Design as intervention

I recently attended a series of presentations by designers who were invited to create "interventions" in public space.

I've been thinking about this since then, and especially about the concept of design as intervention. Is "intervention" a valid or appropriate strategy for design?

Interventionism is where one group disregards another group's right to self-determination in order to forward the first group's moral agenda and sovereignty. There are clear cases where interventionism is accepted, e.g. to prevent genocide. However, in the case of a designer intervening in a space or situation through a designed artifact in order to forward that designer's moral (or technical) agenda, we have to be more careful. "Intervention" has an activist ring to it, but when employed by those equipped with the tools of mass production, it quickly becomes hegamonic.

In particular, I wonder what criteria is used for evaluating a given intervention? Designers talk of objective functions for measuring the consequences of an object in line with their agenda. For example, if a designer were to publish a series of leaflets on waste disposal they might adopt an objective function that measures the resulting increase in the use of recycling bins. Although these types of objective measurements are appealing, they are often misleading. I'm reminded of Thomas Midgley's invention of Tetraethly Lead (TEL), a gasoline additive that had important benefits measured in the metrics of the day (it reduced engine "knocking"). It was only years later that we discovered the disastrous secondary and tertiary consequences of this change. Another example is plastic bags, which in the objective measurement function of their day were cheap, lightweight, and strong. Today we have a new artificial island in the Pacific that is made up from this cheap, lightweight and strong.

Interventionism applies a cause-effect analysis that fits well with the service-based ethos of design: Have a problem? Identify a solution, create an intervention, measure the improvements, iterate. How does this address a complex ecosphere? It is unclear, since the designer in this scenario is placed on the outside, as a lone agent with little real accountability for the secondary and tertiary effects of their work.

I realize I am being rather cynical. Certainly I often enjoy encounters with social interventions. I especially relish the bizarre, strange and unexpected. But the strategy of interventionism seems stuck in a colonial imaginary, one that relies on a construction of self and other. What other strategies are possible? What about design for the subaltern, for example?

Thinking about this (and this is very unformed), Daniel Eatock represents one place to start. Eatock is an independent artist with a design practice (or is it the other way around?) He offers a materials-based conceptual take on design. His manifesto on his website is:

Begin with ideas
Embrace chance
Celebrate coincidence
Ad-lib and make things up
Eliminate superfluous elements
Subvert expectation
Make something difficult look easy
Be first or last
Believe complex ideas can produce simple things
Trust the process
Allow concepts to determine form
Reduce material and production to their essence
Sustain the integrity of an idea
Propose honesty as a solution

His approach is deceptively simple. His model is collaborative and at the same time he asserts his independence. He does have large clients (e.g. Channel 4), but he is selective in his choice of clients, and insists that they work within his creative model, rather that designing to a brief. "there is no brief, no description, no guidelines.... If criteria were written down, they would be restrictive." Eatock's approach downscales design and takes it out of a solution-oriented framework. He doesn't make any claims about interventions or about measuring results.

Discussing Eatock in class last year, one student proposed taking the idea of an independent designer further: What about a designer who creates designs for just one other individual? Or a designer who creates artifacts for one very small community or village? Returning to these highly embedded and communal models is a counterstrike against design for the masses.

Finally there is APG. Claire Bishop wrote about the Artist Placement Group in this months ArtForum (link). The APG was a group in the 1960's which placed artists (or "Incidental Persons") within organizations. The motivations of APG's founders, John Latham and Barbara Stevani, were intentionally precarious. Rather than aiming for a specific identifiable outcome, the Incidental Person was viewed as a figure who "takes the stand of a third ideological position which is off the plane of their obvious collision areas." In other words, rather than occupying known positions, it was an attempt to intentionally create unknowable positions.

The APG makes a mockery of activism since, although their aim was to achieve change, they were unconcerned with the ideological direction of that change. Instead they measured the change produced by their placements in terms of what they called the "delta unit", which had factors like the number of people affected by a change, or the length the change lasted. At first this seems absurd - how can you be for any change whatsoever? But what the delta unit does is force us to take a much longer view on assessing change. It prevents us from pre-determining an objective function based on naive causality.

The APG is a call for experimentation that is intentionally unplanned, where evaluations are performed a long time after the fact. If I were an interventionist, this is the kind of agenda I would want to impose on design.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking - from ideo.com.

I went to a presentation at CCA Thursday by Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo. The presentation was structured as a conversation between Tim Brown and Mark Breitenberg, CCA's Provost, who himself has a record of leadership in design. In the talk, Tim Brown plugged his new book, Change by Design, which I haven't yet read.

During the talk, Tim Brown and Mark Breitenberg frequently used the term Design Thinking. It is a fairly new term to me and I didn't really understand what they meant by design thinking - at least in a way that distinguished it in my mind from thinking on the one hand or design on the other. I did hear lots of descriptive words - prototype, experiment, build, iterate, change, collaborate, reflect, observe, or analyze. In the end, though, I realized design thinking is a misnomer. What emerged (consistent with here and here) is that design thinking is not a type of thinking, like, say, analytic thinking or creative thinking, but rather it is a label for a methodology or process model, like the waterfall or spiral methodology. Design thinking is a shortcut for referring to the process that designers typically follow.

My first response was to wonder: in these days of interdisciplinary teams, how is it helpful to adopt a label for a team process which privileges one discipline over others? Design thinking hints at hubris. It is liable to lead to turf wars. I imagine non-designers seeing this as a branding tactic that positions the designers as the source of cool.

Next, I thought: it is a clever label. Designers are cool, after all. So this methodology must be cool too. And because it involves thinking it must also be smart, in the same way Adidas shoes are intelligent. What could be better? If I had to pick between, say, "human centered design methodology" and "design thinking" I know what I would swing for.

Clever labels are not necessarily good ones. I'm reminded of George Orwell's great essay on Politics in the English Language. Orwell notes that language is full of tired metaphors that people use automatically and without thought. He argues that we should always seek out fresh metaphors that evoke clear images and assist thought. As a metaphor, design thinking is fresh and appealing. However it is far from a clear image that assists thought. Quite the opposite, design thinking is so vague and sounds so good that people (myself included) immediately want to use it regardless of what it actually means. The result is a cacophony of claims. We learn that design thinking is "what all the creative people do", or it is "about innovation and creativity." It is "a human centered systems thinking that enriches life." "Design thinking converts need into demand" writes Tim Brown. Design thinking is the change agent that will lead us to a better world, where complex problems are addressed in a transparent, inspiring, transformational, participatory, contextual, sustainable way.

Design thinking has grown to become far more than a label for a process. It is a movement, a group of people sharing a vision for how to make better things. Coming from the software industry, I've seen similar movements there, all aiming to overlay some kind of roadmap over the chaotic moshpit of innovation. Scrum, extreme programming (xp), test driven development, agile, ... I could go on. Coders are a vanguard of process innovation. They are also in the unique position of being able to build software tools to assist in and instrument these methodologies. You could argue (eager as I am to use the term) that coders have been applying design thinking to the problem of software design for 25 years.

What have we learnt? That we haven't finished yet. The core of the problem is that innovation involves building things that haven't been built before and thinking things that haven't been thought before. To innovate you have to leave the map. Methodologies, on the other hand, always produce a map, structuring what innovations are possible. Methodologies only help innovation to the extent that the map they produce doesn't get in the way. In other words, the team using the methodology must realize that it is not the methodology that innovates. Design thinking does not think in exactly the same way that Microsoft Word does not write. Thought takes place in the complexity of dissensus, where we leave behind labels like "designer", "coder", "user" and "product".

Ultimately, it is about what works. In software, I've seen teams that adopted rigorous methodologies only to crash and burn, and teams who followed almost no methodology who then thrived and excelled. In my experience the methodologies that work best are those which start with modest claims and a lightweight infrastructure, provide a barebones of management scaffolding, and then slip into the background. The more sophisticated, complex, ambiguous, ambitious or vague the methodology, the more steps there are, the more room there is for debate about the methodology itself - all of which is time taken away from getting it done.

Will design thinking stick? It is probably too early to say. But, even if we question the label, or wonder at the efficacy of the methodology, we should agree with the intent of design thinking: our goal is to expand human-centered approaches across our organizations and companies. Meanwhile, back to the moshpit.

LED Lighting

Flexible LED lighting from Elemental LED

My friend Bob referred me to Kick Lighting and to Elemental LED. They both sell LED lights on flexible rolls that can be powered with 12v. I haven't quite figured out what to use them for yet, but I was really impressed by the sample Bob showed me. The LEDs and control circuitry are mounted directly into a flexible circuit strip. You just tape it up somewhere, plug in 12v and you have light. You can get small power dimmers too.