Notes on Design

NOTES ON DESIGN

Prepared by Hershel Nashman 2021

INTRODUCTION

Notes on Design

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Over the past several decades, design has expanded its practice; from creating products and services to tackling complex social challenges. This shift has made way for a variety of new schools of thought within the discipline. New order design, coined by Richard Buchanan in the 1990s, reveals how designers look at problems from a systems perspective to capture the wickedness of problems (van der Bijl-Brouwer & Malcolm, 2020). There is no shortage of wicked problems today, and sadly, many of these problems have been a product of design (Monteiro, 2019). Today humanity sits on the precipice of the 6th mass extinction as the effects of the Anthropocene run rampant. Climate change has — and will continue — to drastically alter people's lives. The frailty of our globalized economy has been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media continues to rupture nations and communities with the spread of disinformation. Although these truths may be disheartening, I believe there is opportunity for design to facilitate the social reimagining of the status quo.

As my undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo comes to a close, I have spent more time reflecting on what my role as a designer might be in the future. Over the past five years I’ve learned about design through theory and hands on experience. My biggest revelations have come from the negative space, or institutional blind spots, where I’ve experienced paradoxical design. These have often led me to ask generative questions in the face of uncertainty. Whether or not I’m equipped to be a designer tomorrow, I wonder what the pursuit of a life as a designer might look like twenty years in the future. In this work, I lay out a design industry overview, emerging new practices within design, and the directions in which I think design is headed. In the second half of this piece, I talk through the three phases of design: defining problems, the design process, and building solutions. In doing so, I articulate what I believe to be good design.

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DESIGN INDUSTRY OVERVIEW

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Design practice has seen an incredible transformation over the last half-century.

Most notable is the role that users play in the design process. Coined in 1970, but popularized in the 90s, user-centered design (UCD) has become a standard practice in North America. UCD strives to make the end user the focal point of design decisions (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Understanding the underlying pains, motivations, and desires of users has allowed for design solutions to better reflect the very people they hope to help. In the early 1990s the term user experience design (UXD) first gained traction in Silicon Valley. UXD aims to design the end-to-end experience of users, as opposed to isolated products and services. Over the past 30 years UXD, and more broadly UCD, have gained significant traction in technology industries and beyond. The increasing rate of technological advancement has emphasized the need for rapid product testing.

UCD analyzes data acquired from users to make more informed decisions. In this context, the user is seen as a subject. The user is engaged only as far as the designer desires, whether that be a survey, a focus group, or an A/B testing session, but much of the designing still happens behind closed doors.

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PROBLEMS WITHIN DESIGN

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The interconnectedness of design and business has facilitated an extractive paradigm of user engagement, raising ethical questions about how UXD is practiced. Dark pattern is a term that describes when user value is replaced by shareholder value (Gray et al., 2018). The most notable examples are intentionally addictive social media platforms that hook users to drive revenue through ads, or otherwise sell user data (Rhodes & Orlowski, 2020). A UX designer looks at the behavior of users to determine usability development. The idea is that behavior is a better indicator than what a user might say, as they may be behaving differently than they think they are. This can be a very useful tactic to build more accessible, functional, and intuitive experiences. However, there are certain instances, like on social media platforms, where these same principles can lead to experiences that exploit subconscious human behavior. For example, technology services like Facebook have mechanisms that mimic gambling machines, and use design principles to create persuasive designs that prey on neurological patterns (Gray et al., 2018). When business desires drive design, designers may build functionality that feeds better content more frequently to users without considering whether or not the content has a positive effect on the user’s life.

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EMERGING PRACTICES

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As design practice addresses new and increasingly complex societal issues, there are indications that UCD may not be the most suitable methodology. There is a desire for the democratization of design, to empower users and recognize them as holistic people (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).

Designers are being tasked with building resilient solutions for a future that has yet to come. Emerging design practices emphasize the importance of designing for purpose as opposed to designing for products. Service design, interaction design, co-design, and speculative design are examples of methodologies that have been gaining traction in design practice (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).

Speculative design uses fictional future artifacts to spark debate, critique, imagination, and collective social dreaming of possible futures (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Co-design, built on Scandinavian participatory design, embeds the user not only at decision making moments, but in idea generation as well. There are many reasons why these frameworks have been overlooked by industry, but one that stands out is that they are not inherently capitalist (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). In other words, these processes are not as conducive to traditional business desires and are far more complex to implement in a profitable way.

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THE FUTURE OF DESIGN

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There are clear arguments as to why these methodologies are now gaining traction. Designers are aware of the long term implications of their work. There is a growing number of people recognizing that business as usual is not sustainable (Monteiro, 2019). To solve for the future, humanity must have the capacity to reimagine how we live. I believe design will lead the charge in this domain, holding significant weight in both the private and public sector.

Disciplined designers will facilitate the social reimagining of the complex systems tying us to an unsustainable world. Designers will build the tools that democratize our imaginations, building ground up, resilient solutions for a more just world (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Many of the skills that designers possess today will be useful in the future, however there will be an emphasis on the designer’s skills to translate knowledge, contextualize problems, and frame generative design for communities.

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PURSUING GOOD DESIGN

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There is incredible work being done in these emerging design practices which deserve attention from the broader design community. However, even today these methodologies are underrepresented. In my personal and professional work, I have taken on a plethora of design roles. Each experience has helped me build clarity around my own design practice. I have found little consensus in the design community on the definition of good design. I believe there are three foundational components to any design endeavor: defining problems, building solutions, and the process to connect these. Each component necessitates an exploration of fundamental questions that grapple with what the problem is and what the solutions could be, who the design is for, and why it might work. I have seen these questions been misused or ignored by designers, while stakeholders perpetuate biases and push personal agendas. Much of design practiced today lacks accountability (Gray et al., 2018). However, being a designer means being responsible for what is brought into this world and the repercussions of it existing. Design is not inconsequential, and so requires a deep level of care and consideration. Over the past six years, as a design student and as a designer, I have learned to work with this ever-evolving definition of good design, rooted in questions and responsibility.

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DEFINING PROBLEMS

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At the heart of any good design project is a well defined problem. In many contexts, designers are given prompts that have solutions embedded in their exploration. While working as a designer, I have often been handed a brief to “design a web application to solve for x”. By predefining what will be built, the designer loses the ability to look at a problem space beyond the lens of the medium they are using. A designer who wants to build a chair will only investigate a problem space to the point where they believe a chair can act as a solution. Good design starts with no medium in mind. One way to achieve this is to build prompts that are based on emotion and human wellbeing. An example of this could be using the prompt how might we make cities more accessible for those with mental health issues, as opposed to, how might we design a mobile app that makes cities more accessible for those with mental health issues. As world renowned industrial designer, Deiter Rams , put it in an interview, working on cutting edge projects within the automotive industry is not an interesting way to fundamentally address challenges across transportation as a whole (Rams, 2019). If designers only try to improve on the blueprint of the car to address user needs, they rob themselves of the opportunity to design and reimagine transportation outside of the constraints of individual automobility.

Critical to defining problems is probing the area of focus. As design moves towards addressing ever more complex societal challenges, there has been an increase in designers considering problem spaces as systems (van der Bijl-Brouwer & Malcolm, 2020). The integration of systems thinking into design has been widely and positively received as a marriage of systems research and design outcomes. Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer and Bridget Malcolm (2020), in their paper Systemic Design Principles in Social Innovation: A Study of Expert Practices and Design Rationales, outline five systemic design principles, as follows: 1) opening up and acknowledging the interrelatedness of problems; 2) developing empathy with the system; 3) strengthening human relationships to enable creativity and learning; 4) influencing mental models to enable change; and 5) adopting an evolutionary design approach to desired systemic change.

Although these principles exist in a relatively new domain, I believe they are critical for good design because they prompt designers to consider problems

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broadly, create solutions with empathy, and build forward-looking evolutionary processes into their interventions.

Exploring systems to understand interwoven problems and their root causes is something which requires time and care. It is a process which can be stifled by difficult time constraints. It involves extensive probing to establish why certain components of a system exist and what factors act upon them. To do this, designers need to be able act as researchers, engaging people from a variety of backgrounds and synthesizing secondary data. In a fourth year design course, my partner and I undertook the challenge to prompt communities to think in the long-term about food and agriculture. Although we knew there was a tangible delivery that needed to be made at the end of the term, we spent the first half of the project unearthing the problem space. We spoke with experts across industries and built a comprehensive systems map to understand how large-scale agricultural practices reinforce food insecurity over the long-term. The result of this was a speculative design exhibit called The Food Library, which took into account many important nuances of the problem space.

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MAKING DECISIONS

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Discovery within the problem space is a constant feature of the design process.

There exists a juncture, though, when the designer must move towards creation.

Determining when and how to close off the discovery process and begin the creation process is critical to the outcome of the design endeavor. Marc Steen, a researcher and practitioner of human design, outlines an interesting approach to articulate the experience of a designer (2012). He explains that a core tenet of UCD is the designer being open towards others to learn from them, and to discover that which the designer did not know they needed to know. However, the way the designer sees themselves, and the desire of designers to create, leads to conditions of tension between that openness (understanding lived experience knowledge) and closure (delivering results), as well as, other (centering the user) and self (the designer’s own interests, methods, knowledge and ideas). Steen (2012) describes this experience as a fragile encounter and ultimately asks designers how they can move towards openness and others, while constantly being drawn toward the closure of the creation process and the delivery of an output.

Participatory design is the methodology I believe produces the best outcomes.

Participatory design strives to democratize the design space and empower non-designers to play a critical role not only in decision making, but in idea generation as well (Ehn et al., 2014). In this context a designer facilitates the user’s creative journey and provides the tools necessary for them to express what solutions can address the issues they face. This method of design is challenging, and can be especially messy in the early stages (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). I see this methodology as the best way to address the tension outlined by Steen. With users embedded within the design process, it is easier for designers to recognize where their personal and outcome driven mindset is influencing a project.

Participatory design alone is not perfect, but good designers are able to create an environment for users that allows them to have agency over their own worlds and amplify their lived experience. Good design is predicated on a process that truly reflects the desires of those it serves.

Designers naturally develop constraints to narrow their scope with the intention of achieving a tangible outcome. We make decisions about who we want to design for (sometimes based on the communities we have access to) and what that solution might be (sometimes based on what skill sets we possess). In traditional UCD, users are subjects, meaning it is up to the discretion of

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designers to take into account their feedback. Rapid prototyping is something widely used within UCD, especially in agile environments. However, this can be a problematic approach depending on how users are engaged, as it focuses much more on a closed, individual process. Rapid prototyping involves quickly mocking up low to medium fidelity prototypes of a solution and testing it with users to direct future iterations. This method does not unearth systems, but confines the user's imagination to the solution laid out in front of them. This approach creates the conditions for very rigid feedback from users, and fails to give either users or designers the space to discuss the issues present.

I was a designer on a project in Sweden looking at community resilience in the face of natural disaster. We identified this prompt and proceeded to conduct a participatory design approach to engage citizens. We spent five months working with community members, hosting workshops and public design interventions.

As a team of designers, we tried to minimize our biases as much as possible in the development of the project. We created the context to allow for citizens to define how they viewed their community in terms of preparedness, crisis, and responsibility. We realized that as we continued to engage citizens we were making decisions that were important. We grounded ourselves in the questions of: who is this for? And what does it do? Our final act as a design team was hosting a Design Thing, where the community could engage with one another and form a democratic decision in our space. The purpose of the project was not to rush to a deliverable, but to honor the tough process of co-designing.

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BUILDING SOLUTIONS

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What makes design distinct from other disciplines is the pursuit of creation.

Designers not only research and facilitate, but also actively work towards building engaging solutions. Making the decision to bring something into this world must be held with weight. Mike Monteiro (2019) has argued for more accountability for designers and their creations. In his book Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It, Monteiro outlines that the choices designers make, what they choose to design or not to design, are political acts. He believes many of the complex societal issues we face today are caused by design working exactly as intended (Monteiro, 2019). Clearly, designers must establish common characteristics of solutions that can be deemed “of good design”. In doing so, designers should at once be accountable and have authority within teams to ensure that design outcomes adhere to an ethical framework they are proud to stand behind.

There is little consensus in the design community on an ethical framework for design, as there is much debate regarding the designer’s role and approach to what they create. Three main categories of ethics are discussed in relation to design: technology, responsibility, and sustainability (Chan, 2018). However, developing clarity in these categories is challenging. The moral questions that arise are so complex and sometimes paradoxical. It is fair to question whether a designer, or any lone individual, can be made responsible for ethical decision making.

The design world and ethicists will continue to navigate ethics of design in the Anthropocene. I believe that today, the quality of designer’s output is defined by how they engage stakeholders throughout the design journey. This requires users to be central in decision making, outsider perspective to identify unintended consequences, and introspective designers that are identifying biases in their own models. Ultimately, good solutions are those which relieve pain for the affected, as well as create benefit for the greater community. In addition, design must be sustainable. There are three main pillars to sustainability: economic, social, and environmental. Each of these are deeply intertwined. When pursuing design, one must recognize the levers of change that strengthen or weaken each pillar, including the act of designing itself (Chan, 2018).

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CONCLUSION

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As design continues to have a greater authority within industries and at decision making tables, the importance of defining good design is more important than ever. Practicing good design is the best way to create a future which represents the values and motivations of communities. Design is a complicated discipline which exists in an incredibly complex time. In this piece, I have articulated some thinking on the different elements that define good design. My views are constantly evolving the more I learn and practice in this domain. My biggest takeaway as a designer thus far has been the importance of questioning everything. The more I question the way things are, the clearer my design solutions become. I am optimistic that design will be the tool that amplifies the imaginations of current and future generations, to develop a better world, not only for humans, but for the entirety of earth.

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REFERENCES

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Bijl-Brouwer, M. V. D., & Malcolm, B. (2020). Systemic Design Principles in Social Innovation: A Study of Expert Practices and Design Rationales.

She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 6(3), 386–407. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2020.06.001 Chan, J. K. (2018). Design ethics: Reflecting on the ethical dimensions of technology, sustainability, and responsibility in the Anthropocene. Design Studies, 54, 184–200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2017.09.005 Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. The MIT Press.

Ehn, P., Nilsson, E. M., & Topgaard, R. (Eds.). (2014). Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy. The MIT Press, 1. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9874.001.0001 Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 534, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108 Karppinen, P., & Oinas-Kukkonen, H. (2013). Three Approaches to Ethical Considerations in the Design of Behavior Change Support Systems.

Persuasive Technology, 87–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37157-8_12 Rhodes, F. M. (Producer), & Orlowski, F. M. (Director). (2020). The Social Dilemma [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.netflix.com/ Sanders, E. B. N., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign, 4(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880701875068 Steen, M. (2012). Human-Centered Design as a Fragile Encounter. Design Issues, 28(1), 72–80. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00125

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Prepared by Hershel Nashman 2021