The 3 most unconventional designers of 21st century — starting with Design shaman
Speaking of grand challenges, such as sustainability, inequality, and diversity, we need designers that can connect people, companies, and systems with bigger causes — to solve the crises in our relationships with the ecosystems we live in, and with people’s internal emotions and values.
Even as we mature in our technologically advanced lives and move up the rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we encounter a deeper crisis, of people, of nature, and their relationship. Think of climate change; staggering statistics of cancer patients; massive migration paths from war zones; or socio-economic inequalities even in the most developed countries of the world. While creating wealth, consumer products, and superficial satisfaction, we lost key checks and balances, and destroyed the ecosystems that we rely on to exist.
These systemic issues point out the need for new ways to be making, and re-making of the systems we are living in. The Design community’s role in these crises (if we want to be relevant to tackling its challenges) requires fresher sensitivities, and new competencies.
Some new roles for Designers — that get at holistic, deeper needs of people and their environments — are the Design Shaman, the Design Sufi, and the Design Zen. These new roles put designers in a new dynamic. It’s not about making products and services to attract people’s time, attention, and money. It’s about being a connector between people, their ecosystems, and their deeper selves.
Design Shaman
A shamanesque designer is cognizant of the deeper needs of people and nature. A design shaman is a sustainability geek by heart, as s/he has intrinsic understanding of the life cycles at work in nature. S/he supports these intrinsic understanding with external facts and insights reading cues in nature and culture. S/he is a strategic consultant, gives suggestions to companies about their product futures, gives recipes for sustainability and resilience.
A shamanesque designer doesn’t stop in just reacting what’s asked of her. She knows the friction in the world, and entropy embedded in human kind to derail from what’s right and important. With that in mind, she works hard to create myths around sustainability. She creates micro-visions for a harmonious futures, mixes the spiritual with the functional without hesitation. At times of hardship, she infuses light superstitions for the greater good.
Design Sufi
A sufi designer emanates an inner peace in her/his clients. S/he helps the clients to connect their audience with the divine causes and sensibilities. Design sufis are minimalists by heart. When they are working on a project, they can fast on certain aspects of the project-for instance with the technology angle — and deeply engage themselves with the context. For them, it’s all about the flow. They listen to the conflicting voices and rhythms in people’s lives, and design for harmony. Music and choreography are in their nature. Design Sufis have rituals as it’s in a Sama Ritual. They help their clients to realize how they might connect to the ecosystems surrounding them. They ponder on small ritual moments that are worth millions of ordinary moments.
Do you feel overwhelmed by the pace and speed of a tech-driven life? Sufi designers are great at ways in which you can expand time and space. Think of the sufi concepts like tayyi-mekan, and bast-i zaman for a second. Tayy-i mekan means the possibility of experiencing a year worth of experience in a minute. Bast-i zaman means being in multiple places at the same time. Design sufis would mix technological advances with philosophical underpinnings, and work towards experiences that are holistic, and fulfilling not only for the body but also for the souls. A design sufi strives for that connection, connection between the functional and the transcendental.
Design Zen
While a design sufi explores the internal sensibilities with rituals and performances, a design zen looks at the sensibilities from a more meditative point of view. A design zen is a master of focusing, and refocusing. She/he is a design therapist, who can help organizations to bridge the mental gaps between different stakeholders with mediation & meditation. Let the stakeholder be an end user in a consumer facing product, or one of many challenging stakeholders in a wicked government service design challenge. Similar to a mental model, a design zen works toward values and emotional models of stakeholders; and looks for overlaps that can help her to facilitate the problem space.
Design zen strives for being in the moment, and present. Being in the moment means appreciation of the qualities embedded in people and the situation.Speaking of qualities, Matthew May suggested the Zen qualities of austerity, simplicity, naturalness, subtlety, imperfection, break from routine, and tranquility to strive for a zen experience and shibumi. A design zen doesn’t take these qualities as their face value and looks for deeper connections. Kenji Ekuan for instance takes a simple lunchbox design and reads its deeper connections with the zen philosophy. According to Kenji, every designed object or environment is a manifestation of the spirit — a spirit that connects a particular design to the culture, ecology, and the environment that the design belongs to. A design zen looks for that connection, between the one and the many, between the particular and the system.
The takeaway from this article is that we need a new breed of designers who are connectors of people with their internal sensitivities and external ecosystems. In the age of technological advances, we can go back to centuries-old cultural concepts and philosophies to find our footing. Shamans, sufis, and zenmasters can teach us designers how to tackle the bigger challenges of sustainability, equality, and diversity — and how we can be a new kind of leader, bridging communities, ecosystems, and higher purposes.
