consciousness competence
consciousness competence
unconscious incompetence
unconscious incompetence unconscious competence
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conscious competence
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Fig. 1a
Fig. 1b
Seasoned designers must add consciousness
Consciousness competence should be taught to young
competence to their existing skills.
designers at the earliest stage of design education.
reimagine our creative capacities to more intentionally shape desirable futures. The time has come to add another skill: consciousness competence. Adding a Competence of Consciousness So we’ve discovered that our otherwise magical stages of competence in design have been lacking something vital for humans to thrive on an increasingly small planet: consciousness competence, an awareness that all things are interdependent, that all actions have consequences, and that those consequences reverberate in surprising ways far beyond our imagination. Things are not just connected; they’re dynamically interconnected. And actions are never linear in their impacts in either sense of the word; they are instead both cyclical and nonlinear. A big question for designers is, Which interdependencies have we been taught to ignore? This is a relevant question, because individual design actions, by definition, enable others to act at larger scales. Our work has consequences that are both intended and unintended. The impacts of any design, by their very nature, are compounded by the actions of those who adopt them. Because as designers our actions have such outsized impacts, we should be as aware of them as possible throughout our entire process.
Designers of my generation are playing catch up. It’s not easy to unlearn deeply ingrained patterns of thought, especially when our career success has been built on them. At a time when we’re supposed to be the sages, we must acknowledge we’ve been trained to ignore fundamental aspects of design consequence and commit to developing our own consciousness competence as a fifth stage of learning, tacking it onto the other four after the fact (see figure 1a). More importantly, we have to shake our own students loose from that same narrow path so that their consciousness competence guides the development of their design mind, not the other way around. We can do this by teaching them a suite of systems thinking competencies that have a fundamental appreciation for interdependence baked directly into them (see figure 1b). The requisite body of knowledge has been waiting for designers for decades. And while complex and nuanced, these fundamentals are already being taught to everyone from business managers to school children. Thinking in Systems Design has a strange relationship with systems thinking. On the one hand we can trace it back to Buckminster Fuller’s Anticipatory Design Science, Herbert Simon’s “Architecture
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