Design & Change
I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of design being a mediator to cause change, and I question (rather optimistically) if design could indeed help create a better world. Different factors shape design, and design shapes a society (a chicken and egg situation, I would say), and wanting to better understand these aspects drew me to a recent class I took about Information & Communication Technologies, Design, and Marginality as part of my first semester in graduate school.
We started the course by diving into globalization and development theory. While I initially resisted the need to understand these concepts, it was eye-opening to see how the effects of power, colonialism, capitalism, inequality, poverty, and oppression (to name a few) in the world are mirrored and reproduced in the world of design. How power structures have formed a society plays a vital role in understanding design in it. We often minimize the designer’s role in maintaining these systems because, as designers, we like to believe that we mean well and that the products we create help the people who use them- an idea sometimes reinforced by social and political naivety (which I am 100% guilty of). I personally associated problems like social disparity and inequitable distribution of resources as those concerning economic and political institutions. Langdon Winner’s ‘Do Artefacts Have Politics?’ shows that these problems manifest in designed artefacts and technologies, and that design is integrated with the dynamics of inequality, i.e., there is an intent to create a position of power — there is a way to establish this position of power through design — the consequence of this design excludes people.
Though I was born and raised in a colonized nation — India, I had never paid much heed to the terms used to describe my country — “Developing”, “The Third World”, “The Global South”- terms that describe and reveal power hierarchies between nations — terms that can be seen as loaded and encapsulated in the past. I now find it important to understand how colonial powers unfold in the modern world because the world defines countries by western development standards, which reiterates white supremacy. In the guise of progress, western concepts of development are utilised as standards to impose specific lifestyles through having a dominant language that is considered superior ( as we see with the internet (Nunberg, 2001)) and culture. Moreover, this development concept includes an assumption that development is always a change for the better (Sachs, 1992). Neocolonial ideas are then used to fuel capitalist motives and create demand for consumer products, boost free trade and strengthen unequal power relations (Sachs, 2020).
In the design world, the dominant attitudes assume a universal standard by which the world’s complexity can be addressed as a series of problems to be fixed with products and services, instead of changes in policies, dismantling of capitalist structures, and decolonization. Not every problem can be addressed with a design solution, so non-design approaches must be considered first. With profit being prioritized over agency in today’s patriarchal, capitalist, and oppressive corporate practices, design is frequently described as a “problem-solving” activity. However, this mindset ignores what constitutes an issue, for whom it is a problem, as well as the fact that solutions are often subjective. ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Human-Centered Design’ are examples of profit-oriented approaches that are too often one-size-fits-all solutions that treat people as homogeneous consumers (Irani, 2018). They don’t evaluate people connected to their surroundings, communities, or society as a whole. It also fails to acknowledge the simultaneous existence of multiple perspectives and intersectionalities (such as age, ability, gender, race, etc.) when people have multiple identities. Modern technology has failed to meet the standards of equality and diversity, leading to the creation of biased products as a by-product of years of systemic racism and practices that are influenced by our own internal biases (Noble, 2018).
How then do we create alternatives for designers and new ways of designing?
To begin with, we need to ask ourselves if we should adopt a particular technology and question what form it would take to provide more decentralized or egalitarian solutions (Winner, 1980). This could help in re-thinking the role of technology in our lives and shift focus to the implications of said technology rather than the application. Design practices, even those striving for inclusion and participation, can reinforce dominant ideologies, and how we develop design processes and products distribute the design’s benefits and burdens. It’s crucial as a designer to clearly define who will benefit from and who will suffer (and how they’ll suffer) from each of our design decisions (Costanza-Chock, 2018). Designing is not a solitary activity — It needs to be part of a larger community of discourse. To aid this, we need to look at alternative design systems and identify those appropriate to use in a particular context (Nieusma, 2004). Often, with marginalized communities, that might mean to design with and not for. To make sure we include their voices and even learn from their experiences, they must be equipped with more rights and capabilities. We need to shift narratives (away from abundance and scarcity) to regeneration and restoration to integrate top-down expertise and technology with bottom-up knowledge when designing for social impact towards equity and justice.
Here’s a little reading list with some of my favourite pieces from the class
- Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, Sasha Costanza-Chock
- Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin
- Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Noble
