How Does it Resume?
Thoughts on the evolving role of design to improve experiences for people in spaces as we emerge from global lockdowns.
Introduction
The late 1990’s film The Truman Show is a fictional tale about a man living his entire life unaware he is inside of a giant film set. All the while he is being secretly recorded as actors play the roles of all the characters in his life. In the film, millions of viewers would watch Truman, played by Jim Carey, as he navigated life’s milestones. The audience would ask “How’s it going to end?” Will Truman figure it out, fall in love, escape, or perish?
We are now in a transformative moment, as most countries emerge from a mandated public lockdown due to the spread of COVID19. Unlike watching Truman, billions around the globe are watching one another to see how life will resume. We observe a variety of responses from global leaders to citizen-led improvements.Trying to predict how our families, work-life, and communities recover or evolve into something new. We try to understand the growing social and economic frustrations from others who experience life from a different viewpoint.
We can all relate to the feeling of trying to understand something new. Try to recall how you experienced something before COVID19. This feeling might have happened as you attempted to find your way in an unfamiliar part of your city. Your initial curiosity can quickly lead to anxiety and frustration as you struggled to complete a task. But what happens when you add valid concerns about healthcare, safety in public and economic insecurity?
The Role of Design
Design’s role is to explore these challenges and create practical and often ambitious solutions that help people achieve their goals. This investigation happens through understanding a person’s needs and working through a process that refines new ideas through ongoing cycles of learning and making.
At Arup, our Design practice allows us to create new Integrated Experiences that span spaces, services, objects, and often unseen technologies. We aim to create a positive impact on people, meeting client goals, and reducing the risk of wasting time or resources to solve the wrong problem.
Historically this happened by improving the functional or visual appeal of a specific object or solution. But the world is now more connected, and the lines have blurred between the services we rely on, the consumer products we use and the spaces we occupy. In response, new design practices have emerged, requiring a new type of designer and collaborations between design disciplines.
As we start a decade in chaos, the following is a brief exploration of what’s changed, why clients are requesting these services and why it matters to Arup. We will explore how integrated experience teams and partners can best work together to solve these new challenges post COVID19 and for the decade to come.
Evolution of Design
The role of design and technology as response to societal issues is not something new. The modern design profession evolved out of the Industrial Revolution. Crowded cities, unsanitary conditions and disease led to public sector improvements in the form of street grids, parkspace design and sewage systems in the 19th century. After WW1, the Bauhaus movement after was a reaction to a growing working /middle class in need of functional yet affordable objects and environments. A number of iconic mixed discipline design studio’s emerged to answer these challenges.
What these organizations all had in common was how they were able to leverage advances in technology, notice changing human behavior, and evolve their methods to solve new problems of the day.
In recent decades, advances in technology have again drastically changed how we exist as people. These changes can be organized into three waves. The first emerged with the popularity of desktop computing in the 1980s and the modern internet during the mid to late 1990s. This helped to share insights, connect communities, and built the design tools that power our industry. The second was the widespread adoption of smartphones starting after the release of the initial iPhone in 2006. In summary, this sparked the app revolution that changed how we move through, live in, work, and related to personal mobile devices in cities.
The third wave involves the relationship of technology in physical spaces. This includes advances in infrastructure, processing power, sensors deployment, and applications that fuse into every space, service, and city. While smart city and smart building advocates have been pursuing this for decades, COVID19 and our larger climate crisis will propel significant innovations. For example the ability
to understand and isolate will impact spread or the impact of occupancy during social distancing will require better tools to monitor and measure data.
Designing for Impact
The role of the individual designer until now has adapted with the technology waves. The design profession moved from shaping a predefined object to joining strategic conversations earlier in the process and influencing how the brand was represented through storytelling, understanding the constraints of business, collaborating with partners to shape the entire service journey. This is the path of progress. Each design process is more sophisticated than the one prior. Designers could easily focus on interfaces for software because they had experience designing the hardware on which the applications would run or the “unboxing” moments. Having crafted better experiences for computer users, designers could readily take on non-digital experiences, like the larger service provided. And once designers learned how to redesign the experience in a single organization, they were more prepared to tackle the holistic system of organizations.
In order to think through these multi-sided challenges, new types of design teams formed. These brought together different disciplines such as industrial design, ethnography, graphic design, human-computer interaction designers, business strategies, among others. Along the way, these mixed practices experimented with the design process to help clients explore solutions faster.
This new integrated design has proved vital to a business. If you were to review the top companies listed in the Fortune 500. In the last twenty years, entire industries have shifted often by new entrants who were able to merge market strategy, design, and take advantage of emerging technology. In order to stand out, clients demand new offerings to help them make sense of change, remain relevant and shape a business case for all design decisions.
Sustainable Design
Evolving an integrated design approach is not only about responding to business needs but also about the ethical choices regarding what we make and how they impact the world.
However, the design profession as a whole has some “dirt” on it ‘s/our hands. There are some harsh truths to face up to, as poor design decisions have done damage. A few skeletons in our profession closets include wasteful industrial design, poor urban planning that has impacted communities, and now digital design that keeps people addicted to devices at record levels during lockdowns. So far, designers have mostly been complicit in taking assignments, and we need to act more responsibly.
To honor Arup’s commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals as reiterated in the A Better Way report, designers must help question the outcomes early and often. Before designers propose solutions that require us to take more materials from the earth, change neighborhoods, or deploy risky technology, we better be sure of the impact. In the chaos of COVID19, we must also keep an eye on how all actors are rebuilding and if we are being true to meeting sustainability goals. We face yet another recovery, of the environment being ignored inorder to let the economic engines churn.
Designers must ask if we are wasting time building the wrong thing or making stuff for the sake of it. If the design profession continues to question in this manner, we can better positively impact our industry, the design community, and our natural world.
Conclusion
Much like Truman, who bravely opened a backstage door of the “set” to step into the world, we will also venture into somewhat new spaces. We will resume our lives, economies and adapt to the shape of the recovery. These challenges will require different skill sets, methods, team structures and ethical considerations. There’s a need for integrated experience design practices to help.
I lead Arup’s Experience Design Studio as a response to this. The Studio helps clients frame and concept new types of integrated experiences for people in a variety of spaces. In addition, we collaborate with Arup partner teams who can then expand initial ideas into the structures, technology, and policies that we exist within.
The Studio is a mixed discipline collective of strategists, conceptual designers, technology designers, architects, urban planners, ethnographers, services designers, and storytellers. With capabilities in all of our regional offices and in partnership across Arup, we’re attempting to work differently. As the challenges of the present will not be solved using the approaches of the past. COVID19 has made that clear.
