Greetings once again from steamy London. It’s hot and as I write, the orange light is bleeding across the rooftops I can see from the window. I’ve now taken to getting up earlier. There’s never enough time and my morning hours are my most productive and engaged so another hour has had to be snatched from the night but even at this time of year it’s dark when I get up.
Last week I was on Lake Windermere for the Design Research Works Jamboree; a wonderful gathering of about 30 people from across the world working in design research. Most were folks from academia but from a pretty broad variety of different approaches, stages in their career and disciplines. I was there as the industry shill and though I had to skip a couple of bits (gripping the slender Wi-Fi bandwidth for all it’s worth for a couple of hours of calls) I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it incredibly stimulating.
The whole thing was masterfully curated by Joe Lindley with a great team from Lancaster University, with some loose structure to encourage thought, discussion and capturing of ideas about what design research (and specifically research through design) is and what it does. It’s been a while since I’ve felt we’ve had the opportunity to do these kind of things; my world since Covid has been charging ahead at break-neck pace and there hasn’t really been a forum to sit with peers and talk about the state of things for years and I left feeling re-energised to get back to work but also left with questions about how all of these amazing ideas add up. I thought I’d share (in an unstructured and open-ended way with very little editing and quite abstractly) some things I’m still thinking about.
- We spent quite some time discussing design and futures as you might imagine as well as the more experimental dimensions of design research and research through design. A number of years ago I pondered on where all the weird speculative design had gone, why it appeared that design futures-y work was all about period-tracking apps, autonomous cars and smart clothes. I have a longer, more careful thought on where it went and why that I need proper time to think about and write down. But, to pose some connected hypotheses/questions:
- First: How do these fringe ideas about design actually add up to change? I don’t think we’ll end our reliance on fossil fuels through a strong cannon of projects addressing multispecies agency. Is more-than-human design going to encourage people to drive less? No. Will a sustained mix of protest, policy intervention and disincentivising profiteering of planetary exploitation? Yes. But wait.
- Second: Do we need to move the ethical line of what we’re willing to do to help the world we want come to life? Design (broadly) is at the front line of bringing worlds into being, whether through visions and renderings or products and systems. Most of practitioners and design-minded people (I believe( want to see a habitable planet, one in which a sense of justice prevails and climate collapse is limited such that future generations can thrive. I think that’s a fair sentiment. However:
- Third: While we’ve been tackling the nuances of this problem, experimenting with new tools and methods, debating the ethics and virtues of various ideas and individuals and trying to build consensus on the best way to get to this world, the other side have just got on with the business of building theirs and structurally imposing it on us. While we’ve been prevaricating or bickering, they’ve been doing the speculative design, the worldbuilding; telling the story of how much ‘better’ the world will be once borders are closed, the country is great again, people like ‘us’ are in power. Simple, straightforward visions and stories that bring a complex a world into sharp and easy focus for scared, worried people. And:
- They do this because our world is so much better, more feasible and necessary, but it’s one where they have no power. Or the power they’ve always assumed would be theirs is diminished or handed away. So they will use any tactic – lying, cheating, hacking, deceiving – to obfuscate and blur it and to make us scrabble around fighting ourselves. So:
- We need a compelling story of how the world will be better and to teach people who have a platform, whether politicians or celebrities, how to tell it. Not a story of indulgence and luxury, but one of abundance. And:
- We need to shout louder, fight harder, be willing to call their bluff. As long as we are on the back-foot, analysing, justifying and bickering, we’re not telling people how much better things could be. There’s lots to learn about fighting form protest movements, and we’re generally pretty good at doing that; either working directly with them or sharing strategy. But (as Srnicek and Williams said) ‘you can’t resist new worlds into being.’ What’s missing is the futures bit. The vision of how a world in which Extinction Rebelllion succeed is better, how it feels, what we do, how we live, what we value. So:
- Will a strong body of work of more-than-human, multi-species design end our reliance on fossil fuels? No. But does it start to tell us what the world afterwards looks and feels like? Yes. Does it give us something to aspire to, to aim towards, to appeal to people’s best interest? Yes.
- If this can be brought together, made digestible and appeal to people’s daily interests then we’re onto something. How is my dad’s life changed by more-than-human design? How is he safer, happier, more socially secure? How are his needs met and a feeling that he’s achieving things made? Not high-level, abstract notions of community, or quasi-spiritual nature-human symbiosis. Make it real for the real experience with people who have known nothing but extractivism. Make that connection, internationally and loudly and you’re onto the winning ticket. You’re designers, it should be easy.
DS077
Another one where there were serious hardware limitations but also somewhat a lack of inspiration. In case you haven’t figures, these are starting to thematically connect into a sort of world-building project and designing them with that limitation (coherent with each other and the world) as well as making them somewhere to experiment with Blender is a tricky balance sometimes. I may have to adjust the strictness of my creative policy to allow more experimentation.
Short Stuff
- Study finds that 1/4 of climate change tweets are from bots (aren’t 1/4 of all tweets?) and mostly, predictably, denying climate change.
- Relatedly, I missed Eco-bot.net when it was launched at Cop 26. A useful scraping tool looking at greenwashing and climate misinformation. Not a brilliant design though, it’s actually quite hard to navigate or dig deeper.
- Via Johannes on why Game of Thrones got bad; because there isn’t an understanding of how to write stories about institutions that are sociologically rather than psychologically driven.
- How one guy built a crypto ecosystem by pretending to be 11 people.
- If we punish minor violations of social norms to the maximal extent it incentivises people to break norms to the maximum extent for the same punishment.
- Really enjoyed Carl di Salvo on Scratching the Surface. I’m always using Design and The Construction of Publics as a touchstone but it’s great to hear about the breadth and richness of his other work. He makes a point that I used to think about a lot, particularly in education; designers are sort of inculcated to be great, transformative, powerful individuals. There’s no permission structure (outside academia) to (in Di Salvo’s words) say ‘We made this car, it’s ok. There’s some things we like and some we don’t.’ This creates a false over-inflation of the power of design to do these incredible things when maybe it’s in Di Salvo’s words) ‘small.’ Interesting to think about this in the context of a conversation I had with Julian recently about designers working for free, or cheap or for the joy of it because we’ve sort of shot ourselves in the foot by over-inflating our passion for it and making that more valuable than $$$.
- AI work still can’t be copyrighted (in the US) because it has negligible human authorship.
Look at that, two weeks in a row I managed to write to you! Love you , speak next week.