My design training has taught me many tools to be used to understand and create either a product or service that is ergonomic and human-centered. These products are created with usability as a primary focus. I as a designer was brought up to listen to the stories of ’users’ everyday life, distill this down to areas in which my design creation could aid, and then produce the material required to either directly create this product or service or the guideline that would lead towards this creation. Throughout this entire process my focus as a designer was hyper focused on the problem space and not necessarily on the direction or ethics of my work. Now this is not to say that I was not aware of ethical design. There was an understanding that one should not design something that harms those using the product or manipulates them towards an end that could lead them to harm. But, strangely this is where design is in the process of leading the ’users’ of their products and services.
Is this on the designer? I would argue the lion’s share of this blame lands square on design education. How this will, or could, be addressed is the topic of another post.
What I want to dig a bit deeper into today is more of the directional nature of design and what this means, or has the potential of meaning, within the context of transitioning towards systems that are more able to sustain a world that operates within planetary boundaries. As a side note, I am currently looking into ways that this alternative world could be visualized in explorations of solar punk fictions. Design needs a rebirth of creative vision and play a role in shaping a vision of a viable world. This is one place to start such visioning quests, but I digress.
As a part of making the theoretical and oftentimes philosophical descriptions of frameworks and concepts towards system transition more tangible I have been thinking about how to create prototypes that embody the directionality of transition from one system to another. More specifically, I am referencing Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizon Framework. Simply put, this framework gives system thinkers and designers a way to visualize and describe the transition from one paradigm, or horizon, to another. He introduces an intermediary horizon that serves in some senses like a bridge between the present to the more distant future. This intermediary future is one that begins to show signs of the approaching horizon while still having a foot in the current paradigm or system.
What has begun to interest me here, especially in terms of how the directionality of design could be considered, is what do products or services look like at various intersection points along and throughout this framework? Can the various phases of the framework be over accentuated in order to illustrate the forces at play that either innovate towards a new system, service, or product? Can such an accentuation or prototype illustrate the exnovation forces at play that remove an element of the old horizon?
This line of questioning about the role of design as a cybernetic force leads me to think of designed objects that continue designing or evolving over their lifespan. I have been reading Anne-Marie Willis and Tony Fry's work around ontological designing and the concept of this double movement of designs that design back as they inhabit the world inspires this way of looking at products as evolutionary in nature. With products becoming more diffuse and fluid, see the work by Heather Wiltse on fluid assemblages, it becomes a the challenge of a designer then to steer how the way in which the design designs back and the direction of this fluid nature.
In order to illustrate this point and how objects, products, and services could potentially embody a directional nature and how the nature of such objects (as I will refer to this cluster of designed creations from this point on) shift and change as they move across the boundaries of various horizon transitions I will present two potential cases. Looking at Sharpe's Three Horizon Framework, we can abstract out a trajectory of an object along the second, or bridge horizon. There is a temporal aspect to the object as it traverses the second horizon. In order to act as a bridge though, it must exert upward and downward forces on the third horizon and first horizon respectively. In a sense, this tansital object must first remove the necessary elements of the first horizon, create a space for the third horizon, then support the growth or implementation of the third horizon as it fills the void created. I believe that it is impossible to view these objects as independent from the current paradigm and the proposed future one, they are interconnected.
By viewing this relationship in a detailed, yet abstracted, way we as designers can begin to experiment with what ways objects can or should interact with existing services or everyday habits. It also has the potential to provide a way of imagining a way for the creation of space to allow new pathways for alternative paradigms to emerge. I see this trajectory as having three phases, though this is a hypothesis that I intend on prototyping out.
The first is the exnovation and objects that decompose existing services, habits, and products. Design is destructive by nature and actively defutures through its act of creation. How can we as designers look at what the whole system needs, identify collaboratively with communities areas in need of removal, and create an object that aids in this removal. All the while the discussion must have an eye on what is coming next, the creation of space for new pathways to coalesce. This event has a more finite nature than the first and third.
This finite event, or series of events, is a space that assumes that the community has an understanding of what has in some degree been removed, though this could equally as well be a building of understanding that will eventually lead to the ultimate phasing out of the first horizon in question. This is where the methods of participatory and adversarial design could become quite useful. What does an object that is self-aware that it has a direction, a purpose look like? Are there markers that will determine when this reopening will occur? Principles of collective action and direct democracy could be applied during this reopening of the fluid object. During these events, which I am currently describing quite loosely, pathways will be identified and connections made. This is the entry point, or the first intersection of the second and third horizon.
From this point the object will have the role of supporting the growth and development of the selected pathways. These pathways will be themed around the initial challenge so as to not divert off on some tangent. Ideally the transitory object will be no more than training wheels and be rendered useless after a certain point. What do objects of support look like where the desired outcome is possibly more to guide towards other functions that are currently in their infancy? When does it know that it is obsolete?
Fleshing these three elements out and contributing more nuggets and thoughts from the readings that I am currently digging into will come next week. I will be sketching out some concepts that fit along this described trajectory. I immediately start thinking about what an object that is a distributed autonomous organization could be in this context. What if Spotify was a DAO on a mission to remove all physical recorded music material, under the guise of removing material waste in the direction of sustainability? How would designers need to think of such a proposition relationaly? What would such an object do in order to design away this material? Would the data it produces be weaponized in this motive? What would the reconvening events look like and how would consensus be made? How would this future third horizon be visualized and what pathways would it open? How would they then be supported? Finally what would the aesthetics of such an object look like? Too many questions to answer here. But that is for another week.
What am I reading?
Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice by Tony Fry
Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth
Ontological Designing by Anne-Marie Willis
What is on the turntable?
Nursery Cryme, Genesis
CSN, Crosby Stills and Nash
Spectrum, Billy Cobham