Can we design resiliency?
GOOD DESIGN IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
In a room full of interaction designers, I’m the annoying participant with her hand up asking the question, “Is the value of this design really worth the trade-off in resource consumption?” I’m the first to criticize the Internet of Things, and probably won’t buy a Bluetooth connected toothbrush that helps me brush my teeth for two minutes. Or a scale that tweets.
Yet some of the best advice I received last year is to test design solutions that seem totally crazy and against your values. Take them two steps past their initial offers, explore their ramifications, push the design dialectics, and see where the paths of critique and exploration take you.
As I’ve followed this advice, I have been slowly challenging my notions of what I consider ‘good design’. Beyond meeting a user’s needs, or providing something aesthetically beautiful and delightful, I’m hungry for deeper criteria. And while I love Dieter Ram’s Ten Principles for Good Design, I think he glossed too quickly over what it means for something to be “environmentally friendly.”
And I’m not talking about “sustainable” either.
Sustainable design offered a list of extensive but siloed outcomes: low-carbon, toxic-free, socially responsible, energy efficient, recyclable, waste-free, water conserving, and so on. But these are not siloed issues. Our planet is a series of interconnected networks. I often think of John Muir’s comment, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
As climate change accelerates and we face a more volatile future, I advocate for a systemic shift in the networks that constitute our anthropocene: the networks of energy production, agriculture, commerce, education, communication, etc. At the cost of the actual biological systems that support our man-made ecology, we are rapidly burning through our resources.
We live in a man-made ecology yet we haven’t figured out how to make it a true, resilient system.
Yet as I think about the role of an individual designer, I am faced with the nagging question: can we actually design resilience?
The complexity of the task at hand makes shifting design behavior even more challenging. As planetary futurist Alex Stephan has said, “You’re always going to miss things, things that you shouldn’t miss. That’s just how the world is now. You have to learn to be OK with it.” No single individual can anticipate all of the changes or catch all of the pieces in the complex matrix of our world.
Which takes me to a critical observation about resiliency: no single actor can design the system entirely. He or she can only make contributions.
Contributions need to be at all scales, from small bits of content to structural organization. Ultimately, though, it’s how all of these contributions network together that creates the resiliency.
An individual contribution is, by itself, not resilient.
The central focus of resiliency is the networked interactions. Therefore a piece, independent of its system, is inherently not resilient. I don’t think it’s enough to design resilient pieces and assume the sum of the whole will be resilient. I think that was the original idea about sustainability; resiliency addresses a larger context. Resiliency is about connections, systems, and relationships.
Perhaps a design can be judged resilient by how well it achieves the outcome of resiliency. A design is not resilient; a design creates resiliency. This gives us something to aim for.
Design for the outcome of resiliency.
I’ve spent hours creating checklists for resilient design, endless lists of criteria and definitions. Perhaps such a definitive list does indeed exist, but I feel that my lists are too limiting. This isn’t a question of ticking off boxes. This is about seeing the picture as comprehensively as possible and framing the opportunities well from the start.
Instead of a list, perhaps an alternative approach is a process. Each situation is unique so I think the first step is to map how the design intersects with other networks (social, infrastructure, and resource). The second step is to particularly analyze energy, or entropy, flows through the intersections. Can you achieve greater thermodynamic efficiency through the development, manufacture, use, and death of a design? Lastly, consider the signals your design is sending at each of the intersections. What are the inherent values of the signals? How can these signals be crafted so as to increase redundancy, diversity, and adaptability?
It is difficult within the time-crunched span of an individual project to address these complex issues. In my ongoing attempt to be less of a hypocrite, I am trying to be better at answering, or at least acknowledging, these additional questions in my design projects. I can only hope that it gets easier with time and experience.
