Designed Futures in a Non-linear World

Image from chefsteps.com

Andrew Lovett-Barron @readywater

Before anything else: Problem Statement

Non-Linear design 07.10.2015@readywater

Poisonous Urbanism

Image from http://www.shanethoms.com/

Food scarcity

Image from REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Climate Change

Image from CBS news

Social Justice

Image from blacklivesmatter.com

4th Generational Warfare

Image from HackCircus/Extinction Symbol

Inter- and intra- national conflict

(with people caught between)

Image from Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

Observable outcomes from infinitely complex

challenges that we struggle to describe,

diagnose, and act upon.

A humble protagonist enters the scene

Non-Linear design 07.10.2015@readywater

Designers

Point of Design #1: Make sense of things

Point of Design #2: Make a thing

Point of Design #3: Critical analysis of

outcomes via things

Point of Design #4: Iterate

We now have lots of people who do this daily

But we’re getting harder problems

Image from hbr.org

And we’re asked to step into new roles

Image from hbr.org

We are in a better place than we have ever been as designers;

We have never been in a position of greater liability.

A Whole New You

Non-Linear design 07.10.2015@readywater

And you may ask yourself “Well...How did I get here?”

Image by Daniel Sieradski/culturebot.org.

We are in over our heads

Image from The Fall by Tarsem Singh

Designers traditionally make a thing to fulfill a

need or requirement

Image from Vladimir Vyatkin/AP

And we don’t take responsibility for the

emergent result

Image from Sebastiano Tomada

We fetishize and lionize the process of making

But what of the logistics of design outcomes?

How might we shift design outcomes

towards a designed outcome?

Non-Linear design 07.10.2015@readywater

Let’s talk about non linearity

Systems often sensitive to initial conditions and

dynamic change

An input disproportional to its output

Image from Mark P. Thomas

We tend to think in linear ways

We problem solve intuitively in a non-

linear world

Thoughtless Acts by Jane Fulton Suri

In analysis, we often describe non-linear

effects in linear modes

Image by Thomas Homer-Dixon

And we communicate those linear models

because it’s easier

But when linear analysis leaves its boundary

conditions, it falls apart

Image from CNN

Too many of our analyses have broken their

bounding condition

Image from the New Yorker ( J. B. Mackinnon/April 21, 2015)

And we need to change things now

Image from HackCircus/Extinction Symbol

Critical Design and Responsibility

Non-Linear design 07.10.2015@readywater

A caveat: Critical Design is not

the solution

Image by Alvaro León

It is a tool to see the invisible

Faraday Chair Dunne + Raby

Privacy, Attention, Space, Community, Opting Out

Soft Suit Michael-Owen Liston &

H. Lundberg & L.B. Borgersen

Violence, Resistance, Embodiment, Justice

Image by Whitney Curtis/The New York Times

Clean Air Pod Ant Farm

Climate, Aesthetics, Policy, Authority

Image from Rueters/Liu Chang

Plugin City Archigram (Peter Cook)

Urbanism, Waste, Transience, Migration

Critical and Speculative Design provide an early frame around which to deconstruct and iterate on complex problems

Designed Futures in a non-linear World

Non-Linear design 07.10.2015@readywater

We start by critiquing our frame of reference

Image from Jorge Silva

San Francisco ≠ world San Francisco ≠ future

Except where it’s the worst

Image by Artem Shumnik

Empathy through action

Our metaphors shape our creations

Image from Nervous Systems

Make those metaphors tangible

Image from Joe Linton

Does it penetrate the meme-brain barrier?

We suck at foresight

In fact, we suck at hindsight as well

Image from Buck Ennis

We must design the boundary conditions, and outcomes follow

Image from HackCircus/Extinction Symbol

We must design our own metaphors

Image from Eye of Science/Science Source

This allows us to turn the preferable future

into a set of actions

Image from Stuart Candy

It comes down to figuring out what kind

of seed to plant

Image from Transition Network

What we use holds the seed of tomorrow

Image from Paul Mackie

Build the amplifier to human needs and

behaviours

Image from The Get Set

Help many small actions create emergent change

Image from Unknown

We are responsible for the future we are designing

towards.

Design is all about responsibility:

making decisions for the users and human collateral.

We must create and use tools that reveal our roles within systems, that enable critical analysis of

systems, and that encourage radical action to enact systems change

We will continue to discovered how much

we didn’t know yesterday.

It won’t stop us.

Thanks

alb@ideo.com @readywater

Non-Linear design 07.2.2015@readywater