Social commentary through design part 2.

Edd Brown sent me a fantastic email in response to my post on social commentary through design. Edd I hope you don't mind me writing your responce as a proper post, only I've given the issue a lot of thought and I wanted to share them with other people.

First let me say the most important thing I can say (and this applies to all considered comments people might chose to leave on my blog) In absolutely no way do I regard comments as unfounded criticism or insult. The fact that anyone has read and chosen to engage with the issues I raised is in truth some small victory for me. Best of all a little contention or challenge makes me want to raise my game and give an answer.

That aside I may well have misrepresented you opinion because the original comment you left me was very brief, just a sound bite in truth. You gave me some impetus to defend critical design and the importance I see in it. The email I'm responding to now, is a fantastic response, it gives me a much fuller picture of your perspective on design and where you stand.

'I' created this comparison between the design of irrigation pumps for the third world and video cell phones for the first. Perhaps my choice of examples was unfortunate, I wasn't attempting provide a 'moral contrast' between designing the right things (water pumps) and designing the wrong things (mobile phones). What I intended to illustrate was how designing the water pump was almost an exact, measurable science. An objective problem has to be solved, its plain to see if the solution is effective, and indeed whether the designer has done a good job.

The "Hype Cycle of Emerging Trends and Technology". Published each year by the consultants Gartner Research. Provides investors with a 'purchasable mapping' of change brought about by technology. Describes the various phases of maturity, including the "Trough of Disillusionment" and the "Plateau of Productivity".

Design for electronic products and technology happens within a much larger value system, which has formed around the twin influences of consumer culture and electronic technologies. Product designers didn't 'do a bad job' in designing shinny new products, but they are part of a culture which regards complexity, miniaturization and newness as ends in themselves. Combined with the need to generate revenue, I think that they naturally become a bit short sighted in producing products and services, which reap significant, long term human benefits. Its not that big corporations are adverse to producing social beneficial products and services, rather that their still trying to support rather dated business models.

Now it's because of this short sightedness that I think 'critical design' has so much to offer. A really important thing to clarify here is that what's misleading about the term 'Critical Design' is that the word 'Critical' is not used to mean 'critical' as in 'Criticism' – "Hostility or disagreement with the object of criticism." (I think if the work was simply an exercise in 'criticism', that would be pretty deplorable and not really very intelligent either). It means (or should mean for the best pieces of Critical Design) 'Critique' – " A systematic inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a concept or set of concepts, and an attempt to understand its limitations ."


Critical design then; is an academic model of enquiry applied to design. It's not a scientific theory, so you won't find an official 'party line' what issues its supposed to critique, or whether the accused is the design world or society itself. These things are left to the individual will of the designer who employs it as a method. If they're a good-willed, intelligent person, working through the right channels, I think the outcome of their work can be to be positive.

Memphis design: not really critique but aesthetic protest. "An exuberant two-fingered salute to the design establishment after years in which colour and decoration had been been taboo."

It sounds like the term has been tainted for you by a couple of bad examples. I'm not actually familiar with the work of the Campana brothers. But you're description brings Ettore Sotsass' work for Memphis and Superstudio during the mid 1980's to mind. This work might be called 'critical design' in some circles. Taking Memphis for example, they created luridly coloured, deliberately dysfunctional furniture because it was supposed to be a reaction to "the minimal black box furniture of the 1970's". For me that's not really critique, as its really only the expression of an aesthetic preference, I can't really see that it qualifies as particularly savage criticism either (There is, I grant you an element of barefaced self-parody in passing off astronomically priced Italian home wears as some kind of serious commentary.)

But I draw a complete, distinct line between that work and the pieces of critical design which been influenced by and grown out of the RCA's
interaction department during the late 90's onwards. Firstly the context has changed, because we don't only have the aesthetics of products to account for but increasingly the behaviours which electronic products and networks foster in society (or rather those things were issues during the 80's but no one thought of using design as a vehicle to critique them).

Mirroring Tony Dunne speech at the Interaction Design open day last year. I don't think peoples work, leisure, and social networks have been as heavily mediated by technology as they are right now in 2006. Technology affects the richest of the rich, with mobile phones for every six year olds, and puts in place an infrastructure which also affects the poorest of the poor, with intensive call centre training in India.

Cultures or repair and Innovation in India. "Aside from the scale of what's on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice" (via
future perfect)

I don't believe that technology is some autonomous agent dictating an inevitable set of future changes. But I do think (through not giving its implications a very through consideration) we often let it play that role. So now, I think it's more important than it ever has been before to bring debate about our possible implications of new technologies into the public sphere, and critical design is one vehicle for doing that.

It seems very dismissive (and a bit cynical) to announce that because the man on the street can't design tomorrows technology products for himself, but only make comparative judgements about what's on offer, that any bog standard experience is as good as another. I'm sure if you really think that you'll find you didn't mean to make that point. Just taking desktop computing as an example. It is easy to take for granted how many brilliant minds established the metaphors for interaction we depend upon so heavily today. Watching this interview with
Bill Atkinson really brought this home to me;




Were Bill and Doug Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse) getting 'holier than thou' about user experience. Or were they making a comparatively alien technology (a processor which spewed out chains of numbers) into a usable everyday tool.

I don't want to get diverted here, but a lot of the issues I raised in my post, such as learning to view the user as a more sophisticated individual, and tailoring design to human behaviour are not ideas most commonly associated with critical design anyway. But they are linked to other emerging practices such as 'Human Focused Design', 'Service Design', 'Interaction Design' and 'Qualitative User Research'.

You complained that there seemed to be a growing trend for designers to spend their time designing critiquing products. I think this is symptomatic of an industry, which is gradually moving away from designing and manufacturing objects, to an industry which sells knowledge. The area of design press column inches taken up critical/speculative work (+ The RCA Summer show ) might be more than ever before. But I don't think this is in anyway proportionate to the percentage of industry involved in this work, it just receives more attention in the media.

Lastly I can predict the main question on your lips. You'll want me to show you evidence of a piece of Critical Design which has changed things, which has influenced people. I'm afraid this is where my argument falls a little flat. There are not many great examples precisely because critical design is still at a really embryonic stage.




I'm going to give you the example of a project called
ARC: design solutions for post crash civilisation by Jon Arden, a graduate from the royal college. The project presents a range of products and services, for a possible future in which an environmental catastrophe has occurred. Rather than labouring to design a range of environmentally products, he's adopted a critical tack and gone straight for a future worst-case scenario. It takes a project like this for people to actually pay attention to an issue like sustainability, we all seem to have become immune to the sight of another environmentally friendly chair/tent/water bottle at student shows, they appeal to those already engaged with the issue, but beyond that they don't really move the debate on, or facilitate change.



I spoke to Jon at the show and he mentioned developing the project further by working with The Horizon Scanning Institute. HSI are a body which directly advises government policy makers around social and technological change. For me this is a really inspiring example of a designer acting autonomously, and targeting their creativity through the right channels.

Once again thank you for reading my blog and taking the time to write. I hope that I've given a decent response to some of the points you raised.

show and walk

Theres not really much to this post, except that I think the above bamboo speakers are rather beautiful, and a very elegant means of providing the audio guides for exhibitions. The Aimulet LA is a batteryless, light-activated handheld audio communication device, with an outer shell made from molded bamboo, designed by the Information Technology Research Institute at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

They are designed to be held up to your ear like a mobile phone. When you stand over special LED emitters set into the ground, they receive the light signals via an array of spherical micro solar cells set into the bottom of the handset. The signals are then translated into audio messages that are played through a tiny speaker in the device.

(via Pink Tentacle)

designing interactions

A huge archive of video interviews, promoting Bill Moggridge's new design interactions book. Its fascinating to hear how the metaphors for desktop computation were first established. Durrell Bishop's interview is brilliant, he talks about the social value of objects and augmenting physical objects with digital information. Bill Verplank describes interaction so elegantly through description and drawing.

"We're drowning in functionality"

In reference to the dizzying array of dials, buttons, and sliders which adorn everything from cars to mobile phones. MIT professor John Maeda declares us to be 'drowning in functionality'. At the request of wired magazine he applied his scrutiny to Sony's DCR-SR100 camcorder.

I love the idea of giving people pictures of products, and asking them to scribble notations all over the paper. The real gem in Maeda's annotations is the bit where he announces;

"I love the 'Easy' button. It's like "oh, this product is hard to use, but we'll fix it by having an Easy button." Well I kept pressing it, hoping it would get easier, it doesn't!"

His rules are outlines in a book entitled The Laws of Simplicity

(via wired)

Social commentary through design.

I received an interesting question in response to my last post. I wanted to share my response as a new entry;

Don't you think it would be more relevant to society to produce efficient, honest, relevant designs rather than self- indulgent, self- promotional work that aims to provide some form of social commentary schtick?

I apologise, because I don't really have time to engage with this issue in the detail I'd like to. Before I share my thoughts on this I better clarify two points;

I'm looking at design, as someone from a product, industrial design background. My education was in this particular discipline, and many of the frustrations touched upon in my last post are directed towards it.

Secondly when I talk about the need for Social Critique or Commentary in design, I'm primarily interested in this being used to address the unquestioned adoption of new technology, and our values in a consumer culture.

I suppose I should ask you a bit more about what you would term 'honesty' in this context?

Good / Ethical design is supposed to do exactly what you stated,

"to produce efficient, honest, relevant designs"

IDEO helped to develop this human-powered water pump that allows African farmers to continue to grow vegetables into the dry season, and sell the excess to pay for food, water, medicine, and school fees for their family.

Here's efficient, honest, relevant design at its best, a Human-powered irrigation pump (designed in collaboration with IDEO for a non profit organisation in Kenya). The problem it solves is a simple one. Engineering skills are applied. Its parts can be assembled without tools. Its cheap, a simple logistical problem is solved. All very positive. Deciding what efficiency, honesty and relevance are pretty straightforward in this context. Design in this example is not at all self-expressive, its pure process, the simple journey from A to B, from problem to objective solution.

The problem is designers are not commonly asked to address such simple, logistical problems anymore. And when we talk about designing for a surplus, consumer culture, the boundaries become comparatively blurred. The designer may serve his marketing and technologist seniors at Samsung/Motorola/Nokia with an exemplary level efficiency, honesty, skill, and end up only in speeding the delivery of a new mobile phone, which ticks a greater number of boxes in feature review list. Technology is THE driver for development. And the person who ends up owning, using this design (crudely termed as the User or Consumer by the industry itself) is perhaps looking for something more than just use or efficiency. In this context design becomes more of a discipline, which attempts to sell fulfilling experiences, than simple functioning solutions.

(left of the picture) Nokia's N-Gage, a mobile phone and high resolution gaming console in one. The bizarre compromise for the user, is that you have to use the thin edge of the phone to make telephone calls.

The particular problem with electronic consumer products is that however limiting, badly conceived, superficial. When these new products reach the shop floor they have a shinny, official status which people don't seemingly have any opportunity to engage with or question the worth of.

And as degree courses become more vocational, the same model filters down into design education. Those slick models you see at Transport and Industrial design degree shows, are a marketed solution, not ideas to be debated and engaged with. They replicate the same model of official corporate design to infinity. The paradoxical thing about technology is that it’s perceived as a very rational scientific force, and yet it’s applied in the most irrational way, commonly driven only by what’s new and what’s possible.

All in all this is a rather confusing context for designers who simply want to design 'better products'. What is a better product?? One, which is honest and efficient, or one, which enhances experience?

Seymour|Powell's 'ello' mobile phone

What could we call "efficient, honest, relevant" in the context of a technology product like a mobile phone? You might cite an example like Seymour|Powell's 'ello mobile'. The goals of the project where to design a handset which enabled inclusive use for all, young and old. Beyond achieving simple usability I actually find its 'less is more philosophy' quite refreshing.

But what the ello phone doesn't do is to explore the way mobile phones are used in a wider social context, or explore the possibilities for developing richer interactions. This is where Exploratory Interaction Design and Critical Design come into play.

Firstly they foster a culture of critique within the design and technology sphere, provoking debate on the role technology plays in our life, rather than painting a false utopian picture of an imaginary product enhanced existence. Secondly they suggest ideas, which in a mainstream industrial design context maybe considered too silly, poetic, playful to have any genuine credibility. In effect they are more closely informed by human behaviour, than the availability of the latest technologies.

To give this post a little more context I'm going to mention two projects I find particularly poignant. Firstly Carlos Jaramillo’s Hudie . Secondly Synnøve Fredericks Doffing Headphone.

(left) Synnøve Fredericks Doffing Headphone,
(right) Carlos Jaramillo's Hudie

These two projects are very different, but they act to critique a similar theme. You might call both objects ‘Social Props’, their not pieces of technology in themselves, but they explore the way we do interact with technology, particularly within public the spaces we share with others, where emerging mobile technologies encourage us to isolate ourselves.

The Doffing Headphone, is a pair of earphones designed for a social context. It offers a very positive, poetic new gesture of technological etiquette, just like the 'doffing' your cap to someone.

Hudie provides a splendidly isolated environment for the mobile games player, and a rather sinister sceptical for everyone else. This sting in the tail is intentional. But step into any tube carriage and you'll see that the situation it critiques has emerged unchecked, people gaze hypnotically at the screens of their Playstation Portables, business men are hunched in the Blackberry Prayer Position. Critical design in this context stops and asks us if were sure, if these are the kind of behaviours we want to be designing? I imagine the designers of Blackberry and the PSP painted a fairly rosy, utopian picture of their use, and that the development process for each was a model of honesty and efficiency.

Are these pieces of work self-promotional? - YES! Surely the natural aim of any designer is self-promotion. But I find it hard to label critical/speculative work as indulgent or self-serving when it aims to critique such widely held concerns about our relationship with technology. If we simply strive hard to design better products, we get stuck in the same old paradigm’s that have already been established. Mobile phones of the future are supposed to be faster, smaller, packed with new features, the possibilities for fostering meaningful interaction get shut down.

I don't think that the existence of this speculative work detracts in any way from the objective, problem-solving design it co-exists with. But what it does do is to cut a little deeper into the consciousness of the design community and the public.

design questions

Oh dear I promised this blog wouldn't simply spend its posts citing external reference points, but Anne Galloway is on fire this week!

I get very frustrated when artists and designers demand I give them something useful to work with. That I tell them how to make better objects. That I effectively shut down discussion and debate instead of opening them up. I've been asked to bring more social and theoretical concerns to the table, but when I don't give them what they expect or desire, they dismiss the validity or relevance of my work, of sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy...

This echoes the frustrations I felt in my own education. Why must all work, solve a problem stack a shelf (this echoes my header quote a bit). This leads to a slightly reductive way of looking at the world does it not?

I still don't understand why I should set out rules for more socially and culturally responsible design. I don't believe in universalism. Plus, it implies that designers are separate from the objects they produce. That regardless of their own everyday values, their own worldviews and ways of living, there are external, relatively objective guidelines that will make it all better.

Something I also don't understand / That there are 'objective universal guidelines' by which to we design things better. The praised, famous designers of our age seem to be designs terrible children, rule breakers such as Stark and Rashid. Now very recently it seems to be people like James Dyson and Johnathan Ive who we put on a pedestal, they uphold the view that design is a process, that its rational, and exists to solve problems, not as self expression.

In any case the designed objects I love seem to express something unique to their creators. When this happens successfully their creations seem to be imbued with life and poetry. Even if their beauty isn't visible to the majority of the population, does this matter and why? I love George Walker's work because it feels like self-expression, not artefacts flattened to universal norms. But then I despise Karim Rashid's for exactly the same reason; his work is a clear expression of a persona a find mildly repulsive.

There are writers, musicians, painters who have moved me deeply and influenced the course of my life. It would be absurd to argue that art should solve a problem, be understood and consumed by everyone, when its affect upon some people, some of the time is so profound. But then contemporary art often feels like a big “so what” precisely because just "producing a discourse" doen't really feel like enough -

"Within theory, history, and other aspects of the humanities, it's enough to produce a discourse, to frame a debate, AS a discursive statement. In art, there seems to be more expectation of locating the work IN discourse, not AS discourse.

Furniture design also feels a bit lame at times. Is it really enough just to establish a beautiful form and an efficient means of manufacturing that form? But at the same time I do admire that sort of hands on connection with your craft which it advocates. Product designers commonly seem to view themselves as part of a larger process, and the meanings of the objects they create have already been established, they just produce another variation on the torch or mobile phone.