Changing the change

At the Institute without Boundaries, changing the change has meant tackling local problems that have global repercussions, while also speculating on global issues to devise frameworks within which local agents can contribute solutions to those issues. Walking on both sides of the line, from systems theory to generating examples and embodiments of design innovation, the faculty and students fluidly interact with experts to exchange knowledge, build ideas, test prototypes, and formulate systems. Over the past number of years, this process of experimentation has generated a number of insights on change that are worth consideration, especially in the context of a world where global forces connect and impact communities in the most unpredictable ways. Here are some of our insights:

Sometimes, the world is good as it is and we don’t have to change it as designers. Sometimes we need to stop trying to change the world and let it be.

Other times, the rapid pace of change demands that designers mitigate change, acclimatizing people so it becomes bearable, channeling it into a direction that is evidently beneficial all.

When inexorable change becomes dehumanizing, degrading, alienating or brings about conditions of injustice or inequity, designers can work with civil society to postulate alternatives, to dream alternative realities that society can adopt. Designers can change the change as they control the embodiments of change.

When rapid or massive change is needed to avert crisis or imminent extinction, the redesign and reinvention required may be too critical to leave to designers alone. In these instances, design needs to interact with science, sociology, economy, and politics to generate possibilities that ensure survival and open avenues of opportunity.

Working with students from diverse backgrounds in arts, design, business, science, economics, sociology and informatics in an environment without professional boundaries, where students, faculty, and visiting experts embrace challenges together has made clear to me the complex readjustments required of design methodology. This past year, we have been working on design solutions for sustainable housing for Guanacaste, a region in Costa Rica. How could we help from such a great distance? How could our inter-professional team generate relevant solutions? To address these challenges, we experimented widely, conducting extensive research, showing up in person to charrette, collaborating with other academic institutions, finding on-the-ground NGOs to stimulate, roping in experts local, national, and international, and even working with elementary school children. We learned that their problems were ours.

Experimentation, while not always successful, taught us how varied methods generate different design results. Knowing which approach may generate a particular result can empower communities, designers, and clients and if not to change their change, at least to guide it positively.

Society has been served well by the pursuit of deep knowledge (the cornerstone of any self respecting academic institution) but more and more the nature of today’s “big picture” problems resides at the intersection of what we know. What is – for example – healthcare? It’s not medicine, law, buildings, therapies, doctors, processes, ethics, or business but rather the convergence of all of them in a complex system. We need to first see the nature of these system problems to define the path towards more complete solutions. Not reductively, not as fragments, but in the complex, integrated and synthetic ways that drive them. These are the cornerstones of design, yet its not design as defined by our professions, rather design as defines by our needs.

But what does this call for “system design” have to do with Changing the Change? A lot when examined from two simple perspectives.

First, it captures many of the threads that seek to rethink design found within the conference Newsletter. Here alone there is much evidence for a call for design to sustain better solutions: Mugendi M’Rithaa places the question of Design in context of Africa’s future. The call, by Lou Yongqi, to “pause” and think strategically and systemically is apt not only in China, but throughout our geographies; Stefano Marzano places design in the context of economic systems. All seek more effective design, but discuss them within a broader context of systems.

Secondly, one could argue that the hallmark of a discipline is in the research that it pursues: as such the question of what kind of research is central to academia. At Harvard, President Drew Faust has spoken at great lengths about the challenge to work more effectively across disciplines. In this context design has a unique leadership opportunity across the university, but it’s the kind of opportunity that will only come if we are able see beyond the professions we serve to the value of our discipline.

To meet this opportunity, academia is going to have to challenge itself to define the right frameworks, incentivizing students and faculty to work in ways that may inherently contradict the established structures of success. The institutional dilemma is that with success comes rigidity towards change. The future will be in the hands of those whose past success won’t create an insurmountable barrier towards rethinking how they operate in this design driven age.

Here are four kinds of design. They form a hierarchy of contribution, with
Design Research at the highest level.

Let’s start at the bottom with General Design Awareness. Do you remember
what happened when desktop publishing emerged in the 1980s? All those
notices on pin boards at the office about the picnics and social events had
been written by hand before that, and then suddenly they were printed from
laser printers and composed on WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
screens. Everyone was suddenly a graphic designer, choosing fonts and
composing layouts. At first the tendency was to use lots of different fonts on
the same page, and to completely fill the surface with type. Over time these
amateur designers became more aware of the skills of graphic design; they
started to choose fewer and more appropriate fonts and leave some white
space around the text. The tools that democratized printing had the effect of
increasing the general design awareness of many people who had never thought
about fonts and layout before, and as a result they started to respect the
talents and skills of the professional graphic designer. A similar effect can be
expected as mass customization allows people without college level design
education to make design decisions about products.

Professional designers operate at a more sophisticated level, having mastered
Specialist Design Skills. They are expert at deciding how to do it, how to create
a elegant solution to the problem posed by the constraints, but they expect
the context that they operate in to be decided by someone else, probably
the boss or the client. This expectation wastes the value of design thinking,
and reduces the stature of the contribution made by designers. Why not
apply interdisciplinary design thinking to deciding what to do in the first place?
That change is overdue! Particularly with the challenging problems posed
by the complexity of design contexts in the world of digital technology and
global connectivity, the application of teams can help to set the brief for
development, to harness design thinking in order to decide what to do.

By developing interdisciplinary design thinking we can encompass the process
of planning and management, but we are still woefully immature when it
comes to knowing how to know. The whole area of Design Research is infantile
in scope. An important opportunity in the context of Changing the Change will
be to move design research forward faster and more effectively, so the we
discover more about how to know and how to communicate the results of that
knowledge.