Transdisciplinary Design

Speculative Ebolamania

Posted by Katie Edmonds on November 14, 2014

 

Who’s afraid of ebola?

As I unwind one evening with some baking and mid-shelf bourbon I discover that I am, in fact, not afraid of ebola. More specifically, I am significantly less afraid than my companion, a dear friend and neighbor, an all around can-do lady, who is terrified of ebola.

As she hands me ingredients to measure and mix she asks if I had heard the latest about the outbreak. Before I can respond she begins rattling off bits of information about epidemiology and strains on infrastructure in African “hot zones”.  It quickly becomes apparent that she, while lacking any medical background, is obsessed. “They should do something,” she said, referring to that all-powerful they who operate the complex and opaque infrastructure we engage with every day. She follows up with what proves to be eerie foreshadowing “What if someone gets infected and rides the subway?.”

She is the first friend I was brave enough to tell when I decided to apply for this MFA. I was in my final semester of my first masters degree, and felt deeply ambivalent about the prospect of investing two more years, and a many more dollars, in my education. She was also the first of many patient interlocutors who held back their critiques as I cobbled together an awkward description of the kind of design I intended to practice. Since then I’ve managed to find my pitch, but I had yet to demonstrate what that practice looks like. Ebolamania was my chance.

Dana: An outbreak would be impossible to contain in New York. The incubation time is so long that we’d never know if someone was exposed. What would happen on the subway? When the first exposed person came to the US they should have quarantined him immediately. If you’re coming from a country that has a serious ebola problem, and you know you’ve been exposed, it makes sense that you’d have to go into quarantine for 21 days until you’re cleared. That seems totally logical to me. It’s a lot easier to do if you have one case of it than if you have four. They should never have let him just go home.

Katie: Who is the they? We’re just as much they as anyone else is.

Dana: We don’t have control over who they let into airports and the systems that are in place.

Katie: What if it was us who had the control? What would we do?

This question engages two discourses upon which the transdisciplinary practice heavily relies: co-design and speculation. In that question I was proposing that my friend consider the features of a design that she might actually use, while developing a fictional universe in which real-world constraints don’t exist.

Dana: If we’re going to actually contain it, every person who is exposed has to go into quarantine.

Katie: Where would we put them? Would they get to hospitals? That would take a whole hospital. Where else could they go? Hotels?

Dana: A cruise.

Katie: YES.

Dana: Everyone would have to wear hazmat suits

Katie: With festive prints. How would they get to the cruise?

Dana: Ebola trailers.

What would an ebola cruise look like? A ship populated with individuals in festive hazmat suits arriving in their own trailer and whisked away for the duration of their quarantine? In my mind’s eye I see a split-screen narrative, one a saccharine dystopia full of reconditioning and abuse, another a truly uplifting retreat with lovely catering and accommodations, comfortable attire and a kind staff.

Katie: What about a mental health component?

Dana: Yeah, you know they’d be freaking out, they’d have to Skype and Facetime with family.

Katie: What about work? Could people Skype in to work and school? Could I Skype into class if I was on ebola quarantine?

Dana: Yeah you totally could.

Katie: What about after, when you’re cleared of it? Won’t people still think that you have ebola?

Dana: But you’d be clear.

Katie: What about the stigma?

Dana: Well they wouldn’t let you out if you had it.

Katie: What about a messaging campaign, so people know that you really don’t have it? I survived ebola quarantine and all I got was this stupid tshirt. Ebola world tour 2014. Ebola swag.

By this point we are both laughing about ebola, and she is far less stressed out.

In my role as a designer, the service I provide after this encounter is a rendering of what we envision and the systems that make it possible. As I move on to that stage, what have I left in my wake? An individual who, for a moment, transcended the chasm between her small, familiar kitchen in Brooklyn and the unknown and unknowable “they” responsible for protecting us from a virus that has infected some people’s bodies but far more people’s minds.

 

For more on speculative design and co-design:

Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, (2013).

Sanders, Elizabeth B.-N., and Pieter Jan Stappers. “Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design.” CoDesign 4.1 (2008): 5-18.