Good morning. It is a pleasure for me today to share some of my ideas on design education and ethics with all of you. As you may know I am trained as an architect, and not as a product designer. So I hope you will pardon me for my ignorance in your field. That said, I am also a design teacher, and so I hope that my own reflections on design education will still be of some use.
Preparing this lecture brought back memories of my experience as a student in a design and technology classroom. For two years in secondary one and two respectively, I remember learning how to sketch, draw orthographic projections, axonometric drawings and work on various materials from wood to acrylic. I remember that it was a class that allowed me to conceptualize, calculate, measure, make, and also take whatever I have made home. On hindsight, I thought that there was something in the task of making that made it very different from physics, history or literature.
In any case, subsequently in the next four years of my pre-tertiary education however, I drew nothing and made nothing. Even though I learned more about complex equations and formulas, and knew more about the world through the various sciences, in many ways I had come to know less about it.
This brings me to the two questions at the center of this lecture.
First, what does it mean to be ‘educated by design’? To be educated by design must be the aim of design education. However normally we don’t phrase the aim this way. Normally we tend to say that in design education, a student learns to visualize and draw; this student learns the dexterity of handling tools and hones his tactile intelligence with materials. This student also learns how to observe users’ needs and wants, and to synthesize all these ideas together through a design model or prototype with some intent in mind.
But here, I want to raise the question by asking: is that all to what it means to be educated by design?
This leads me to my second question. The second question is, ‘what is design ethics?’.
I do not intend to ask this question out of the blue. On the contrary, I think this second question is intimately connected to the first question. Unless we have something to say about design ethics, it is very hard to arrive at a sufficient answer of what it means to be educated by design.
As a prelude to what I want to share, one can say that design shapes and modulates the interests, the relationships and lives of individuals and communities. Because of this impact, design always has an ethical dimension. Hence the question is not, ‘how do we make design ethical?’—because it already presupposed some kind of ethics—but rather, ‘how do we engage and activate the various ethical values already implicit in the design process for the development of the student?’
So let me begin with the second question on ‘what is design ethics’ first. It is possible to answer this question tentatively first by saying that design ethics is mostly about ‘good design’.
Good design is always somewhat subjective and controversial. But as you will see later, I am concerned here with the other kind of good design.
As a start, to define what is good design, it is always fruitful to show what is not good design. I understand that even bad design may still be a very subjective issue. Even so, I would still like to demonstrate my position on this matter. Hopefully the examples I am going to show will speak for themselves. I apologize that most of them come from architecture.
My first slide here shows a house by the famous architect Peter Eisenman. For a time, Eisenman was designing a series of houses through the exploration of geometrical rules. I should add that these explorations in geometry came at the expense of livability and perhaps even safety concerns. It was said that upon hearing that an occupant in one of his buildings fell from the stairs and broke his ankle, Eisenman remarked that from then on, this person would cease to take a staircase for granted.
Here we see that in order to obey the geometrical rules he set up, Eisenman had to include redundant beams that serve no structural purposes, and he also separated the bedroom of a loving couple with a gap.
My second slide shows the basement levels of Fusionopolis. The pictures speak for themselves. Even where human traffic is low in a temporary set up like this, human factors of safety and ease have not been considered in the implementation of this design.
My third slide shows the carpark at Orchard Central. I don’t know if you have tried driving in this carpark. Thankfully, I have yet to experience the design here. But for those of you who have tried it, I hope your experience has been less harrowing compared to that of these policemen.
My last slide in this series shows a case of risky improvisation. While we may not call improvisation a form of design, it is however a form of designerly problem-solving behavior. The key but debatable difference between improvisation and design is that improvisation aims to solve a problem expediently with readily available materials—such as seen in this case where a sense of responsibility was lacking.
If this is the general idea of what bad design means, now lets look at a definitive example of what is known as good design.
Here are Dieter Rams’s famous 10 principles of good designs. I am sure many, if not all of you, are acquainted with Rams, for he was for the longest time, the most iconic designer working for Braun in Germany.
But what Rams missed is the other category of what it means by ‘good design’. This means good as implied in the ethical good. I am afraid that there is no easy way of expressing this so please bear with me. Good design, in the ethical category, is concerned with the following questions:
(1) Why are we designing this artifact?
(2) What are its anticipated consequences and costs?
(3) Who are we designing it for? Who benefits and who loses?
(4) Who is responsible in this design? What are the responsibilities of this design?
These questions, except for (2) and (3), are rather peculiar by standards in design today. The first question is usually bypassed because the need or want is apparent. As for the last question, lawyers are the ones who usually answer it.
In contrast, questions of ‘how’, for example, how is this or that made? How do we achieve this or that effect?, have become much more prevalent today, perhaps owing both to the wide range of technological tools at our command as well as to the immediacy of communicative networks for sharing what we know and have made. Even so, these questions of ‘how’ usually do not invoke the question of ethical making, for example, such as, ‘to what extent is the method of making sustainable?’ or ‘has the method considered fair wages?’. Instead, questions of ‘how’ tend to refer to questions of method and techniques.
In any case, Australian designer and researcher Tony Fry once remarked that design ethics is a marginalized and underdeveloped area in design. It is not hard to imagine why this is the case. Designers are practitioners of action. This does not mean that they act without thinking. Rather, to use a Donald Schon’s aphorism, designers think in action. Furthermore, designers enjoy looking ahead, not looking around—something that ethics oblige us to do. The attraction of the end product is a very seductive and an all-encompassing goal. And perhaps most of all, ethics has a stodgy aura about it: the ethical thinker is perceived as a superior personality on a high-horse reprimanding anyone deemed to be morally inferior. This common but inaccurate view does not sit in well with the pluralistic ethos practiced in design today.
And so as designers, shouldn’t we just contend with being the most skilful and talented designers we can be?
However the famous designer George Nelson once said that if designers start out by limiting their responsibility, they also limit their potential. This insight can be said to be the mother of all insights in design responsibility. Think about this for a second. What Nelson seems to say is this: design always starts out with a problem or need. And how we define this problem or need in turn depends on the formulations of our responsibilities towards this problem or need. Thus how we formulate our responsibilities then determines the kind of potential and command we enjoy as the designer.
In other words Nelson is asking to us imagine a forward kind of design responsibility—responsibility that is not associated with the backward responsibility of liability but with hopeful anticipation, obligation and virtue. To put this concretely, if designers were to embrace this forward responsibility, they would look forward to a world where their designs are proudly implemented and not just sold; and they would be willing to participate in the continuous development of a product alongside the user and not just as the client. The anecdotal tale of the architect who does not look forward to his creation, much less visiting them and asking how the user is, demonstrate the rarity of this forward kind of design responsibility.
But surely Nelson did not ask us to expand our responsibilities as designers indefinitely. To do so would be profoundly irresponsible. On this, I think Nelson is asking us to draw our boundaries in a responsible manner—both backward and forward responsibilities--and this exercise is itself an enlarging move towards ethical design.
(from The School and Society, p.37-38: ‘Take the example of the little child who wants to make a box. If he stops short with the imagination or wish, he certainly will not get discipline. But when he attempts to realize his impulse, it is a question of making his idea definite, making it into a plan, of taking the right kind of wood, measuring the parts needed, giving them necessary proportions, etc. There is involved the preparation of materials, the sawing, planing, the sandpapering, making all the edges and corners to fit.’)
The disposition in design today to focus much more on the ‘how’ over the ‘why’ can be partially traced back via Donald Schon to the Progressivist’s philosophy of John Dewey. According to Dewey’s philosophy, in order to learn something we must try it. By trying, we see the consequences of our action and by comparing that with our original intent, we learn something new. Dewey’s great faith in the experiential method must rest on his equal faith in the epistemology of the scientific method, which is experimentation.
But today, questions of ‘why’ have become just as important as questions of ‘how’. The state of environmental degradation, the novel but harmful financial derivatives and new products of every kind that ultimately end up in landfills are not categories of design action that can benefit from experimentations. As a matter of fact, countless acts of design today are irreversible actions: design actions that exact a cost in both material and human resources and sometimes have residual effects that last for many generations.
Interestingly, Dewey saw the need to expand education beyond that of learning and skills towards the broad social goal of democratic citizenship. However, in his writings replete with so many references to design education, he did not anticipate the day when design would come to threaten a sustainable way to live, for example as highlighted by problematic issues of mass consumption, mass disposability and planned obsolescence.
In light of these issues, systems thinker C.W. Churchman, who coined the phrase, ‘wicked problems’ once remarked that many ways of doing things were invented in the Twentieth Century, but we have not found any way to justify for many of them. At the same time, phenomenon that was once in the vicinity of fate or destiny have now turned into problems of design under mankind’s discretion. Here are a few at a very high level of design possibilities:
(a) genetic traits of one’s offspring
(b) procreation beyond one’s death
(c) distribution and allocation of deadly risks
(d) the natural balance of ecosystems
(e) the size of the world’s population
(f) the survival of species, including our own (Protzen & Harris 2010: 222)
Hence the focus on questions of ‘how’ over ‘why’ ultimately spells what design thinker Horst Rittel calls the ‘loss of destiny’—we no longer require a justification to exercise the power of design. In other words, the human species has arrived at a stage where we can no longer quite distinguish between what to design and what not to design. The range of design artifacts out there tell us that many design artifacts exist simply because we have the capacity to make them. And unfortunately, the logic of the market tends to reinforce this state of affairs.
Subsequently, this leads to a state today where we can no longer quite distinguish between what to design and what not to design. The tallest building? What productive role does it serve? The fastest car? Where is it going? Man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree? Is our planet running out of interesting geographical features?
Techniques, methods or even enlightened aspirations and design talents cannot answer these questions on our behalf. Only ethical reasoning, along with their corresponding dialogues and debates between individuals who will be affected by these designs, can begin to point the way.
Now let me conclude this lecture by returning to the first question on what it means to be educated by design.
To be educated by design, I suggest, is to be made more aware and conscious as a human being by design. What do I mean by this?
Let me further explicate this idea a little more through two different ways. The first way has to do with a designer being aware of what he or she is doing. The second way has to do with an individual being made aware of design as a citizen in a democratic society.
First let me start by situating design awareness from the designer’s point of view. Here, I quote Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Project as accounted by Richard Sennett as an extreme example:
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about only after you have had your technical success.”
Oppenheimer was however in this case, referring to the atomic bomb.
I certainly hope none of our students end up designing weapons of mass destruction! It is not my intent to demonize Oppenheimer, for he was also deeply tormented by the military use of his design. Yet one thing is clear: the designer who is unaware of the ramifications of his or her private design tampers with risks and dangers that may one day become the public’s problem. To put this in another way, being aware of what we do as designers have something to say about what we should design and what we should not design. From here, we can then begin to consider how we design.
To underscore this idea better, I provide you with Tim Brown’s own account. You may know that Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO. In Brown’s account, he talks about how IDEO was engaged by Oral-B to reframe and redesign toothbrushes for children. The project was lauded as a success. A few months later, one of the lead designers of this project was walking on a beach in Mexico when he found the very toothbrush that he has designed, except for a few barnacles and still quite new, washed ashore. In his estimation the toothbrush was disposed for quite some time, yet it looked more or less the same as the day someone had decided to dispose of it. The moral of the story is clear: Brown is highlighting the need for designers to be aware of the complex interactions between users, product life-cycles and the environment in things we design. It will not be a straightforward task to analyze these complex relationships, but Brown asked us to try.
I should add here that questions of ‘how’ are important in this context of design awareness. For how we design something shows the values we bring towards design. This lesson of craftsmanship is direct but seldom invoked. Indeed, how we design and what we design teaches the users the values and the responsibilities that designers hold on to.
The skeptic may say that this lesson has become obsolete in the age of industrial production. Yet many designs today show that the ethic of care, and hence also an act of educating by design, is still achievable despite the disappearance of the traditional craftsman.
And as my last example on this point, consider this Tsunami warning marker that became news recently. It was discovered that people who built above this marker, erected long ago by the ancestors of the villagers, got to keep their lives and houses. But everyone who built below this marker had their houses and lives swept away. We can see in this example, a case in point where individuals who lived long ago saw the responsibility to warn future generations about the tsunamis that they had experienced through an act of design. And they elected to design in a very direct way: carving a stone tablet that is anticipated to last a long time on a point on the hillside they deemed safe for their descendents. They were far-sighted in their design responsibility. To reiterate a point I made earlier, this Tsunami marker can be seen as a case of forward responsibility in design.
In any case, I do not want to give you the idea that design awareness is uncontroversial. As a matter of fact by Rams’s definition, good design is design that we are not aware of, that is, unobtrusive!
This brings me to my second way of being aware of design as a citizen in a democratic society.
If we take a look around our environment today, we quickly realize that we are surrounded by objects of all types that are opaque and mysterious. Yes, many of these objects are very attractive and some are even downright seductive. This has become the mandate of design today. However, they say beauty can sometimes be skin-deep, and this is the limit to design that I hope to explicate a little more here.
To use a Heideggerian formulation, such designs only become apparent, that is, they become visible to our consciousness when they malfunction. Heideggerians like to use the example of the malfunctioning hammer: when it works, we don’t think about it. But when the hammering head falls off, we realize it has become a hammer that does not work. To put this in design lingo, a user-friendly design has the unintentional effect of rendering us less aware and more unreflective of its design, a point made by sustainability scholar John Ehrenfeld.
This does not mean that we should design or live with designs that calls on our attention all the time. Rather, the point is that design artifacts today are hardly designed with the intentions for users’ self-maintenance, much less for training his dexterity and hence also, mental and physical awareness of these designs. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the designed artifact challenges us every moment to try and understand the reasoning and logic behind its creation: why did the designer do this? How did the designer accomplish this? How can I as the user find new ways to interpret, use or maintain it? Designs that seek to heighten our design awareness attempt to consider these questions in their conception. Designs that seek to reduce our awareness dismiss these questions as superfluous. The choice between these options is therefore also a choice of design ethics.
Thus, it is possible to say that today, we have an unprecedented range of design artifacts at our disposal, but in contrast, our design awareness has become unprecedentedly low. The bushman has to know each facet of his flint intimately but how many of us truly understand—and can repair—an induction cooker? Truth to be told, today, design can only catch our eyes initially, but cease to catch our minds and our bodies as people who try to live and work with them. And it is by understanding design both cognitively and bodily that we come to be further educated by design.
On this, should the values of user-friendliness and unobtrusiveness be the perennial guiding principle of good design? They should be if we are interested to continue this trend of low design awareness. On the other hand, they should be questioned and challenged if we are interested to find greater design awareness through designs that invite us to work and understand it, and perhaps through this, to become co-designers with the original designer.
Here, I end my lecture with a provocative question: how then do we teach design awareness, if by design awareness we refer to being educated by design, when our environment is filled with designs that are user-friendly (but not maintenance-friendly), unobtrusive, opaque and or mysterious? To put this more concretely, how are we to heighten our quotient of design awareness when design tries to be invisible in everyday life?
I suggest we first start by asking ‘why’. Why is this design made? Why is it important for us to have this design? And what is the intention of the designer? Like the proverbial example of the young child who always asks ‘why’, this is perhaps the only way when design becomes apparent and conscious to us, appearing in our mutual conversations, public dialogues and national discussions. Only by rendering visible what was once unproblematic and unobtrusive can we begin to be truly educated by design.
Thank You.
*post-script:
"Language can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don't talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about. Our perspectives on the world depend on the interaction of our nervous system and our language..." --Fred Kofman
