Superhuman Design

Venturing Beyond Human-Centrism

“The ecological thought understands that there never was an authentic world. This doesn’t mean that we can do what we like with where we live, however. Thinking big means realizing that there is always more than our point of view. There is indeed an environment, yet when we examine it, we find it is made of strange strangers.”

Timothy Morton (2010)

After a particularly distressing year, we start to see glimpses of hope. I am writing these lines as Joe Biden secured a majority in the electoral college after the division and structural injustice in the Western world has become once again painfully apparent, and as an effective vaccine against a ravaging zoonosis might have been found. The events of 2020 unfolded — not by coincidence — in front of a looming planetary crisis and a wave of mass extinction. And yet, also here there is reason to be hopeful, with major Western players promising “Green New Deals” left, right and centre: the US, the UK, the EU.

As a strategic designer, design tutor and trained architect, I think that it has never been more pressing to reflect on the role design can play in the age of the Anthropocene. Can a discipline that has never played a neutral part in this environmental crisis (far from it!) help in reimaging what human occupation on a healing planet might look like? And where do we as designers even start, if so much of what we have learned and taught, observed and practiced got us into this mess in the first place? This blog post is a fragmented attempt to reflect on a series of ideas which might prove useful in the search for answers.

In the beginning of the 20th century, an emerging avantgarde implored artists, artisans and architects to overcome disciplinary boundaries, kickstarting the modern design movement. “The ultimate goal of all art is the building!” proclaimed Walter Gropius in the Bauhaus Manifesto (Gropius, 1919). Towards the end of the 20th century, an emerging avantgarde occupied with the field of human-machine interaction urged designers to put the user and their experience into the centre of their endeavours: resulting in the explosive rise of connected technology and the ubiquitous digitalisation of lived reality. “Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.” claimed Don Norman in his landmark book, The Design of Everyday Things in 1988 (Norman, 2002). Whilst different in many aspects, both of these design schools revolve around human actors, as practitioners or as users. Now, we are witnessing the dawn of a new shift: a new generation of designers and philosophers are questioning the human perspective and focus altogether, something which has long been taken for granted.

“The future city is not for us. The anthropocene (the reframing of the earth in the image of modernity) will be short lived, more of a geopolitical instant rather than a slow geological era. Humans are slowly vanishing even as their aggregate biomass continues to swell, our cities are not our own as we are already building habitats for other forms of life.”

Benjamin Bratton (2017)

Within the current debate, positions range from inviting designers to actively ignore human values and needs to tweaking existing design methods. One thing, however, is clear: as the status quo becomes increasingly indefensible, we need to rethink what it means to design in the Anthropocene age, and how to expose us to strange realities and new perspectives in a new, holistic way.

Now, one could say: “well, we are humans after all, so of course we tend to be human-centred”. But when we dig deeper, we find that it is more complicated than that. In fact, humans seeing themselves as exceptional and entitled to taking advantage of surrounding “nature” is deeply rooted in the Western world, and as philosopher Timothy Morton reminds us, deeply ingrained in the culture, custom and religion of agricultural society (Morton, 2010). This self-proclaimed superior role — be it as master or shepherd of everything ‘else’ in the world — relies on a constructed rift between what we call “nature” and human “culture” (Possamai, 2013). Supercharged by Western philosophy in the last centuries — from Francis Bacon to René Descartes — this clinical separation of the two realms brought about the enlightenment, industrialisation and with it “modernity”.

“The taming of nature became a major project within modernity’s broader aims, a project that scholars came to term “Promethean”. Within this context, the modern scientist or engineer would be the new Prometheus, who fights for human emancipation through the domination of nature.”

Maria Kaika (2005)

It didn’t need Covid-2019 for sensing that nature wasn’t that external to begin with (walking past the probiotic yoghurt aisle in the supermarket is enough of a reminder), and that the resulting processes of colonisation, industrialisation, and modernisation led to a deeply unjust anthroposphere and an unstable biosphere on the brink of collapse. What contribution can design play in challenging this exceptionalist stance, and how can it help to heal this chasm between culture and nature, between us and the ‘other’? It almost sounds impossible: how do we, as humans, can take any other worldview than a human-centred one?

From a philosophical point of view — both in Martin Heidegger’s idea of ‘Worldhood’ (Heidegger, 1978), or Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘Worlding’ (Haraway, 2016) — our lived realities can be seen as subjective constructs, each different from one another. And in fact, the old design mantra “You are not your user” implores us to design for the ‘other’, not ourselves. Whether developing a service or a product, designers are tasked to be ‘empathetic’ with the users they are designing for to create successful outcomes. So despite living in different realities, and only having access to fragmentary research and data about the ‘other’ — no matter how much of it is being collected — designers were and are still able to create transformative work that delights their users. So why should it be impossible to work towards a wider scope of empathy, one that does not only include fellow human beings, but also the living systems on which we rely, from the microbiome in our guts to the bacteria forming our biosphere around us, from the endangered animal and plant species which we might not be able to ‘catalogue’ before their extinction to the charismatic megafauna we know from fundraising posters?

Taking the view of the ‘other’, the ‘stranger’, requires what Timothy Morton calls ‘tuning in’ (Morton, 2018): finding a way of gaining meaningful access — albeit fragmented — to a different world. In User Experience Design, anthropological techniques have long become part of the toolkit of every designer to tune in with (human) users: conducting a deep interview whilst strolling around in their neighbourhood, reconstructing a ‘day in their life’ or engaging in participant observation might all bring us closer to our audience. And whilst many industries — especially historically slow-moving industries, such as the construction industry — still grapple with implementing human-centred principles, we as designers need to keep pushing further.

Yes, we need an approach that addresses users, customers, visitors, but that’s not enough. We need to further recognise their role as humans, community members, citizens, and yet: this might still be not enough. As designers and thinkers we need to see all of the aforementioned fellow humans –as well as us ourselves as part of a fragile ecological web that sustains our very existence. And we might be less removed from it as we wished for in the last decades and centuries. Quite the opposite: in a way, everything around us will eventually become a ‘user’ of what we create, in one way or another, either now or in a million years, in all scales from the cellphone to the city. Sounds a bit ambitious?

Well, as designers, we have already adapted and shaped change — such as the digital transformation — but we cannot afford to be complacent. If we want to be part of the solution to the biggest challenges humanity faces we will need to form new alliances with other disciplines, from biology to ecology, from landscape architecture to planetary science and work seamlessly across digital and physical realms. But most importantly, we will need to develop a super-human (‘super’ in its meaning of beyond, not superior!) sensorium and a design intuition to halt and ultimately reverse the detrimental effect our species has had on the planet, in order to unlock what ‘regenerative design’ could look like. We can’t start soon enough.

Agostino Nickl works as Strategic Designer at Arup Digital Studio and teaches MLA Studio 5 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, exploring landscapes of coexistence.

References

Bratton, B., (2017). “The Post-Anthropocene is the New Normal”. In: 2017/18 Research Program, Moscow: Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.

Gropius, W., (1919). “Manifesto of the Staatliches Bauhaus”, Weimar: Staatliches Bauhaus.

Haraway, D., (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 11.

Heidegger, M., (1978). Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, p. 92.

Kaika, M., (2005). City Of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, p. 3.

Morton T., (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, p. 7, pp. 57–58.

Morton, T., (2018). Being Ecological, London: Penguin Books.

Norman, D., (2002). The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Basic Books, p. x.

Possamai, F. V., ( 2013). “Nature and Culture: Genesis of an Obsolete Dichotomy”, In: Philosophy Study 3(9), p. 836–842.