Scales of Intervention
Posted on December 10, 2009 | posted by:When I’m giving presentations about the launch of the TransDesign program, I often refer to an example from my earlier teaching to describe how we might frame a transdisciplinary design project. More particularly, it relates to how the varying scales of a problem allow for different kinds of responses—what I am calling scalar thinking.
A former student, Beth Van Why, was working on her thesis project in a graduate program in Industrial Design that I used to direct at The University of the Arts. She was a regular volunteer on a project that brought dental supplies and mobile dentistry to villages in Guatemala. The problem was that each year the group had to pack up huge piles of supplies into bags that they could check in the regular luggage compartment on an airplane and in the overhead bin. It took weeks of packing in advance of leaving for the project, and then everything that wasn’t used was packed back up and returned with them to the US.
Now, as an industrial designer, one’s first impulse might be to redesign the bag to make it easier to pack and store the supplies so that the relief agency could have more standardized packing units. However, if you broaden your perspective and move out one power of ten—as the Eames might say—then you realize that each year the volunteers brought supplies down and back, and that a more fitting solution would be to design a storage facility so that some supplies could be left behind in Guatemala, for use the next year. At this scale, the problem shifts from one of product design to an architectural project—designing a shed for storing supplies year round. However, if you move out yet another level, you see the problem in even new ways. It turns out, as Beth discovered, that there are literally dozens of relief agencies that all bring their own supplies back and forth from Guatemala every year. Now, instead of having each agency bring all of its supplies back and forth—at great cost, what if you implemented a system of sharing. For example, rather than have every agency—all of which are strapped for resources—buy an electrical generator that they only use for a few weeks of the year, why not introduce a resource-sharing system that allows 20 partners to share that one generator? Like car sharing systems, you “own” the service only when you need it, and not during the rest of the (idle) year. For this response, a designer needs skills in systems analysis and creation and service design, at the very least. But if you move out one more power of ten, you begin to realize that the need for medical and relief services has now become a full-time, year-round job for agencies. And why? Because of a range of global processes such as resource inequalities, climate change (more meteorological disasters), and land settlement patters (too many people building in flood zones, for example). A designer wanting to address this level of change must begin to consider whether she can intervene, and really make a difference, at the level of national policy and international cooperation.
The point is, at different scales we see the need for different responses that call on different capacities of the designer. The trick, it seems to me, is for the designer to be able to identify which level is most feasible for real impact. If all you have is limited resources and a background in product design, then redesigning the bag might be the most strategic move. But if you have the capacity to affect change at the level of systems and you have partners who are willing to collaborate at that level, then the resource-sharing might effect the most change. Part of the ambition of the TransDesign program is equip designers with the ability to frame problems across these scales and to determine at what level one can best have a substantial impact.