Everything designed goes on designing.
A reflection on current events via design theory for non-academics.
Everything designed goes on designing.
‘Everything designed, goes on designing’ is a phrase used by design theorist Tony Fry to describe the influence one design phenomenon can have on the next. In his book Design Futuring, Fry uses a case study of the invention of the automobile to show decades of influence. The mass production of cars led to the creation of car accessories, showrooms, garages, and parking. With this came a need for better roads and infrastructure - from highways to street signs to standardized road signals. This would eventually lead to more people owning vehicles, the development of suburbs, and fast-food drive-ins. We can extend Fry’s example to also include car phones which became smart phones, and road maps which became GPS, Siri, and Google Maps. The effects of mass-producing cars for individuals can be traced in exponential, fractaling, spiralizing directions. It’s doubtful that Karl Benz, Henry Ford, or other early auto producers could predict that today there would be a world with self-driving voice command cars or that entire cities are structured around where to park cars. The car, went on designing, and continues to go on designing.
We won’t go back.
Like many, I’ve been horrified, numb, and everything in between by the plethora of recent attacks on women, children, and the planet. As I’ve been repeating Planned Parenthoods’ catchphrase “we won’t go back '' over and over again, I think about how this phrase sits in parallel to Fry’s “everything designed, goes on designing”. So much of what I feel right now is a tension between watching collective thought regress backward, while the world continues to move forward. The past week has laid bare the effects of the horror house the United States has become that regulates uteruses over guns, bans books over masks, and prioritizes profits over people and planet. This dizzying maze of hypocritical laws and polarizing politics also began somewhere as a design that has gone on designing.
Many people are wondering “how did we get here?” But there is not just one starting point, there are many for the design of how we got here, and many decisions that went on to influence other decisions. Just as the car led to maps led to fast food and phones, so too there is a fractaling domino effect of decisions that got us here. As an educator, I’d point to the adaptation of “No Child Left Behind” which directly led to the increased pressures around standardized testing. With test results being tied to successes, funding, and jobs, teachers began teaching to the test - memorization, mimicking, and parroting instead of learning, synthesis, and processing. This in combination with the rise of alternative news sources, increased speeds of work and life, social media, disposable incomes, disposable products, increased wealth gaps, and many, many other designed processes, interactions and systems… are all part of how we got here.
Yet, we won’t go back. We can’t go back. Because even if Roe is overturned, even if gun laws are loosened instead of restricted, even if we ban all the books, and all the words, design will still go on designing. Design is not a thing or a product but rather the interaction, the process, and the outcome. The effects of these decisions will keep us moving in whichever direction, most likely multiple, it’s up to us as designers to help stere them. Issues of women's health care, gun violence, and understanding race and gender are complex interconnected issues that can not be addressed or “fixed” with a ban. We already have enough hard evidence to know that banning abortion would not lead to fewer abortions, there will be other (likely less safe) ways to get access. Banning books has (in some instances) led to increased sales of those books. A high school valedictorian in Florida cleverly proved in his now-viral graduation speech that banning the word “gay” can easily be replaced with new words and phrases like “kids with curly hair”. And while I wholeheartedly believe in better laws, I also know that there will still be ways for the wrong people to access guns with bans in place. This is why we also need to address the mental health crisis in our country, improve education systems and support for teachers and caretakers, access to food, nutrition, childcare, and many other interconnected support structures. While these decisions seem to be in the hands of politicians and lawmakers, a culture was designed that allowed it to be so. We can not leave the work to those in elected positions. It is also the designers' job to engage in design activism, and design for change.
Resisting and generating
I am reminded of Ann Thorpe's essay Design as Activism: to resist or to generate. Right now we are at a critical juncture for both. We absolutely must resist the rights of women being stripped from them, we must demand better gun laws, and speak up for climate justice. But we also must reimagine new ways of regenerating ideas and systems to support women, children, and the environment that do not depend on simple bans. What might a pro-health society look like that supports the physical, mental and emotional well-being of people and the environment?
New systems and new ways of imagining the world of course do not happen quickly. It took generations of design decisions to lead to our current crises of climate, violence, gender, and race. Yet now we are in a place of urgency. We look for quick fixes when there is no quick fix. When tragedies happen, there are immediate protests, calls for donations, petitions, and calls to act now! While this is necessary, it also needs to be done in tandem with slower, more thoughtful designs for new systems. We can not keep protesting the system and then go right back to using the same system that has caused these wicked problems. Thorpe addresses the issue of time - the discrepancy between fast action and slow design stating “design is slower than protests, which is why it's sometimes harder to see the effects as they happen. Even more reason we must be intentional about the impacts of our designs.” These quick, one-liner calls for action that we see on both sides - ban abortions, protect Roe; ban guns, more guns; no coal, more coal - have the danger of keeping us thinking on the surface. It hides the story behind it all, of what's underneath, the story that needs to be addressed to create systems-level change. Thorpe reminds us that “Ultimately, most design activism is about better understanding the problem, rather than acting with certainty towards a single right answer.” If we strive to understand the problem, we’d see the interconnectedness of these systems - we’d understand the relationship between women, the environment, and violence. We must design not for multiple-choice standardized tests, but for the inclusion of complicated interconnected systems.
It’s time to imagine radical new futures, then backcast our designs on how to get there from today. What would a world look like that prioritized preventative care in all aspects - physical health, mental health, environmental health? What might it look like to uplift those who have been most affected by the harms of past designs to design a healing future? How do we image our preferred, utopian futures and design towards that, instead of letting design steamroll us into a dystopian future?
I’ll unpack speculative design, future cones, and backcasting a bit more in a future post. For now I invite you to consider the responsibility of action from one design to the next. How do we resist but also reimage to regenerate? Let’s not stop after signing the petition based on systems past, but then plant seeds for a new one. How do we act to create the conditions for the intended impact of our positive design solutions?
Fascinating! As a non-designer, I’ve never heard of Ann Thorpe. I’ll have to check out their essay.