Making it up
Where co-design meets material making
Thirty years ago, I had to repeatedly explain to my grandparents what I was studying at university — presumably, they felt about Design the way I feel when my kids tell me they want to be YouTubers when they grow up.
Today, the litmus test for what people think design might be plays out every time I get into a cab. It’s enough to say I am a design professor to get through airport immigration, but the cab driver has time for the inevitable follow up question: what kind of things do I design? There is always an assumption that I design a “thing”. My answer depends on how long I want this conversation to go on.
I can answer “communication design” without further explanation. Or I can say I design experiences and interactions by comparing what it is like to hail a cab versus ordering a cab, or how it feels to have bulletproof glass between us versus being offered candy. If it’s a really long ride, I can talk about designing services and systems by comparing Google Maps to Waze, the autonomy yet insecurity of the gig economy, or the unintended consequences of midday traffic congestion when school kids use UberEats to get their lunch delivered.
I studied design at an art school in the days when a designer was a sold-out artist. Back in the 90’s my counter-narrative was to idealistically position the designer as functional problem-solver. Over the decades my perceptions are less reactive or romantic. Today we can hold the idea of designer-as-facilitator alongside the perception of designer-as-futurist. We can reconcile the philosophical belief that design operates in the realm of possibilities to craft preferred tomorrows with the pragmatism of co-designing with stakeholders as a strategy for community engagement.
Design today is an inclusive practice that accommodates powerfully complementary orientations.
There is a process of pushing and pulling at the heart of designing. A creative tension that helps navigate between a material-oriented practice and a people-oriented one. A pragmatic push toward seeking solutions for real-world challenges and a poetic pull toward speculatively imagining never-before-seen worlds.
This push and pull are what locates design as between art and psychology, between engineering and science fiction. The professional practice of a speculative designer can at times seem antithetical to that of an industrial designer and yet it seems critical to interrogate the ways we are the same and different rather than place ourselves in opposing camps.
To leverage the dominant, enduring perception of designers as makers of things it is illuminating to see this creative tension not as a binary to be negotiated but as a field of making to be animated. In this way, we start to understand how convergent thinking drives solution-seeking and is complemented by divergent, speculative thinking.
Across an expanded field of “making” we see that to make meaningful change, we need to first make ideas believable in order to make them possible. Similarly, we see how a people-centred orientation complements the material orientation of piloting and prototyping so we might value making sense through making tangible things with others.
Suddenly, it becomes possible to imagine a participatory design practice where bespoke artefacts leave sticky notes for dead.
We know that today’s designers create services, experiences, interactions, games and systems as well as products. Yet defining design practice by the outputs limits an understanding of the outcomes that design facilitates.
It can be illuminating to see beyond what we design to what we are making. Our tangible designs are the manifestation of what happens when we design for connection, for wellbeing, for justice, for clarity, for engagement, for play. To make sense, to make with, to make better, to make possible lays the foundation for the designers’ commitment to make believe, to make tangible, to make known, to make change. If design is really about crafting preferred futures, then our superpower may not be that we make tangible artefacts but that we make room for conditions to adapt, evolve and just maybe transform.
