What stops us from designing a sustainable future?
Designers have the tools and competence to solve many of the problems we face regarding sustained life on this planet. Let’s explore two of the problems that leave us remaining on square one, reductionism and the way we measure success.
Designers in a world of complexity
As contributors to the world we live in and interact with, we as designers operate both behind the scenes and right on top of it. We do not only produce the products and services that people interact with daily, but we are in the rooms where decisions are made around what products and services should reach the market. This leaves us with a great responsibility
Problem 1: Reductionism
Reductionism from a design perspective
Reductionism is used to describe a few different philosophical concepts in relation to reducing complexity. From a design perspective, reductionism is a belief that everything can be broken down and understood as parts of a whole. For example, imagine that we’re running a start-up with a digital platform for car rentals.
A reductionist approach would be to get one team working on the sign-up flow, another that works on displaying cars, and a third that works on dealing with payments. These teams would analyse the data for their respective area, define problems relating to their specific area, and solve problems for their users in that particular context. Does this sound familiar? Probably, because this is how many product or service companies are organised.
By reducing an entire experience of renting a vehicle to a sign-up flow, a car selection flow, and a payment flow, a long and complex journey can be broken done and dealt with efficiently, from an organisational point of view. Reading between the lines, you’ve probably guessed that I’m not entirely convinced this is great. Reductionism is based on the assumption that the entirety is based on the sum of its parts, and nothing else.
From a scholar's perspective on reductionism, Vandana Shiva describes the western technological approach as reductionist and states that “modern science” has a reductionist foundation and claims monopoly on knowledge. She is a harsh critic of “modern science” and talks about two parallel paradigms, the holistic and the reductionistic.
If reductionism is to reduce complexity to smaller chunks of digestible information, holism, or a holistic approach, is instead seeing that the parts cannot exist on their own. There is an interconnectedness that ties the parts together to make a coherent complexity. Looking at our example of a car rental service, what use would we have of a car displaying interface if there was no way to sign up and pay for the service?
What’s the problem with reductionism in design?
I see designers as holistic practitioners within a reductionist system. Good design is not just the refinement of the parts, but the fineness of how it all works together. There is a duality in design, and I like to compare it to the duality of designing for both users and business stakeholders. (Michael F. Buckley has a good article on designers serving these two sides.) There is little to no value in design when it only suits the need of the business stakeholders, in the same way that there is little to no value in a product or service that has nice buttons, but that doesn’t solve your problem. Only when the whole problem is understood and catered for, the same way as when both business stakeholders, as well as potential users, are pleased with a service or product, can we call it good design.
When taking a reductionist approach on problem-solving (which in many cases design is all about), there is a risk that focus is moved from understanding the full scope of the problem, to producing a solution. There is also a risk that the aim is for this solution is to be a uniform simplified system that is scalable and reproducible. The reason this is problematic is that we as users of these services and products are humans, and humans are not uniform or simple. Humans are creatures from nature, and nature is one of those very complex systems that we struggle to fully understand.
The reductionism and universalisation of natural processes goes against the complexity that our world is, in the way that it sees a part as a resource, and not as a cog in the wheel of a much larger structure. It leads to violation of nature as it is, by ignoring the greater complexity.
Designers however are trained to uncover the complexity of the underlying problems they’re trying to solve. There are tools and methods for working well with complex problems and finding solutions to them. But, as I mentioned before, designers work not only to solve problems for users but also to satisfy business stakeholder needs, and the organisations designers work for are commonly based on a reductionist mindset.
The one problem that I hear from most fellow designers over and over again, is that of ending up working in an organisational silo. It is a term so commonly used amongst designers that just dropping the word silo in a design conversation gets everyone shivering. It refers to when an organisation has several departments who are unaware of what the others are doing, or unable to cooperate. Each department might have its own goals, sometimes even competing with a different department within the same organisation. This type of business is based on a reductionist mindset, assuming that if only every department can run smoothly, surely the organisation will too. (Yaron Cohen has an interesting piece on the importance of interdisciplinary work as designers.)
We can see the same problem in services and products designed by these organisations. I published a rant a while back on my experience of a company just like this, where the silos of the organisation became so prominent that as a user, I didn’t know what was going on.
Reductionist design, or a reductionist historical context?
Is design intrinsically reductionist? No, but design rarely exists on its own. But the businesses and organisations that pay designers to solve problems are usually more or less in the mindset that complexity can be reduced and simplified. And it’s not just the organisations that pulled that out of thin air, I would argue that we live in a society that has valued this type of thinking for such a long time that it has become the norm.
Francis Bacon, who is said to have invented modern science, did so with man’s dominance over nature as a guiding principle. Male and female were seen as opposing powers, such as rational and irrational, or objective and subjective. The female side was also seen as representing nature, or the natural, meaning that the act of developing (which back then basically was all about conquering nature) also means conquering women, the subjective and irrational. For the emerging industrial capitalism to work, the image of gender as a polarised dichotomy was required to reach the success we can see today. Science and masculinity was hierarchically placed over nature and femininity. The exploitation of nature through reductionist development was a reaction to the need for such a world view, according to Vandana Shiva in her book Staying Alive. Together with the industrial revolution and the capitalist economic system, they were parts of the same process.
Context matters, and designers today are left with the consequences of centuries of a reductionist worldview. Reductionism is a problem that stands in the way for designers to work on sustainable solutions to massively complex problems. If designers can embrace complex problems, only then can we expect to get complex solutions.
Problem 2: Measure of success
Measure for the sake of measuring
The highly debated quote; you can’t manage what you can’t measure, that “management guru” Peter Drucker is said to have coined, is maybe not true as such, but it’s often thrown around. With so many of our products and services being digital, the availability of numerical values to measure has increased, and as a designer, I’ve seen a change in the way projects are scoped.
These days I think more and more about how whatever you are measuring is going to steer what outcome you get. This includes both the outcome of the design of the product or service, as well as its usage. Don’t get me wrong, I believe it’s important to measure one’s impact, but it’s equally important to know why. There’s a difference between measuring the impact a service has on a community, to better understand how to help that community, as opposed to measuring certain things that investors or business acquisition firms would like to see before a transaction.
Success is subjective
Csilla Narai says in her article on impact-driven design, that “commercial product and service design is not exactly an impact-driven industry”. At least not if it’s social impact for the user of the product or service that we’re after. I think this really captures the issue of success.
The reason there’s an issue around success is only because success is subjective. There is no one definition of success that everyone can agree upon, instead, it has everything to do with what we are trying to achieve. The idea of success for a designer can vary greatly from what a marketing manager sees as success.
I was working on a digital platform a few years ago, when the team and I identified that the sign-in flow caused a lot of trouble for the users. We altered it and created a flow that saved users a lot of time and effort, reaching what we thought of as a great success.
When we presented this amazing piece of work to the CEO and CTO they got quite upset. We were asked not to proceed and if possible, add other hurdles to the sign-in flow to slow down the users. We were confused. They explained that the investors they were trying to get on board were measuring the time users spend on the platform, the more time the more money they would invest. That meant that satisfied users browsing around were considered equal to unhappy users who got lost and stayed on the site because they were struggling.
Measuring to confirm bias
Another issue with our ambition to have numerical indications to measure our progress is our selective behaviour. We can choose what to measure, and some things are easier than others to avoid. I can choose to measure the accumulated total number of sign-ups on my digital platform instead of active users, to get a number that looks nice when I go public. I can also choose to measure the carbon footprint of my organisation and show it in marketing material, instead of measuring the effect on biodiversity, plastic pollution or the long-term negative social impacts on less fortunate communities.
Measurements are not objective truths, they can be used to prove or disprove what we aim to achieve, meaning that they can both be really useful but also not automatically show us the entire truth.
Not a solution-problem
What is the problem?
Designers have the tools and competence to solve many of the problems we face regarding sustained life on this planet. The problem is not that there’s no solution, but that the context has reduced this massively complex problem into smaller chunks of unrelated issues. The problem continues when these smaller chunks are measured separately, and the definition of success is vague.
What is the solution?
The solution is complex. The solution isn’t just another design of a product or service, it is a redesign of systems. The context in which the products and services live is the problem. The artifacts that we develop are products of the context we’re in. Unless we change the context, we will continue only solving problems that have been singled out, simplified, and detached from their complex context.
