Transdisciplinary Design

A layer of hope on the canvas

Posted on November 23, 2021

On Thursday, November 18th, 2021, I found myself in a strange in-between place in time.

I started my day reading Speculative Everything by Professors Dunne and Raby, who proposed that designers could be facilitators of “social dreaming” [1]. At noon, during a panel discussion, I observed and listened to four experts discussing the possible futures of data and humanity. In the afternoon, I took notes as my professor Jamer shared suggestions on internships and future employment. Finally, at night, I drowned myself in a cycling studio filled with nightclub-level noisy beats. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the four activities I engaged in that day all point to the future — they range from the near to the far, from the personal to the universal. Even while cycling, my present self was constantly thinking about my future self, who would feel rejuvenated. Thinking about the future helps me get through the thick and uncomfortable present.

As I was preparing to wrap up my day, I received a photo from my uncle in Guangzhou, China. It was a photo of my grandma, in her wheelchair with her usual attire and an adorable maroon-colored hat on, sitting in her apartment with the familiar dim light in the background. I was reminded that my nighttime is my family’s daytime and that with the 12-hour time difference, we were literally on the opposites of this reality. With their realistic quality, photos always point backward in time. However, the future is something not yet defined — it is abstract and has not been given form; it points forward in time and always lures me in. Receiving this photo of my grandma felt like someone yelling at me while I was dreaming, telling me to stop thinking aimlessly about the future and instead take a closer look at the present.

While I was thinking about the world’s future of technology and data, the planet’s future with the changing climate and pollution, my own future of working as a design researcher, what was my grandma thinking? I wonder. What does “future“ mean for her?

 

The future was not an abstraction nor a metaphor for my parents and their generation. Since the Chinese economic reform in 1978, my dad was among the first few groups of young people to get into prestigious Chinese universities through Gaokao, the National College Entrance Examination. For young people like my parents once were, Gaokao promised a brighter future with better employment and a better quality of life for the family. With the Open Door Policy, China welcomed foreign investments with hospitality; studying Finance, my dad was determined and eager to make use of the opportunity and become an entrepreneur. All the new structures in late-70s China significantly extended my parents’ beliefs of what was even possible and what “the future” could mean for them. Young people were suddenly granted mobility, economic opportunity, as well as a faint taste of liberty and freedom.

I was reminded of a quote by Erik Olin Wright on “Envisioning Real Utopias”, which I read from Speculative Everything:

“The actual limits of what is achievable depend in part on the beliefs people hold about what sorts of alternatives are viable.” [2]

 

Flashback to November 18th, 2021, staring into my phone screen, I wasn’t sure how to respond to the photo of my grandma. Part of me felt the urgent need to help her decorate the apartment with more flowers, to help sew the buttons on her clothes as her eyesight continued to worsen, or simply to help her go outside in her wheelchair. I could be doing all these things to make her immediate life more pleasant right now, yet I was here in another country studying and thinking how could design make the world a better place in the future — how grand of an endeavor.

What is making my situation muddier and perhaps ridiculous is that, after learning about all the wicked problems that exist in the world, I can’t help but feel powerless as one of the many design students who were once optimists. According to Rittel & Webber, Wicked problems are “never solved, and at best they are re-solved — over and over again.” [3]

Standing in the middle of the road and scared to take a step in any direction, I encountered this quote from my professor, Jamer Hunt, in his essay Anticipating Future System States:

“Designing to solve complex systems is impossible. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to model heuristically their tendencies, potentialities, and misbehaviors.” [4]

As the complexity of all the problems that need to be solved continues to paralyze us, would using design as speculation be one of our only ways out? I began to think back to Dunne & Raby’s argument for speculative design:

“Speculative design can be a catalyst… to inspire imagination and a feeling that more is definitely possible.” [1]

Instead of changing how the future might look like, can I map the past and the present to find poetry and beauty in the world’s scale and expanse, like what artist Julie Mehretu tried to accomplish through her artworks? How could I swim through layered histories of the past to propose new surfaces of possibility and hope? Does the secret to great art and design works lie in one’s ability to find the best proposal of an alternative way of looking, existing, and believing?

Like many of my classmates, I was skeptical of how a proposal can impact real people in the real world. But when I think back on the old photos in the albums at home, I see on my parents’ young faces the yearning for the future promised to them. I was brought to this world only because they believed in their future, in my future, and in someone’s proposal of a better future. The one thing I am sure about now is that I am not skeptical of hope.

 

– Shan,D. 2021.

 

Citations

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1. Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, 2014.
2. Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010.
3. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences, vol. 4, no. 2, 1973, pp. 155–169., https://doi.org/10.1007/bf0140573
4. Hunt, Jamer. “Anticipating Future System States.” Journal of Futures Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, Mar. 2019, pp. 119–128., https://doi.org/10.6531/JFS.201903_23(3).0011.