Good Intentions, Scale, and the Design of Political Possibility
Posted by Sam Haddix on December 15, 2014In 2010, Bruce Nussbaum posed the question: “Is humanitarian design the new imperialism?”1 While he was likely not the first to ask, his prominence in the design community (and perhaps his identity, not so ironically) prompted a debate around the politics of design. The debate took many interesting twists and turns, but only began to change scope when Cameron Sinclair replied, “Let’s not fall into the trap of who’s best and who’s not when we have BP filling our oceans with oil, large hidden corporations taking major reconstruction contracts, and poor government policy forcing inadequate housing to remain the status quo. If you want to take on an imperialist empire, you’re going to have to shoot a little higher than pro bono designers.”2 Gong Szeto pushed this perspective further when he said, “What is not being asked is what causes poverty.” How do we reconcile the different understandings outlined in the debate on humanitarian design? If all of these designers have the best intentions – how is it that these variations of truth seem to conflict with one another?
This problem of scale is not an easy one. Questions may appear to be more or less significant depending on the scale at which the problem is approached. For example Nussbaum’s challenge to Emily Pilloton is important when considering the relationship between user and designer, but may seem less of a concern when cast against larger systemic violences. What we begin to see in the humanitarian design debate are different concerns with scale – that is, both problem and purpose change depending on one’s scalar framing.3 In her book Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows reminds us to keep these differences in perspective:
“There is yet one leverage point that is even higher that changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is ‘true’, that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension […] If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.”4
Here, it would be unwise to mistake Meadow’s eloquence for simplicity. Juxtapose her use of the term purpose with the recent emergence of racial tensions in the United States. Could we say that there is a common purpose to these protests? Even if a majority could agree on a general purpose such as ending systemic apartheid – what paradigm or scale would be appropriate and how would that translate into a course of action? Returning to Szeto:
“Cancer will continue to metastasize until you chemotherapy the root cause, and there is scant evidence that these assailed designers, well-intentioned as they are, are doing anything to address root causes. until then, an impoverished community will remain so if the politics they exist in, the intrinsic political realities, the presence or lack of presence of true markets and state philosophy geared towards evaluating the disenfranchised […] then design as a profession, well-intentioned or otherwise, will simply be in the business of producing bandages to persistent problems that will never go away.”5
While it is difficult (if not impossible) to evaluate the effects of social intervention, compare the effects of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, or Anonymous with the more traditional attempts at intervention such as the Occupy movement or Arab Spring. Perhaps the old models for social intervention no longer address the new systems of hegemony in quite the same way. That said, there is potentially a place for a multitude of responses to any systemic problem; and likely what is required to address a systemic problem is a systemic response. In an essay entitled ‘Against NGOs? A Critical Perspective on Nongovernmental Action’, Nidhi Srinivas says, “successful social change generally involves a range of organizing methods and organizations, operating at multiple levels of society. Such associational biodiversity offers choices for organizing and for rehearsing differing answers to questions of the public good.” The protest has as much a place as anonymous, but while it would be difficult to say that any one intervention is better or worse than another, it would do well to acknowledge that the landscape of power relations has transformed.
Perhaps we could limit the scope of this exploration by asking what role the designer has to play. If design has been responsible for systemic violence, how can it begin to intervene? Is ‘intervention’ even an appropriate course of action? In his book, By Design, Ralph Caplan says that “the most elegant design solution of the 1950s was not the molded plywood chair or the Olivetti Lettera 22 or the chapel at Ronchamp. It was the sit-in.”6 It is uncertain whether even a well designed sit-in would have the same effect today that it did in the 1950‘s. The question would then become how to design a contemporary intervention that opens a space for political possibility, dialogue, and contestation – what is the sit-in of the 21st century?
Returning to Srinivas, in Critiquing Social Innovation: What is it? Does it matter? Cases from India and China he writes that the original meaning of social innovation “represented no less than a dramatic change of political structures, a revolutionary shift of power, and the ruptures that indicated such change […] the transformation of an existing circuit of social relations.”7 This original meaning changed over time, as the language was co-opted for the purposes of profit by corporations and NGOs alike. “Instead SI is better understood as a historical trajectory that has gradually become depoliticized, so that today it can stand for vapid endorsements of change without substance.”8
We may talk about social innovation at a small scale (such as the transformation of social relations within a business or organization) but what happens when we think about social innovation at a larger scale? Is innovation at a small scale really ‘social’? What does it mean for an organization to fundamentally transform social relations when it is itself operating within a larger system of social relations? Won’t the larger system impose a set of parameters and limitations on the smaller system to the degree that the fundamental social circuit is left unchanged? Are there instances where an organization has had an effect on the larger ecosystem? Perhaps this is what we are beginning to see with the advent of companies like Uber, Zipcar, or Airbnb – but it is more likely that these newcomers will not so much destabilize the capitalist economy as strengthen it through diversification.
Is it more productive to incentivize capitalism to do good for humanity? Or to look for entry points to transform/transmute/manipulate it from the inside out? It is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that the globalized capitalist economy as we know it could lead to anything other than an unsustainable future.9 But perhaps this seeming impasse is dependent on the very grammar of transformation itself. That is, how we understand change as it occurs and what it looks like — perhaps change itself is changing before our very eyes.
In her lecture on the art of making publics, Maria Hellström Reimer noted that “as the manifestation of power changes, publics also change.” In this sense, if we can acknowledge that the grammar of power is beginning to transform, do we also find ourselves at a tipping point of public consciousness? Technoglobalism has already blurred the distinction between center and fringe, but is the ‘revolution’ (a word that has lost all meaning) really to be realized via twitter?
But isn’t it more than a little presumptuous to believe that designers are in any position to take on systemic violences? Returning again to Szeto, he answers Nussbaum’s original question saying,”…it is imperialism because there is a not-so-subtle imposition of an ideological stance that ‘design can save the world.’” Here Szeto is potentially contradicting himself. Does not design that attempts to address root causes presume world-saving? Or is Szeto simply encouraging the design community to ask different kinds of questions? Certainly the designer must thoroughly interrogate their intentions.10 Every designed act is an imposition and must therefore be carried out with awareness and responsibility.
In his book ‘In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World’, John Thackara shares a story that he believes speaks to the attempt to wrestle history:
“Children who build a small dam on the margins of the current of a great river, who make a tiny pool in which to bathe and splash around, do not play in the rushing current, yet neither are they separated from the water flowing in the centre of the river. They create, along its banks, small inlets and unexpected habitats, thus passing to the future the marks of their difference.”11
Certainly Thackara offers a response to Szeto, but what if the systemic (or ‘wicked’12) problems involve time frames that are not so generous? To put it differently – there is little point in handing off a torch that has gone out. If a serious response to wicked problems involves a combination of rigorous economic, educational, socio-cultural, judicial, and political (etc.) engagements, how would such an effort be coordinated? Here I am reminded of Al Reinert’s 1989 film entitled ‘For All Mankind’, when astronaut T. Kenneth Mattingly II speaks to the impossibility in comprehending the Apollo launch, “This is such a big thing, I frankly don’t see how you can do it. Even when you’re participating in it, I think that it’s audacious that you would try. I clearly could never understand as a crewman how to make it work, I can only learn how to operate my share of it.”12 Perhaps similarly, designers may never fully comprehend their work in its entirety. When will society treat climate change with the same coordination of resources, effort, intelligence, and artfulness as was witnessed during the mission to the moon?
[Note: Image is from Harun Farocki’s 1988 film entitled ‘Images of the World and the Inscription of War’]
1. Nussbaum, Bruce. “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism? Does Our Desire to Help Do More Harm than Good?” N.p., 7 July 2010. Web. ↩
2. Card, Kenton. “ALTERNATIVE ARCHITECTURE LENS.” : Bridging The Paradox of Humanitarian Architecture: Constructing Space for Political Engagement. Web. 13 Dec. 2014. ↩
3. See Jamer Hunt’s lecture on Scalar Framing, in which he refers to these shifts as phase transitions. ↩
4. Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems. 164. Print. ↩
5. Card, Kenton. “ALTERNATIVE ARCHITECTURE LENS.” : Bridging The Paradox of Humanitarian Architecture: Constructing Space for Political Engagement. Web. 13 Dec. 2014. ↩
6. Caplan, Ralph. “The Design of Possibilities.” By Design. 161. Print.↩
7. Srinivas, Nidhi. “Critiquing Social Innovation: What Is It? Does It Matter? Cases from India and China.” (2013): 37.↩
8. Srinivas, Nidhi. “Critiquing Social Innovation: What Is It? Does It Matter? Cases from India and China.” (2013): 39.↩
9. “When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (2013): 1. Print. ↩
10. Here I am reminded of Slajov Žižek’s warning, “…such behavior cannot but arouse compassion and a false feeling of guilt that is the negative of a narcissistic satisfaction.” Žižek, Slavoj. “Introduction.” The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London: Verso, 1994. 1. Print. ↩
11. Thackara, John. “Flow.” In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005. 225. Print.↩
12. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4.2 (1973): 155-69. Web.↩
13. For All Mankind. Dir. Al Reinert. Criterion, 1989.↩