Culture » January 11, 2008

The Revolution Will Not Be Designed

As we look beyond housing solutions to urban poverty, good design is enjoying a second coming as the cure for what ails us

By Alix Rule

In October 2005, amid ample media buzz, Stanford University christened its Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Known as the “d.school” (rhymes with B-school), the institute proclaims itself the home of an interdisciplinary vanguard that is set to unlock the potential of “design thinking.”

Bruce Nussbaum, editor at BusinessWeek, is a believer, hailing the school’s “powerful methodology.” Optimize and Fortune magazines concur. So do the corporate stakeholders that are sponsoring classes—Motorola, Electronic Arts, Wal-Mart and Mozilla, among others.

Their investments are helping fulfill the prophecy of the Institute’s founder David Kelley, also chairman of IDEO, the commercial design powerhouse. As the world increasingly confronts what the school’s website terms “messy problems,” such as extreme poverty and ecological catastrophe, design will emerge as the most powerful corrective force.

Stanford’s new institute will not only partner with corporate America, but also develop value-producing solutions for, well, the rest of the world. The d.school puts it this way: “Stop drunk-driving. Build better elementary schools. Develop environmentally sustainable offerings. … We use design thinking to tackle hard social problems.”

It sounds strangely familiar. Just as the West has nearly retired the modernist ethos that sought housing solutions to urban poverty (Chicago has been demolishing its failed high-rise, public housing projects for the past decade, displacing tens of thousands), good design is enjoying a second coming as the cure for what ails us.

Hilary Cottam won the United Kingdom’s prestigious Designer of the Year award with her blueprints for schools, health services and prisons, that combine architectural and policy elements. Cottam, with the help of U.K. policy-guru Charles Leadbeater—Tony Blair’s favorite “corporate thinker”—and veteran IDEO CEO Colin Burns, is launching Participle. It plans to join a bevy of new nonprofit and for-profit projects—including Spark! in Finland, Massive Change in Canada and Design for Democracy in the United States—all of which promise a design approach to the world’s quandaries.

The World Economic Forum is on board. In 2006, summit moderator Tim Brown wrote, “Innovation and design … are a fresh way of thinking about business innovation as well as social problems.” They “encourage us to take a human-centered approach to business problems as well as social problems … so we [can] start to see more of a congruence between otherwise distant spheres.”

Various theories exist about how this fresh thinking will transfer to the world-saving sector. For one, the development of progressive products is causing a stir with “Superlow cost” items for the developing world and “Green” gizmos for ecologically minded customers in the United States and Europe.

A May 29 New York Times article—headlined “Design That Solves the Problems of the World’s Poor”—gushed over a mobile wheel-shaped carrier that ameliorates some of the pain (if not the drudgery) of peasant women fetching water.

At Participle, on the other hand, Cottam and company champion the power of the design process. Designers are on the ground, talking to people (“users,” in Cottam’s terminology) and consulting all interests (newly reinvented as “stakeholders”). In Participle’s hands, design has undergone a transformation. Where mid-century urbanists like Mies Van Der Rohe and Robert Moses were arrogant and antidemocratic, today’s “transformation design” is user-centered and participatory.

But most of the recent buzz is about the “designer” as template for the social activist. A common wisdom today dictates that effective change isn’t about reforming public attitudes, but discovering practical, realistic fixes. This belief has become powerfully institutionalized through funding bodies (and at universities), most evidently in the wild enthusiasm for “social entrepreneurs.”

Like designers, the new changemakers are supposed to discover innovative solutions to intractable problems. They accept the given problem, the specs and the budget, and get the job done. This new approach adheres to a “post-ideology” ideology: Yes, there are problems in the world, but what we need isn’t theory but solutions.

Design offers a special brand of pragmatism. The d.school teaches students to collaborate, to make prototypes and to be T-shaped (to think creatively, that is). Its failing isn’t realizing that activists need problem solving skills (of course they do), but the assumption that pragmatism ought to be their highest aspiration.

In particular, design metaphors obscure the ideological—and political—decisions involved in tackling societal issues. Depending on your perspective, “drunk driving” can be a symptom of some broader systemic failure (from un-walkable suburbs to deficient public education), a lapse of individual responsibility, or a right to be defended. The solution to the problem is inseparable from its conception. Conceiving of global ills as design challenges may sometimes be in order, but only when a consensus exists on goals, budgets and relevant values. Such is rarely the case.

“Design thinking” describes a moment in the pursuit of social good that hardly ever arrives: when all the hearts are in the right place, all opinions have been brought into line and all that needs to happen is the change itself. If the model has intellectual benefits, it’s doubtful they outweigh the deficiencies of ignoring the long process by which consensus is built—a.k.a. politics.

This generation’s design movement is built less on a coherent set of ideas than a simple, can-do attitude. As BusinessWeek’s Nussbaum puts it: “The natural optimism of a design approach is refreshing and relevant when tackling global social problems as well as business [ones].”

In other words, when it comes to the nastier socioeconomic and environmental corollaries of growth, everything is going to be just fine. No need to reevaluate or contest the road to economic development. When we run into “problems,” we’ll simply innovate our way out of them.

There’s nothing wrong with a little faith in social progress. Nor should we ascribe a facile progressivism to every voice chiming in these days about the design of the world. In Canada, the multifaceted (if ill-defined) Massive Change claims to understand design’s “utopian, as well as dystopian, possibilities.” Unfortunately, it is an exception to the rule.

As the d.school has discovered: Claim the kind of thinking that can save the world from the excesses of capitalism is one and the same as the kind that can increase profits, and Wal-Mart will fund it. That brand of progressivism is naïve, at best.

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• Reader Comments

  Creative (imaginative) thinking could have eliminated the morass Iraq has become. It could have given the U.S. a workable energy policy at some point between the 1970s oil lines and today’s $100/bbl price.

  As a former graphic artist and packaging designer (with a bit of product design here and there) — a few observations from the real world…

  Designers tend to think in terms of reducing the design problem to its simplest form and then go at from a “what if” approach. A group of intelligent ideas with great ideas feeds on each member’s input and I’m sure they will present many valuable plans.

  Problem solving by design must run a gauntlet of politics (governmental and corporate), finance, political correctness and the whims of influential individuals that is unimaginable unless you’ve been there.

  The design solution is the easy part — it’s the gauntlet which kills creativity. Worst of all and to be avoided if at all possible is the COMMITTEE.

  It is ironic to see Wal-Mart listed among the sponsors. From experience I can tell you when Wal-Mart says, ” Always Low Price,” they mean it. That is THE only acceptable entry for a supplier. Today that is the major consideration with nearly everyone due to globalization and the falling dollar.

  I wish them well.

  Posted by whattheheck on Jan 13, 2008 at 5:28 PM

  The author reminds us of some important questions to keep in mind, but seems to have missed what design thinking is really about.

  To me, this assumption is where she goes wrong: “They accept the given problem, the specs and the budget, and get the job done.”

  Isn’t NOT accepting the given problem what “design thinking” is all about? Anyone who has ever worked as a designer or with a designer will know that very few accept the given problem.

  As they say, tell a designer to make a door handle, and the designer will identify the door as the real problem and soon they want to design a new house…

  Challenging the conceptualisation of the problem is something we do in every project. When taken to a higher level this way of challenging the given problem is what I see as “design thinking”.

  Posted by Ludo on Jan 13, 2008 at 11:52 PM

  The points in this article are appreciated, I would like to respond with an opinion of my own. 

  I am a graduate student in the Graduate Design Program at Stanford,  and also a student recovering from a day of testing monsoon rain catching structures built for the d.school class called Extreme Affordability.  Before coming to graduate school, I worked in wheelchair design in the southern Philippines as well as in production engineering in a fruit factory in Ghana.

  I have decided to spend the next 2 years of my life studying design and design thinking because I believe that it will best enable me to make positive change in the world.

  My reason for this belief is founded in the history of design, product design in particular, which is the birthplace of design thinking.  Product design, a process based method of invention, historically focuses on the physical manifestations of solutions to human problems and dates back to humans turning branches into spears and before.

  Over the years the methods behind this type of problem solving have developed.  As business have pushed for decreases in product life cycles, the demand on product designers to continually innovate has intensified.  IDEO with its success in continually meeting this need has shown that in order to increase ones ability to solve problems one benefits from following a design process, or in other words practicing design thinking.

  From my point of view, it was this insight that spurred the d.school and its humanitarian desire to share this knowledge and the underlying skills with disciplines outside of the design field.

  While the media may be portraying design thinking as the pathway to a better future in its current state, I believe that the fact that design thinking is continuously reviewing its own process for areas of refinement the most potential.

  It is in that light that I invite and would greatly appreciate ideas on potential improvements to the d.school/GPD/ideo method. For, as a designer I know that what I bring to the table is my design process, the basis of design thinking, even though and indeed because of the fact that it is and always will be a prototype.

  Posted by Joe Mellin on Jan 14, 2008 at 8:27 AM

  Lido,

  YES!  The “problem” presented is often a result or symptom of the condition to be addressed.  A free-thinking approach allows examination from all points of view. By first reducing to the essence and then expanding to ultimate application designers could make life better for all. It is the defining of specifics too early which stifles creativity and is the death of so many ideas.

  The best part of the school this article describes is their proposal that “design thinking” be applied to intangible issues. If only our political leaders, elected bodies and policy makers would expand their thinking rather than settling for what they perceive the limitations to be (re-electibility for one) we would see genuine progress.

  
  Joe,

  You are entering a challenging and increasingly necessary field. Increasing population and decreasing commodities are currently seen only as cause for conflict. The “what if” factor must be pressed into service.

  Whether you work inside a company with an appreciation for your speciality, do as I did (as a free-lancer), service,  a wide range of manufacturers and service providers, or apply critical, creative thinking in some other way — I want to wish you the best.

  Enjoy!

  Posted by whattheheck on Jan 15, 2008 at 3:45 PM

  If you are looking for “Design That Solves the Problems of the World’s Poor” then you are not going to find them with organisations such as IDEO I don’t think. What does IDEO do?

  By their own words:  http://www.ideo.com/portfolio/
  - Mouse - First production mouse for Lisa and Macintosh
  - Palm V - Connected organizer
  - Shopping Cart Concept - Redesign of the shopping cart for ABC’s Nightline
  - Staff Devices & Dressing Rooms - Information architecture for high-fashion store
  - Intel - Video scenarios of tech-enabled behaviors
  - Pantone - Multimedia tools to systematize color
  - Red Cross - Donor experience blueprint
  - HBO - Future vision of the media experience

  These are not solutions for the poor, for people with no clean drinking water and no sanitation or for a way out of the energy system mess and the resulting climate change.

  I submit that designs for these problems are actually around already, but they do not make money for the incumbent, so are not interesting. If you want to find new and interesting designs to actually interesting problems and important issues you have to look beyond the standard design, which only fits the norm.

  Computer geeks that design energy distribution systems and cars, lighting engineers that design sustainable food production systems are some. They are out there, just don’t look to the standard place to find the answers.

  Posted by bjelkeman on Jan 18, 2008 at 10:39 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 6 posts.

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