptation according to reports from authorities such as the IPCC:
Food
Water
Housing
Energy
Health
Design strategies for climate change
We also analysed the interviews we’d conducted with experts working in design, policy, activism and ecology, and found that there were four different design strategies that could be used to manage climate change. They cover the entire spectrum of what design can do, and all the disciplines and skills that ‘design’ encompasses:
- Storytelling (to raise awareness and create a positive narrative about the future)
- Making products or environments (to encourage positive behavioural change that can help adaptation)
- Creating services (to connect people together and make them more resilient)
- Transforming systems (to address structural problems that cause/worsen climate change effects and to replace them with a system that can withstand a changing climate and shocks)
Iterating
The four design strategies speak to certain kinds of designers, without restricting them to their discipline or day job. Filmmakers can opt for ‘system transformation’; service designers can, if they wish, choose to tell a story instead of designing a service.
At that point, we considered having either one brief per topic (five in total) or one per design strategy (four in total). Neither seemed sufficient. We decided to find out if we could write a brief for every combination of topic and design strategy (e.g. storytelling about food, or system transformation in housing), which would make 20 in all.
We made a spreadsheet with our topics across the top and design strategies along the side, as below. We filled in the ‘necessary adaptations’ recommended by the IPCC in each box according to design strategy and topic, and then went through several iterations to identify a ‘challenge’ and ‘opportunity’ for each area where design could really make a difference (as opposed to politics, finance, or technological innovation).
This gave us 20 briefs. We were still concerned that this would be too many, so we held a vote among STBY and WDCD team members to see where the most interest lay. As it turned out, the vote was scattered quite evenly across the briefs, and no one felt particularly enthusiastic about picking just five of them. We wanted to keep all 20; but how could we communicate this many briefs to designers without confusing them or sending them to sleep?
The answer lay in the modular system we already had in the spreadsheet. We could build a generator! That way, designers could pick a strategy that most suited their skill set and ambition, then choose a topic they were interested in, and hey presto — a brief customised to their interests would be generated!
Location, location, location
There was one more problem to be solved: location. While we recognised that climate change will hit the poorest and most vulnerable regions the hardest, we wanted entrants to design for a country that they live in, or were familiar with — not somewhere they once went on holiday for a couple of weeks. Should we also add ‘location’ as another variable and customise the briefs accordingly? But making a version of each brief to fit each of the seven continents would mean making 120 briefs. And weather and climate change consequences can vary drastically across continents. So, no.
Instead, we decided to make the briefs universal enough so that they could be applied anywhere, from Riyadh to Stockholm, Lagos to Havana. We did this by identifying structural and societal obstacles to climate change adaptation that commonly occur, such as too many middlemen in a food system, or lack of regulations for construction that cause houses to collapse in a natural disaster.
While you might think that people who get water from a centralised water utility in Western European have a very different problem to people who get their water from a borehole in India, they actually have a similar vulnerability to climate change: they rely on an invisible water source that they cannot personally control or fix. Similarly, urban consumers everywhere are vulnerable to a breakdown in food distribution, as cities do not produce enough food to sustain themselves.
We’re not the experts…
The phrase ‘Think global, act local’ is very apt for climate change, as its consequences are so varied from location to location. This is why we designed the briefs so that designers and experts can do their own research and find out for themselves where local problems are, rather than us determining it for them. Entrants will know a lot more about the issues in their area than we do, and will also have a better understanding of socio-cultural factors that need to be addressed to solve such problems.
The key to this entire process was putting people at the centre. Whether interviewing designers, reading hundred-page-long official reports, or iterating on the brief matrix, we were always asking ourselves: What is the impact on people? What difference can people make? In every iteration we got a little closer to answering these questions, and we tried to write the briefs and challenge guide to encourage entrants to answer them too.
In short:
The generator was a neat solution because it does justice to all three variables: it allows the fullest interpretation of design; it calls attention to the most urgent topics and addresses them at every level from the personal to the systemic; and it allows global themes to be interpreted in a local context.
If you’re struggling to strike the right balance between the general and the specific when writing a design brief on a tricky topic, why not give a generator a try?
Join the Challenge: http://www.whatdesigncando.com/challenge-2017/climate-action/
