Designer as Facilitator
Posted on December 15, 2019“Design is big enough to swallow the world if we let it” – Matt [1]
What if, a designer wasn’t a person who came into “problem areas” equipped with a set of “human-centered design thinking” toolkits and armed with Post-It notes – who then collected the thoughts of the target audience and went away to decide on the best solution to be implemented through products or services? [2] What if, instead, a designer was a person whose job it was, by invitation, solely to create a space for affected communities to come together to articulate their own problems and discover their own interventions? These are two very different ways of thinking about the role of a designer. But what if?
And that difference matters. According to Napier and Wada, “Professionals in arenas such as healthcare, business management and education have made concerted efforts to adopt designerly approaches to identifying, framing, operationalizing, and, eventually, assessing the efficacy of new initiatives.” [3] And as Davies points out, “‘Innovation’ and ‘creativity’ are now tedious obligations of every middle manager and worker, having lost whatever modernist zeal they ever had”. [4] If Design and design thinking has been co-opted by corporations and governments to maximize the efficiency of their operations, then where are the voices of the people who are affected by the decisions made by these massive parties?
What is the role of the designer in this expanded notion of design? We are gradually becoming more aware of the systems that operate around us and how they touch all parts of our lives. Designers are being asked to take a more active role in the design and operation of these systems, and before you know it, design will have swallowed the present and the future. Indeed, Davies believes that the future has already been determined, “…no enclave outside the grid. No future beyond already emerging trends…there is already an abundance of conservative visions of the future, even if they are not always recognized as such. An industry of ‘futurists’ seeks to narrate futures in such a way that they can be brought under managerial control, pre-empted, offset, and planned for…” [5]
But we can still change the future. If we accept that designers are being given this great mantle of responsibility, then it is our job to ensure that our work is not furthering historically harmful practices or flawed solutions as best as we can. There’s already a lot of energy towards this idea: Co-design, Equity-Centered Community Design, and Participatory Design Methods are all different ways to disrupt the current Design Solution paradigms and open up the possibility of empowering the people who are living and breathing in rich problem spaces we look into from the outside. Augusto Boal believed this was possible. His methods of Forum Theatre allowed people to “rehearse the revolution” [6] by role-playing moments of oppression and crisis plus how to change the situation and outcomes.*
But is this solution too small? Do we run the risk of trapping ourselves in “folk-politics” as Srnicek and Williams would call it? Are our current design methods trapped in the same outdated modes of intervention as petitions and sit-ins are today? “Petitions, occupations, strikes, vanguard parties, affinity groups, trade unions: all arose out of particular historical conditions. Yet the fact that certain ways of organising and acting were once useful does not guarantee their continued relevance”. [7] It’s great to say we are empowering “the people” to find their own interventions with co-design, but does it really matter if it doesn’t actually work? Does it matter how participatory the method is if it doesn’t effect change at any scale beyond the hyperlocal?
So what do we do? How do we completely rethink the role of a designer from an expert outsider to one of a facilitator? How do we use design to empower people in large scale systemic ways while avoiding the traps of “folk politics”? Should we?
I don’t know.
But I suspect there are threads of answers lying in Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies and some participatory design methods, but that these need to be updated for the current moment, or even speculated into the future. I also believe this is likely the work of a lifetime. We’re at a sea change in our society where we are starting to acknowledge the system-wide forces at play, while still tied to old methods and tools. How might we, as designers, create these spaces for communities to affect change in new ways? How might this happen on a systems-wide scale? Is it possible?
[1] Thackara, John, Paola Antonelli, Paola Antonelli, Ricky Jackson, and Paola Antonelli. 2019. “Republic Of Salivation (Michael Burton And Michiko Nitta)”. Design And Violence. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/republic-of-salivation-michael-burton-and-michiko-nitta/.
[2] phases and phrases taken from the IDEO Field Guide to Human-Centered Design
[3] Napier, P. & Wada, T. “Defining Design Facilitation: Exploring New, Strategy Leadership Roles for Designers and What These Mean for the Future of Design Education.” Edited by Gibson, M.R. Dialectic 1.1 (2016): 154-178. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/dialectic.14932326.0001.110
[4] Davies, William. 2018. Economic Science Fictions. 1st ed. London: Goldsmiths Press. p 26
[5] ibid. p 20-26
[6] Boal, Augusto. 2013. Theatre Of The Oppressed. Theatre Communications Group.
[7] Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. n.d. Inventing The Future. London: Verso.
* To be fair, Theatre of the Oppressed NYC has tried to bring this small-scale community change to a larger city-wide scale through their Legislative Theatre festival. Lawmakers are invited to the festival and asked to pledge to law changes and proposals developed by the communities. This has led to adjustments in housing laws and IDNYC policies. Source: Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. 2017. “The Impact Of Theatre Of The Oppressed NYC Legislative Theatre On New York City Policy And Civic Engagement”. New York City: David Rockefeller Fund. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/tonyc/pages/53/attachments/original/1518111556/LegislativeTheatre_Report_02.01_Screen.pdf?1518111556.
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