Designing Differently

Navigating the Reflective Design Practice

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Design for the greater good(?)

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Social engagement is a relatively young phenomenon within the field of design. Although there are many different interpretations of the term ‘social design’ and its origins, many believe the field picked up momentum around the time Victor Papanek’s book Design for the Real World first appeared. In a moment of increasing environmental and societal concerns, Papanek and other visionaries of his time (Fuller, 1969; Rittel & Webber, 1973) published elementary works on the world’s increasingly complex problems. Works that are ever so relevant today. In Design for the Real World, Papanek criticises consumer culture and calls designers out on their environmental and social responsibilities.

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“There are professions more harmful than industrial design but only a few of them.” (Papanek, 1985)

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More recently—roughly over the course of the past two decades—design research and practice started to adopt a rather socially inspired agenda, leading to the diversification of the field of socially engaged design. Practices such as service design, interaction design, design for social innovation, human centred design and critical design emerged—and more variations are developing rapidly. Besides that, the potential of design’s problem-solving potential has been picked up by a range of other sectors as well (Stewart, 2011). This application of design is mostly known as Design Thinking, an idea that has been around as early as the 1960’s. According to Kimbell (2012), the main idea of Design Thinking is that ‘the ways professional designers problem-solve is of value to firms trying to innovate and to societies trying to make change happen.’ Various authors have suggested that Design Thinking might even be an effective approach to solving Wicked Problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Buchanan, 1992)—an idea that is still very much alive today and is increasingly popular within the public sector:

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“More and more of the issues the public sector is facing can barely be resolved by the sector itself—if at all—with generic policy measures also proving insufficient. For instance, how do you ensure that […] we’re prepared for climate change? That the level of vaccination against diseases remains high enough? These are (social) issues that no one entirely understands and that cannot be effectively addressed by any one person. […] This explains the rationale of the innovators in the public sector to find new approaches to deal with wicked problems. Design thinking is one of them.” (Schaminée, 2019)

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But despite these hopeful developments, socially engaged design practices are not always as effective at fulfilling their good intentions.

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“As innovative thinkers, designers tend to believe that a good idea will automatically lead to the desired change. But that’s not true. Confronted with the powers that want to keep everything as it is, designing unfortunately doesn’t offer the answer—designing stops at the idea.” (Schaminée & Dorst, 2019)

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And in some cases, these practices even do more (unintended) harm than good:

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“Many examples of what we call social design also, though perhaps unconsciously, build on western traditions of idealistic, ideological, utopian, sometimes noble-minded and sometimes quite patronizing or even neocolonial design solutions of the past century or so.” (van Helvert, 2016)

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In part, design education could be to blame for some of these shortcomings, as design is still mostly understood (and taught) as an object-oriented practice. Applying the object-oriented process to a societal concern may result in knowledge gaps, for example on a systemic or societal level.

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“Contemporary design practices are mainly construed to support creating objects, interactive devices, spaces and intelligent systems, but these practices give designers little help in the area of abstract social entities and how to work with them.” (Chen et. al. 2015).

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And although we could fill a book or two listing possible points of critique on socially engaged design practices, I would rather do so in conversation with other designers. I believe that collective reflection could make a tremendous contribution to the development of the field of social design.

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Towards a reflective practice

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It is safe to say that social design has expanded the scope of the discipline of design (Chen et. al. 2015). Considering its increasing popularity and application, I believe social design reached a critical mass at which reflection has become absolutely vital. This is the moment to reflect on our design practice from a meta perspective and to look beyond good intentions in order to expose ineffectiveness—sometimes even unintended harm—in the processes we put in motion. I am convinced that social design could make a substantial contribution to ‘taming’ wicked problems. But in order to do so, we must develop the field with criticality, consciousness and sensitivity.

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Not only social design could benefit greatly from a reflective approach. I believe that all forms of design, as well as other disciplines for that matter, could improve their effectiveness by inserting regular moments of reflection into their agendas. Critical reflection is an important part of learning and doing, because it helps us review the effectiveness of our actions and develop the skills needed to improve:

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“It is about questioning, in a positive way, what you do and why you do it and then deciding whether there is a better, or more efficient, way of doing it in the future.” (The Open University)

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In his book The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action, Donald A. Schön (1983) distinguishes two types of reflective practice: reflection on action and reflection in action. Reflection on action happens after the action has taken place, whereas reflection in action happens during the action itself, meaning that one can act upon the reflection in the moment of occurrence. The latter may be rather challenging to integrate in the creative process, which is typically chaotic, intuitive and nonlinear. And even more so in the context of an education system that is ever so fast-paced and result-oriented. In order to navigate our reflective practice more effectively, I propose several activities: to create space and free up time to dedicate to reflection; to identify common pitfalls that should be avoided in practice; to facilitate critical exchange between students and to develop tools that help us retain our critical view throughout the chaos of the creative process—tools that help us reflect in action. With my workshop Methodology Lab, I aim to facilitate these endeavours.

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Perhaps more important than critical reflection is the proactive application of our reflections. Wouldn’t our reflections be absolutely useless if we didn’t use them to improve our way of working? It is exactly that part of the self-development process—moving beyond reflection—that can be challenging, especially when our ambition is to address societal issues, or ‘Wicked Problems’ that are inherently complex, messy and impossible to solve (Rittel & Webber, 1973). I invite designers to embrace an approach Donna Haraway calls staying with the trouble: being proactively committed to the matter while acknowledging its inconclusiveness and entangledness (Thiele, 2012). In other words: rather than merely identifying the problematics and shortcomings of social design, we take some first steps in developing more fruitful alternative approaches. Even if these steps are small.

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Explore, Evaluate, Experiment

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Designing Differently is an initiative that aims to help critical thinkers and social dreamers (and other designers) navigate their reflective practice. Endeavours related to this project include research, education, product development and active participation in the design community. The outcomes of this research project (so far) are a product or toolkit (under development), events and an educational program (Methodology Lab), including (digital) tools.

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At the core of the produced outcomes is a method I call ‘The Three Es of Reflective Practice’ (later referred to as the 3Es). As its name suggests, this method consists of three steps: explore, evaluate and experiment. As its name suggests, this method consists of three steps: explore, evaluate and experiment. The first step, explore, is all about gathering inspiration and learning from what other designers have already done. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel! We will map the practices or methodologies that already exist today and, by conducting case studies, we will get an idea of how they work. In the second step, evaluate, we will look at the design practices from a critical perspective. Comparing our reflections enables us to identify common pitfalls. Armed with new insights and reflections, and with the newly described pitfalls in mind, we can then—in step three: experiment—develop alternative approaches, or hybrid practices. These hybrid practices offer guidelines that help us put our reflections to action in our next design project. By iterating the 3Es, we can refine our practice infinitely.

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The 3Es invites designers to look at the discipline from a meta perspective. This means we will reflect on the bigger picture rather than our day-to-day design activities. We will explore something we could refer to as ‘design practices’ or ‘design methodologies’. The term methodology knows several definitions, but the one I base myself on is the following:

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“A methodology is a system of methods and principles for doing something, for example for teaching or for carrying out research [or, in this case design].” (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.)

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Within the field of design, we can recognise a wide variety of well-defined practices or methodologies, for example social design, critical design, sustainable design, design for social innovation, design activism, open design, et cetera. Plenty of interesting practices have been developed—we do not need to reinvent the wheel! What we do need, however, is to critically re-evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches. Following the 3Es, we will analyse different design methodologies and break them up into several elements or building blocks. Based on our own interests and ambitions, we will then select the building blocks we believe to be most effective, in order to compose new hybrid practices.

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By developing and sharing such new experimental practices, as well as our reflections on the current state of socially engaged design, I believe we can make a substantial contribution to the further development of the field.

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References

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Buchanan, Richard. (1992) Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues (Vol. 8:2, pp. 5–21.) JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1511637. Accessed 26 Mar. 2020.

Chen, D. -S., Cheng, L. -L., Hummels, C., & Koskinen, I. (2015). Social design: An introduction. International Journal of Design, (Vol. 10:1, pp. 1-5.)

Fuller, R. B. (1969). Operating manual for spaceship earth. Carbondale.

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. (n.d.). Methodology definition and meaning: Collins English Dictionary. Methodology definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/methodology.

Helvert, M. van, Bandoni, A., & Helvert, M. van. (2016). The responsible object: a history of design ideology for the future. (p. 13). introduction, Valiz.

Kimbell, L. (2012). Rethinking Design Thinking: Part II. Design and Culture, 4(2), 129–148. https://doi.org/10.2752/175470812×13281948975413

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Method. Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/method.

The Open University & Unison in Partnership (n.d.). Self reflection. Self reflection | The Open University & Unison in Partnership. open.ac.uk/choose/unison/develop/my-skills/self-reflection.

Papanek, V. (1985). Design for the real world: human ecology and social change. Thames and Hudson.

Reymen, I. & Hammer, D. K. (2002). Structured Reflection for Improving Design Processes (pp. 887–892). Dubrovnik; International Design Conference – Design 2002.

Schaminée, A. (2019). Designing with and within public organizations: building bridges between public sector innovators and designers. (p. 13) BIS Publishers.

Schaminée, A., & Dorst, K. (2019). In Designing with and within public organizations: building bridges between public sector innovators and designers (p. 6). foreword, BIS Publishers.

Schön D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. Basic Books Inc.

Stewart, S. C. Interpreting Design Thinking. Design Studies, vol. 32, no. 6, 2011, pp. 515 520., doi:10.1016/j.destud.2011.08.001.

Thiele, K. Critical Condition or Fully Out of Steam? Critical Thinking ‘Today.’ ‘Terra Critica: Re-Visioning the Critical Task of the Humanities in a Globalized World, Utrecht University, 7 Dec. 2012, terracritica.net/wp-content/uploads/Thiele_positionpaper-1.pdf.

Webber, M. M. & Rittel, H. W. J. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (Vol. 4:2, Ser. Policy Sciences, pp. 155–169). essay, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam.