A design contribution, a new direction?
Episode one. This is the first article of a series concerning fundamental themes related to the design discipline. It’s a personal story too, each article is the natural progression of my dissertation, where I tried to underpin the inevitable connection between ethics, service design and a sustainable future.
We live in a changing and unpredictable world: each person and each organisation, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions, must define and enhance a life project. Sometimes these projects generate unprecedented solutions; sometimes they converge on common goals and realize larger transformations. Sometimes they are not going anywhere, but they produce irreducible effects without considering any implications.
The well-balanced among us see one certainty: the world as we had it in the past 20 years is over and it might never come back. After a period of crisis, we should start thinking about the future. Will the actual conditions only allow for new kind of projects limited to the conceptual space of marginality, emergency and breathless? Will there no longer be a demand for products of ingenuity and ambition that defy limits and aim for a perspective of grandness, whatever that might entail? And it is hard to say, but how big ambitions can be conciliated with projects that are not big in size; how idealistic and technological prowess can be expressed in ambitions where the scope is not clear, or conditioned by the era’s mood, or by certain objective limits of the circumstances. Consequently, the core of the next reality will be complexity definition and management, with an inevitable closer relationship with nature.
While it may be assumed that our professional responsibilities (in particular I’m focusing the attention on the service designer spectrum) do not matter much in terms of leadership, the existential dimensions of the environmental crisis give us the consent to act. We don’t need justifications or, hopefully, reasons. We cannot continue to rely on compensatory techniques, nor can we motivate ourselves only through the rhetoric of sustainability and the lure of the potential of the green economy.
We need to be willing to participate in a radical shift that favours environmental and social initiatives over meaningless business imperatives.
As a matter of fact, several opinions are arguing that the actual approach to reduce the human impact on this planet is not enough and far from a sustainable achievement.
“Our world as we know it and the future we want are at risk. Despite considerable efforts these past four years, we are not on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. We must dramatically step up the pace of implementation as we enter a decisive decade for people and the planet. We must connect the dots across all that we do — as individuals, civic groups, corporations, municipalities and Member States of the United Nations — and truly embrace the principles of inclusion and sustainability.”
(2019, António Guterres — Secretary-General of the United Nations)
I’m personally alarmed by the fact I grow up during a historical period of proclamations and easy answers to complex questions, where it seems everyone wants to find a simple solution, with as little change as possible, to be able to roughly continue doing what we have always done, continue to burn fossil fuels in a society that produces and consumes like today. But the simple solution that would allow us to continue living today’s life does not exist, because we are treading on the limits of nature (Isonio, 2020).
Without any doubt, my perspective is design-driven but before we are designers, we are human beings. Like every other human being on the planet, we are all part of the social contract. We share a planet. “By choosing to be a designer you are choosing to impact the people who come in contact with your work, you can either help or hurt them with your actions. The effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work” (Monteiro, 2017). For Victor Papanek, too, ‘‘design is basic to all human activities — the placing and patterning of any act towards a desired goal constitutes a design process’’ (Papanek, 1984). Designing is what human beings do and living on this planet we are obliged to do our best to leave this planet in better shape than we found it, and designers are not excluded.
Design isn’t purely about aesthetics, according to Mike Monteiro in his book “Ruined By Design”, it’s a political craft whose practitioners carry an ethical responsibility as for a doctor or a lawyer.
And in a world where there are uncertainty about data use, dark patterns, and privacy concerns, digital product designers even tend to make a larger difference. As we understand the stress and damage we have inflicted on the natural environment through our actions and the world we have created for ourselves, we reevaluate this relationship that we have helped destabilize. Unfortunately, our renewed relationship with nature cannot be based solely on more careful consideration of how we will design from now on, but must also deal with the damage already inflicted. According to that, through a service perspective, we should redesign our relationship with the industry, while it is growing an obsession with the business of service delivery. Now, that we are the customers and the culture is one of a business, we have normalised the idea that for every problem there must be a service. As a consequence, we are living an increase in the mismatch between what is on offer and what help is required.
We are driven by an economy that keeps growing and growing without end. And according to Jonh Thackara in his book “In the Bubble”, the difficulties come when we begin of arguing and acting (for reasonable rationales) in a way that should stop economical growth. To keep growing, a system dependent on economic growth must continually convert natural resources into goods and relationships into services, things once provided to us as shared goods become monetised transactions. Yet past a certain point, the costs of more growth, congestion, pollution, declining quality of life, inequality, destruction of ecosystem services and liquidation of natural capital, start to outweigh the benefits. An infinite economic growth model has created the need to keep our system constantly under pressure until a preventable end.
Unfortunately, we don’t lay out specific policy prescriptions or immediate answer for what to do next in a hypothetical post-growth economy. For these reasons, as designers, we should start wondering how much our living ecosystem will change the rules of our job and which kind of implication we will face in the next decades. The players are changing too and we are radically thinking about the economy in different ways. Consequently, we are including new patterns and principles that would equip the thinkers and economist this century is demanding for changing the direction. As a matter of fact, designers need to learn different forms of communications, in particular, we have to learn business language because we cannot expect our counterparts to listen just because we have arrived. We need to meet them where they are and be able to bridge communities.
In the next article, I’ll analyse the evident association between the designer role and the ethics of the discipline, how our intervention could be responsible, and a catalyst for change.
