Getting Messy: Welcoming Disaster in Transdisciplinary Design
Posted on December 6, 2016What Is TransD
As my first semester in the Transdisciplinary Design program comes to a close, I think I finally understand how to explain what transdisciplinary design is.
This is me when I first began:
This is me now:
The Assumptions Behind TransD
After a lively class spent debating whether it’s possible to measure the impact of design interventions, a forgotten light bulb finally came back on in my head.
We were all talking about measuring the “success” or impact of an intervention, but we danced around the underlying assumption that the intervention itself is a valid response to a social issue. Who created that intervention and why?
More questions followed: ought we to design interventions? And if we ought to, how ought we to design? How do we understand the designer’s role within society’s social impact fabric?
As a field, transdisciplinary design is extremely complex, and not just because systems thinking is very complex (detailed, semi-unreadable stakeholder/relationship spiderweb maps everywhere!). TransD is messy because the very notion of “doing good” is messy. Because human beings are messy. And by virtue of being a discipline committed to both improving the world and involving many different kinds of human beings at all points, TransD is SUPER messy.
Most of us entered the program with some aspiration of changing or improving something: climate change, poverty, violation of human rights, you know the list. And we all saw some aspect of the program that seemed uniquely equipped to tackle these global issues.
But where was the moment to come together to question whether we could do good, whether we should do good and what “doing good” even means? It’s awfully presumptive, isn’t it?
Ah, but transdisciplinary design has a tool for targeting presumption: systems mapping. It’s our failsafe for trying to catch our assumptions and to make decisions that will have tangible, desired results.
And I have to say, design thinking, systems mapping, post-its and big white boards—they are some of the most effective tools I’ve experienced to date when it comes to understanding intractable problems, especially in group settings. Design thinking offers a significantly more expansive, visual, nonlinear and flexible way to portray issues, events, systems, histories and more.
However, when considering the role of a designer, the problems arise in doing, not just thinking and ideating. As always, everything works great in theory. Putting theories into practice is when they go awry. I only have perfect conversations with my family in my head. Then I open my mouth and . . .
Even if designers base their interventions off solid, nuanced thinking, does it follow that their interventions will be “good”, that they will make the world better?
If it does follow: how valid and nuanced can the thinking itself be? As professor and designer John Bruce says, “Every systems map is wrong.” It’s impossible to map “accurately” all the factors involved in an issue like homelessness. Invariably something is missing or drawn in disproportionate relationship.
Okay, okay. But, let’s say all interventions are somewhat flawed or insufficient, they wouldn’t make things worse would they?
Design Imperialism: Am I Colonialist?!
That was a leading question, I know. But one that was hotly debated back in 2010 when Bruce Nussbaum published “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism? Does Our Desire to Help Do More Harm Than Good?”
The article led to a string of responses arguing along the spectrum. Nussbaum raises a question that anyone doing social impact work has encountered since the generally acknowledged Big Cruel Mistake of colonialism and missionary work: are we barging in and imposing what we believe would be good for these other people, in turn undermining everything they are and believe? *Note: the us/them language I use here is itself part of the issue, something I will come back to later in my post*
In “An Open Letter to Bruce Nussbaum,” David Stairs critiques Nussbaum saying, “My more immediate gripe is that it has taken you so long to come around to your current point about ‘humanitarian design’ and that, only now, when it has finally become obscenely popular to do so, you have spoken out.”
I’m with Stairs on this one. I was shocked that everyone else was shocked. Isn’t this the first thing people question and deeply investigate when considering how they want to make change? Are designers not already discussing power and privilege and colonialism and historical + present trauma and identity and their role in all of that?
Thus, though the question felt old, I found Nussbaum’s article provoking for reasons entirely different than his “controversial” theme—his language and his kind, noncommittal, well-meaning tone reveals another question, one at the heart of the debate:
Is it possible and is it ethical for me as a designer to intervene in social issues, when intervening indicates that I’m in a position of power—I have something allowing me to intervene: education, money, resources, time, a job—and implicates me in possibly abusing that power, despite my very intentions to do the opposite?
What could be more terrifying than realizing that my entire life’s work to empower people resulted in my perpetuating my own power and their disenfranchisement?
In a way, it is a basic question of character: am I a good person or am I bad person?
The danger, and the trap, is the question’s absolutist nature. That absolutism creates immense fear. It’s what causes people to clutch onto the belief that they’re doing good so as to ensure that they are good. To realize their flaws becomes, in turn, paralyzing, because it might translate into being a bad person. The good/bad dichotomy enflames a human tendency towards labels: I am this or you are that. It’s us versus them. It worked versus it failed. Labels make things clean. They give us boxes so that we don’t have to live in the messy.
Look how Nussbaum insists that the designers he critiques are still good people:
“Again, I know most of the players and they are good souls.
. . .
I know almost all of my Gen Y students want to do it because their value system is into doing good globally.”
Emily Pilloton is similarly defensive in her response:
My jaw dropped. Am I not living in rural America, trying my damnedest to tackle a broken education system, in a very real way? . . . Had my partner and I not just gone through the arduous process of getting our teaching certifications to run Studio H, the country’s first high school design/build program? Do we not have support from amazing partners like the Kellogg Foundation to explore the scalability of design education in rural America? Please do your homework, Mr. Nussbaum.
She is understandably annoyed and offended (I would probably have been even angrier and less polite), but her impassioned defense indicates that something beyond her design is getting attacked: her self.
Nussbaum and Pilloton work extra hard to defend the moral character of the designers under critique. As though it would be shattering—too controversial—to suggest: yes, maybe you do have a bit of colonialist, power-blind mindset in you.
Does that mean that is who you are, categorically, inherently?
No. It doesn’t. It may be part of you, it may even be deeply embedded in you, but it does not define you.
I write about this because I live it; this is the self-questioning I’m constantly undertaking, that I’ve been pushed to confront through my social impact work, and really throughout my life. Checking my assumptions, my perspective, my privilege, the ways I perpetuate systems I want to dismantle through my habits. Experiencing the shock and devastation of finding –ist beliefs inside me (classist, racist, sexist, misogynist, colonialist). Beliefs I never remember ingesting. Beliefs that oppress me!
Unlearning—do people talk about how this is lifelong work? Do they talk about how it’s upsetting, extremely personal and very hard to do?
And yet: it is necessary. It is the only way to answer the question of whether we ought, or ought not, to design.
It’s Complicated
The debate of whether design can really impact systems similarly slips into a reductive It can/ It can’t argument. Our class conversation about measuring impact began with insisting: you can prove that interventions are helping!
And sure, you can! But it’s not so simple. Maybe an intervention increases access to education in an economically depressed town where less than 40% of students complete high school. Maybe after the design intervention, 75% of students graduate from high school. Does that mean the intervention was a success? What if the same intervention brought in teachers from out of town, coming in earnestly to help “the poor, underprivileged” kids, laden with their own problematic assumptions, passing those assumptions down and through to the students?
Psychological studies that investigate cognitive dissonance between what people consciously believe and how they nonconsciously behave demonstrate just how challenging it is to undo the root of a social problem. In 1999, Jose M. Abreu conducted a study where six therapists were randomly assigned to priming with racially neutral words or with African-American stereotypes, and then given a vignette about patient Mr. X. While none of the therapists believed themselves to be racist, those primed with African-American stereotypes rated Mr. X less favorably on hostility-related attributes. In 2004, Sandra Graham and Brian Lowery conducted a similar study, priming officers with words related to the category Black (the control group had words neutral with respect to race). Officers were then asked to read a story about an adolescent committing a property crime (like shoplifting), or an interpersonal crime (like assaulting a peer). Graham and Lowery report: “As hypothesized, officers in the racial prime condition reported more negative trait ratings, greater culpability, and expected recidivism, and they endorsed harsher punishment than did officers in the neutral condition.”
How do you design for this? And what if you as the designer are enacting the very problems you’re trying to tackle? Again, none of the officers consciously held different attitudes about African Americans.
Taking Accountability
The main qualm I had with Nussbaum’s article is that he avoided owning his assumptions, stopped short of admitting the inner work he also has to do. Though I realize he was trying to push designers to ask crucial questions about their assumptions, the very language he uses perpetuates, even exposes, the power and privilege he occupies.
He writes, “Is the new humanitarian design coming out of the U.S. and Europe being perceived through post-colonial eyes as colonialism? Are the American and European designers presuming too much in their attempt to do good? It may be that we should ignore those Asian voices of protest—after all, what are they doing for the poor in their own countries?—or not.”
I recognize his slight sarcasm, and yet the question “what are they doing for the poor in their own countries” is incredibly aggravating, especially because Nussbaum doesn’t contextualize it by recognizing how messed up it is that many people, especially people in power, genuinely feel that.
I used to work for a nonprofit committed to connecting people with opportunities to make the world a better place. One day at lunch, our Senior Director of Marketing complained that his sandwich was way too big to finish. My co-worker suggested he pack up the half he didn’t touch to offer to someone on the street. The director shrugged and remarked, “I don’t get what the issue is with homeless people. I see the same guy on my block every day. It’s like, why don’t they just get a job already.” A number of us—his subordinates—sat stunned. Then he got up and dumped his food in the trash. This was in NYC in 2015.*
The theme of “what are they doing for the poor in their own countries” reminded me of Lee Mun Wah’s documentary “The Color of Fear” in which a diverse group of men heatedly and painfully debate racism in America. David—a white man—has the general perspective that people of color hold themselves back by believing that things are harder for them in the U.S., projecting racism onto others when it doesn’t exist.
At one point, David explains: “For years I’ve said: Why do these guys have such a problem being a color? Why can’t they just be individuals and go out and make a place for themselves? And I hear you saying that we whites don’t allow that. That we keep you down. Why aren’t we just humans? Why aren’t we just brothers?”
I can’t summarize Victor’s response. It is too powerful and too important. This is how he replies:
Phewsh. I’ve watched this at least twenty times, and I still need to take a moment—and some breaths—after it ends.
To me, this clip is the crux of the imperialism/humanitarian debate. This conversation. This discomfort. The raw realities underlying sunny, well-meaning, do-good social impact work.
What is the responsibility of a change-making designer? To stare into the face of extreme power disparities and say them out loud. To drop defensiveness. To understand the f***ed-up-ness of the vast, global oppression that we all operate within—the fact that I am born into a skin color, gender and class that will heavily define my social, economic and political freedom.
We are not all equal. Not today. We have so much work to do.
To deny the disparities of power and privilege, to “overlook” the trauma of colonialism, to consider it “past” history, or even to speak about it politely, is to perpetuate the ills. None of the trauma is behind us, and more just keeps piling up.
Nussbaum says he was “pretty shocked to hear the criticism” of Lisa Strausfeld’s Sugar interface, which he thought was brilliant. He asks, “What was it? The intellectuals, designers, business people and government officials at that meeting—sensitive to India’s long British colonial history—criticized OLPC’s pedagogical intent of cutting out the teacher and the family to link Indian village children directly to the web for learning.”
Even though his point is to acknowledge the validity of the critique, he makes light of an extremely heavy history by calling people “sensitive to India’s long British colonial history.” I don’t think people are merely “sensitive” to their country’s historical devastation. They are actively, every day, undergoing great efforts to recover from decades/centuries of colonialism. And designers should be, too.
As Victor said: “Racism gets looked at as a person of color’s problem and it’s not. We are on the receiving end of the problem, but we are not the problem . . . All these different people are experienced as “problemed people.” . . . And for you to understand what racism is about, you’re gonna be so uncomfortable. You’re gonna be so different from who you see yourself to be now.”
If designers are going to attempt to tackle Big Systemic Problems, it’s going to get really, freakin’ uncomfortable.
It Goes Both Ways
So what would it mean to implicate and acknowledge my own power? What does it look like in writing? In design? In action? How would I do it straightforwardly, without creating a culture of guilt, which is also toxic? Maria Popova calls for new words and more voices: “Let’s invent a new language that allows us to better think, talk and care about indigenous cultures and microcommunities before we try to retrofit them to our projects and our preconceptions. Language that is just, because this is not just semantics. Above all, let’s welcome voices and viewpoints from other disciplines, other parts of the world and other paradigms.”
Many thought leaders are calling for entirely new paradigms in every living system.
Yes and yes and more. But where do we start as individuals?
David Stairs suggests that we need to begin where most people may be least willing to: with the redistribution of wealth:
Maria Popova’s call to redesign our critical language was itself successfully gainsaid by one of her own commentators who suggested that we must first consider redesigning affluence. Do you seriously think anyone from the North and West will volunteer for that assignment? . . . everybody’s got turf to protect. So long as some of us live like kings while others live in squalor neo-colonialism and economic hegemonism will be alive and well in the neighborhood, in spite of our frequent lip service to “stakeholders.”
So, step one: redesign the entire global economy. Aside from the enormity of that task, I have to consider where I am in my own journey. Would I volunteer for redesigning affluence? And might I need to if I’m serious about a more equal world? This is the moment where I’d have to call myself out, potentially see myself in a way I don’t want to, and/or generate a new mindset that I do want.
Beyond this large re-design, are there any other entry points for simultaneously tackling wicked problems in myself and in the world? Points that people like Emily Pilloton moved through when designing more localized interventions, ones that don’t exactly topple an entire system at first go?
Who’s At The Table
In an article about the White Savior Complex, Toi Scott lays out a cautionary map that details what some of the check-yo’-self points might be. Though Toi wrote this almost ten years after “The Color of Fear”, their sentiments strongly echo Victor’s:
We don’t just want to be heard when something we say complements your agenda. We have had our own ideas on how things should be in our communities since the beginning of time…and it wasn’t until our communities were disrupted that we started to have these huge disparities.
. . .
Envisioning and creating a shift in paradigm
We need a completely new paradigm, not the old, musty models and mentality rooted in wayward assumptions and savior mentality. For those who aren’t sure what savior mentality looks like..it goes a little something like this…
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“Why won’t they just come to the table. They never show up. We’re trying to help them but they don’t want to be helped!”
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“We just want to help you/your people/those people/the at-risk/minorities…”
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“They just don’t want/won’t to do the work…”
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“They just don’t understand. We have to teach them all about how to…x,y,z”
Toi is writing about race, but their content applies to all social impact work. Coming to the table—a truly transdisciplinary table—means more than just scooping up friendly and willing experts from many fields and communities when, as Toi says, “something [they] say complements your agenda”. For TransD designers, it means getting into a room with people who might disagree with us and with one another. It means having embarrassing, vulnerable, maybe scary conversations we might not want to have. It means sitting down with people we have prejudices and assumptions about, sitting down with people that have prejudices and assumptions about us, and TALKING IT OUT and understanding it—from the personal straight through to the systemic—before getting into the grit of design work.
As emerging designers eager to implement change, we need to be prepared to eat a lot of humble pie. The mess is going to happen. In fact, if we’re doing our job right, the mess will happen. You can’t have all those people at a table and not have someone spill some wine—or some deeply rooted assumptions—and leave a couple stains.
But it’s up to us not to give up there, not to interpret the mess as a condemnation, a failure of character or of the possibility for design intervention. It’s what emerges from the mess that matters.
Pilloton pointedly references Studio H’s hard learning curve with the Hippo roller. But that mess is what taught them how to be deeply integrative and inclusive in future designs. She says, “In hindsight, the process of redesigning the Hippo Roller was misguided and disconnected because of its lack of direct collaboration with end users, and a minimal shared investment in its success.”
A minimal shared investment in its success! Yes! That is what we are after. But I don’t believe it is so minimal. I believe that doing social impact design (or any change work) requires a lot of shared investment in its success.
And that investment isn’t forged, nor is it created through relatively superficial stakes like being good at your job. It emerges organically when people design with others for the earth, for their community and for themselves.
In the powerful words of Lilla Watson: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Well my fellow designers, it’s time to get to work.
~Nandita Batheja
*In case you encounter similar sentiments, I find this NationSwell article on what to say (and not say) to someone who is homeless to be very helpful! I shared it with our director, though he never wrote back.