Good design doesn’t necessarily make our world better. We need to elevate our design practice to strategically drive positive change.
Illustration by: Sh8peshifters / Source: https://www.designingtomorrowbook.com/
Co-written by Martin Tomitsch and Steve Baty
The world is filled with good design. We have awards for good design. We have museums that mummify good design in display cabinets. We have good design processes, principles, and methods.
Companies that deliver well-designed products are adored, idolised, and copied. Businesses strive for good design to help them flourish in the market.
There is nothing wrong with good design. It can solve problems, give delight, and inspire beautiful thoughts and deeds. But as futurist Bruce Sterling says:
‘Good design doesn’t necessarily make our world better.’
Whether you are a designer or work for an organisation that designs things, it’s time to realise that good design is no longer enough.
This is not, of course, a call for bad design. As Sterling goes on to point out, ‘bad design very commonly makes [the world] worse’.
But good design is not going to solve our planetary crisis.
To continue doing good design while the world around us burns is like drinking a glass of champagne and listening to classically trained musicians as the Titanic slides into the freezing ocean. Our planet is heading towards irreversible tipping points akin to the Titanic approaching the iceberg.
Design not only has a role to play in changing our course away from planetary ecocide, it has also contributed to the crisis we find ourselves in.
As designers, we can no longer afford to ignore the unintended consequences of design decisions that prioritise humans and their needs without accounting for planetary perspectives.
How did we get here?
For centuries, organisations have turned to design to help them succeed in the market. Organisations have adopted human-centred design to innovate and deliver products and services that meet the needs of their consumers.
If design decisions are based on what people desire, so the mantra goes, the design will succeed.
But what does it mean to succeed in today’s world?
We grab onto metrics and industriously insert our ‘rich data’ into spreadsheets and presentation slides. Metrics like user satisfaction and customer growth justify time and investment spent on creating more good things.
It works so well because metrics are ‘facts’ management can righteously sign off on and use to drive the company’s focus for the next quarter. Much of design’s role in business is geared towards profit-making and quarterly profit growth, feeding the metrics machine.
If we are able to improve consumer satisfaction, we can grow our users, customers, and sales, leading to more profits. But what’s good for the next corporate quarter is not necessarily good for society or our planet.
The human-centred design delusion
As designers, we aspire to help people live better lives. The real benefit that we help to create, however, is in the interest of corporations and their shareholders.
Are we solving problems for people, or helping fill the pockets of shareholders? (Based on the original diagram for human-centred innovation popularised by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design)
We are deluding ourselves if we still think that companies are investing in human-centred design to make the world a better place.
We may believe we are acting on behalf of the consumer. But the consumer has become the product and human-centred design a mechanism to monetise them effectively and efficiently.
Designers contribute to a game where the goal is growth — to make more stuff to sell to more people.
And the world doesn’t need more stuff. According to a study published in Nature, human-made things now outweigh all life on Earth. This includes roads, houses, printing paper, coffee mugs, smartphones, and all the objects that we have produced to support human activity.
Every week, we produce new stuff that weighs more than the combined body weight of the world’s human population.
Human-made stuff weighs more than all of natural life on Earth (Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-made-stuff-now-outweighs-all-life-on-earth/)
There’s no Planet B
You don’t need a doctorate in earth sciences to figure out that this kind of growth cannot be sustained. Our planet isn’t able to regenerate itself quickly enough to make up for our rapid consumption of resources.
Last year, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 1st. The day marks the date by which we used up all the ecological resources that the planet generates during the entire year.
To sustain our current lifestyle, we need 1.7 Earths. We are using up the resources of future generations. If the whole world population lived like the United States, we would need 5.1 Earths each year.
If the whole world population lived like the United States, we would need 5.1 Earths each year (Source: https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/)
We are starting to experience the consequences of human impact: Global warming is more likely than not to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that rising temperatures caused by human activity will lead to an intensification of multiple and concurrent extreme weather events.
It’s not just physical stuff
If you are reading this thinking, ‘I don’t design physical stuff; I’m not contributing to the depletion of Earth’s resources’ — think again. Even if your work is in the digital sphere or your organisation is providing services with no tangible components, you are almost certainly contributing to the growth of human-made things weighing down our planet.
The hidden impact of UX design stems from the physical infrastructure that underpins our digital systems and the behavioural patterns driven by design decisions.
The website you are designing? It doesn’t live in a serene cloud; it sits on a server that is housed in a concrete data centre and requires a significant amount of electricity to keep it running.
The online shopping service that you’ve just improved based on user research? It will allow more people to purchase more things more easily, and those things must all be manufactured, stored, shipped, used, maintained, and eventually disposed of.
Even digital platforms and services have an impact on the environment and contribute to the stuff weighing down the planet (Source: https://www.designingtomorrowbook.com/)
Taking charge of changing the course
If the beliefs that underpin current economic thinking and the actions of organisations operating in a liberal market system have set us on this course, we need to shift those beliefs and how organisations operate.
For too long, we have designed our world around us ignoring the downstream consequences and the impact of our design decisions on the broader ecosystems.
As we are experiencing the effects of our growth-focused economic structures, it almost seems like we have already left it too late to change course.
Using the metaphor of a bus barrelling towards a cliff, writer Cory Doctorow tweeted:
‘In many ways, it’s a terrible future. It’s too late to build a bridge, or fix the bus’s brakes, or do anything except yank the wheel. It’s gonna hurt.’
The captain of the Titanic received numerous warnings of ice and icebergs throughout that fateful day. A specific iceberg warning was sent to the ocean liner by another ship exactly two hours before the crash, enough time to change direction and save more than 1,500 lives. By the time the crew spotted the iceberg dead ahead, it was too late to change the direction of the 47,000 tonnes heavy vessel.
Leaving the decision to correct our course away from planetary ecocide to the last few minutes risks equally devastating outcomes.
As designers working for organisations and clients that steer the ocean liner and influence the trajectory of the bus, we should have started this work decades ago.
But we were induced to focus on other issues, distracted by corporations spending millions of dollars fighting the truth, clouding judgement, and influencing leaders so that business-as-usual could continue.
A great blessing for corporations
Our attention to helping organisations design things their customers desired has been a great blessing for corporations. Instead of designers holding businesses accountable by uncovering the unintended consequences that their products and services create, they have been kept busy generating customer insights and searching for ways to improve the user’s experience.
It’s convenient to have next-day delivery of cheap products and a frictionless online shopping experience. But fast shipping means more delivery vehicles on roads and accelerates greenhouse emissions. To offer products at low costs, they are imported from faraway countries and made from cheap plastics that end up in landfill. What if the team designing Amazon’s 1-Click feature had considered these unintended consequences 30 years ago?
‘Our happy ending isn’t averting the disaster. Our happy ending is surviving the disaster.’ writes Doctorow.
To survive the disaster, our planet needs designers doing the right thing now, before it is too late to change course.
We need designers that are like good ancestors
Instead of good designs that win awards we need good designers.
Like good ancestors, good designers are able to think long-term and act on behalf of future generations.
They are effective collaborators and know how to facilitate the contributions of others and use partnerships to enact positive change.
They are able to envision multiple futures and form networks to advocate for the actions that need to be taken now to stop the bus from plunging into the canyon.
Being a good designer means challenging the status quo and bringing diverse perspectives into the design and decision-making process.
To achieve this, we need to expand our tool kits and mindsets, which includes a shift from human-centred to life-centred thinking and a reduction in dominant western perceptions towards plurality.
Taking a long-distance perspective to shift our approach to making design decisions (Source: https://www.designingtomorrowbook.com)
Making small changes to generate a cumulative impact
Taking urgent action is not a revolution; for it to be effective it has to be an evolution. This is not about yanking the wheel. It’s about making small changes now to generate a cumulative impact over time.
As a consumer, we have the ability to change our own behaviour. With some luck, we can convince a few others within our circle of influence, like our family and friends, to adopt more sustainable ways of living.
The actions of designers and decision-makers, however, are amplified, built into thousands or millions of products and interactions. How those products and interactions are designed has knock-on effects on resource consumption, supply chains, consumer behaviours, and corporate agendas.
As designers, we have the power to influence the front-row occupants that determine the trajectory of the bus barrelling towards the canyon. We have the tools to gather diverse perspectives and visualise multiple future scenarios and the far-reaching impacts they may have.
The Titanic was a human-made masterpiece, a celebration of engineering feats and design brilliance. The first-class decks offered a luxurious experience with a spacious restaurant and Turkish baths. It was precisely this focus on perfecting the first-class travel experience that led to short-sighted decisions like reducing the number of lifeboats.
The short-sighted decisions organisations around the world continue to make today have an indisputable global-scale impact on the environment, communities, and future generations.
To strategically drive change in organisations, we have to realise that our role as designers must go beyond merely designing ‘things’.
What we help to create has the power to influence the impact organisations bequeath the planet.
How to start practising and thinking like a good designer
To elevate the impact of our design work and drive positive change within organisations, we need to adopt a strategic and holistic view—which is what underpins the practice of strategic design.
Strategic design, at its core, is committed to the long-term perspective — the ‘where to go’ part — which requires futures thinking and using tools like scenario planning and backcasting to identify potential futures and the initiatives needed to deliberately shift towards those future states.
We can employ the impact ripple canvas to look for positive and negative big picture impacts, develop a more complete depiction of the entities affected by those impacts with an actant map, and use systems mapping to understand the second- and third-order effects of design decisions.
Instead of a business model canvas that solely prioritises the value proposition for customers, we can turn to the triple layered business model canvas to bring social and environmental perspectives into the design process.
Most importantly, we need to start small.
In the current global climate, trying to affect any kind of positive change may seem like an insurmountable task. But we can achieve a significant impact over time through implementing small steps, one percent at a time.
As designers, we can achieve a significant impact through implementing small change that has a compounding effect over time
Much of our design work is directed towards small changes. Yes, a radical transformation is needed to cut emissions and stop the depletion of ecological resources. But transformation starts with small change that compounds and grows exponentially over time.
This is the opportunity for designers and decision-makers to make a difference.
This article is adapted from the first chapter of the book Designing Tomorrow.
The limits of good design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
