Notes from a recent conference we attended. Words by the ever-so-clever Jess Miller…
Can Graphic Design Save the Planet?
No.
Can it help?
Maybe…
How Can Graphic Design Help Save the World, hosted by the Australian Graphic Design Association, featured leading design thinkers including Jacqueline Gothe, Andy Polaine, David Berman and Rick Pryor to share ideas about whether we as graphic/designers can be part of a world-saving solution.
Republic of Everyone went along to have a listen and was inspired to hear some incredibly insightful thinking on the topic of whether graphic design actually can save the world. Here’s a bit of what we saw and heard.
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine is a Germany-based practitioner of service interactions design. He has worked in Australia as well as in Europe on a range of projects and now runs his own consultancy Polaine www.polaine.com .
Andy Polaine is not convinced that graphic design can change the world. “Instead, we need to reframe the question and think about what power we have to help save the world…this inspires a more indigenous mode of thinking, reframes the question of salvation, and calls upon designers to make a genuine connection with the world and work collaboratively within it”, he said.
When he was a design teacher in Australia, Andy was surprised by the influence that European and American design had on his students, particularly given the richness of Australian colour and patterns, “It was as if the Australian landscape and culture were somehow ‘off-limits’ as a source of inspiration to students”, Andy observed, suggested a much deeper lack of connectedness or collaborative relationship with the environment, culture or community.
Years later, Andy now notices a growing industry sentiment among and movement of designers who are leading a more collaborative and connected approach to their work, and getting stunning results. “The power of design is its ability to connect people and increasingly we’re seeing more work like that of David Lancashire that incorporates community, the environment and culture and having some great results”, said Andy.
Saving the planet is a BIG wicked problem.
In the book, Designing Design, Kenya Hara talks about how design tackles small, big and wicked problems. Climate change is a massively complex and wicked problem, changing one part of the system results in complex follow-on effects. Andy likens saving the world and climate change in particular as a Vaseline-coated-octopus type of wicked problem, but says that designers are in a good position to tackle them by using right-brain thinking.
“Most wicked problems stem from many small acts of thoughtlessness”, says Andy. “At home in Germany, I did the right thing and took my old TV to the recycle depot and it was terrible and powerful to be confronted by the multiplier effect of my and others decisions – there were mountains of TVs.”
The feeling of terror and confrontation evoked having seen the multiplier effect of consumption is something that Andy says designers can use. Designers, and particularly, graphic designers have the power to evidence the mountains of TVs as a tangible way of understanding the consequences of small acts of thoughtlessness. Andy says that, though often the last in the process of developing a product, graphic design is the first thing a consumer sees and can influence better buying decisions.
Service and Interactions design – designers influencing behaviour.
Service and interaction design seeks to influence decision-making processes. Essentially good service and interactions design works to build upon an understanding of how people experience the world, their interactions within it and how designers can become more powerful change agents.
Incorporating the elements of co-design, research and collaboration, services design signifies a major shift from traditional top-down processes and helps tackle wicked problems like climate change. Unlike processes common to government and business, service and interactions design and thinking is transdisciplinary and human-centred blurring the distinction between ‘professional’ decisions and those based on personal values.
To demonstrate the benefits of good service design, Andy compared train travel in Germany to that in Australia. “In Germany train travel is a nice experience that people want to do, it is comfortable, you can enjoy a meal – and people do it in large numbers. This just isn’t the case in Australia: chairs are often slashed and uncomfortable; there is a lack of information surrounding timetables, platforms are inaccessible and information difficult to obtain. These are design flaws that put people off using low-emissions transport in Australia. Again, this is where design can be quite powerful – designers help us make decisions that benefit the planet.
Let’s make the invisible, visible.
Minimalist design hides small, big and wicked problems.
“Where things are made, where things end-up and the whole system of global manufacturing and production is largely invisible to end-consumers. By designing in a way that makes them visible we nudge action”, says Andy.
For example, the Smart Meter is a piece of design that tells you in money terms how much energy you are using and which home appliances are most energy intensive. You can set a price cap on the Smart Meter which when you’re close to going-over, it beeps; you run around switching things off to make it stop. The design considers that people don’t have a clue what a kilowatt is or means, but certainly understands energy use as money lost; the design therefore catalyses a process of thoughtful action.
“The climate change debate has evolved from being about saving polar bears to being about money. Powerful design goes beyond re-educating people and instead seeks to understand peoples’ behaviour and influences it by making the invisible visible”, says Andy.
Which brings Andy’s discussion back to the need to shift our framework for thinking to a more indigenous understanding of the world, its interconnectedness and collaboration.
“Design can help save the world by making sense of complexity. We’re accustomed to the consequences of our actions being pushed beyond our line of site, and it’s interesting to hear indigenous people talk about the process of interconnectivity – its network thinking, and not so utterly intangible anymore because we have the internet as a powerful metaphor for understanding how we interact and connect online”, said Andy.
Design in its most simple form is about making complex problems, big problems and wicked problems easier to deal with and this is how graphic designers have the power to help change the world.
What Andy is working on: The Human Listening Machine:
Straddling interaction and service design, Andy works as collaboratively as possible with clients in a hierarchy-defining way. Working on the sensitive issue of terminal lung cancer, Andy’s brief was to undertake research that would inform an interactive design piece that fostered emotional relationships between doctors, patients, health practitioners, carers and families.
Rather than producing yet another questionnaire, Andy came-up with the concept of the Human Listening Machine. Its interface records keystrokes to better understand the User’s thought processes and humanise what would otherwise be yet another detached interaction between patients and their communities perpetuating the feeling that ‘my Doctor doesn’t understand me’.
Via a number of questions like ‘what makes you angry’, ‘what are you looking forward to?’ and other interactions, the process of reflection was captured and recorded as thought spirals – it gives the patient’s broader community a deeper understanding of where the patient is at as well as records these feelings throughout their last days and provides a permanent record after the patient has passed away.
