Expression or Impact: A designer’s dilemma
Exploring opinions, reflections and discourse around today’s #Speculativedesign #Socialdesign practices. Traversing through the dilemma of designing to express or as a means to bring impact.
Does designing for a cause bring “measurable impact?”
Is the scope of design dialogue limited to the “privileged” and “think tanks?”
Do these buzzwords like designing for impact, provocative design and design to transform behaviour actually bring “meaningful change?”
Does design end up being an elitist, expressionist medium of “visual pleasure?”
Is it wrong for design to become “artsy?”
These questions have been bugging me for some time now. These musings have been an obsession, especially in the last few months. It’s a constant nag in the back of my mind to figure out the emerging pathways that shape the design community’s interactions today!
I started talking to other designers, tinkerers, creative practitioners and futurists, curious to listen to their journeys, inspirations and responses.
Here are a few thoughts about speculative design. “Speculative” basically entails a form of future envisioning. Recently, the design community has been keen on using this practice to foresee and project the implications and impact of the future.
While discussing with a designer, she discusses the inaccessibility of speculative design methods and approaches, which become more art, less function, and impact-driven. Her current design practice has moved to a more narrative and fiction-based approach, with an exciting balance of speculation and design impact. However, she finds the traditional notion of design fiction too artsy and far-fetched.
“Speculative design, especially the Silicon Valley manifestation of it, is culturally insipid by design. Can we ground it in culture and by focusing on the mundane and make it more nuanced and relatable?” says Mansi, a foresight and innovation strategist and founder of Future Tense Inc.
Indeed, the commercial and popular design inspirations come from the tech giants and the Western part of the Globe, especially in India. I could relate with Mansi when she says, “Mainstream speculative design can be unrelatable and tends to project a singular vision/prediction rather than a nuanced, pluralist perspective of multiple possible futures”.
Get Vidit Jain’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
“Speculative design can and should merge with applied forms of design, and there’s a decent number of people starting to do it, particularly within systems design, policy design and some fringes of service design”, says Santini Basra, design practitioner from Andthen Ltd. UK.
These instances certainly make a good discussion around the balance of functionality and relatability in speculative design practices of now.
I had a similar discussion with social designers and creatives working on designing for impact. Here are some of the opinions from there.
“Often, when we do social design and want to bring a direct impact, the people we engage with for qualitative interviews and conversations might not benefit directly. As you mentioned about your project “Interwoven,” the end outcome was a toolkit for social experts, not those directly affected…” says a design practitioner working for social impact.
Influence and power often hold designers handicapped, ending up in a helpless condition. We discussed how social design and designing for impact becomes a complex systemic intervention where the nature and quality of collaboration between stakeholders directly affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the design intervention. The working of those intricate webs of direct and indirect, seen systems which makes a systemic design successful.
Who gives designers this power even to think they can solve these societal issues and concerns? Designing for social impact is a “sensitive area.”
“We need to consider who has the agency in design and engage and co-design with not just experts but the people and ecosystems that will be most impacted by these designs. We need to discard the solutionist approach and instead design emergent processes that seek to build with these communities, not just for them.” — says Mansi.
Reflecting upon my experience with social impact and design, I have engaged with Manav Sadhna, an NGO working for the rights of the underserved communities of Ahmedabad, for a classroom team project- Interwoven — It was an exciting, challenging, eye-opening process. At first, the main challenge was to make the stakeholders understand design and its role as a facilitator. The project aimed to investigate and bring communal harmony between the different marginalised and secluded communities in Ahmedabad. Through ethnographic research, we built interesting insights and synthesised and found ways to respond to the recognised challenges. It was a challenging and overwhelming experience. Seeing the gamut of problems and the wickedness of the socio-economic and political factors affecting the overarching system, we felt helpless.
What it made me learn is to use design thinking and methodology as a tool to facilitate. I realised to decide what is good and bad! Moreover, my role was to interact, co-create, co-design participatory engagements with the stakeholders, knitting the city's fabric, making its boundaries socially sustainable.
So, the impact of the design interventions depended on the stakeholders' participation; the more it was felt that the ideas were co-owned and not passed from us designers, the more pragmatic and perennial they were. But doesn’t that obtrude the designers’ expression?
It feels like I’m in endless circles of impact and expression. If one does go up, the other recedes. However, all approaches have a commonality — an aspect of transformation, the willingness to make dreams actionable. When the context is to bring impact in a particular scenario, the type of expression changes; it is “context-specific.” In the social design context, the expression depends on the methodology/ framework/ process, which can change according to the audience’s need and the expressionist style of the designer conducting/facilitating the research/workshop. When you design an artefact for a museum, the expression is in the medium and style you use to convey your story/vision. But still, how much of it depends on the target audience’s preference and the designer’s take?
To summarise, I want to conclude this with three broad questions based on the mentioned discussions, thoughts and findings:
- What would happen if we merge speculative design practices with applied design, making them more relatable? Would that help ground expressionist provocation with actionable measures?
- What if we gain a pluralistic stance on speculative/ discursive approaches; would a cultural stance help make it more accessible? How would that merge with the individual expression of the designer?
- What if we create a measuring instrument/ tool to assess the stakeholders' participation quality and efficiency, ensuring collaboration at different levels? Would that bring efficiency in monitoring hindrances like politics, social stigma and socio-economic conditions? Would this help designers balance their take without compromising the impact of the intervention?
___
