seminars - week 19

In parallel to this first job, I started volunteering in various organizations that addressed topics that I was sensitive to such as homelessness (with Red Cross), refugee crisis (with Place collective), alimentation (with a community supported agriculture organization).

What does design mean for me?
I discovered design when volunteering with this collective that helped refugees in Paris start their projects. We were using service design, user research, rapid prototyping approaches, a lot of them based on ideo.org open source toolkit. I was fascinated by the fact that there was a discipline that could combine creative thinking and action to bring solutions to social issues.

innovation by design? I wanted to know more about design and studied a course on innovation by design for a year in a design school. We explored different aspects of design, from its history to different areas where it is applied now including social design, public policies design, care design, strategic design… My final thesis was about urban dynamics, “city making” for people, I wanted to question if public spaces were really open to everyone so this research work was at the intersection between user research, sociology and urban design.

design thinking, the forbidden words I became receptive to the discord between designers about the “design thinking” trend popularized by Ideo that began to spread everywhere in the corporate world with its famous double diamond methodology. It was interesting to see from my new point of view (as I was now part of the two worlds both corporate with my consulting job and design with the course I was following). On one side some designers argued that at least it made their work more visible and known as more than aesthetics aspects but also as a potential strategic asset for organizations. On the other side, others would argue that design is not about “thinking” but more about “doing”, that design thinking causes harm to design by reducing it to a methodology and letting people think that anybody can be a designer as long as they follow the steps.

I felt like I agreed more with the second point of view. Which also made me feel “impostor syndrome” for a long time! Was I allowed to work in the design field?! How many experiences did I need to have in design to be legitimate?! Would “real designers” think I come from the evil corporate world and all that counts for me is to replicate a methodology? I definitely was not that person so “design thinking” became a forbidden word for me! I could not be mistaken for a consultant applying a double diamond methodology.

service design, open innovation After this one year course, I quit my consulting job and started working in an innovation collective focused on “Tech for Good”. It mixed social innovation, technology and design to collaborate with public actors, big companies and startups and solve social and environmental issues. We had a multi-disciplinary approach working at the same time with designers, developers, data analysts, researchers, scientists… I started this professional practice of design with user centered design with a lot of user research, co-designing sessions, prototyping, user testing. As we know, it can be limiting and even harmful if it doesn’t allow this holistic or systemic approach. To avoid that, we were developing frameworks to include social and environmental impacts into each project as well as new ways of mapping ecosystems to include non humans into the picture.

design for emergent futures? Even though I was in the appropriate environment to address the social and environmental issues I was concerned about, I was still missing something. I still had my impostor syndrome about design. I didn’t really make things! I was lacking technical and fabrication skills in my practice and that frustrated me a lot. I needed more tools and a community to address concerns I still had about food systems, social justice, climate inaction, to question the way we live and consume in cities, our relation to nature…so MDEF seemed to be the right place to explore these topics deeper.

Has my vision changed now after eight months here? Now that design softwares, digital fabrication, and making in general are becoming more familiar to me, I think I lost this impostor syndrome I had when I arrived. Designing from a first person perspective is a new way of approaching design practice that we have used a lot this year. As opposed to user centered design, we start from our own individual experience, from our own context. Just as we cannot separate our personal from our professional identity, it would not make sense to ignore the designer’s influence on the design. Being part of my research as a subject and not a neutral observer has brought many new perspectives.

I would not define design as a set of technical skills or know-how. Rather than being a discipline separate from others, it is the one that links them all. I love the fact that this practice mixes disciplines and can be at the intersection of art, science, technology, urbanism, sociology, crafts...

a bridge in an interconnected world The world is interconnected even if we tend to not see it. Every action or decision we make has an impact somewhere else on the planet, today or for future generations. But the modern era has simplified everything and made these connections invisible. Capitalism has made it so easy (and cheap) for us to consume, travel, heat ourselves, eat, produce… that we have stopped questioning and knowing “how” all this happens (and at what real price). We need to deal with this interconnectivity, with this multi-scalarity. For this, we need stories, devices, systems. And this is where design is situated for me. In between. It creates a bridge, it creates channels of communication. Like a bridge, I see the value of design in the way it is situated at the intersections and I think this is the reason why I was attracted to it. It is at the same time a bridge between disciplines, between communities, between past, present and future.

How can design help me achieve my purpose?
For me, design encompasses a conception dimension with a strong desire to intervene on existing realities and this is what drove me to it. My purpose comes from some frustration including social injustice, climate emergency, access to good alimentation. The reason why it frustrates me is because I have the impression that as a society, we do not do enough about it while all the means exist : financial, technical, technological. Something is missing to make us take the step out of a system that has been harming the environment, people and animal lives for the last decades. I am looking for ways to reconnect humans to nature, and promote more sustainable and resilient ways of living.

I am not claiming that design is a solution to every problem on the planet. Because it is not. And in a way it even has a responsibility. But I think its role is key in creating alternative scenarios today as a path towards the future.

creating systems for action Design is the action of bringing to the world something that transforms realities. I think it is not necessarily about coming up with solutions but rather creating the right environments to give space for others to think and create desirable futures. These “environments” can take different shapes: from physical spaces to communities that can interact physically or digitally. I want my practice of design to contribute to creating the framework or system in which a kid, teenager, adult can be inspired and take action. The responsibility of design here is to create new systems, not new objects. We don’t necessarily need new objects, new technological innovations but rather a new system in which navigating is easy, in which we know how to take care of the environment and of others, in which we know where and how what we consume is produced, what resources from the planet we are using. We need to give agency and autonomy to those who were traditionally expected to be passive “consumers”. Design as I see it can be an enabler to achieve this purpose.

Systemic approach The climate emergency we are facing today is the consequence of many choices we made as a society and in which designers play an important role. To address this, designers should take a systemic, holistic approach and take into account all dimensions affected by their project : time (what about future generations?), space (what are the impacts in other parts of the city/the region/the world?), species (which humans and non-humans will be affected by this?).

new narratives - how words create worlds Our society is experiencing a crisis of imagination, “The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.” (Jason W. Moore). This sentence resonates a lot for me because there is an inclination of humans to think in terms of fiction, narrative, storytelling and I am convinced that design contributes to creating these new narratives.

How can design be used to transform my world?
So what did my interests in crafts, botany, sewing, gardening, food, social justice, climate, nature, technology, economy, arts, ceramics, cooking, culture, cities, games have in common? I thought for a long time I just couldn’t focus.

But maybe design was the missing part to connect it all. And as I am building my own practice, I now see connections between what seemed to be a list of unrelated fields of interest. I want to see design in places where it is not expected. I like that it is not a “frozen” discipline and not two designers will be the same as our practices evolve all the time. Every designer is unique and there is no “check-list” that defines what a designer is.

So to transform my world, I need to keep taking into account new perspectives, new ways of creating with others. Exploring non western perspectives on conception. Find ways to collaborate with humans and non humans. And maybe not even use the word design anymore for what actually seems to be a way of living, thinking, doing.

making sense & meaning

19th of January to 21st of March 2022

faculty: Tomas Diez

full paper