In the
I begin this article with a brief discussion of a
rapidly emerging, though not new, social design discourse, looking at “the
social” as it is framed by advocates and practitioners of social design and
what its use can elide when imaging what design might do in the world. I then
build on three stories from my students’ and my work with students and teachers
at the social services organization to explore the possibilities of engaging
the political in what are often referred to as “social design” projects. Tony
Fry argues that “‘the politics of design’ is how design is employed, by whom,
to what ends, while ‘design and the political’” speaks to “the agency of how
design acts as (one of) the directional forces that shape human conduct and its
material consequences.”[6]
In a recent book, he builds on this to assert design itself as a politics, specifically in relation
to its “world-making” role, which he argues is both “ecologically and
ontologically transformative.” Design’s capacity for “causality” makes it,
fundamentally, political.[7]
I work with these and other ways of understanding the relevance (and presence)
of the political, reflecting on the struggles of all participants in our
course’s work to speak across difference and find ways to articulate the depth
and character of the problems that shaped design possibilities. The goal of the
class was to identify and prototype service design opportunities related to the
experiences and needs of students at the partner organization. In this article,
I argue that efforts to unpack the kinds of complex conditions in which we
found ourselves are also endemic to most “social design” contexts, and should
more seriously influence such design.
Social design
In a 2002 article, “A
‘Social Model’ of Design: Issues of Practice and Research,” Victor Margolin and
Sylvia Margolin issued a call expanding on Victor Papanek’s 1985 second edition
of Design for the Real World: Human
Ecology and Social Change, originally published in 1972. Unlike Papanek,
who saw design for the market and design for “social need” as necessarily in
opposition, they argue for a continuum with a “social model” of design on one
end and a “market model” on the other. This widely cited argument proposes this
“social model” focus on designing for “the satisfaction of human needs” less
likely to be met by “products designed for the market,” especially where some
people’s needs do not translate into consumer needs “in the market sense.”[8]
Social design, they assert, will design for people with less economic power
whose needs neither define nor drive markets, e.g., “…people with low incomes
or special needs due to age, health, or disability” and “people in underserved
populations.”[9]
Presumably these are also people who have less access to political power.
In the decade since Margolin and Margolin’s article,
social design has become a topic much discussed in the popular design media,
academic design journals, and on the websites and blogs of a growing number of
social design and design for change consultancies, organizations, and, in the
In discussions of social design, the “social” is rarely
linked explicitly to political structures—the underlying structural forces and
logics that shape and determine both systems and their repercussions for people
and communities. An engagement or analysis of power is often also absent, and qualities of good or ideal social
relationships are presumed to be shared by “society,” as are, sometimes,
understandings of what it might take to produce those conditions. For example,
in a 2008 article, “SES! Social Equity and Sustainability,” Ann Thorpe defines
“social” as “relations among people, whether those relations are economic or
cultural,” and defines “equity” as “fairness.”[14]
While she acknowledges the role of capitalism and market economies in
preserving economic inequity, Thorpe ultimately equates “social equity” with
“the public good,” which she says is maintained through the work of
institutions such as “security (defense, fire, and police protection),
education, health, democracy, and justice (courts and legal systems)…”[15]
The assertion that there is a general public interest in “social equity” that
can be maintained through these institutions is widely accepted as common sense
in the US and Europe (how they might be funded is another matter).
However, a wealth of research into the impacts of police,
courts, and legal systems,[16]
not to mention education, health, and democracy, suggests that experiences of
efforts to maintain “the public good” affect different people differently,
especially depending on where the power to define both “public” and “good” sits
and through what institutions. In more recent work, Thorpe explicitly takes on
the question of what characterizes “design activism,” noting that design has
sometimes taken concepts like “change” and “social impact” and reworked them into
design concerns, such as “human needs” or “usability,” thereby reorienting
“activist frameworks” such as “rights” or “struggles.”[17]
While she investigates “types of change” and offers discussion of activist
aims, Thorpe’s focus remains on describing what she calls “excluded or
neglected groups,” and makes broad claims that “the public at large” might be
one of these groups, in keeping with an idea that “social change” presumes
making change based on politically uniform, if individually varied, notions of
both need and desire.[18]
It is precisely the historical and political specificity of claims to and
struggles for resources and space that shapes activist frameworks, and this,
along with their complexity, is often what is lost when those ways of knowing
are sublimated to more traditional ways of framing design concerns.
Social
innovation presents different approaches to “the social” as a site for design, focusing
on small-scale systemic change rather than a “social problem”/ designed
solution approach. In their book Collaborative
Services, François Jéjou and Ezio Manzini describe social innovation as the
production of relationships and organization for enacting the needs and desires
of “creative communities,” groups of people that “cooperatively invent, enhance
and manage innovative solutions for new ways of living.”[19]
In this model, groups work on a local scale and create scenarios that meet
specific individual and group needs: food access and production,
transportation, use of tools and resources, etc. Designers in this context are
imagined to facilitate changes to accepted structures (e.g., individual
consumerism) through building on what people are already doing and modeling
other options to make these systems viable, desirable, and replicable. Nicola
Morelli describes another facet of the social innovation frame, the role of
designers in creating conditions for the development of “enabling” solutions
through which people “find solutions for themselves.” [20]
While this work sets
out to produce certain kinds of system redefinition in specific
communities—including systems of sharing geared towards changing consumption
patterns and increasing sharing systems—it often does not engage with the
possibility of resistance from business or government. In fact, Morelli seeks
to meet the call issued by Margolin and Margolin in 2002 by scaling up social
innovations through business strategies making such designs profitable.[21]
As Ilse Oosterlaken argues, however, “…one should not too easily assume that
the interests of the poor and of companies are always compatible.”[22]
Cameron Tonkinwise has argued that, in an age of the
Most
approaches to design in relation to social contexts build on user- or
human-centered design methods discussed above. But as Klaus Krippendorff
argues, human-centered design (HCD) is not only a method, but a way of
conceiving design as “an essentially social activity,” in which designing
cannot be “separated or abstracted from the context of people’s lives.”[26]
He notes that what HCD should focus on is not an articulation of the needs of
individuals or communities in a pre-constructed framework suitable to the thing
being designed, but rather, imagined and possibile futures conceived and
desired by people with whom a design is shaped.[27]
While it is precisely these futures with which social design is arguably
concerned, “the context of people’s lives” is not, in fact, always at the
center of efforts to design in the face of poverty, ecological degradation, or
potential violence. This might be especially true where design practices focus only
on those immediate needs that can be seen and understood for the purposes of
designing in relationship to them. A recent article in the San Francisco
Chronicle, for example, covered a design student’s prototype testing for a coat/sleeping
bag designed to help homeless people keep warm on nights they do not have
access to indoor shelter.[28]
While this undoubtedly could be an important intervention into the conditions
experienced by homeless people—it tested well, and people with whom the
designer spoke expressed excitement about it—it is not a design addressing the
problem of homelessness, it is a design addressing the problem of hypothermia,
an outcome of homelessness.[29]
I say this less as a critique of the project itself, and more to point out that
making it easier to survive homelessness is different than working to end
homelessness.
Tony
Fry and Clive Dilnot note that in designing for sustainable futures, “…a great
deal of well-intended ‘reformist,’ ‘sustainable’ design activity does little
more than sustaining the unsustainable.”[30]
Were social design to fully consider the political, designers might be
compelled to imagine how design can address or intersect with “social problems”
by first reconsidering what defines a person’s or community’s needs (especially
where that challenges designers’ own conceptions). Even as the problem of
hypothermia caused by homelessness
and the structural inequality that causes
homelessness necessarily overlap, there is the possibility, as Fry and Dilnot
point out, that designs alleviating conditions
of structural inequality also “sustain the unsustainable,” especially if a
designer doesn’t know or make clear that a given design is merely a stop-gap,
and, in fact, an undesirable one. Gui Bonsiepe describes participation as a
process through which “dominated citizens [people dominated by external forces]
transform themselves into subjects opening a space for self-determination,
[which] means ensuring room for a project of one’s own accord.”[31]
If participation which is now so valued in designing can be similarly
considered, then design in these contexts becomes a political project aimed not
at ameliorating needs, but producing or enabling conditions for making
fundamental shifts in systems of power. With this idea in mind, I’ll turn now
to a consideration of the political and return to the context of my course.
Political contexts
Sociologist Avery Gordon asserts a theory—that “life
is complicated.”[32]
She builds on legal scholar Patricia Williams’ argument that the law—a system
of meaning with material consequences—refuses this complexity, insisting
instead on “narrower, simpler, and powerfully hypnotic rhetorical truths.”[33]
Gordon breaks this theory into two parts—the first concerns the legibility of
power relations and the second regards what she calls complex personhood. I begin with the first and return to the
second to provisionally define the political contexts that are arguably
inextricable from design, whether or not they are acknowledged, and to explore
why unpacking these contexts should be important to designers and design
processes.
Gordon writes, “Power relations that characterize any
historically embedded society are never as transparently clear as the names we
give to them imply.”[34]
Power can be understood as the ability to influence or control outcomes, and as
oversight and control of resources of all sorts. Here, Gordon refers to the
ways power is wielded, or just exists and evolves, between people, groups of
people, and institutions. So, on the one
hand, she argues, power is not something static. On the other hand, it can be used to create
harmful conditions, with or without intention. Power manifests through
exchanges—through the sometimes literal give and take of information,
resources, access, opportunity, and even legibility. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault characterizes power as something
that is neither always external to us nor separate from us; power can be
disciplinary, imposing forms of self-discipline, and it can also permeate our
lives and experiences at multiple, even contradictory points.[35]
Gordon writes:
Power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and
routine. It can be obvious, it can reach
you by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and
desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it
can travel through time, and it can drown you in the present. It is dense and
superficial, it can cause bodily injury, and it can harm you without ever
seeming to touch you. It is systematic and it is particularistic and it is
often both at the same time.
Power is undoubtedly at work in design relationships[36]
and in the lives of people in any design process, whether designers,
stakeholders, users, or collaborators.[37]
In my course’s first workshop as a large group, the teachers at the partner organization
and I planned to have our groups of students do a series of activities and
tasks together, in an effort to address up front something we experienced
previously: the students were wary of each other and where my students often
had preconceptions of people who have been to jail, their students were dealing
with ideas about who gets to go to college and what their experiences and
privileges might be. We asked all of the students to interview a number of
other students, primarily focusing outside their group, asking two set
questions and one question of their own choice. The set questions, “What do you
like most about the city?” and “What is most challenging for you in the city?”
aimed to draw out a range of ways of thinking about and being in the city that
could be used for brainstorming. We
hoped that this might also raise issues that each group of students might not
have considered on their own (e.g. policing), or, conversely, wouldn’t have
expected someone in the other group to share, even if for different reasons
(e.g., getting a job or living in an expensive city).
Students’ responses to each other expressed a range
of likes and challenges. Peopled liked the bright lights and big buildings of
Gordon’s theory that life is complicated helps
connect students’ experiences to a larger political context which is, among
other things, a set of conditions that both shapes and is shaped by
relationships of power, which are neither fixed nor finite. Such political contexts
shape the systems in and with which we live. They are manifest in people’s
experiences with those systems (e.g., the courts or the police) or in reference
to them (e.g., being stereotyped as dangerous by someone who crosses the street
when they see you). Designers work back and forth between the possibilities and
constraints of such systems and how they do or do not meet the needs of people
who use them. Often missing from this process, and from the analysis and
synthesis through which design proposals, prototypes, and final designs emerge,
are the complex political forces that
shape and determine these systems, how they are experienced differently by
different people, and, perhaps most importantly, who benefits from them, who
does not, and why. For example, the students at the partner organization—not
just the one student who commented on my clipboard—shared certain experiences
of the city in which we all live, including regular interaction with or
conscious efforts to avoid the police, while interacting with or avoiding the
police did not figure prominently in most of my students’ (or my) experiences.
And, if we were to be stopped, members of my class were likely to have
different interactions. Across a group of some twenty people, then, we had both
different experiences and associations with a large city system—policing—and
we, as designers entering into this issue, might find that what was challenging
about the police was not individualized bad police behavior, but, instead,
realities of how policing functioned and on whom police attention focused in
the city. This was something that seemed to challenge my students’ ideas of the
role of policing in “society” and their capacity as designers to design
solutions to a stated, if complex, problem.
This was not the only challenge facing students in this
organization. There were a host of other concerns and interests: financial
capacity; feeling safe (defined differently by different people); finishing
school; getting a job, and, more explicitly, being able to get access to the
education or capital that would give them a chance to get, or make for
themselves, work that interested them. Students also identified concerns and
desires about the physical space of the organization. They wanted better food
nearby (or better than the bologna sandwiches provided for those who cannot
afford to buy lunch) and community or performance spaces in the building where
the organization is housed. Some of these concerns seemed more “designable,”
and one challenge of the course became not
choosing to focus on these in lieu of wrestling with the implications of the
“more” complex, which would remain major factors in the day-to-day lives of our
partners. If policing or under-employment represented complex networks of
issues, then to keep them close at hand we would need to work on and around
them in ways that would allow us to gain footholds while not compromising the
real messiness of the issues themselves.[38]
We had to resist flattening out the experiences and stated concerns of the students
in the organization in a rush to find “problems” for which we could make
“solutions.”
Wicked problems and structures of power
In his 1992 essay,
“Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Richard Buchannan makes a now
well-rehearsed argument that the types of problems that characterize what
designers do and how they work are what Horst Rittel described in the 1960s as
“wicked problems.” Buchannan notes that Rittel was asserting a counter logic to
the idea that design processes are linear, moving from analysis to synthesis to
designed thing.[39]
Instead he described the kinds of problems coming through design as “a class of
social system problems which are ill-formulated” and in which there are a range
of people involved in both problem defining and decision-making, who themselves
have a range of “conflicting values,” and where both information used by
designers and the “ramifications in the whole system” are confusing.[40]
In other words, design and designers are always working with and on problems
characterized by their “indeterminacy,” which Buchannan defines as having “no
definitive conditions or limits.”[41]
Beginning with these exceedingly, but also typically,
complex foundations and materials, designers, he argues, are working with
“quasi-subject matter” that they must particularlize through their working
process. In this way, without attempting to “take the wickedness out” of the
problem, designers can look to the specificities of a “concrete situation” to
“conceive a design that will lead to this
or that particular product.”[42]
While arguably the imagined outputs of design processes have expanded, it is
widely accepted that a series of iterative, linked phases using analysis,
synthesis, and generation, sometimes linearly, but always also circularly,
characterizes what (good) designers do.[43]
It is evident to many people doing and writing about design today that
designing happens in complex, changing systems and that design processes
wrangle with this in a range of ways.
In my course, our work was to design or redesign
services intended to facilitate “transition” out of the large and complex
system of policing and incarceration. And while the fact of the system’s
complexity and unfixed-ness are undoubtedly important to designing in this
context, also central and perhaps more defining, are questions related to how
power, authority, and dominant ideologies closely linked to them, figure
prominently when designing with people currently and formerly under the control of this system. In
this specific context, manifestations of relationships of power, even when they
go unarticulated, impact what can be designed and for what purpose.
In the days following our first workshop with
students and teachers in the partner organization, I received an email from a
student in my class. She discussed the specificity of her relationship to the
students with whom we’d met—how some aspects of the institutional-looking
organizational space and the sense of obligatory participation she feared the
students there were feeling were reminiscent of experiences she’d had. She also
discussed her clarity that despite these similarities, she was now on the side
of the “designer” working with people in a service agency, and that this had
something to do with her whiteness and opportunities, among other things. In her struggle to orient to the work we were
undertaking in this context and to understand the context itself, she noted,
I guess this is where I find myself as a designer. I am sitting
here looking at a complicated problem. A problem that really I don’t
understand. I can understand the problem - but it is so complicated...I guess I
start to wonder, what gives me the moral authority to even suggest that I do or
do not understand? How do I make sense of this at all?
One paragraph before,
however, she offered a very specific understanding of the system in which the
students in the partner organization were caught up, as one that is,
…designed to either eat a person alive, or to at least to chew
on him long enough - only to spit them back out in a form where he is longer
the person he once was. You can leave the system - but it will never let you
go, it doesn't matter what part of it you were in or why you were there.
Whether it follows you in the form of paper documents or only existing in your
dreams at night. Isn’t this the whole purpose of it all? Its either to make an
example of you or to teach you a lesson (maybe even both).
And from here, she
arrived at a question not about the ability to design at all in such complex contexts, but of the political nature of
recognizing the purpose and position of a system and imagining how to design
against its aims: “How can we design something to transition people from a
system that doesn’t want to let them go?”
Contending with the political—the systemic nature of wicked
problems—means adapting designing to explore conflicting and contradictory
aspects of how concepts of “need” are differentially defined by people in
different political and experiential positions, with different relationships to
power. It also means situating not only the knowledge and experiences of
potential “users” but of designers themselves as a means of fully acknowledging
both tacit understandings and tacit beliefs that deeply inform the often
hunch-based work of design. Some designers may be drawn into work in
political contexts by their own experiences and desires. In another article I explore at length the importance of seeing
what designers are “reflecting through” in relationship to their own situated position(s)
and how this impacts designing, especially in these contexts.[44]
I raise this key issue here to argue that the tools and methods of
design alone are insufficient if design work is to make social or political
change, as a real engagement with histories and systems of power relevant to
each specific design context is a precursor to such shifts. I turn to the
second story from my class here to explore this idea.
In our final workshop the design students worked from
the semester’s research to define a range of possible design ideas. From these,
they made artifacts for paper prototyping, including blank images of open
spaces (a deck/garden, food truck, and room being used for storage that opened
onto the street) and scenario cards picturing a range of service and use options
for the spaces. Prior to the workshop, students working on the materials sent
me the images they planned to use. The scenario cards act as prompts to engage
users’ own ideas and imaginations, so while based on ideas that came through
previous workshops, their purpose is to provoke responses that expand on what
they suggest or act as a platform from which people can suggest new or
different ideas.
The cards looked visually engaging, with easy to read
images and text and plenty of space for writing/drawing. I was, however,
concerned about the images themselves, which were almost entirely 1950s-era
US-based images of white people. The people with whom we’d been working were
all people of color, mostly African American and Latino, and many roughly the
same age as my students, between 18 and 22. I decided to write to the students
in my class to raise these ideas, as over the semester we discussed issues of
representation and how images produce meaning, and this seemed like a critical
moment to engage their work and process. I wrote:
I am concerned that the images on the cards are stylized images
of white America in the 1950s, a time that might be hard for students at [the
organization] to identify as their own and using images that feature all white
people in the spaces as the makers, doers, buyers, sellers. The era pictured in
the images is also one that was defined by racial segregation that was
maintained by not allowing African American people into some of the kinds of
spaces you all are proposing, something the…students may or may not know from
their time at [the organization], or from hearing stories in their families or
among friends, but could be a point of confusion or frustration. We've talked
in class about how images mean and about the ways in which seeing images in
design tools that one can really own and work with need to show ideas that
people can project themselves into. I think these images might be an obstacle
to them helping to facilitate the process you want to have happen in the
workshop. I am not suggesting at all that you should use images that might be
stereotypically associated with the students…, but that you think about what
kind of images would represent a space that is one your co-designers in the
workshop can project themselves into in order to take that ownership you
expressed the desire to create and switch in those images in your designs.
I was asking my students to consider how these
scenario cards were or were not likely to reflect, speak to, or represent the
specific needs and desires that had been expressed by our collaborators. I was
asking them, as well, to make central to their design process consideration of
the specific political and historical contexts (e.g., the
How, then, can the role of a design tool become doubled so that
it acts not only as an artifact for designing, but as a means to provoke
important conversations about our own assumptions and privileges? I was asking
my students to consider both their own positionality and at the same time to
focus on how their design process could facilitate what Ruth Wilson Gilmore
calls “making power.” Specifically, she suggests that change happens when people
organize to make power, rather than
thinking of power as something to be taken,
as static and on one side of an “it (structure) versus us (agency)” model.[46]
To imagine this as a capacity of both making generally and making in design,
specifically, requires an understanding of the already present role of
hierarchical structures and existing, if always shifting, relationships of
power in the structures around, about, and within which design takes place.[47]
To ignore the political dimensions, then, is to refuse to engage the question—a
question that can be asked in a number of ways in a range of circumstances in
which design and especially “social design” are operating: How do (people)
transition out of systems that do not want to let (them) go?
Complex personhood and figuring need
In closing, I return to
the second part of Gordon’s theoretical statement “life is complicated,” which
she calls “complex personhood.” Complex personhood is a way of understanding
that the stories people tell about themselves and their “social worlds” and its
problems move between what they know and see and what they imagine and hope,
and that complex personhood “means that all people (albeit in specific forms
whose specificity is sometimes everything) remember and forget, are beset by
contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others.”[48]
In the process of designing, designers work to identify design opportunities
which are often summoned into visibility through methods that draw out the
articulated, and sometimes unarticulated, needs and desires of future users or
co-design collaborators. In this concluding section of the article, I turn to
one last group of artifacts produced in the course’s collaboration in order to
consider how Gordon’s notion of complex personhood might help unpack the
political contexts and forces that shape and make articulable needs that become
central to designing.
All of the workshops and co-design sessions after the
first class were planned by the students in my course, acting in their role as
designers. This preparation was central to the class, and while students
experienced failure and frustration at times, they became adept at
information-gathering as the semester progressed. For our penultimate meeting
with the organization, the design students determined they had broad ideas
based on what they had heard so far and wanted to hone these to inform a more
specific set of design possibilities. They hoped that rather than, for
instance, proposing a service scenario focused on job placement (which already
exists at the organization), they could propose a specific way the organization
could provide jobs the students wanted, or jobs that provided skills they
wanted, so that the labor a service might require would also build toward
students’ stated needs, needs beyond job placement alone.
To do this, the design students developed five
prompts: “What are you doing when you feel best about yourself?,” “Describe
your perfect (legal) hustle,” “What would you most like to learn about?,”
“Describe a time you felt really comfortable,” and “Think of a time you were
out and someone made an assumption about you – what would you like to say to
them?” To draw out specific and detailed responses, they made books into which
students could write or draw their ideas. They also arrived at this approach
because in previous workshops working in groups had sometimes made it harder to
hear from everyone. The books created private spaces where people could work,
even as they sat in small groups and so could also talk about their ideas if
they chose.
Students’ responses to these prompts ranged from
wanting to run a hair salon to a plan for a food truck that sells ice cream and
t-shirts in summer and hot chocolate and warm clothes in winter at New York
City parks and schools; from feeling most comfortable with family or taking a
long walk in order to “think about how beautiful life is and don’t take life
for granted” to feeling best when doing music; from learning science (“the
planets and the stars and the beginning of time”) to getting a General
Equivalence Diploma (GED) to being a drug counselor; from finishing school even
though people thought she couldn’t to believing that when people “see me out in
the world they think I’m a bad guy because of my appearance and how I carry
myself…,” but feeling that “I am nice and respectful.”
If we look at these responses through the framework
of complex personhood, the needs, desires and goals drawn out through this
workshop can also be understood politically. There is a complexity, in Gordon’s
sense of the word, in wanting opportunities, experiences, and sometimes even
things that many other people have access to without ever having to consider
the possibility of not having or
presuming that access. Given the context of this work—collaborating with people
who have been or are currently in contact with or subject to systems of
policing and incarceration—these needs, desires, and goals are not only
information about social relationships and formations, but about relationships
of power. And, while they might also be shared by others in other contexts,
they are not only specific to the people speaking them, but specific to the
context in which they are being spoken.
What, then, would it mean in this context (and others
like it) to imagine that “need” is defined and determined differently by people
with different relationships to existing systemic organizations of power and to
making new forms of power? How does one design from that understanding? Often,
“needs” or the ideas of how those needs might be met are defined through
dominant ideologies, structures, and relations of power, in addition to the
perspectives and assumptions through which designers themselves see or
understand their worlds, which may converge with or diverge from dominant
ideas. Considering the political aspects of design in social contexts would
require designers to acknowledge that designing based on needs defined by people
seeking to make power for themselves means contending with how access to
defining one’s own needs, much less meeting them, is uneven and structured by
inequality. In this context, things like “comfort” or “happiness” or “work”
take on the significance of also demonstrating a right and capacity to be at all, in both social and political
terms.[49]
Gordon explains that complex personhood is “at the
very least…about conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming
that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of
enormously subtle meaning.”[50]
In design, always, but especially in design that is intended to address “social
needs” or “social problems,” it is critical that designers (and their academic
and media interlocutors) reckon with the determining and distorting factors of
political contexts for understanding that words mean differently, needs
register differently, and that in some cases (for example, safety, in which the
dominant logic is that the police and prisons produce safety, which was not
true for our collaborators at this organization) this means the difference
between seeing or not seeing how it is that a system will resist letting go.
A 2010 article in Design
Weekly, discusses the opportunity some designers in the UK see in Prime
Minister David Cameron’s Big Society—his call
to “open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises
and private companies” in order to produce “innovation, diversity, and
responsiveness to public need.”[51]
In the story, Lord Bichard, chairman of the UK government’s Design Council and
director of the Institute of Government notes that, for example, “No designer
would have created the dysfunctional web of policies and procedures which,
while aiming to reduce reoffending, have instead increased the prison
population to record proportions and failed to provide support to short-term
prisoners.”[52]
Perhaps he is right that had a designer designed it, it would be better
designed. But Lord Bichard’s assertion presumes an apolitical framework in
which prison is itself a presumed “social good,” rather than asking what else,
besides poor design, might influence the manifestations of imprisonment in the
Design in and for social “problems” alone cannot help
but produce changes that are always already adapted to political contexts as if
those problems exist in contexts that
are fixed and unchanging at best, and nonexistent or inevitable at
worst. In so doing, some kinds of social design assist in more deeply fixing
politically unequal relationships of power, even as the range of design
solutions produced either alleviate specific hardships or aim to bring
awareness to them (and here, to what end?). How, instead, might increasing the
capacity in design professions, among designers, and in specific design work to
see into a range of possible futures, including ones shaped by political
visions or desires to fundamentally change relationships of power, change the
nature of “designing for change”?[54]
Shana Agid is an Assistant Professor
in Art, Media + Technology at Parsons the
[1] John
Schmitt, Kris Warner and Sarika Gupta, ‘The High Budgetary Cost of
Incarceration’ Center for Economic and Policy Research,
[2] ‘The Sentencing
Project Interactive Map’ The Sentencing Project, accessed May 10, 2010.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/map/map.cfm#map.
[3] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and
Opposition in Globalizing
[4] There is not space in this article
to delve deeply into Gilmore’s argument here, although it is highly relevant to
why the political contexts that produce or surround what get called ‘social’
problems can and should be fundamental to design in these areas.
[5] See, for example, Ray Rivera, Al Baker and
Janet Roberts, ‘A Few Blocks, 4 Years, 52,000 Police Stops’ New York Times, July 11, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/nyregion/12frisk.html and ‘Stop, Question,
and Frisk in New York Neighborhoods’ an interactive map of stop and frisk
police stops in New York City in 2009, July 11, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/07/11/nyregion/20100711-stop-and-frisk.html?ref=newyorkcitypolicedepartment.
[6] Tony Fry, ‘Design and the Political’
Design Philosophy Papers, 6 (2003-4):
np.
[7] Tony Fry, Design as Politics,
[8] Ibid., 25.
[9] Ibid., 25.
[10] See, for example, Participle
(http://www.participle.net/), Project H (http://projecthdesign.org/), The
Design Council (and its RED project) (http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/), Design
Altruism Project (http://design-altruism-project.org/), Design 21
(http://www.design21sdn.com/), among others.
[11] Elizabeth B. N. Sanders, and Pieter
Stappers, ‘Co-creation and the new landscapes of design’ CoDesign 4:1,Jan. 2008: 6
[12] While it is too much to delve into
here, there is of course a great deal of work on participation in design, which
has a long history. For recent discussions with some particular relationship to
this article, see: ‘Ilse Oosterlaken, ‘Design
for Development: A Capability Approach’ Design Issues 25, no. 4 (2009):
91-102; Henry Sanoff, ‘Multiple Views of
Participatory Design’ METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 23,
no. 2 (2006): 131-143; and Zeynep Toker
and Umut Toker, ‘Community Design and Its Pragmatist Age: Increasing popularity
and Changing Outcomes. METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 23,
no. 2 (2006): 155-166.
[13] Tony Fry’s extensive writing on
design and politics and design as politics addresses many overlapping
approaches to the role of politics in design and design in the political,
including the imperative that design recognize that it is a political
engagement (see, especially Fry, Design
as Politics). Here, I am additionally interested in framing the politics
inherent in design scenarios and designers’ own frameworks and approaches to
designing in what are most often called ‘social’ areas to ask what are the
impacts of existing political structures of race, class, gender, sexuality,
nation, etc. on the contexts in which designers are beginning to work in new
numbers.
[14] Ann Thorpe, ‘SES! (Social equity and
sustainability)’ Innovation: the journal
of the Industrial Designers Society of
[15] Ibid., 22.
[16] See for example, Ruth Wilson
Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus,
Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
[17] Ann Thorpe, ‘Design for Social
Impact – is it activism?’ Design Activism
Blog, September 15, 2010, www.designactivism.net/archives/262.
[18] Ann Thorpe, ‘Defining Design as Activism’
unpublished article, accessed May 20, 2010, available at
http://designactivism.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Thorpe-definingdesignactivism.pdf.)
It is interesting, for the purposes of this paper,
to note that one of the case studies Thorpe includes is of the redesign of a
massive US Courthouse to be a ‘green’ building intended to ‘re-imagine the
public square.’ The redesign of this building, Thorpe argues, ‘frames the courthouse’s role in the
functioning of democracy and its values of fairness and openness’ for ‘citizens
navigating the justice system’ which seems to build on the basic presumption
evident in much social design that crime, courts, police, etc. are understood
and experienced as uniformly ‘helpful’ or necessary for ‘public safety.’ See Thorpe,
‘Defining Design as Activism’ 7.
[19] François Jégou and Ezio Manzini, ‘Tools’ in Collaborative services: social innovation
and design for sustainability, François Jégou and Ezio Manzini
(eds),
[20] Nicola Morelli, ‘Social Innovation
and New Industrial Contexts: Can Designers ‘Industrialize’ Socially Responsible
Solutions?’ Design Issues 23:4
(2007), 5-6.
[21] Ibid., 18-19.
[22] Ilse Oosterlaken, ‘Design for
Development: A Capability Approach’ Design
Issues, 25:4 (2009), 101.
[23] Cameron Tonkinwise, ‘Politics Please, We’re Social Designers’ Core 77, September 1, 2010,
http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/politics_please_were_social_designers_by_cameron_tonkinwise__17284.asp.
[24] ‘Let’s hear those ideas’ The Economist, August 12, 2010,
http://www.economist.com/node/16789766?story_id=16789766&fsrc=scn/tw/te/rss/pe.
[25] The role, and limitations, of
capitalism is addressed at length in Fry’s Design
as Politics, with a specific focus on the political and ecological
unsustainability of a system that requires unending expansion and resources.
[26] Krippendorff
puts it this way: ‘Designers need to know how
desirable these futures are to those who might inhabit them, and whether
they afford diverse communities the spaces they require to make a home in them.’
Klaus Krippendorff, ‘Design Research, on Oxymoron?’ In Design Research Now, ed. Ralf Michel,
[27] Ibid., 71
(emphasis in original).
[28] Kevin Fagan, ‘Design student creates
coat for homeless people’ San Francisco
Chronicle, September 11, 2011,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2011/09/11/BAHR1L2HK8.DTL.
[29] Many thanks to Christine Gaspar, who
summed this up astutely in a conversation about the jacket/bag and the
possibility of articulating political and contextual specificity in
relationship to what it is that designers are designing for, and to Cassandra
Shaylor for bringing the story to my attention.
[30] Tony Fry and Clive Dilnot, ‘Manifesto
for Redirective Design’ Design
Philosophy Papers 2 (2003).
[31] Gui Bonsiepe, ‘Design and Democracy’
Design Issues 22 (2006): 29
[32] Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination,
[33] Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights,
[34] Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 3.
[35] Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality,
Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley,
[36] Yoko Akama, ‘Warts and all: the real
practice of service design’ paper presented at DeThinking Service, ReThinking Design: First Nordic Conference on
Service Design and Service Innovation,
[37] See, for example, Lucy
Suchman’s excellent discussion in here 2002 article ‘Located Accountabilities
in Technology Production’ Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 14(2): 91–105.
[38] John
Law, ‘Making a Mess with Method’ version of 19 January 2006, available at
http://www.heterogeneities.net/publication/Law2006MakingaMesswithMethod.
pdf.
[39] Richard Buchanan, ‘Wicked Problems
in Design Thinking’ Design Issues 8:2
(1992), 15.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid., 16.
[42] Ibid., 17.
[43] See, for example, Sanders and
Stappers.
[44] Shana Agid, ‘Worldmaking: Theory /
Practice Practices in Design’ Design and
Culture 4 (1): forthcoming, March 2012.
[45] Bonsiepe, ‘Design and Democracy’ 29
[46] Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 247.
[47] This, too, can be linked to Fry’s
notion of ‘redirective’ design, and to the idea that ‘the designing natures of
things…becomes a matter of political decision (without the comfort of
certainty). Design as Politics, 103,
234.
[48] Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 4.
[49] Gordon describes an exercise she and
her students did after reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, in which they listed every explanation given for ‘why
dreams die.’ I quote extensively here both because it strikes me as deeply
relevant to a discussion of how one hears and understands need in specific
contexts and because it is somewhat reminiscent of the layers of meaning that
could be gleaned from the books made by the students at the organization: ‘These
ranged from explicitly externally imposed and internalized white supremacist
standards of value, the nature of white
man’s work, and the dialectics of violence and hatred to disappointment, to folding up inside, to being
put outdoors, to the weather, to deformed feet and lost teeth, to nobody pays attention, to it’s too late, to total damage, to furniture
without memories, to the unyielding
soil, and to what Morrison sometimes just calls the thing, the sedimented conditions that constitute what is in
place in the first place. This turns out to be not a random list at all, but a
way of conceptualizing the complicated workings of race, class, and gender…Such
a conceptualization asks that we constantly move within and between furniture without memories and Racism
and Capitalism.’ Gordon, Ghostly Matters,
3-4.
[50] Ibid., 5.
[51] Angus Montgomery, ‘Designers want to
be part of David Cameron’s ‘big society’’ Design
Weekly, July 29, 2010, 7.
[52] Ibid.
[53] In the wake of the uprisings in
London and beyond in the summer of 2011, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy gave a
talk in which he argued, among many other points, that the decision to imprison
vast numbers of people as a response to the riots is a distinctly American
response. He said: ‘If we go down that road, we're
headed toward a society that's run on the basis of mass imprisonment.
And that's not just about making the prisons bigger and fuller, making them
engines for making money for private corporations, but it's also about turning
your schools into prisons, and turning your streets into prisons, and turning
your community into something that's much more like a prison. And we do not
want that society based on mass imprisonment. That's not our future. We are not
Americans, we are not Americans.’ See, ‘Paul Gilroy speaks on the riots,
August 2011, Tottenham,
[54] As one example of work being done
that takes these questions on directly, see the Center for Urban Pedagogy,
http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/