This text was originally published in German for the 2021 PIAZZA conference on digital transformation in administration and society, commissioned by Fraunhofer FOKUS.
Design is eating the World.
Few terms have experienced such a boom in recent years as that of design. There now seem to be at least some interesting intersections between the seemingly most diverse disciplines. They range from planning a street (urban design) and developing an app (digital product design) to furnishing a workplace (interior design), writing blog articles (content design) or reforming a city administration (organisational design).
It is reasonable to assume that there is something more behind the prominence of the "design-driven organisation" than mere remnants of the design thinking craze of the 2010s. Namely, something like the traces of a transformation process that is flushing the corporate culture of those start-ups that are technically driving this transformation into our everyday working lives. Agile and iterative working, continuous learning and constant innovation are just as much a part of the self-image of a "future-proof" organisation today as looking at the world as a design problem.
It is worth taking a closer look at what this view means for our thinking and work - especially when it comes to designing public systems (public interest design). This raises three questions:
- Who designs - i.e. who is considered a designer, who is considered a user and who no longer appears at all?
- If good design is characterised by good solutions to problems - what exactly counts as a solution? And what counts as a problem?
- What do the answers to these questions mean against the backdrop of the major and systemic crises of our networked world?
You are not the user!
Under the (marketing-rich) banner of "user-centred" or (somewhat more broadly conceived) "human-centred design" (HCD), since the 1980s the user's problem has slowly moved into becoming the pivotal point on which all further decisions should be based. The aim is to take users seriously as experts for their own needs and thus place people themselves at the centre of new products and services, public services and strategic programmes.
A central credo of this user-centred way of working is therefore: "You are not the user!" – depending on your point of view, a continuation or counter-narrative to the technocratic corporate logic of the modern age. And in any case, it's a departure from the design paternalism that had prevailed up to this point: it is about recognising the difference between one's own needs on the one hand and those of the user on the other as the basis for joint "co-creation" on an equal footing.
However, although or precisely because the overly narrow focus on users has been steadily expanded in recent years – good service design begins long before the actual "use" of a service and thinks just as far beyond that – the focus on one or a few central target groups, users or "use cases" necessarily remains selective, making for justified calls for an expansion of the term. Suggestions range from "more-than-human-centred" design to "planet-centred design" and to no longer design for individual users, but always for interconnected systems – from neighbourhoods to cities to the entire planet.
The blind spot of design
So instead of Design for Users, now it's Design for Systems? Behind this lays the desire not to exclude groups and actors – whether they are vocal or silent, human or not (think of animals, the environment, AI bots), local, distant or even unborn – in advance, but to take them into account in all solutions as a matter of principle. When developing the strategic framework of the smart city strategy for Berlin, for example, in addition to the many "traditional" stakeholders, "silent groups" also appear explicitly as a group that can be named, as all those who are usually underrepresented or invisible in participatory decision-making processes – from schoolchildren and refugees to people without shelter.
This broadening of the perspective is both, desirable and overdue, but inevitably leaves a blind spot. That is because, initially it remains unclear who exactly counts as a user and when, and who does not (or no longer). Who is an important resident, a negligible visitor, a relevant expert or an annoying angry citizen? Who decides whose problem should be solved and when, which costs can be accepted for whom and which not? And, maybe most importantly: who decides who decides?
When it comes to the design of public spaces or even the entire planet, these are not (only) questions of democratic theory but also conceptual ones. If we take the user-centred design approach a step further, it quickly becomes clear that designers are also just users. They are an integral part of the system they are designing and therefore have a significant influence on the design before it even starts.
To put it somewhat provocatively, the focus is therefore not on "the person", but initially always on the designer themselves: You are also the user! The designer's view of the world becomes both the most momentous and the most difficult design hypothesis to shape.
When the problem is the solution
This brings us to the second question, namely the distinction between problem and solution. This becomes particularly clear in the case of those challenges that should be of particular concern to us today: social, economic, ecological, democratic and health crises. What is strange is that these challenges are often so complex, so open and unmanageable that they all fall into the category that Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber aptly characterised as "wicked" 50 years ago: These problems are characterised, among other things, by the fact that you can only formulate them once you have already found their solution. In order to ask the right question, you have to already know (roughly) what answer you want to hear: the formulation of the problem is the problem!
This sounds strange, but it will sound familiar to anyone who has ever formulated or read a somewhat more complex public tender. They know, the routines of the very institutions that are actually responsible for these major social challenges – ministries, administrations, political and public institutions – usually work in exactly the opposite order: first the clearly formulated question (the needs assessment or tender), then the answer (the procedure proposal or project award). And rightly so, as it really is about the public interest, which should be decided and monitored in a transparent and comprehensible manner. Rittel and Webber also note that this approach has been "successful" in the past. However, we should add: at least as long as we ignore the fact that practically all the crises we are dealing with today are the consequences of precisely these "successes".
Design for Conversation
If not only the selection of users but even the start and end of a design project ultimately depend on current political or strategically promising topics and budgets (hint: structural change, digitalisation, climate catastrophe, corona...), where can we really talk about a truly comprehensible design process? Architect Ranulph Glanville gives us the sobering and liberating answer: not at all. Our complex society has long since become "unmanageable." And interestingly, this is precisely where the freedom and responsibility to be able to shape things actively and creatively lies. What can this look like? That is the third question.
Glanville himself makes a suggestion and calls it, in the spirit of his doctoral supervisor, the psychologist and cyberneticist Gordon Pask: "Design for Conversation". This is less about defining objective values or final goals - and more about continuously learning and understanding shared ideas and stories together. As designers, it would then be our task to make explicit and tangible which problems, which solutions, which desirable images of a future we have in our heads. We could also talk about how we speak - and make our own terms explicit, explain and add to them. And we could ask ourselves what we have overlooked so far, why the major crises in our society have been so stable for so long - and how we ourselves benefit from the persistence of a problem.
Shaping stories together in this way is open in principle, i.e. designed to be constantly surprised, varied and supplemented. This fits in with the realisation that the "goals" we achieve in our design projects are never really final but, to quote the economist Herbert Simon, are only the starting points for our successors. Because then it seems sensible to think about the reuse and repurposing of our solutions from the outset. As designers, it would then be our task to ask how we can minimise the costs of redesigning or abolishing the results of our work. In this context, the urban researcher (and strollologist!) Lucius Burckhardt speaks of the "smallest possible intervention". Always in the knowledge that we are not only shaping today's stories about the future, but also future stories about the past.
Anab Jain, in a similar vein, suggests that we should also consciously change our thinking and language – and instead of talking about planning, for example, talk about gardening: Our role as designers will thus become the temporary care of a system that continues to grow anyway, with many visible and invisible players - and a lot of life of its own. As designers, it would then be our task to help shape this life of its own and to understand transitions, interactions and its own logic. As in a garden, we should be prepared for the fact that stumbling across the unforeseen and discovering new connections and contradictions are the rule rather than the exception when designing complex public systems.
Transparent localisation of our own values and wishes, the negotiation of guidelines and principles along the way - and above all the openness to constantly learn and be surprised - help us to do this. Not just so that we can address the world's problems, but so that we learn to be are aware of the world that we ourselves have in mind along the way.
