Doctor Who the Designer
Posted on December 17, 2018Science fiction has always been a space where anything can happen, a space dedicated to imagining other worlds or, often more powerful, speculating about alternative versions of Earth. Arguably, science fiction is an ultimate version of speculative design. Doctor Who illustrates through stories where humankind could go, and while it usually isn’t a utopian vision, the flaws point to critical areas of society that we can focus on today.
In short, Doctor Who is the story of a man in a box, traveling through time and space. The Doctor is an alien that looks human, is roughly 2,000 years old, and has the ability to ‘regenerate,’ allowing their memories and essence to stay the same while their physical body and personality alter. The series ran from 1963 to 1989 and was resumed in 2005. The Doctor usually travels with one to a few humans, referred to as companions.
While fictional, the show has a “believable series of events that led to the new situation.” (Dunne and Rabe, 4) Particularly through the Doctor’s traveling human companions, the viewers are able to see someone like themselves go through stages of disbelief to acceptance of the existence of these worlds. From there the possibilities become endless, whether in the past, present, or future. much of the show focuses on life on Earth. Again, through the human companions of the Doctor, each adventure is related back to humankind and “inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that imaginary world.” (Dunne and Rabe, 1)
While the show structure itself is brilliantly set up to serve as speculative design, more than that, the Doctor themselves embodies what it means to be a designer.
Systems & Nonlinearity
“This is one corner… of one country, in one continent, on one planet that’s a corner of a galaxy that’s a corner of a universe that is forever growing and shrinking and creating and destroying and never remaining the same for a single millisecond.”
The Doctor, Season 7, Episode 4
The Doctor is constantly thinking at different scales and within a systems context, perhaps the largest system there is – the universe, across time and space. Most episodes start with the premise that something, or someone, within a world has disrupted the system, leading to chaos and destruction. The Doctor’s goal is to either reverse that disruption, or through a mapping of the system, find a different leverage point. While the Doctor usually reveals their discoveries in a monologue, the process is one that is rarely completed alone or without the help from that world’s locals. In Rosa, the Doctor literally maps the system on the wall of a hotel room, relying on knowledge from their companions.
While accepting the interconnectivity of the world and displaying an understanding of systems, the Doctor rejects linearity and that there is ever an absolute understanding of the world. In perhaps the most famous quote from the Doctor, “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.” (Blink, S3 E10) As a designer it is challenging to stay in the messiness of the world and, instead, attempt to force everything into neat little boxes, but the Doctor demonstrates that living in that space is alright, even beneficial! Design problems are each unique and situated within an infinite cycle of cause and effect. How the designer places the problem within time and space changes what solution is chosen and implemented. The Doctor’s philosophy is a critical reminder that the world is complex and it is important to avoid reducing problems to a “strict progression of cause and effect.” Complexity is overwhelming, but the alternative, oversimplification, can be more dangerous.
Responsibility & the Anthropocene
The daily life of the Doctor involves solving wicked problems. Wicked problems involve society and their solutions center around values of good or bad or, “more likely, as ‘better or worse.’” (Rittel and Webber, 163) Every attempt to solve a wicked problem leaves repercussions and traces that “cannot be undone.” (Rittel and Webber, 163) Thus, the responsibility of a designer working on a wicked problem is enormous, and no one takes that responsibility more seriously than the Doctor, extending this consideration to all creatures of the world.
In fact, the Doctor gives special dedication to those with no voice, pushing back when one species evolves through the sacrifice of another. In The Beast Below, humankind is surviving on a giant ship after solar flares made Earth uninhabitable. Sadly, it is discovered that the ship is built upon the back of a captured and tortured star whale, a giant whale-like creature. In order to clear their conscious, every five years the individuals aboard the ship are given the choice to forget the torturous nature of the ship or be fed to the whale. In this example of an extreme niche construction, humans have rejected the responsibility of being “ecosystem managers with attendant ethical and practical responsibilities.” (Fuentes) Faced with an extreme choice of, “What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance,” the Doctor chooses the only option they can see to end suffering and save the most people, “knock out its [the whale’s] higher functions, leaving it a vegetable. The ship will still fly, but the whale won’t feel it.” (Haraway, 2)
(In a twist, the whale is set free by the Doctor’s companion and it is revealed the whale’s original intention was to help the humans and instead of abandoning the humans, stays voluntarily. If only there was an attempt to understand other creatures and an attempt at cooperation, much suffering could have been avoided.)
The Doctor takes special care to refrain from jumping to conclusions about what is causing a problem in any situation, restraining from judging actions until the motivations are made clear. Multiple storylines have illustrated how creatures may be seen as evil, but are really misunderstood or stuck in a world that isn’t their own. Rather than jumping to killing, the Doctor always tries to understand the forces at work and whether the situation can be solved in a nonviolent manner. For example, in the episode Hide, the Doctor lands in 1974 in what appears to be a haunted mansion; however, the Doctor is able to conclude the ‘ghost’ is actually a stuck time traveler in need of help.
In both of these scenarios, the Doctor is exemplifying the great responsibility of a designer. They navigate situations with explicit care to every actor involved, especially advocating on behalf of other-than-human actors that may not have voice. The Doctor also doesn’t stop until they find the root of the problem, not just taking the problem at face value, demonstrating a true understanding of wicked problems, “To find the problem is thus the same thing as finding the solution; the problem can’t be defined until the solution has been found. The formulation of a wicked problem is the problem!” (Rittel and Webber, 161) As a designer there is much to learn from the Doctor in their approach to ‘solving the world’ over and over again. The Doctor teaches that “we need to be more cognizant of these processes and impacts and recognize that nothing we do is only about us (as a species or individuals).” (Fuentes) Even though this cognition often complicates the problem, ignoring it means ignoring our responsibility as designers.
Nobody’s Perfect
While the Doctor has much to teach us as designers, nobody is perfect. Looking beyond blatant racism or sexism in the original Doctor Who series (which current interactions of the Doctor have begun to call out upon themselves, such as in the episode Twice Upon a Time), the Doctor’s habit of dropping into foreign worlds or times and immediately taking charge to ‘fix’ everything is certainly demonstrative of a white-savior complex. The Doctor is white, and for the last 12 iterations, a man. They are often portrayed as a hero and all too often, storylines show the fate of a world lying in the hands of the Doctor, rather than the hands of the inhabitants. Is the speculative design of Doctor Who demonstrative of colonialist speculative design as described by Pedro Oliveira and Luiza Prado?
Additionally, the main symbol of the Doctor, their ship the TARDIS (time and relative dimension in space), is a police box. While originally the ship was intended to change the exterior to camouflage with whatever place it was in, the budget of the show didn’t allow for this and instead it was said that that feature of the ship was broken. The TARDIS is often seen as a safe haven for those in trouble and its arrival a sign that help is on the way; however, would a police box appearing in the middle of a Black Lives Matter protest be seen a symbol of safety?
Doctor Who doesn’t always get it right. The show and the Doctor could absolutely take notes from Oliveira and Prado’s Cheat-Sheet for a Non (or Less) Colonialist Speculative Design, as well as Sandrine Micossé-Aikins’s 7 Things You Can Do To Make Your Art Less Racist. For example, the first point on both lists, acknowledge the truth, should be done more explicitly in every single story line. And while there have been people of color on the show in the role of companion, they are often portrayed through a number of stereotypes, showing the need for the writers of the show to take a critical look at their own work and privilege.
Yet, the Doctor also has a long history of political and social awareness, demonstrated through this list of over 100 key moments. Furthermore, the Doctor themselves, consistently struggles with their role as a designer. The Doctor is aware that their actions have results and question their role in intervening. So while the Doctor isn’t perfect as a designer, nobody else is either, and the Doctor shows how to move through that imperfection and work to improve. Although there is still much that needs to be done within the show to prove a full critical self-reflection and acknowledgement of the racist and colonialist components of the show, the newest season and Doctor is a testification to the continual self-improvement that the Doctor demonstrates as a designer.
Empowerment and Stories
The most powerful moments of Doctor Who are when the Doctor doesn’t save the day. Instead, when the Doctor empowers someone to save their own world and write their own destiny. This I believe is the highest power of design, as a tool to allow people to change their own situation.
Bruno Latour writes, “Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past. It is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures,” and then challenges designers, “where are the visualization tools that allow the contradictory and controversial nature of matters of concern to be represented?” (151, 163)
In this, Latour overlooks perhaps the oldest visualization tool there is: stories. Doctor Who proves the power of stories; not only is the show itself speculative design through storytelling, but the moments in which the Doctor allows for people (and other-than-human kind) to write their own stories shine through as the brightest moments of design.
In the episode Rosa, the Doctor and their companions travel back in time to Alabama, 1955. The episode centers around ruining the plans of another time traveler whose goal is to change the moment Rosa Parks refused to stand for a white passenger on a segregated bus. At the end, the Doctor successfully ensures that Parks is able to make her decision that marked a critical moment in the US civil rights movement. What highlights this episode as an example of what I see as exemplary design is that the Doctor allowed for Rosa Parks to make the decision on her own, the Doctor wasn’t there to set off the civil rights movement, but to give Parks the opportunity to do it herself.
The episode also touches on what it means to be present as a designer and the influence that may have within that community. One of the Doctor’s companions is forced to be the white person on the bus that Parks refuses to stand for. He says, “I don’t want to be part of this.” Another character realizes, “We were here, we’re part of the story, part of history.” As designers, this is a question that has to be grappled with over and over again. How are we able to empower others and in those actions, how are we part of the story?
Doctor Who both faces and navigates those questions in every episode. Their actions and the outcome isn’t always perfect, but how they react and move forward also teaches us how to move through failure and hold ourselves to higher standards as designers. A higher standard to not participate in symbolic violence, racism, or colonialist actions and to not shy away from those discussions just because it isn’t easy. The Doctor reminds us that our role as designers isn’t to save the world alone, but to work with people and give them the ability to create their own change.
The goal of the Doctor is stated clearest through the words of Haraway:
“My multispecies storytelling is about recuperation in complex histories that are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as beginnings. In the face of unrelenting historically specific surplus of suffering in companion species knottings, I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together.” (10)
And although Doctor Who may be fiction, designers can still learn a lot, both through the actions of the Doctor as designer and the speculative design of the story itself, because, as the Doctor once said:
“I’ll be a story in your head. But that’s OK: We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?” (Doctor Who S5E13)
– Lauren
Sources
Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto
EXCEPT FOR THAT TIME: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL AWARENESS IN DOCTOR WHO
THE WEIRD RACISM OF DOCTOR WHO
For Black Doctor Who fans, the TARDIS is a legendary, loaded image
Is Doctor Who finally getting it right on race?
Doctor Who: Why has the Rosa Parks episode got people talking?
A powerful Doctor Who ensures Rosa Parks is the hero of her own story
Becoming Human with Others in the Anthropocene: The Long View
7 Things You Can Do To Make Your Art Less Racist – A comprehensive How-To-Guide
Cheat Sheet for a Non- (or Less-) Colonialist Speculative Design
Dr Who ‘longest-running sci-fi’
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2014). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. S.l.: MIT.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Latour, B. (2008). A cautious Prometheus?: A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk). Cornwall: Design History Society Falmouth.
Meadows, D. H., & Wright, D. (2015). Thinking in systems: A primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1972). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Berkeley: Univ. of California.