Do we need a new design matrix?
‘Design ’ asserted industrial designer Victor Papenak, ‘is the primary underlying matrix of life’. When a design project starts, we select certain knowledge to influence how that design ends up. But, here’s the thing that makes design complex; each human on the planet designs their own matrix of life formed by multi-experiences, multi-ways of doing, multi-ways of being, multi-joy, multi-hate, multi-choice, multi-politic, multi-faith... What we end up with is a pluriverse of approaches to design and not one matrix to follow.
It is true that one design can’t meet the needs of all possible pluriverses – that’s impossible. But to design for a world which has multiple versions of what is the primary underlying matrix of life we have to check if we continually follow a similar matrix to design things by. Because, if we are, the concern is that the more we design for a particular matrix, by default, we will encourage more of that experience. Encouraging increasing disparity between historical systemic issues we face such as socio-economic divides, gender inequalities and systemic racism. Is it possible that a new design matrix might help dismantle parts of these systems?
A million different view points
An example of showing the multiple different ways to design life has been emphasised during this unusual moment of an ‘we’re all in it together’ mentality to support and care for people during the Coronavirus pandemic. This togetherness, however, is more about a shared experience at the same time, rather than the same experience. The evidence is clear – our experiences have been uniquely different depending on a myriad of factors such as; socio-economic, gender and health. These experiences have brought to the surface many problems to solve, and possibly, previous design processes have not allowed enough different viewpoints to capture the prism of knowledge and data to help design in new ways. Perhaps we have been too linear, solving things in ways that are familiar and safe to eliminate risk and have clung to the same, outdated design matrix.
Sameness gatecrashes design
As it turns out, being the same is actually boring. And the multiverses we live out in a shared world reveals how creative we are and makes the world a much more interesting place to spend our days. However, if we design through a lens that is narrow and exhaustive, then what we get will be dull. What seems unfortunate, is that this sameness gatecrashes the structures of how and what we design and that sometimes we are not even aware to notice how narrow we have got.
At the moment, it seems questioning design is more up for grabs and perhaps open for conversation – an increased capacity to perhaps dismantle the gaslighting tactics in which a person or entity makes another person question the way they live and their worth. Without a doubt, it can be difficult for many of us to go beyond the boundaries of our experiences but when we enter a boundary we are unfamiliar with, do designers have the right practices in place to notice their own cognitive bias’ and commit to understanding an unfamiliar world to design in new ways?
Borrow the lives of others
During the design process, it is important to make sure that the way a person lives their life, that is different to us, is perceived as equally valuable. In fact, in Change by Design by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO an international design consultancy suggests, the design process can be seen as a way to ‘borrow’ the lives of other people to inspire new ideas. Advocating that we need to recognise that an others strategy for coping and ways of living might be very different from our own, and we can learn from their “confusing, complex, and contradictory world in which they live.”
Every design project starts with us, humans – individual people and in order to design we need to demonstrate and make sure that the people in the project represent the experiences and needs to help ideas to emerge. A strategy to help design for these pluriverses is to collect knowledge and data to shape it. However, if we choose a bias dataset for instance or the wrong data, by default designs will be skewed. Caroline Criado Pére plainly details this in her book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Caroline, discusses the missed opportunity of using other human experiences – women other than men, to help design the world, “when we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights”.
New knowledge to design a new matrix
Going back to the ‘we’re all in it together’ mentality, very early on in the pandemic new data revealed that people who live in poorer areas in the UK are more likely to die than those who live in richer areas. A Sky News report put it clearly that, “Yes, we are all in it together. But some more than others.” More recently, Office of National Statistics announced that Black people were four times more likely to die from Covid-19, again highlighting that our recent experiences have brought to the surface many problems to solve, and Helen Barnard, acting director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said, “With the Bank of England now forecasting the deepest recession on record, we must ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in after the virus passes…It doesn’t have to be like this. As a society that prides itself on justice and compassion, we can and must do better.”
Barnard’s statement is rather open and perhaps interpretive, but it is good starting point. What all designers should be asking; what kind of society do we want to live in and can we design a better underlying matrix of life to support it?
A short essay inspired from Ma-kin sense conversation on the topic 'the real world'. The group of reflectors: Laura Cloke, John O'Reilly and Katherine Simpson.