The Stigma of Failure leads to Failure
Posted on November 15, 2013 | posted by:We’ve gone from local to global. We buy things—online and offline—produced in distant, exotic places, yet we wonder and complain about the uncertainty of our economy. Imagine listening to or watching the news. You hear about the current state of the economy, expected job creation rate, the actual job creation rate etc. How do you react? Guilt and a spark of activism? Let’s say you want to do your part to change or avoid this, so you decide to implement a global vs. local variable in the (rational) decision-making process you apply when shopping. And it is rational, isn’t it?
You are at work now. You are sweating to satisfy the demands of your superiors and to comply to the rules of the organization. The rigid top-down control and excessive implementation of mid-level managers has bereaved you of any form of autonomy. So to secure your place around the hearth, you turn to mistrust and secrecy as your guiding principles making competitiveness the main driver of your work. Failure is your enemy, so risk and chance becomes paths less traveled by you. Creative, innovative ideas pop up in your head, but the once fertile ground of your mind is now a paved highway of efficient (yet uncreative) routines that cause your ideas to wilt and wither. Back in design school, you were taught to bring the users and other stakeholders into the design process, but now you realized that it just isn’t possible. You have many questions to answer and choices to make but resources are limited, so you keep the baton and leave the stakeholders out of the loop.
Whew! It’s closing-time, so you go home.
Now you’re sitting behind the computer. It’s evening, you have had a long day and you are surfing on Amazon. By shopping with Amazon Prime, you know you will get free shipping and have your things within two days, and with 1-Click shopping, your aching hands are relieved from the taxing clicking that would otherwise be required. In other words, you have taken the second step into convenience—the first being the fact that you are shopping online. Today’s work has left you with a severe case of decision-making fatigue, so you click away looking mostly at the little red number with the dollar sign in front of it. Click. Click. Click.
Two days later your items arrive. As you unpack them in the kitchen, you realize that the Arizona heat (yeah, you live in Arizona in this story!) has affected the material of your products, thus rendering them useless. Why? They were not designed with your needs in mind. In that instant, the almost inaudible blabber from radio suddenly crystalizes: “…U.S unemployment rate has gone up 0,9%”. But you dismiss the knot tightening in your gut and say to yourself: “It’s just 0,9%. How big of a deal can that be?”
This short example of a day in our lives is caricatured, yet it poses some relevant questions.
Some of these include the following. How do we foster, measure and evaluate success? How do we as designers make decisions? Who is responsible?—and how?
Especially evident in NGO work in third-world countries is the fact that when our brilliant designs break down, they stay broken. Also, they might never be used because they simply don’t address the most pressing or relevant issues.
But some designers try to address these questions and challenges. Could a project like the $1000 incubator made out of car parts be the future for Africa? Designing with the users skills and available spare parts in mind, you can open up for innovative possibilities where the user becomes a capable maintainer—and maybe even a co-creator/-producer. To build the trust of the users and other stakeholders to become co-owners and guardians of the project requires commitment. It matters less whether we are Indian working in Argentina, Chinese working in Finland or Canadian working in Uganda. The importance of geography has been diminished by globalization, and whether we are returning from global to local, staying global or maybe even hybridizing into glocalization, I believe that commitment is a primary factor for success. Also it fosters cultural diversity within projects and communities. Having read Steven Johnson’s book Emergence most of this article had me nodding to the verge of muscle spasms in the neck. Diversity is key—to accessibility, resilience and innovation!
What if we supported diversity in the incentive systems and mindsets of our businesses? What if we embraced Crony Capitalism AND Indie Capitalism as equally valid and capable paradigms? Could diversification of our modes of working, thinking and designing help us avoid limitations of each mode and paradigm? Would this inclusive approach help us designers make the community of stakeholders feel ownership and responsibility for the projects and design?
Read this!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110903142411.htm
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1661885/are-humanitarian-designers-imperialists-project-h-responds
http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/feature/in-defense-of-design-imperialism/14488/