Today, designers seem to have a better idea of what to make and how to make it toward a positive change... End of The Year Reflections by Christian Palino & Jared Cole (Contagious ideas by PSST : spreading 2.0 innovation (editor = jérémy dumont, strategic planner, france))

29 December 2009

Today, designers seem to have a better idea of what to make and how to make it toward a positive change... End of The Year Reflections by Christian Palino & Jared Cole

End of The Year Reflections

One of a designer’s greatest strengths is having a holistic perspective on the world. As designers, we often pride ourselves on our ability to see both the forest as well as the trees, we understand that the work that we do can have a huge impact on the world around us. Ease and efficiency have been consistently high priorities for decades now (if not longer) and the fulfillment of these goals can be witnessed across the broad field of design – from online applications and salad spinners to programs that reduce the spread of infectious diseases. Over the last few years in particular, the public design discourse has focused heavily on the designer’s role in creating more sustainable products and services. From the established studio to the student portfolio, it would seem that designers are eager to take up the mantle and work toward positive change in the ways that we affect the world.

The design community has done a good job of starting to consider the life-cycle of products, from materials and production methods, to the recycling and discarding of the products. Coupled with a human-centered approach, it appears that designers now have a better idea of not only what to make, but also how best to make it and what to do with what we’ve made when we are done. While we respect and embrace these changes, we can’t help but notice that most of the recent shifts in considering design’s impact center largely on material concerns. However, we’re interested in finding ways to explore two of the respective gaps that we feel are under-considered.

The first touches on the the indirect impact of design. While not everyone designs physical products, we guess that most readers have been involved with the redesign of a product website. Assuming you’ve done your job well, you’ve likely designed a pleasant and usable site that drastically reduces calls to the customer service center. The users are happy and the client is happy. Everyone is happy - everyone but the folks that used to work in the call center. Once the site went live the need for their services was drastically reduced, and in the end many of them were let go. Are we as designers in any way responsible for the loss? Could we have done something to reduce the number of employees impacted by our work?

What if we look at one of the many solutions for providing clean drinking water to villages in rural Africa. They are amazing devices and they provide a life-saving solution to one of our greatest problems, but what happens to the cultural fabric when a mother and her children no longer spend two hours of every day gathering water, sharing village history and building relationships. How does this impact the future of the village? Without a doubt the life saving aspect of the products outweigh all others, but we don’t think that we can simply ignore the other questions because they are out of scope.

The second under-considered impact lies not in environmental sustainability, but in human sustainability. As seen in the clean drinking water example, a designer’s ability to positively solve one perceived problem has an affect on the qualities and activities with respective dependencies.

Certainly no one would argue with the fact that we are seeing what was once the vision of a nearing future quickly becoming reality – digital chips in a majority of the products and services that we interact with. This means that the scope of design has been growing as well, and the number of touch points out in the world that reflect the designer’s hand increase. What does it mean to maintain ease and efficiency as primary design priorities? Through the process of designing to promote some qualities, designers quickly eliminate others. In a sea of user-friendly products and services, at risk are a vast array of qualities that define being human. Design has the ability to maintain the valuable difficulty of a task, to allow our loneliness to endure, to be confusing – though if we look around us, these qualities – like hardship, sadness, risk, and isolation – are intentionally being purged through design from our day-to-day interactions.

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