QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SPRING 2021
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INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE & IDSA Education Symposium
A 24 HOUR GLOBAL VIRTUAL EVENT September 22-23, 2021
internationaldesignconference.com
QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA
SPRING 2021 ®
Publisher IDSA 950 Herndon Parkway, Suite 250 Herndon, VA 20170 P: 703.707.6000 F: 703.787.8501 idsa.org/innovation
Executive Editor (interim) Chris Livaudais, IDSA Exective Director IDSA chrisl@idsa.org
Graphic Designer Carl Guo 703.707.6000 x110 carlg@idsa.org
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Annual Subscriptions Within the US $100 Canada & Mexico $120 International $165
Contributing Editor Jennifer Evans Yankopolus
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Single Copies Fall/Yearbook All others
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Above: The Najma light handcrafted by Moroccan artisans, page 56.
$50+ S&H $25+ S&H
Covestro, Pittsburgh, PA
Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH
Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness, IDSA
48 Fostering a Multilingual Design Studio Classroom by Amanda Huynh, IDSA 50 Maybe Grassroots Collectivism Is How We Expand Access to Design by Christina Harrington
Ambassador, visit idsa.org/ambassadors or contact IDSA at 703.707.6000
by Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA, and Marshall Johnson, L/IDSA
IN EVERY ISSUE 4 In This Issue 5 Letters to the Editor 6 Chair’s Report by Jason P. Belaire, IDSA
10 From HQ by Chris Livaudais, IDSA
12 Beautility by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA
QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SPRING 2021
16 Design DNA by Scott Henderson, IDSA
68 A Final Thought by Judith Anderson, IDSA
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64 Additional Resources About Decolonizing Design
For more information about becoming an
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60 Inclusive Design 3.0: Broadening the Goals of Inclusivity in Design Education by Craig M. Vogel, FIDSA
Techmer PM, Clinton, TN
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56 Lighting the Way to Transparent, Ethical, and Fair Trade by Dounia Tamri-Loeper
TEAGUE, Seattle, WA
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54 Celebrating America’s Culture Diversity by Danielle Chen, IDSA
Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO
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44 “Recruit a Mix,” They Said by Jemma Frost
Charter supporters indicated in bold.
20 Academia 360° by Aziza Cyamani, IDSA, and
22 Tribute: Budd Steinhilber, 34 Rethinking Design FIDSA Thinking by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA by Jasmine Burton 24 Tribute: Ed Zagorski, 38 Appropriate Discomfort: FIDSA Challenging Appropriation by Jeffrey Breslow in Product Design 25 Donate Your Archives by Fran Wang 42 The Problem With Othering in Design by Tracy Llewellyn, IDSA
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30 Colonized by Design by Anna Mengote Baluca, IDSA
19 Book Review Superhuman By Design
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26 From Colonization to Liberation by Raja Schaar, IDSA
FEATURED
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DECOLONIZING INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Innovation is the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the professional organization serving the needs of US industrial designers. Reproduction in whole or in part—in any form—without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. The opinions expressed in the bylined articles are those of the writers and not necessarily those of IDSA. IDSA reserves the right to decline any advertisement that is contrary to the mission, goals and guiding principles of the Society. The appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement by IDSA. All design and photo credits are listed as provided by the submitter. Innovation is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks. The use of IDSA and FIDSA after a name is a registered collective membership mark. Innovation (ISSN No. 0731-2334 and USPS No. 0016-067) is published quarterly by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/Innovation, 950 Herndon Pkwy, Suite 250 | Herndon, VA 20170. Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/Innovation, 950 Herndon Pkwy, Suite 250 | Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2021 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 40, No. 1, 2021; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 07312334; USPS 0016-067.
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I N T HI S I SSUE
DECOLONIZING INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
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ndustrial design operates within a capitalistic system. Industrial designers create things to be made, purchased, and used by consumers. In the end, this exchange most frequently benefits corporations and other entities who hold power in dictating how the system itself operates and who is allowed to participate in it. Decolonizing industrial design encompasses many things yet is centered on truly understanding who we design for and whose voices are privileged (or suppressed) in the process. Colonized design perpetuates power imbalance. It ignores the needs of a diverse society and community in order to please a myopic group of stakeholders who don’t reflect the full diversity of our society. It has led to harm. From racist algorithms and poor education outcomes to exclusive and oppressive healthcare systems, design (broadly applied) has had a role in supporting systems of oppression, white supremacy, and patriarchy, which has led to (among other negative outcomes) environmental racism, sexual violence, and cultural erasure specific to industrial design and the products we use in our daily lives. Is it possible that these objects have been created with cultural biases built in, perhaps without the designer even knowing? Do the products we use create or perpetuate systems of oppression that empower certain user groups while diminishing the abilities of others? The question of “What is good design?” is also increasingly tied to conversations around design decolonization. The answer to this question is often dominated by a Eurocentric perspective, aesthetics, and a material culture of good design. With that in mind, and with a critical lens applied, other questions emerge: What do other societies, cultures, and communities value as good design? Further, why aren’t those perspectives given the same level of regard as, say, Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design? Has the design industry been built in a way that systematically amplifies the voices of some while marginalizing others? In December 2020, Fast Company (Co.design) ran an article called “10 New Rules of Design.” The story was viewed over 60,000 times and was shared extensively
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across social media. In it, design leaders representing a wide range of design disciplines and academia presented a new manifesto, if you will, for how we might reshape our practices in an effort to overhaul the frameworks used by the design industry to create a more equitable future for everyone. Mark Wilson, a senior writer at Fast Company and the author of the piece, tells INNOVATION magazine, “The response was overwhelming … Every single industry is facing a mea culpa spurred out of the Black Lives Matter movement. Design is, in many ways, the most privileged creative class of all. We realized that to address white supremacy in 2020, we needed to question the very foundations of design itself. Because if you trace back almost any convention of ‘good design,’ it ends with the citation to some European man.” Mark continues, “To live under the influence of white supremacy is like being stuck in a 2D world. Frankly, I’m excited about what comes next, when the definition of ‘good design’ doesn’t only mean a vintage Braun record player. We’ll all be able to open our eyes and see the galaxy of possibilities.” Whatever role design has played until now, it also has an opportunity and tremendous responsibility to be intentional and thoughtful about the methods and strategies it employs to heal these traumas of the past. Conscientious efforts to decolonize industrial design must include acknowledging oppression and dismantling oppressive systems, rebuilding our design education models, employing inclusive hiring practices, and amplifying marginalized voices across the lines of race, gender, and class. It’s also about honoring Indigenous perspectives and including diverse and pluralistic sociopolitical perspectives. In this issue of INNOVATION, we explore this complex topic and shed light on how dismantling certain aspects of our institutional constructs could foster a more inclusive and diverse industrial design profession. We asked educators and practitioners to share their perspectives on the matter and hope to create space for transformation within the industry that starts from within. —INNOVATION Editorial Team
LETTERS TO TH E EDITO R
THE OVERLOOKED VALUE OF THE FLOW STATE
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fter reading Scott Henderson’s insightful article in the Winter 2020 issue (“State of Flow: What I Wish Design Schools Would Teach”), I felt compelled to write. First, and foremost, for bringing to our professional and academic communities—which seem to be constantly operating under the constraints and pressures of budgets, timelines, midterms, and final presentations—a significant aspect of the creative process that is being forced aside. I have spent almost five decades working in the field and the last two within the academy. I try to impress upon my students (graduate, undergraduate, interdisciplinary) the importance of reflection. Taking the time to pause and reflect … flow. My motto to these design students is to first “replace judgement with curiosity.” Flow theory by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is another useful theory. I have read Adrian Bejan and use his mental image of the single tree that is connected to the forest, yet below the surface; its roots are connected to an even greater holistic network. Bejan has also been influenced by Mihaly’s flow theory. Many years ago I saw John Cage live, and in his performance/talk he said that when confronted by a creative impasse to simply, “Begin anywhere.” I’m gratified that a well-respected design voice within our community is proclaiming this vital aspect of the creative process and raising awareness in doing so. —Stephen Melamed, FIDSA, University of Illinois at Chicago melamed@uic.edu
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ravo! I was wondering if I was the only one who thought that the flow state is the ultimate path to design creativity. As a disheveled freshman at college, I too struggled with foundation classes, yet the ongoing refrain from our classroom instructors during drawing exercises was to “find and forge a path and get into the flow.” I haven’t heard that term used in a long time and now have finally found someone acquainted with it. I find that students interviewing for jobs become so educationally bogged down with design ethics, global impact, equality, and race relations, to name a few, that they have little mental resources, skills, or time for finding and achieving creative flow. A review of the images in the Student Merit Award section of the latest issue of INNOVATION reveals the overall lack of this type of creativity. For me as with designers everywhere, the flow state can be elusive, especially since the products I design and our market share in industry is small, very focused, and narrow. I find that flashes of flow occur more frequently with my moonlight consulting work where the clients are seeking creative solutions to their needs and are open to more artistic solutions that transcend the normal design path than they may have thought possible. I wish the educators and their respective colleagues would reevaluate the training they offer and focus on design principles, history, and art to train students how to achieve the flow state. They should leave the non-design courses and curriculum to non-major departments, since that is where they really belong and that is what a rounded college education is all about. If they would do this, the students will be better designers and grasp the essence of what true design is all about—and it would show in their work. But really, as Scott points out, for a product designer or artist, there is no higher high than getting into the true groove of the flow. —Gregg Niven, IDSA gniven@powerteq.com
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CHA I R’S R E PO R T
LINGUISTICS: A STRATEGY FOR POST-COVID DISCOVERY
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f we haven’t been at the mercy of ‘outrageous fortune’ the past year, then I don’t know what qualifies. And if climate change isn’t a sea of troubles then nothing qualifies. So, to be (the change) or not to be (the change). To ride out the chaos, or to oppose and end those troubles, that is the question. But it’s not ending the troubles in the physical sense, at least not as the first step, but ending the sea of troubles between us at the societal level and within us as human beings. In that world, design is more important than ever. And designers’ ability to influence the narrative of products and services—circular economy, zero waste, regenerative practices, sustainability—may even determine the answer to the question, To be, or not to be? For many years, design—big D, little d, all the trends— has been marketed as a core pillar of business practice. But other business practices, marketing especially, have dominated the use of language regarding the use and design of all the products available to consumers. The impact of this on designers has become a habit, a default setting of going with the flow. We let marketing and advertising tell consumers what to think, which means that we as designers let marketing tell us what to think, or, really,
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how to think. Profit, ease, and convenience have been driving design, controlling the outlook and the language of what design is for, what design even is. Worse, it’s taught us to not even question the context of the game—the ultimate form of indoctrination. Designers, like much of business and society, are stuck in a bubble created by outside sources, discouraging our ability to think critically and articulate the lie that kills innovation and births repetition, cheap knockoffs, and derivatives of past success. Some of us find the tools to burst the bubble on a personal level, but the industry as a whole has not yet been able to do that at scale. We know that because complacency has, and continues to, set in, and because we largely ignore the way we are influenced by rapidly changing technology, or investors spending of billions of dollars into “failure,” or how mergers and acquisitions are defining what a commodity is versus a value proposition. With so many of these sources influencing our thinking leading up to the pandemic, how do we use linguistics to make sense of what just happened and what we need to do in order to successfully come out of COVID-19? And then deal with the next crisis after that?
“To be, or not to be? That is the question—Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
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And, by opposing, end them?
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Are We Missing Out? When we can’t identify the origin of our perceptions, at either an individual or a cultural level, we don’t know what’s influencing our thinking, our very approach to design. Our biases, our prejudices, and our blind spots inevitably have us missing out, and not even realizing we’re missing out. Without investing in ourselves, we can’t authentically create proper design solutions. Our experience related to COVID and its effects demonstrate our instinctive move to survival mode when stressed. In that state of distress, our way of being in the world naturally becomes reactive, protective, and resistant to change. And in that prevailing mood, our perspective becomes short-sighted and our lived experience becomes predictably riddled with fear, blame, guilt, and resistance. Left unacknowledged, we can exist in a state of disharmony, which can lead to missing out on key opportunities. In other words, as industrial designers, how can we synthesize to create when we ourselves are not whole? When we are unaware of the many possibilities that remain unexamined due to a lack of investment in ourselves and the development of teams and cultures that allow for safe, authentic spaces of questioning and discovery? COVID, any crisis really, offers the chance to look in fresh ways, which can be the start of creating those safe, authentic spaces for discovery and team/culture building. The New Tradition Deeper dives on all levels of design are key. As an organization that not only advocates on behalf of the industrial design community but also key traditional practices, IDSA is growing into a new relevancy by publicly championing greener practices, the UN’s 17 transformational Sustainable Development Goals, the triple bottom line (social, environmental, and financial), and circular design
principles (design out waste and pollution, keep products and materials in use, regenerate natural systems). All this while learning how to engage the necessary stakeholders in the design and business world to implement these practices. As an organization, we strive to tangibly realize the obligation we have as designers to ensure that prudent effort is put into learning, practicing, and sustaining each goal. To ensure we walk the talk, being authentic in our call for action and change, we are transforming IDSA to reflect that which is important from an environmental, societal, and economic standpoint. No one of these without the other. Thanks to our past Chairs, Board of Directors, and IDSA HQ, many IDSA efforts are already making an impact seen in our communication output, conference experiences, and the development of the critical Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee with overarching visibility and appropriate influence in our organizational outcomes. We have proof that large forward-thinking organizations can create the kind of cultural change that is also profitable. Language is used in this process, evidenced by thought leaders speaking differently than those who merely follow. Companies like Google, GE, Autodesk, Intuit, PepsiCo, Samsung, Microsoft, and the Marriott Hotel Group have implemented into their core business practices design thinking, human-centered design, and inclusive measures, both domestically and internationally. Their efforts have advanced them, and others, into a true innovative force, with profits to prove it. As we strive to adapt and embrace socially impactful initiatives, we can draw reference from these organizations on how to use design, and the specialized language of design, to bring positive change internally and externally. Much of the transformation in various organizations can be seen in top-down models with the creation of chief design officer and chief diversity officer positions. You also
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see efforts to influence change from the bottom up with employees creating low-risk autonomous sub-cultures and presenting their proven change models for success to upper management for real-time implementation. Albeit, the latter can be a battle at times; it is a result of human intuition naturally improving broken systems when given the chance. If we can embrace uncomfortable situations, we can build cultures of support in questioning our own biases, which can result in positive organizational change. Not only the results of that, but the effort itself creates a more authentic experience, which becomes a sustainable journey instead of a goal to cross off. How to Unlearn? The rapid development of new industries is revealing how some academic systems are ill-positioned in preparing future designers for current realities. IDSA is gearing up to connect in profound ways with our education and student members, exploring how to deconstruct the perpetual gap between academia and the profession to ensure that design education prepares students to meet industry standards in a global economy. Yet how do we do this when there is a need to unlearn the processes perpetuating the various behaviors that plague us? To decouple some of IDSA’s core membership-based offerings that aren’t relevant for the emerging designer, we will explore and harness new methodologies and relevant technologies in collaborative ways to examine the design archetypes at various stages of their career in order to better understand their nuances. Building on current successful efforts, IDSA will continue to explore better data collecting and generating practices (potentially collaborating with outside resources) to ensure we develop strategic initiatives that prioritize fiscally minded outcomes. Our FIDSA members have proven track records of design and design culture building, as well as a wealth of historical knowledge that often can’t be found in a quick internet search. Unifying efforts to pull them in to help balance out historical experiences can aid in alleviating unnecessary energy output and repetition as we continue to grow the IDSA brand. We are leaders of industrial design due to these giants who have preceded us and paved the way. The world looks to us as an example to continue these efforts.
What does a two-, five-, and 10-year vision look like for the creative culture, for IDSA? How do we individually and organizationally design for post-COVID normalcy, and for other unknown effects of this pandemic? We know how crucial it has been for us to pivot over this last year. And we did! With in-person events shifting to virtual, involving hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes work from IDSA volunteers and staff demonstrating agility, leadership, and a willingness to learn new processes and systems, IDSA was successful! Capitalizing on these newfound skills, we are developing exciting near-term virtual experiences and in-person hybrid versions for when it’s feasible to gather again. Transparency as Context When looking at the excerpt from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I find it beneficial to use linguistics to explore how it defines the context of its time but also to start to connect to what we perceive it means today. If we dig deeper as an organization, how can we acknowledge that we will experience pains as we are transforming into our fullest potential? That to stand against opposition, no matter how well intentioned or unpopular they may be, we must continue to explore the possibilities? That to transparently and publicly demonstrate that growth can be attributed to reconciling how personally and organizationally we can take the past and file it into the future, leading to change for the better? How should this process be observed by our members, and how should accountability be placed on us as leaders? Since first being elected to the Board of Directors for IDSA combined with my tenure as executive director for Denver Design Week, I have had the pleasure of researching, curating, and planning conference experiences across multiple industries, which has afforded me the luxury to have one-on-one conversations with some of the world’s sharpest minds. I have learned from them what is happening in their respective industries as well as across the globe, and the way culture and language influence us all. I welcome the opportunity to explore alongside you, our valued members, how to bring the necessary change that will continue to move IDSA into a vibrant and sustainable future.
—Jason P. Belaire, IDSA, IDSA Board Chair belworldcreative@icloud.com
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November 2-3, 2021
DIVE
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The Business of Design Design has proven itself as a vital component of corporate culture, service offerings, bottom line growth, and exceptional customer experiences. This 2-day event endeavors to further the important role industrial design plays in business successes and ensure that design always has a seat at the table.
Virtual Event
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FROM HQ
OPPORTUNITIES AHEAD
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he long-term impact of 2020 will reverberate for some time to come, yet I’m glad to have many of the challenges and uncertainties it presented us squarely in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps like no other time in recent history, we had to rethink, retool, and readjust what it means to be a community. Delivering value and connecting our membership when so much of our collective norms were disrupted by COVID-19 was, at times, a monumental task. Nevertheless, the contributions of those in our community who dedicated their valuable time and energy toward creating IDSA experiences were able to overcome the obstacles of a pandemic and provide opportunities where others could participate, share, and learn from one another. I am extremely proud of what IDSA was able to accomplish in 2020, and I am even more excited for the opportunities approaching us on the horizon. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Some of my earliest work as IDSA’s executive director involved weaving in the importance of DEI to our internal discussions and strategic planning. With so much of our programming reliant on the volunteer support of our members, it is vital that we align our mission toward building an environment and infrastructure that enables our community leaders to create content that truly reflects the diversity of our community and elevates voices from divergent backgrounds and perspectives. We want everyone who wishes to be a part of the IDSA community to feel they can be. We want them to experience a culture where they feel appreciated and empowered to contribute to our success. We want everyone to feel like they belong and are valued for their participation. In July 2020 we established a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council (DEIC). This group of volunteers began work almost immediately by formulating ideas and recommendations that will create positive change across three spectrums. First: significantly increase diversity and minority representation in IDSA’s core programming, events, leadership teams, membership, publications, partnerships,
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awards, and scholarships. Second: develop new pathways and partnerships that will extend IDSA’s ability to support minority and low-income communities and that will increase access to industrial design education and professional opportunities. Third: be a catalyst in transforming the industrial design industry so that it better reflects our diverse country and world and in dismantling the structural racism and inequities that permeate design and our communities. Moving into 2021, IDSA is preparing to dedicate financial and operational resources toward helping the DEIC achieve its goals. Committing to and realizing their success will have a profound benefit that will impact so much more than just our organization alone. We want to demonstrate that institutional change is possible and that we must lead by example. The Pivot to Virtual and the Return to Something Better We all know that professional networking connections and being in a room together for design events are enduring hallmarks of the IDSA experience. It’s what we’ve always been good at and what we hope to return to as soon as we can safely do so. In the meantime, our pivot to virtual events has provided a unique opportunity to rethink how we create the environments and moments that connect us. Zoom fatigue aside, we now benefit from being able to join in on programming without leaving the comfort of our homes. Additionally, with recordings being made available for most events, attendees can watch (and rewatch) content at a time that is most convenient for their schedule. All this means that the barrier to attending events and learning from global design leaders is significantly lower now than it ever has been. We had thousands of designers from around the world attend our International Design Conference and Deep Dive events. That number grows exponentially when you factor in the more than 80 virtual events hosted by our professional chapters last year. These participation numbers simply weren’t possible when we did things the old-fashioned way.
Knowing it would be difficult to truly replicate the in-person experience in a virtual setting, our content teams focused on curating and showcasing the highest quality content possible. By leveraging IDSA’s network and industry reach, we were able to attract top designers around the world to share their work exclusively with our audiences. Looking ahead, what can we learn from our experiences with virtual events, and how might we blend those findings with in-person events to create a new hybrid model—one that simultaneously creates the space for face-to-face interaction for those who can physically attend and also permits others to connect virtually from a distance? It’s an interesting design challenge to explore, and we’re looking forward to rolling out new event experiences in 2022. Membership Benefits and Opportunities for Community In my 2020 letter to the membership, I wrote about centering our efforts on community and investing in our chapters. It’s important enough to revisit here because I firmly believe that one of the easiest ways to experience the value of IDSA membership is though active participation with your local community through your local chapter. Over the course of 2020, we were able to reengage several dormant chapters and even establish new ones. We transitioned some chapters that spanned large geographic areas, such as Texas, to become city-based community groups. As a result, we’ve seen increased activity and renewed energy around creating localized design events that build community and allow individuals to take proactive leadership roles. An IDSA leadership position provides the opportunity to learn new skills, gain visibility, and connect to a larger network of similarly motivated individuals. This will become even more meaningful when we can return to in-person events. I am often asked, “What is the value of IDSA membership?” My response lately has been, “Well, it depends on you.” You see, the IDSA value proposition is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather it is greatly contingent on one’s current situation and what that person is looking
to achieve. For example, a new college graduate is likely going to value something vastly different from someone who is 40 years into their career. This means that IDSA, as an organization and as a community, is built to provide opportunities to people who are at different points in their career. This value-delivery matrix becomes even more nuanced when the multitude of different industry specializations is factored in. So how do we approach this? IDSA is, at the same time, the curator and broadcaster of content. The relevance and value of this content is largely derived from members of our community who can leverage our growing media network to their benefit. Every member of IDSA who shares their story on our platforms, presents at an IDSA event, or writes an article for INNOVATION magazine becomes part of IDSA’s legacy. This is how we advocate for the profession and simultaneously support overlapping generations of designers. I believe, and it’s been my own personal experience, that being a member of the IDSA community gives you access to opportunities. What you do with these opportunities is entirely up to you, but joining IDSA makes all of it possible. Thank you for being here and making this Society what it is. Your contribution is inherent to our value. Author’s Note : IDSA strongly condemns the rise in racist rhetoric and horrific violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. We stand with our Asian community and are committed to combating anti-Asian xenophobia and hate. Headquarter staff is working with members of IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council to develop programming and assemble resources we can deploy to confront racism and injustice within the design industry and beyond. —Chris Livaudais, IDSA, Executive Director chrisl@idsa.org
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B E A U TI L I T Y
END OF THE USER?
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he supply chain is long, with many users. Industrial designers call the last one the “end user,” signifying the people who actually use our designs. Industrial designers have been obsessed with satisfying that user ever since the 1930s when we called ourselves stylists. In mass markets, niche markets, or services, the end user is a constant and more or less objective arbitrator of our work. “As long as you stick with the end user—and you remember that everyone is an end user, whether in business or in personal life—it’ll be difficult to miss big opportunities that are coming up, especially in the next few months,” says Hyo Yeon, a partner at McKinsey & Company. User-centered design has evolved to new heights of importance and complexity. User data is the currency of Google’s and Facebook’s recommendation engines; technology is now merging the jacked-in user with product in a real-life Matrix. Just like other golden idols, the end user has transformed over time from a vanilla mass consumer into complicated co-designer to essentially becoming the product itself, giving new meaning to the term “end user.” Merging the fields of design fiction and critical design, film director Liam Young in his new book, Machine Landscapes:
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Architecture of the Post-Anthropocene, argues that this trend demands the end of user-centered design. What does this mean? How is this happening? Take a look at history. Consumer In 1947 Gordon Lippincott wrote: “The industrial designer’s ultimate job is to view a product through the eyes of the consumer and to guide his client to do likewise.” In the 1920s as technology was improving, manufacturers were looking for sources of “constant ingenuity applied to products at lower cost,” wrote George Nelson in the 1934 Fortune magazine. The article, “Between Fish and Fowl,” introduced industrial design as working between art and engineering, the bridge between factory and consumers. Understanding production methods, industrial designers improved production efficiency and lowered costs. Mass production requires mass consumption. Bringing customercentric design into the product development process ensured that designs were more comfortable to use and visually appealing, generating consumer desires. In 1951 Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, cracked the formula: “Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable.”
Human Factors Although the word “ergonomics” was coined in 1857 by the Polish scholar Wojciech Jastrzębowski, in 1941, when the Ergonomics Society was formed, human factors was getting a big boost by World War II’s accelerated technology development. The design of old inventions like chairs and swords have a long evolution, but with new inventions like telephones and military aircraft come the urgent need to figure out how they fit peoples’ anatomy and how to reach the controls. Efficiency experts and Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, defined the ideal shape of a telephone receiver, which reigned supreme until the most unergonomic little plank iPhone wiped out the model 500 handset. Dreyfuss and Niels Diffrient published their landmark “Measure of Man” guides in 1959. In the ’80s, IDSA co-sponsored, with the Consumer Technical Group of the Human Factors Society, a series of Symposia on Human Factors and Industrial Design in Consumer Products, cementing the integration of ergonomics in industrial design. In 1991 Bryce Rutter, IDSA, who has a PhD in kinesiology (the study of mechanics and anatomy of the human body), founded Metaphase to blend biomechanics into ID. The other people Steve Wilcox, FIDSA, remembers talking to in a sophisticated way about user-centered design were ergonomists Ron Sears, Charles Mauro, Liz Sanders, and Dan Formosa. Back then, ergonomics was focused on the physical relationship between the human body and the object. If the user is unhappy at work, the task chair will never feel comfortable. I gave a name to the psychological relationships between the human mind and the stuff we make: “psychonomics.” Oxo GoodGrips’ little rubber fins were explained as psychonomic signals telling users that peeling potatoes is fun. Marketing After World War II, global production capacity was growing. Marketing and advertising found “better” ways of understanding and manipulating the customer to expand sales. The science of human response used population segments, demographics, and mall intercepts to explore buyers’ wishes and beliefs. Marketing firms and especially advertising agencies created desire using quantitative and qualitative data from surveys and trend metrics to confirm or predict what customers would buy. They gathered
consumers together in focus groups for a direct read on the customer. A little more objective than when the company president steps out to ask his secretary, “Which color do you like?” The 1959 Ford Edsel was an unexpected, spectacular flop that became a timeless case study for brand failures. Marketing had rationalized the Edsel and boring K-Cars based on statistics and finding the lowest common denominator. Marketing pseudo-science inverted Loewy’s “Most Acceptable, Least Advanced.” Lee Iacocca’s K-cars may have saved Chrysler’s business at the time, but no one liked the dopey design—especially repeated across all the models. Market research was the bane of designers’ existence—a focus group moderator could easily bias a selection, or one cranky subject could torpedo a good design (another opportunity for psychonomic insights?). In 1984 psychologist Robert B. Cialdini wrote Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, laying out his six principles of influence: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. He ignored styling, which saved Apple with the colorful Mac G3 in 1998 and produced the hot designs that finally dug Chrysler out after President Obama’s bailout. Ethnography Following consumer focus, human factors, and marketing, the next step in user-centered clarity was to study users in their natural habitat. Stepping out of the jungle, anthropologists and sociologists brought scientific rigor into the design process. Visiting users’ native environment—watching the activity in their kitchen or office, studying their interactions with appliances, gizmos, furniture, kids, dogs—is not only useful for task analysis, but observers gain empathy for what the user is doing within the ecology. Wilcox worked for Herbst Lazar Bell studying mammography machines in action. Their task analysis found obvious low-hanging fruit all around the exam room floor that the engineers never saw! The field has advanced with deep focus, like the study of gerontology Patricia Moore, FIDSA, has done. Probably the first to earn a PhD in industrial design, Ron Pierce, brought ethnography to Richardson/Smith (which later merged with Fitch). In the ’80s, John Reinfrank and Shelly Evenson established the Fitch Exploratory Design Lab
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to integrate business strategy and design and pioneered a formal school of thought and practice around design languages: “The means by which complex systems inherent in products, services, organizations, buildings, cities, and even policies get created.” Later design researcher Liz Sanders joined the firm and recently co-authored Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design with Pieter Jan Stappers. In 1987, Bill Moggridge, FIDSA, also introduced socialscience-based perspectives to his design practice ID2, and he hired Jane Fulton Suri with her background in psychology and architecture. She was instrumental in building empathic observation and experience prototyping into IDEO. User-Centered (UCD) User preference drives user-centered design. Clients and marketing departments often think they know best. Accordingly, ergonomic, ethnographic, and demographic data are not only useful tools; they are also smart weapons for good design. Mixing rigorous scientific methods with empathy, intuition, and design instincts enhances the process. It wasn’t until 1977 that the term “user-centered design” was coined by computer scientist Rob Kling and later adopted by Don Norman in the Design of Everyday Things (originally called The Psychology of Everyday Things). User Friendly Norman describes the psychology behind what he deems “good” and “bad” as user-friendly design, offering engineers and designers guidelines: (1) Intuitive: simplify tasks so that possible actions are natural; (2) Feedback: express actions, results of actions, and consequences; (3) Map intended results and required actions; (4) Constraints: embrace and exploit the limitations of systems. He considers aesthetics secondary. You’d think that a cognitive psychologist would not undervalue emotional aspects like beauty and beautility —the most friendly design tools! User Interface (UI) Designing a chair or toaster normally focuses on function, how the product works. How users use a product becomes critical with digital technology, especially with establishing user friendliness. UI is the human-machine interaction—born in software on computer screens—involving the graphical user interface, visual language, and icons. UI thinking spread to mice, leaped off touch screens to all hardware. Razorfish founder Craig Kanarick pointed out that people don’t care if the button is real or is on a screen—it’s what it does that matters.
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Moggridge championed interaction design as a mainstream design discipline (he is given credit for coining the term), and in 2006 he published Designing Interactions. He helped establish the Design Institute Ivrea to explore interaction design. Built in Olivetti’s factory, the school created the open-source electronic prototyping platform Arduino. The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction and NYU’s ITP researched physical computing using computers without screens or mice pushing the UI back into the real world. Applying Silicon Valley’s digital coding attitude to lower-tech systems, David Kelly launched the studentcentered Stanford d.school, combining design thinking with social engineering and establishing innovative design methods and practices applied to all kinds of problems. User Experience (UX) Does ID’s scope encompass everything? A user’s experience is everything they feel and observe when interacting with products, services, and communication in any medium over time. Hardware and software blur together into one narrative. Whether a game or a job or a memory, the user experience, the interaction in mind and body, is all that has value. When Bruce Hannah, L/IDSA, assigned his students to design a teacup, he told them to design not just the cup but the ritual of drinking tea—the tea pot, how you pour it, the room, maybe even the sounds and smells—the whole experience. Culture, peer pressure, ambiance, and irrational feelings swirl around the physical artifacts influencing the experience. Charles Duhigg wrote in the New York Times, “The art of telling stories is so enthralling that people lose track of their wallets.” The experience the user feels they have is the reason why they choose one brand over the competition or, more essentially, why they engage in any activity itself. It’s all about the user experience. Service Because UX blurs software and hardware, the physical form of smart products has become a function. This applies to low-tech functions too. Understanding that pillows are a hotel service is a natural stretch for industrial designers. Like the hotel concierge, products can no longer be viewed as isolated things that are simply economical or that fit retailers’ shelves or that don’t cause climate change. People don’t consciously distinguish between what platform or media is used anymore—the interaction is all that has concrete value. GoodGrips fins are an interface for peeling potatoes. Service is a purposeful experience. The product is a service (or disservice) in the ecosystem. The customer is buying an experience; they pay to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events (or potatoes).
Co-design Any experience is co-authored by the user, the products, the space, the events, the environment—essentially a global IoT! On an individual basis, the ultimate user experience is when the user addresses their own needs and desires. Collaboration with designers helps establish inclusive messages. The participatory co-design process gives designers intimate insights into the obstacles that the visually impaired, elderly, or ethnic minorities face. The democratic approach empowers users by putting them to work as co-designers. Very powerful and woke, that kind of partnership bumps up against the twin powers of designers: our skill and talent. Unless the designer is a super collaborator, co-design might turn Voltaire upside down: “Good is the enemy of the perfect.” Open Source Participatory and empowerment are good, but designers still hold the pencil. Closer to real one-to-one is open source, where the doors of collaboration are thrown wide open to all users; there’s always room for another seat at the drafting board. Digital programing is most fluid because the medium is readily available for modification and possible redistribution. Crowdsourcing makes everyone a designer, empowered with shared ownership. Advancing AI technology is allowing the code itself to be an author too. AI writes its own user satisfaction into the program. But does AI count as a user? AI Google’s, Amazon’s, and TikTok’s recommendation engines are constantly evolving, tapping into wider and wider user info, able to offer more helpful suggestions and seductions. The documentary Social Dilemma lays out how technology is harnessing machine learning to manipulate emotions and human behavior. Since Amazon’s software knows what you want, where you are going, if you’re sick, or even if you’re pregnant before you do, it proactively offers stuff the user might be looking for. Working both sides of the equation, algorithms manipulate the target user and the merchandise to trigger the purchase. It’s possible to program robots to create a super-seductive ideal item, like a virus in your favorite color, that the user can’t resist buying. Is this the commercial version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where reality is impacted by the act of observing? It’s hard to distinguish the user and the user’s experience.
U-is Who’s the user? Using deep algorithms, Amazon and Google manipulate the user and the product for the ultimate satisfaction. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, big data and AI algorithms turn users inside out. Set on a terminal feedback loop, the software candle burning at both ends melting users into data packets (U-is). Pogo says, “We’ve seen the enemy and he is us!” What will privacy mean when the user is the process and software is steering? What kind of user experience is that? Where will the self-driving algorithm drive us? Beautility The end user still holds the keys to our IoT. Industrial designers are the user advocate—the user champion. From appealing to the customer to observing and dissecting the user to facilitating user-centered co-design, the role of the designer and the user are in flux. UI, UX, CX, or U2 or just you. Good design is a team effort. It’s up to you.
As technology becomes more and more ubiquitous and connected, fewer experiences will be completely natural or able to stand alone—meaning that more effort and care must be taken in designing artificial experiences. They won’t all be sponsored, branded, or monetized, because most ‘user experiences’ that people really love—like singing and love—have no commercial value! Imagine if the economy was driven by beautility. —Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com
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D E S I G N DNA
THE UNBREAKABLE, UNSHAKABLE PHYSICAL LAW OF DESIGN
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onsider the bubble. This is a pure sphere no matter how you slice it—the purest Euclidian geometric occurrence. Its reason for being is to hold the maximum internal volume by using the least amount of surface area and material to do it. The bubble has eliminated any extraneous detail, boiling away any unnecessary fluff, to arrive at its unquestionable, unfathomable perfection in both form and function. The bubble is perfect.
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Bubbles are round because there is an attractive force called surface tension that pulls molecules into the tightest possible groupings, and the tightest possible grouping that any collection of particles can achieve is to pack together into a sphere. In other words, bubbles are not round because they look good that way. They are not circular to adhere to a style. Mother Nature is not a fan of Eurocentric design, nor has she ever heard of the Bauhaus. The natural world’s honing of perfections like these, which includes us humans, contains a universal genome, a set of instructions and ingredients that are made up of only 118 periodic elements. We instinctively revere this perfect system simply because we are this perfect system. The work of architect Felix Candela contains extremely complex shapes that seem on the surface to be derived only from nature. These ultra-compound shapes have no apparent straight lines. And yet these structures are made up of nothing but straight beams of timber—their sections, once dissected, easily explained by mathematics and simple geometry. Similarly, when you slice a cone with a plane, the resulting intersection is an elliptical curve that when viewed on its own would seem completely organic, and yet it is the result of two much simpler shapes bisecting each other. The complexity of nature is just this—layers upon layers of explainable, rational, geometric outcomes that can be broken down into much simpler elements. When the quantity of these layers exceeds two or three, our brains give up trying to trace their origins because the task is too complex for our conscious mind. So we label these forms as beyond the capabilities of humans—otherworldly, godlike. However, the designer, the sculptor, and the artist combine these shapes using intuition and instinct. When arranged in just the right combination, the result meets our minds with unimpeded flow like a key that fits its intended lock. When done right, good design opens the door to easy comprehension. Why else would abstract sculptures, void of any functional or representational purpose, even need to look right? Any yet they do. A designer’s manipulation of complex three-dimensional forms—transforming them into the elegant and easy—is a seamless analogy to design’s greater philosophical goal. Adrian Bejan, an award-winning physicist at Duke University and the father of constructal law, which states that flow is required to sustain life, has said that “the goal of great science is to compress fifty pages down to three.” This is where science and design actually meet—not through a pseudo-scientific application of the sixth-grade scientific method, but through science’s and design’s mutual ambition to simplify the complex. Good design generates delight because it has succeeded in meeting our mind without any course corrections or roadblocks that would otherwise impede flow. This universal goal of design is unaffected by what it is applied to and where on earth it is applied. This is the unbreakable, unshakable physical law of design.
Normal, Not Normal On the detail level, however, there are plenty of subtle differences in the way design needs to be applied from country to country—and knowing these differences will make you a valuable international designer. Your command over the nuances from one world market to the next can make or break sales. And the American market, colossal and unrivaled in size, is one of the most unique and weird. Take furniture, for example. It’s much smaller in Europe than in the United States. I was struck by this when designing outdoor furniture for a Dutch plastics company a few years ago. Through this project, I attended Germany’s Spoga+Gafa Cologne, the world’s largest garden trade fair. Upon arrival, I thought I had mistakenly stepped foot into Europe’s version of the Munchkin Land Museum—or perhaps I took a wrong turn in the parking lot and accidentally entered the staging area for the Ore Mountain Nutcracker Pageant. Every chair, sofa, and footstool was at least 20% smaller than American ones. Our American couches, chairs, and coffee tables have super-sized proportions. I cannot lie. Our cars, houses, food portion sizes, supermarkets, and mocha lattes are all much bigger here than anywhere else on Earth. Out of a whopping total of 195 countries, the United States is one of only three that uses the imperial system of measurement—the other two being Liberia and Myanmar. Even the way we measure our world is unique, basing our inches on the width of the human thumb, or as later defined by England’s King Edward II (the gentle son of Edward Longshanks, also known as the Hammer of the Scots, both famously portrayed in the 1995 film Braveheart), an inch equals the length of three barelycorns placed end-to-end. Americans are the only people on Earth who walk around with huge paper cups of coffee in our hands—because we fear capitalism’s unforgiving, merciless wrath. Our seemingly innocent Triple Venti Caramel Macchiato is nothing short of American anxiety and high blood pressure to-go—we can’t slow down even for 30 minutes to enjoy the morning ritual—instead taking it on the road as we multitask our predawn workday from a frozen car. Australians chuckle at us and think we’re cute as we fittingly refer to their national symbol of childlike innocence and wonder as koala bears. They are simply koalas—the bear is silent. Differences in language, habits, coffee as a symbol of servitude, our whacky physical measurements, all equal variants that need to be accounted for by design. No argument there. Increasing awareness about the diversity across the globe is spurring the notion that we should no longer default to Eurocentric design—to Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles and the Bauhaus Manifesto—as the ultimate and absolute manual for good design. If we are looking to that past as a guideline for style, then no, we should definitely not. Good design should not look to a tradition of minimalism—the embracing of pure forms and “less is more,” the avoidance of superfluous ornament at all costs—to adhere to a style.
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D E S I G N DNA
Only bad design does this. Remember, the bubble is not round, clean, and minimal because its looks good that way. To base your new coffeemaker on the simplest of cylinders, the purest of domed spheres, the stark use of white with chrome accents—all in the name of honoring the grand master Dieter Rams, Walter Gropius, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—is design that is no better than what is found at the Dukes of Hazard Museum gift shop. Worse yet is to reference a style that references a style! When you employ the glorious mantra that your creation will be Apple-like, yet it is devoid of any greater philosophy, such as creating order from chaos or solving a problem, now you are two layers deep in the mediocrity that’s edging your design ever closer to the Daisy Duke bathmat you so arrogantly despise. In fact, when designers base their designs on nothing more than nostalgia for design’s illustrious history, however clean and simple it may look, we may be harming—not helping—the people we are designing for. Designers have long felt a sense of insecurity. We are not revered as the architect is. We are not admired as the fine artist is. Our work is temporary, commercial, and cheap. Instead of filling the land with enduring monuments, we create landfill. We use as many fancy buzzwords as we can and boast command over the scientific method, all to claw and scratch ourselves a better seat at the figurative conference table of Big Daddy. Big Daddy often doesn’t know anything about design, and yet all our efforts aim to please him. With these inferiority complexes raging, it is only natural to hold fast to the shining examples of our industry’s founders. These titans of niche are in the design history books; therefore, they are important. Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, Walter Dorwin Teague, FIDSA, Norman Bel Geddes, FIDSA, George Nelson, FIDSA, and Charles and Ray Eames are the ticket to our self-invented black-tie party. “They’re in the MoMA, see?” Throughout the history of warfare, vanquishing armies would not only kill the defeated but also destroy their libraries, museums, landmarks, and historic sites to further erase their heritage. Objects, documents, and photographs owned by a relative from a distant past have been known to stir strong emotions, underscoring the extreme power of nostalgia. But when a designer consciously or unconsciously tries to inject an obscure subset of architectural and design history into a product as a secret password to a self-imagined lodge meeting—a history that the user is unaware of and cares nothing about—the user is being slighted by the designer’s insecurities. Ramming Massimo and Lella Vignelli down your coffeemaker user’s throat without reason is design-splaning, and it’s ugly. Good design has nothing to do with this.
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It’s a Small World After All When I think of design from or meant for developing countries far away from our shores, my mind jumps to the antithesis of Apple’s smooth, minimalist gloss. I conjure images of rattan, wood, and leather. I see the handmade and the visible stitch, not the mass-produced witness line, shadow groove, or LED. My mind also jumps to the Hippo Roller—a cylindrical water carrier that rolls in front of its user like a wheelbarrow—the water vessel itself acting as its mode of transport. These devices save lives and add convenience to a task that once took up most of the day—eliminating the burden of transporting hundreds of pounds of water on your head (work done primarily by women). There are many variations of this product such as the Wello Waterwheel designed in America for the Indian market in 2011. This is the product design we love. At a glance, its innovation is burned into your retina where it will forever live as something you wish you had thought of. An icon of the tangible leap, this product has a purity that no superfluous detail, color change, or use of texture and graphics can alter. Here is a product designed for the unique needs of its specialized user—a design project as far away from the iPhone as the Earth is to Icarus, and yet, this is not a product adorned with symbols and style cues from the region it serves. This is not a product that rejects minimalism in favor of sensitivity to local culture and therefore a rejection of Eurocentric design—because that would be an argument based on style! This is form following function, a simplification of the complex, problem-solving and efficiency. Good design is a philosophy, not a style. We should absolutely reject Eurocentric design if it is based on the latter instead of the former. In the case of Dieter Rams’ work and principles, he is emulating the perfections of nature, and therefore, it should be his philosophy that endures, not his style. As we know from the bubble, its form is following its function to generate the apex of efficiency. The bubble is literally and figuratively the result of boiling away the unnecessary. The bubble is the simplification of the complex, an awe-inspiring solution that generates joy because it embodies the higher level of consciousness we sense all around us that is relentlessly pinging—even jabbing us—to take a closer look. The philosophy behind the bubble is why we have chosen this challenging path. It is the unbreakable, unshakable physical law of design. —Scott Henderson, IDSA scott@scotthendersoninc.com
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THE PEP TALK THAT 2020 NEEDED
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hile the separation of work and personal life has diminished during the pandemic shuffle, the unsurmountable transition to a more self-disciplined lifestyle becomes a standard of success. If you are personally thriving in this work-fromhome scenario, feel free to turn the page. If there is room for improvement in yourself as you cope with the cultural unrest and upheaval of your normalcy, then you will benefit from Superhuman By Design by Donald Burlock Jr., IDSA. Let’s talk about doing better and being better, not just at your day job, but in your life. Donald Burlock, a creative technologist in Silicon Valley, is behind some very memorable marketing campaigns for brands such as GE, Coca-Cola, Dolby, Cisco, and Capital One. The designer leverages the deep insight developed from building brands to nurture his own creative core, and packaged up his process so you can too. This playbook lays out some helpful tactics and methods derived from the personal failures and victories Burlock experienced in Silicon Valley. His account administers a healthy dose of authenticity and vulnerability—traits that are essential along the journey to becoming a better version of yourself. The fiercely optimistic tone could be mistaken for hyperbole, although the open humility he offers to his readers is what makes the pages turn. The premise includes adapting your daily design practice so that you are your own client. By leveraging the design process to seek your truths, you may maximize the superpowers that are uniquely yours. This “superhuman effect” can be achieved along the iterative
journey of ideating and testing different approaches to push past your current boundaries and achieve better results. This applies to health, fitness, work, and personal relationships, and naturally allows for failure as part of pushing toward your maximum potential. And, yes, you can do this in your pandemic sweatsuit. Consider honing the following foundational superpowers along the way: magnetism, rehabilitation, and shapeshifting, to name a few. In a matter of speaking, Burlock views these capabilities as instrumental to strengthening relationships and serving as a source of inspiration for those around you. For instance, reminding your team how critical their efforts are to the success of a project emphasizes your investment in helping them win. Your explicit alliance with those around you in the form of a common goal will make you magnetic. Rehabilitation is an essential force if you want to push beyond your setbacks, and requires the greatest level of creativity. You must imagine new ways to be incredibly conscious of the work of gaining strength and achieving more. Lastly, the more we can embrace the superhuman condition of being able to shift ourselves to the most valuable elements of our environments, the more impact we drive. If these superpowers are not relatable, the book outlines how to conjure superpowers unique to your needs as well. The clever analogies modeled after storybook superheroes capture a real-life approach to launching a better version of yourself. So if you are seeking new ways to embrace the challenges of life, consider doubling down on the design process to lean into your potential with Burlock’s Superhuman By Design. Don your cape!
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EXPLORING THE PERCEPTION OF DIVERSITY IN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EDUCATION
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lthough each Winter issue of INNOVATION is dedicated to education, we see value in the contribution of academic stakeholders in ongoing conversations. This is the impetus behind the Academia 360° limited series column for 2021. The state of the industrial design profession is shifting, and so is academia. This past year alone, many issues and discussions in the industry surfaced and finally became louder, such as the absence of diversity and the continued disconnect between academia and practice. It is time for actionable and sustainable changes. As women with different cultural backgrounds, both calling the United States our home by choice and who are working in the academic field, we are aware of these issues and want to do our part. In this column, we aim to bring forward the diverse voices of academia relative to the theme covered in each issue of INNOVATION. The column will take on a conversational format, with contributors being prompted to provide insights and outlooks on current topics in the form of interviews and/ or questionnaires. The goal is to listen and share, and with each column we will leave you with an action item for you to apply or test based on what we learned from the contributors. What impact could this have? We don’t know yet! But we are excited to explore the merits of a common ground and bringing important conversations to you, the readers, hence the 360-degree outlook.
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As our first initiative, we reached out to the IDSA Education Council, composed of educators and practitioners, with this prompt: How would you describe the state of diversity in the field of industrial design education? Each of them interpreted this question from a slightly different perspective. This is what four of them shared with us along with the perceptions of three of our graduating seniors:
“The lack of diversity that surrounds us is disappointing. It took us three years to finally have a female studio instructor. Trying to design to enhance people’s lives is difficult when we are only surrounded by one or two cultural groups. Our goal is to better the lives of everyone, but how is that possible when we are surrounded by people of our own cultural group? As female design students, we have different challenges to navigate going into our professional lives. Our schooling had made it seem like being a woman wasn’t going to affect us in this field, but as we start our professional journey, the opposite is true. They’ve created a safe place for us with false expectations of the real world.” —Alyssa Tiedeman, Lilian Simon, and Malerie Reitzler, IDSA Midwest District students
“One of the questions I have heard come up when planning an event is how to be inclusive without looking to fill a quota. I have heard from companies and universities looking to be more inclusive but not knowing how to properly do so. I have heard from people of color that when it comes to education, scholarship, funding, speaking engagements, etc., some have an internal struggle with the question of ‘Am I here just because they feel they need a person of color or because they truly value what I bring to the table individually?’ We should never make a person question their own worth. Everyone is an individual, everyone has value, one size does not fit all, and it’s essential we don’t lose track of that. We need to work on removing barriers that currently exclude people, and work toward designing events that are inherently inclusive and welcoming to all. We need to continue to listen, engage, and work toward equality for all.”
“Social anxiety, anyone? Prying the silver lining off the COVID pandemic, one of the good things that has evolved is the potential advancement of diversity through online learning, including studio work. It is difficult to imagine developing an inspirational studio culture online. However, design educators’ attempts to do so have the benefit of allowing people with social anxieties to more richly engage in the design world. The intense world of the studio critique and studio work in general can disenfranchise those who don’t work well in those environments. In addition, online platforms lower the cost of education, which further democratizes design education and thereby allows a more diverse group of students to be part of this community. Traditions are being questioned and the world of the studio and practical design pursuits is becoming increasingly accessible and, therefore, increasingly diverse.” —Thomas Ask, D.Prof, IDSA, Northeast District
– Monica Tournoux, IDSA, Central District
“I would describe the state of diversity in the field of industrial design education as slowly improving. There are a number of barriers to entry for the world of academia (including low pay for adjuncts and the requirement of a graduate degree for full-time faculty) that severely limit who can reasonably make a living as a professor. There is no question to me that students would greatly benefit from more diversity in design education.” —Carly Haggins, IDSA, Central District
When I look from a 35,000-foot view, I still see the field as white male-dominated. However, at a micro level I see things happening throughout the field professionally and academically that are moving the needle. There are more women and minorities interested in the field; focus on universal design and more tools than ever for us to use and think about design differently.” —Susan Sokoloswki, IDSA, West District
Our goal is to share unfiltered insights with you, and, therefore, we didn’t synthesize the above. However, our interpretation is that diversity is a very broad, multifaceted, and multilayered topic that we all see through different lenses. It is also important to recognize how circumstances and, let’s not forget, privilege can lead to gradation in what matters. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question above, but we can all agree that there is a need to reform the way we think, teach, work, and live. We would like to end this column on the current theme of INNOVATION with the help of Anoushka Khandwala’s words: “Diversity is about bringing more people to the table. Decolonization is about changing the way we think.” So let’s invite everyone to the table and start by listening to each other with intent and empathy so we can truly foster systemic change in our professional and academic environments. Action Item: How to get started? Start by having a conversation with someone who is not like you. Share and listen to each other’s experiences and perceived expectations in your common environment, even if it is uncomfortable. Then share what you learned about yourself and what you learned from the other person. Follow us on Twitter, @academia360_ID, and join the conversation, #ACADEMIA360_ID. —Aziza Cyamani, IDSA and Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness, IDSA with contributions from the IDSA Education Council and design students at Iowa State University aziza@ksu.edu and verena@iastate.edu
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BUDD FROM A TO Z
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think I’ve known Budd Steinhilber, FIDSA (1924–2021), longer than anyone (not the whole 96 years)! He drove my mother to the hospital when I was born, and even now his memory continues as my backseat driver, role model, and mentor, still encouraging me to be more socially and environmentally impactful. He answered all the questions I had about my dad’s career and corrected my INNOVATION columns. He was active in the whole history of our profession, working with Donald Dohner, Gordon Lippincott, and Raymond Loewy—until now. Budd was a founder of IDSA and was committed to communicating the value of good design to business at a time when designers felt they were unknown and unappreciated. He committed himself every day to fostering the professionalism and growth of IDSA, and in the early ’80s was a supporter of IDSA’s controversial development of minimum curriculum standards for industrial design degree programs, which evolved into the joint accreditation agreement with the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), with minor modifications. It still works. The industrial design profession is one of only two disciplines guaranteed to have participants on every NASAD school accreditation visit. Budd’s life, multi-talents, and work spans 1924 to 2021 and everything from A to Z. He would have made a list starting with something new, like augmented reality or a pun “Ay don’t know” (is that a pun?). Budd was always creative, pushing things a little farther. He was famous for making costumes and creating props just to make a speech. (He undressed at his IDSA retirement announcement!) He would have set this list to music. Or made a crossword puzzle. Here are the ABCs of Budd: Antioch Shakespeare Festival (under the stars, stage design and acting), 1952–1957 Bess Myerson, friend at the High School of Art and Design NYC, where he graduated in 1940 at the age of 15 California, San Francisco, design pioneer, arrives in 1964 and seeds Silicon Valley Deutsch, Barry, partner in Steinhilber, Deutsch, & Gard; clients included Esprit, Grid, Electronic Arts, Atari, 1970–1987
Environmental Concerns, founded this IDSA Section, 1986 Full-size clay of the Tucker car, created with the Lippincott team (only 50 cars were produced, but they were icons), 1947 Ginny, married, 1963, and mother of Carl Hawaii, (aloha) 1987, 2016 (aloha) IDEA, propelled the IDSA award competition toward success by demanding judging criteria and processes, resulting in winners that exemplify only the very best (Excellence) in design J., his first name, which he dropped because everyone called him Buddy Konawaena High School solar car racing team advisor, Sunquest finished 18th in the World Solar Challenge race across Australia, 1990 Loewy’s intern, worked on the double-decker bus project and mastered Raymond’s signature, 1941 Member, Socialist Labor Party, and political cartoonist Nymph, gingerbread Oh boy! He can play the piano with two hands! Pratt Institute, studied with the father of industrial design, Donald Dohner, 1941–1943 Queens, 1939 World’s Fair, “Massive injection of product and exhibit adrenaline. I was hooked.” Read Viemeister, my dad, his pal, and partner in Vie Design Studios; sold Budd his 1940 Lincoln Continental too Shoot! Another great cartoon rejected by the New Yorker? Tepper, Gene, partner in Tepper & Steinhilber; projects included ELBO products, lamps, and clocks mounted in air ducting, 1964–1970 Unlikely that he ever stopped thinking or making things! Vie Design Studios, award-winning graphics, products, furniture, exhibits, and building, 1947–1964 Walter, dad, wrestler, illustrator, and artist; taught Budd a lifelong joy of watercolors (and other things) Xmas cards, silkscreened, printed, handmade, or baked (see “Nymph”) Yellow Springs, Ohio Valley, married Jo, 1949; family: Julie and Donn Zoetrope Studios, deep voice and distinctive profile, a perfect amateur actor —Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com
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T R I B U TE
ED ZAGORSKI, FIDSA, A BELOVED TEACHER AND MENTOR
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dward J. Zagorski, FIDSA, died on January 10, 2021. He was 99 years old. He was my teacher, mentor and lifelong friend for 58 years. After my freshman year at Bradley University in 1961, I was on terminal probation, about to flunk out. A chance 20-minute meeting at the University of Illinois (Champaign–Urbana) with Ed Zagorski changed my life forever. At that meeting, he introduced me to industrial design, and because of his passion, personality, and enthusiasm, I knew that I wanted to become an industrial designer. I was able to transfer to the University of Illinois and start college over as a freshman. During our lifelong friendship, we communicated in person, with letters, and via emails and texts. The important events in our lives were always shared. We exchanged books, dreams, celebrations, and personal tragedies. We were always available for each other. I loved just being with him because his happiness was contagious. Ed found humor all around because he was a happy guy. In my sophomore year, Zagorski was my instructor for industrial design. He gave us an assignment where he wanted us to learn about the sense of touch. He instructed us to carve something that would then be graded by three faculty other than himself who would be blindfolded. Our grade depended on how the abstract carved wooden design felt in their hands. This was a fun, creative, and
important assignment that taught me about the many dimensions of creating. He taught me to be curious and passionate about everything because he was. My life has been enriched by this remarkable man because he not only taught me about industrial design; his real lesson was how to live life. In 1979 Zagorski was a candidate for The Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Illinois. He asked if I would write a letter of recommendation for him. I was honored, and he ended up getting the award. After he retired from teaching, he told me that I was his mentor. That revelation shocked me because I didn’t realize the mentee could be the mentor. One of the books Ed sent to me to read was One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. Not exactly a bestseller. Ed was a collector of antiques, especially old hand tools and mostly ones that you didn’t recognize what the tool was used for. Like Ed, I love tools and the One Good Turn book gave me an idea for Ed’s 80th birthday gift. I spent a few months going to flea markets buying old wooden-handled screwdrivers. I mounted them on a burlap board in a spiral from largest to smallest. It was “one good turn” of a special gift that Ed loved. I sure do miss him, but he will always be with me. —Jeffrey Breslow jeffrey@jeffreybreslow.com
Image note from the author: This was Ed when I met him when he was 39 years old. Now you understand why I wanted him for my teacher.
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DON ATE YOU R ARC H IVES
THE FUTURE WILL THANK YOU
Above: The search for designer Donald Dohner’s archives. Courtesy Hampton C. Wayt.
W
ith the recent deaths of Budd Steinhilber, FIDSA, and Ed Zagorski, FIDSA, we’ve been thinking about how much we lose when we lose such stalwarts of the profession. Saving “stuff” seems to be part of designers’ genetics. “I designed this,” we think as we tuck it away for some time in the future. “After all, if my family or my profession are impressed, all the mock-ups, prototypes, and paper I’ve saved should be of interest, right?” Not that we are all destined to become amateur or professional hoarders, but what happens when we finally decide to downsize? You might ask, “What could I do with everything I’ve saved? Who would want it?” Have you ever considered that it could it be of use to the history of product design and that design history is of value to the profession? Designers of buildings, clothing, advertisements, and marketing study the history of their professions and use this research to promote new trends in style and design. Why shouldn’t the history of products be taught, researched, archived, and used? The history of design achievement can be a valuable source of information for product designers, students, and researchers. Design historian Hampton Wayt concurs. “I cannot tell you how many times I have been in basements, garages, and attics saving this material,” he says. “It is important work that was completely unappreciated by museums when I started seeking out designer archives 22 years ago!” Fortunately, several museums will consider collections now. However, I have found many still reject
amazing archives simply because the designer isn’t considered a ‘big name.’” Museums should be encouraged to add products to their permanent collection. There are many archives within universities, museums, and Smithsonian affiliates that are available to catalog your design history, whether your personal work or your firm’s. “Designers should know, though,” Wayt advises, “that they may get several noes before they get a yes. But their material is worth saving, especially if they worked with wellknown firms/designers.” I (Marshall) am certainly not a “known” practitioner in the design world, but 99% of what I offered to the archivists at the Hagley Museum and Library, personal and professional, both two- and three-dimensional, was considered relevant and important and was accepted for their archives, all 78 lineal feet of my “stuff”! And did you know that IDSA has partnered with the Hagley through the Hagley Heritage Curators program, which allows corporations to preserve their company archives in a world-renowned library? The Hagley houses a collection of IDSA material dating from the 1980s. Contact us and we can put you in touch with these archives so you can help to build on the history of our profession. —Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA, and Marshall Johnson, L/IDSA, Co-chairs, IDSA Design History Section vmatranga@housewares.com, mjoh105055@aol.com
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D E C O L ONI ZI NG I NDUST R I A L D ESIGN
FROM COLONIZATION TO LIBERATION
H
istory is told through the eyes of the winners. Design is no different. Design is about storytelling. In essence, designers tell stories of ideas that don’t exist and validate their reason for being, the details of their form and manufacture, and the context and scenarios of use. And so, the story of American industrial design has been authored by those who have benefited from the conquering of Indigenous peoples, the enslaving of Africans, the appropriation of ideas, the importing of labor and talent, the capitalizing on cheap foreign labor, and the polluting of poor communities of color as a byproduct of manufacturing. These very real and easy-to-ignore sins of colonization have been woven into the very fabric of society, seeping into our material culture, the practice of industrial design, and the education of designers. The impacts of colonization are palpable, and at this point in history, understanding how far and wide they reach is complex. While colonization began in this country in relation to the people whose lands were stolen, it is now tied to matters of race, nationality, gender, language, and ability. Whether you benefit from, support, fall victim to, or are working to combat colonized design practices, the work to recognize the hallmarks of colonization and to decolonize design will be no less complex.
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A Colonized Design Education Colonization is not just the seizure of lands and the poor treatment of Indigenous people, but rather it’s the systemic erasure, the minimizing, and the retelling of history and the contributions of all people who have ever lived in and contributed to our culture and economy. When I look back on my own education, I can’t help but be angered by how the history of the Indigenous people of North America was taught—it was irresponsibly incomplete, incorrect, and racist. In my adult life and career as an exhibition designer working primarily in natural and cultural history centers with communities connected to Native American sites, I’m often left aghast at the cruelty of the European colonizers as they exterminated the Indigenous people, stole their lands, and erased the history of this continent—so much knowledge, culture, languages, and traditions forever lost to history. I was never the taught the extent of the design contributions of my own ancestors—enslaved people from Africa—who endured despite the horrible conditions of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the struggles of the Civil Rights movement, redlining, the school-to-prison pipeline, the war on drugs, and ongoing systemic violence and oppression. Yet Black people literally built this country. We’ve invented new music genres and created art,
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poetry, literature, film, fashion, and life-changing inventions that we use every day, including medical procedures, pharmaceuticals, materials, tools, consumer products, and technology. Instead, I sat through countless slideshows and flipped through enormous volumes on art and design history, was made to memorize every student and instructor associated with the Bauhaus and the New Bauhaus, and was told the stories of the ingenuity of talented and creative white men. Men descended from European colonizers and immigrants who I was supposed to attempt to emulate—although it would be hard considering that I was a woman and, therefore, not as naturally gifted in spatial thinking (true story). Where were references to the contributions to women, Black people, Native Americans, and People of Color from Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and Central and South America? Was it just that BIPOC and women designers never amounted to much? Did we not exist before the latter half of the 20th century? Why was it impossible to find other designers who looked like me? How Did We Get Here? I won’t get into the time I had to write my son’s school about my concerns over the choice of Peter Pan as the fifth-grade musical and explain that its racist depiction of Tiger Lily and the Picaninnies as “savages” made it a poor choice. Nor will I get into a detailed account of the time, just a few months ago, when my younger son used the Zoom chat to tell his teacher that she was mistaken if she thought Christopher Columbus was a good guy, because he was actually a terrible human with a worse sense of direction who enslaved, murdered, and mutilated Indigenous people, starting a deliberate centuries-long erasure of tens of thousands of years of history, culture, social order, language systems, art, and design. Let’s just go back to last week when a Facebook friend shared that her son’s Black History Month assignment was to write about five important items that belonged to
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the historical figure they chose to study. Her son selected 16-year-old Frederick Douglass, who as an enslaved person was not allowed to own anything other than a single shirt and two pairs of pants. As designers, we tell stories through objects too, but how often do we consider the history of the power structures tied to who made, owned, and used products in our past? What sorts of stories of inequity and bias can be told around the products we are designing and using today? Three years ago, my oldest son took a field trip to the Federal School, an old colonial one-room schoolhouse built in 1797 that still stands not too far from where we live. In preparation for this trip, the teacher sent home a permission slip that listed all the requirements, including instructions for the kids to dress in period garb with a suggested list of items they might have handy in their wardrobes to pull together a convincing approximation of a colonial-era student. I signed the form and sent it back. It turns out my son’s read of the same form was different. “Hey, Mom, you know that field trip to the Federal School?” he asked a few weeks before the trip. “We have to dress up like the kids who lived back then. I guess I’m going to have to dress like a slave.” Following a pragmatic discussion with my very astute son—in which I convinced him that his teacher might prefer that he just stick to the colonial white kid wardrobe as outlined on the sheet, even though he was spot-on—I shared the conversation with Facebook for a laugh (along with my recollection of the field trip I took in kindergarten where we picked cotton). I expected some tongue-in-cheek commiseration, maybe a few facepalm reactions. Instead, my post was met with shock and dismay from several white grade school educators confessing that they had never thought of the trauma a “fun” field trip assignment might trigger in students of color. Had it really never occurred to them that Black people don’t play the time travel game because there was never a decade where we have been free of racism, violence, bigotry? Had it never occurred to them that Black people
were enslaved people up until 158 years ago and, even then, were only considered three-fifths of a person and are still being brutalized by the criminal justice system that was born from the days of the slave catchers? Did they think that we didn’t notice that women barely show up in the history books until they are fighting for their rights to vote and own land and are labeled as troublemakers and jailed for breaking the law? Did they truly lack the empathy that afforded them a view of history that was not their own? Where was their empathy? The lived experiences of people going through the same system of education is vastly different based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, national origin, and physical and cognitive ability. Perhaps authentic empathy is an impossibility? If the conceptual act of empathy—the first step of the design thinking process—is a fallacy, what traumas are designers, through our practice of design and design research, regularly triggering in the people we design for? If we can’t get empathy right, what else have we gotten wrong in the packaging and reselling of design to the world branded under American exceptionalism? What other harms have we perpetuated in the development of products for the American market built with inexpensive skilled labor in overseas factories? How much care have we given to working conditions in those factories and the environmental impact of this manufacturing dynamic? Our pursuit to create coveted artifacts that represent the standard of “good” design is a result of the American design process. Because it’s not just the standard of good industrial design or the products themselves but also the processes of designing and design thinking that have become some of America’s number-one exports. This model of creative problem-solving has been swallowed whole by the rest of the world and has led to a homogenous design culture that leaves the door wide open for rampant appropriation and enduring discrimination. It may be design through the eyes and the standards of
beauty of white men, but it is a legacy practiced by all of us who’ve gone through the system and have been influenced by American material culture. How Do We Decolonize Industrial Design? We are well into the 21st century, and we are long overdue for an overhaul of the way we teach, practice, and share industrial design. To move from colonization to liberation, we need a systemic shift that leads to a more respectful practice that is inclusive and representative of our diverse and intersectional lived experiences. A practice that is both radical and grounded in Indigenous knowledge. We must also actively decenter white and Eurocentric design standards and processes and embrace diverse and intersectional practices and aesthetics. We must shift our focus from being human-centered to being society-informed and community-led. Our leadership must prepare to divest power so that those pushing for a more just, equitable, inclusive, and universal view of design can succeed in reshaping our field. In this issue of INNOVATION, we’ve asked designers, educators, scholars, and firms to reflect on how colonization shows up in the practice of design and for recommendations on how to push past it. The events of 2020 and 2021 have shown us that there is nothing to be gained by not embracing change, and we will not be able to change unless we get uncomfortable. So settle in, take your time, and listen to the ideas in these pages—a decolonized and liberated practice of industrial design that benefits everyone. —Raja Schaar, IDSA raja.schaar@drexel.edu Raja Schaar is an assistant professor and program director of the Drexel University Product Design program and co-chair of the IDSA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council
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D E C O L ONI ZI NG I NDUST R I A L D ESIGN
COLONIZED BY DESIGN
H
ow do we decolonize design without honestly confronting our power to colonize? I do not know the answer to that question, but it is one that all designers should ponder. Regarding decolonization, most of our strategies
cater to correcting mistakes from the past, mainly to make the design field more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We strategize on how to amplify voices that have historically been silenced. We think about how to open more opportunities to communities that have been historically oppressed. These are amazing strategies that offer much-needed relief, especially for the process of healing. But we’re still missing something. With all the tasks that need to be done to decolonize design, it’s easy for us to overlook a crucial point: that our efforts must be sustainable. We forget to ask, How do we ensure that we permanently stop the practice of colonization in design? How do we prevent repeating history?
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What Does Colonization Look Like Now? Throughout history, colonization has mutated, evolved, and reproduced. Its reach extends deeper than what most in the West have been taught. In the book Why Nations Fail, authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson created a distinction between the two types of European colonialism: extractive and settler colonialism. Extractive colonialism is the kind of colonialism that happened to land areas rich in precious metals and usually with a tropical climate. Data shows that the settler mortality in these areas was very high, so the colonizers’ objective was to extract its resources rather than to settle there. They created governments that elevated their descendants as the elite. Settler colonialism happened on lands that were not as rich in resources. The colonizers claimed the land as their own with complete disregard for the Indigenous people. The United States, Canada, and Australia are all fruits of settler colonialism. In these lands, colonizers eventually created their own nations. When they did, they staged themselves as the fighter for freedom, the model that the rest of the colonized worlds should aspire to, while casting a shadow that hides all the ways they colonized Indigenous cultures. It would be naive of us to think that colonialism is a thing of the past. Extractive colonialism still happens in parts of the world. For example, China recently claimed a group of islands rich in natural resources that belong in the Philippines by exerting their military power and building a base there. Design’s role in contributing to extractive colonialism is evident in the history of warfare. Many centuries ago, one of the first mass-produced products, as mentioned in the documentary Objectified, were arrows designed to standardize the Chinese army’s weapons. Americans who are not Indigenous are actively participating in settler colonialism. We’ve never paid reparations or returned these lands to the Native Americans. Our taxes fund a government that continuously oppresses anyone who has a distinguishable heritage from the original settlers, and our government doesn’t have an actionable plan for how to truly create an equitable society. We’ve erased Indigenous knowledge and culture. We’ve stolen from and claimed certain Indigenous cultures as our own while
devaluing others. We’ve destroyed Indigenous materials and rewritten history in such a way that we’re comfortable with what our ancestors have done. More prevalent now is neocolonialism. This type of colonialism is not about enriching a monarchy by extracting natural resources from a different land. Nor does it claim other peoples’ land as its own to settle on it. What neocolonialism does is actively homogenize and erase cultures to elevate one dominant culture. As colonialism evolves, the strategies needed to stop it must evolve as well. We’re no longer just fighting for land to be returned and reparations to be paid; we’re fighting to ensure that diversity in culture can flourish in the future. Everything we create as designers will contribute to how tomorrow’s society is shaped. Design Has Colonized Design as a tool of the colonizer did not stop after its inception as a standardizer of weapons for conquerors. The inherent value we put on objects, where they’re from, and the materials used to make them creates division between the consumers of the objects and the community being colonized. Today, neocolonialism in design operates in two ways: It celebrates Eurocentric aesthetics, and it steals other cultures’ identities for its own. As someone who spent her childhood in one of the most Americanized neighborhoods in the Philippines, I can attest to how locally made products were perceived to be of less value by the locals. The division colonialism created in my home country is still felt today in direct and indirect ways. Markers of which societal and economical class you belong to are all built by design. The walls of the gated community that exclude outsiders are physical symbols of the social divide that colonialism has created and design is perpetuating. Whether it’s in the scale of urban planning, architecture, industrial design, or graphic design, in the developing world, we follow foreign standards. I am disheartened by how locals would work days to afford an American brand of clothing only to be disappointed when they realize it’s manufactured in the Philippines. Still, they would choose to spend their hard-earned money on these
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brands, rather than fair-priced products crafted by locals. Here in the United States those stories aren’t as common; instead, we steal everyone else’s cultural artifacts and minimize the gravity of this offense by saying we were just ‘inspired by them.’ There have been recent cases of textile patterns belonging to Indigenous groups making their way to fashion houses without proper credit, all while eliminating the stories and meaning of the symbolism in these patterns. We’re comfortable sending our designs overseas to be manufactured, paying sweatshop labor in some instances, and telling ourselves we haven’t harmed these communities—and that, in fact, we have given them jobs. The cost of colonialism does not come with a dollar value that we can easily calculate—because how do you calculate shame? Is it the cost difference between manufacturing locally and manufacturing internationally? Is it the cost of the labor to manufacture Nike shoes subtracted from how long it takes an actual worker to afford one at retail value? Design Can Stop Further Colonization Industrial designers, as the ones who design artifacts, bear a much heavier responsibility for decolonization than we collectively acknowledge. In the conversation about decolonization, we must include strategies for how to stop colonizing as designers. We must be united in addressing this as an industry. We are culture creators. The objects, experiences, products, built environment, materials, and anything else we create become part of the fabric of our society, and just like a loose thread that could easily unravel if pulled, an irresponsibly designed product can do a lot of damage to societies and cultures when mass produced. Think of the easy access to guns that Americans have. Even a remarkable innovation like the smartphone has failure points when we think about the variety of digital cultures it has fostered. As such, it falls within our responsibility to think about the kind of culture our creations create. What kind of society and culture do we create when our products end up reaching millions? Conversely, what kind of culture do we create when only a select few are able to use the products we make? A Top-Down Approach Is it time for the ID community to do some policy work? Can we think of a top-down approach to eliminate colonization and ensure that the design industry moves forward responsibly? It is not uncommon for there to be oversight in professional industries; architects must be licensed, and so do engineers. There are authorities that ensure bridges, planes, and vehicles all meet minimum safety standards.
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What could this kind of oversight look like in the realm of industrial design? Can we create a policy that protects cultural artifacts the way we protect landmark buildings or trademarks and patents? What if we create a policy that makes it so that certain patterns, symbolisms, and ideologies belonging to specific cultures are protected by a cultural protection policy. Imagine a world where communities are paid and credited for their invaluable knowledge and techniques and the richness of their culture. This could be a step toward learning how to respect other cultures and communities and will be a safeguard to lessen cultural appropriation. What about less standardization? Human-centered design has become unrecognizable to me. I’m not sure if I follow it anymore. How can we truly design with humans in mind if we prototype one standard man and standard woman and build around their needs? A standard man and woman in the United States is not the same in other countries. They don’t speak the same languages, their needs and worries are different, and even their body measurements are different. I know we’re trying, but our privileged Western view will never be able to create a standard for people in different cultures. I’m able to acknowledge this even though I spent part of my childhood in a developing country. Design Can Heal Our industry needs to take responsibility. We need to slow down. We need to assess if the products we create contribute to a healthier future and if they are making amends for the sins of our past. It’s not all dark and gloom. I know that a revolution within the industry is coming. We’re already making progress toward the above suggestions, whether you see it or not. Intellectual property and landmark laws can easily provide a model for a cultural protection policy. We just need to be mindful of their roots in capitalism and colonialism when we draft policies. When we diversify design, a movement that’s starting to gain momentum, it will be much easier for all of us to see that having one-size-fits-all design standards is ineffective and insensitive. We’ll realize that there’s more than one language in the world, that not all people are right-handed, that not all people are able-bodied. We are the ones designing future artifacts and experiences. If there’s an industry that can build a decolonized, equitable future, it is us. Ana Mengote Baluca, IDSA ana@lowercaseinnovation.com Ana Mengote Baluca is designing an equitable world as the creative director of lowercase innovation and one of the leaders of IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council.
WOMEN IN D E S I G N
DIVE
DEEP
July 28-29, 2021
A gathering built to recognize the unique talents, initiatives and challenges of women in the industrial design industry. Join us (virtually of course) for two days of dialogue and fellowship with some of the leading designers who are making an impact. Hear from designers who represent all stages of a career and who work across a broad spectrum of practice areas including industrial design, UX, service design, and more. idsa.org/WIDDD2021
Virtual Event
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D E C O L ONI ZI NG I NDUST R I A L D ESIGN
RETHINKING DESIGN THINKING “Black people are naturally designers; we have had to design ways
”
to navigate a world that wasn’t built for us.
—A panelist at the 2020 Where are the Black Designers conference
Above: Jasmine Burton and some focus group participants in Kakuma, Kenya, following an innovation focus group for the SafiChoo toilet. Right: Jasmine Burton piloting an interview guide with a local translator and research assistant for an innovation market research study for the SaTo Pan toilet in Lusaka, Zambia.
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I
am a mixed race—Black and Native American—product designer who works to use the power of design thinking to drive sustainable social change through empathic research and business acumen. When I heard a fellow panelist at the first annual Where are the Black Designers? conference in June 2020 make the statement on the prior page, I felt seen in a way that I had never been seen before. Designing Toilets My story as a social impact designer and storyteller within the global health and sanitation fields began at Georgia Tech during my undergraduate product design studies. While attending a Georgia Tech Women’s Leadership conference my first year, I learned that nearly half the world does not have access to a safe and hygienic toilet, which leads a host of mental and physical health issues. Specifically, I learned how this reality disproportionately impacts the livelihoods, educational paths, and career opportunities of women and girls of color around the world. I immediately called my parents and said, “I know what I’m supposed to do. I am supposed to design toilets!” Needless to say, they were a bit taken aback but have provided me steadfast support throughout my career as a
toilet designer and sanitation entrepreneur. Fast forward three years to when I was a senior at Georgia Tech and led the first all-female team to win the InVenture Prize, the largest undergraduate invention competition in the United States, for the SafiChoo toilet. We won a patent and $25,000 in funding, which enabled us to pilot our design in a refugee camp in northern Kenya, my first time visiting and working on the continent of Africa. We piloted our toilet prototypes with Somali and South Sudanese refugees (with a focus on women’s empowerment) while using human-centered design practices to effectively iterate and further innovate our toilet concept in a way that included their voices and preferences. Sanitation is a global health issue that is often highly gendered, stigmatized, and entrenched in neocolonial norms. Because I looked like many of the women we were working with, I connected, related, and co-created with them in ways that my white colleagues could not. I quickly realized the power of the Black Diaspora bond and how design has cascading impacts beyond the physical products and services we create. At the same time, I was further learning that my mixedraced phenotype (evidenced by my lighter skin color and hair texture), the educational privileges I have been afforded due
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Above: Jasmine Burton and some focus group participants in Kakuma, Kenya, following an innovation focus group for the SafiChoo toilet.
to my communities of support, and the American passport I hold, have and continue to grant me an enormous amount of institutional power in our global society. Recognizing this, I have sought to redistribute this power as a force for positive change and to lift others as I climb. This sometimes looks like stepping back from a leadership role or project in order to let others step into the light for their voices to be heard. Through my social enterprise Wish for WASH, I have led diverse teams of interdisciplinary practitioners in toilet innovation pilots in Zambia, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the resettled refugee communities in my hometown of Atlanta, GA. Additionally, we have conducted over 10 workshops with varying organizations to help proliferate equity-centered design thinking as a practice in the global water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector. Over the past seven-plus years as a toilet designer and global health entrepreneur with experience across 10 countries, I have learned that design—if used and conducted intentionally—can be a tool and practice to advance the human condition. With a true human-centered, iterative, and inclusive mindset, design can make us better stewards of our diverse humanity and this planet.
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Designing for Equity Design can also be a tool for advocacy that can combat traditional top-down approaches to both US-based and international development. When true participatory and human-centered practices are conducted with communities rather than for communities, the design process can be a disruptive force for positive change. When used this way, the design thinking fail-forward mindset can be a tool to build the evidence base of research by working with historically marginalized communities in both a generative and iterative manner. One example is the need to allow social impact designers, global health practitioners, and development workers to publish failures without reproach. This would enable others to learn from their mistakes, rather than reinventing the wheel only to find that their approach has already been proven to not work. In the sanitation sector, toilet systems fail to achieve their intended public health impact when their purpose and the supply chains for them were not based on local needs because the end users were not included in their creation. For example, there are numerous case studies where ceramic sit toilets were abandoned or used like flowerpots because the users’ context-specific needs were not understood. Discussing these failures more openly could
enable WASH practitioners to move forward with an equity and human-centered mindset in their research rather than spending time and money designing and installing toilet systems that do not work in specific contexts. To help further build a more representative evidence base of research, designers and program planners also need to understand how their projects impact different people in different spheres of society. From a project’s onset, they need to be intentionally capturing disaggregated data on at least the axes of health inequalities—race, gender, and class—in order to effectively iterate the project to better meet the different needs faced by different user groups. Moreover, design can be both a tool and practice to build societal equity. While rapid prototyping technologies, opensource design schematics, and shared learning platforms are democratizing innovation and disrupting who has the power to innovate, design education must iterate and improve as well. The needed improvements include providing both physical and financial access for diverse students to receive a design education and supporting inclusive pipelines for professional development. Representation, mentorship, and sponsorship matter. Additionally, all design programs should educate students about design ethics, social impact design, and the global contributions by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) designers past and present who have made and continue to make a difference in the global creative economy. Showcasing the intersection of power and privilege with the creative process, Sandy Speicher, CEO of IDEO, made the following statement at the 2020 Where are the Black Designers conference, “Imagination is not neutral. What we can imagine is defined through the experiences that we have, which is defined by the bodies that we hold, which is connected to skin that we have.” For me, Raja Schaar, my only Black professor in all my years of education, has not only become a mentor and advisor throughout my career, but she has and continues to show me how expansive and impactful a design career can be for a girl who looks like me. I will never be the best in some tactical design skills, like product sketching and CAD modeling, but I have learned that I have power as a designer. The perspective I bring to product, service, communication, and intervention design is enough to drive, lead, and ultimately open doors for other diverse voices to create the meaningful and sustainable change in this sector that we so desperately need. As history has shown, design
needs more robust and inclusive pipelines for BIPOC and underrepresented voices in order to effectively combat historically homogenous thinking, ways of working, and harmful outcomes (including unintended consequences), especially in social impact design work. As a creative community, we now need to be rethinking design thinking so that we are not reinforcing systems of inequities, dependency, and oppression by continuing to support the status quo way of conducting design work in communities around the world. Empathy in design research is often approached with a linear checkbox mentality when, in fact, empathy is actually a lifelong journey rather than a series of finite steps. As humans, we will never fully understand the experiences that others have, but we can always seek to learn, grow, and expand our understandings of each other. In 2020 the world experienced the great Swiss Cheese Effect, a concept that describes the occurrence of systemic failures in various parts of society. This was showcased by the intersection of mass crises that spanned a public health pandemic, civil rights movements, political unrest, and a fragile global economy. It was and continues to be a forced time of reckoning for those who could not or chose not to see the inequities and darkness that have deeply plagued our global society for centuries. With this awakening comes a collective call to be better and do better moving forward. I firmly believe that design has the power to change the world if used and proliferated intentionally. By being married to the process and not the final product, fostering diverse education and pipelines for industry, and knowing when we should step back to let others with different knowledge take the lead, we can collaboratively work together to decolonize design and move the needle of change in the creative economy. Ultimately, we should never have to ask again, Where are the Black designers? —Jasmine Burton jasminekburton@gmail.com; jasminekburton.com With six years of experience leading Wish for WASH, Jasmine Burton seeks to combine design thinking, business acumen, and evidence-based science to accelerate access to universal health and sanitation for all.
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APPROPRIATE DISCOMFORT: CHALLENGING APPROPRIATION IN PRODUCT DESIGN Author’s Note, 03/26/2021: This article was written before the surge in attacks on the Asian community in the United States. The topic of appropriation pales in urgency compared to violence, but small ignorances allow for brazen aggression over time. Conversely, the idea of incremental changes adding up also works in the positive direction. This is my small piece in the larger movement to face and address racism.
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ecently, it seems like every day has brought us a new villain on the news or in social media. In comedic Scooby-Doo fashion, if we pull off the mask, we expose the familiar faces of systemic problems, ones that have come
up again and again. But if I unpack one more layer, I converge on the idea that comfort is the ultimate pursuit and that the inequitable distribution of comfort can be used to describe privilege, power, advantage, and wealth. In other words, comfort is the ultimate resource or currency, and it is instinctively desired and inequitably distributed. This idea of the currency of comfort is a much bigger and more philosophical topic, but it is present in the way we design and the objects we create.
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If we think about comfort as the ultimate resource, we, as industrial and product designers, play directly into this system. By definition, our practice designs for production on a mass scale, comfortably serving the economies of scale. Our powers of human-centered design cater to human comfort, and the factors we consider map to these needs. Function correlates to a service or an action made more convenient, a lifestyle comfort. Form affords emotional comfort through aesthetics and delight. Physical comfort is captured in ergonomics. In short, industrial and product designers create shit to sell, and people buy shit for comfort. But the undercurrent and drive toward comfort isn’t just in our output; it’s woven into our very practice. The origin and basis of industrial design and product design is the Euro-/Americentric concept of producing on a massive scale and constraining design to uphold that objective. Standardization of thought is a byproduct of standardization of process. If we look at the prevailing preferences and ideals over time, European design has become the standard. This obsession has inertia and is self-fulfilling: We like it so we do it, and now we’re committed to it so we like it. Over time, these preferences become canonized standards. To break away from this collective ideal is to be uncomfortable, and discomfort is a detriment that disadvantages the few. In critiques, in research, in debates, the dissenters shoulder the discomfort of challenging the majority by being the minority (whether by demographic or by opinion). Over time, this has meant a rough convergence on what we collectively find acceptable and good. But this gets boring, and boredom is intellectual discomfort. The history of humans is peppered with the adoption/ theft/borrowing of knowledge and objects. We celebrate the cross-pollination of ideas and variety to challenge the familiar that we know. It scares us in a way we like, but only if it scares us just the right amount. Enter the distinction between homage and appropriation. We want the exciting spice, but only so far as to not disturb the comfort we have. Appropriation is foreignness repackaged for the comfort of the consumer, whereas homage/inspiration is a challenge and an invitation to the consumer to expand their definition of comfort entirely. The way I see it, the tactical distinction between homage and theft/bastardization comes through intent and context. Using the lens of comfort, we often see appropriation happen when there is something that is fascinating for its unfamiliarity but unapproachable for the same reason. In order for something to be marketable and consumed at a mass scale, it is often altered to the mass taste. To make it more palatable, the artifact is stripped down into something that is more comfortable for the majority to consume.
We as product designers are often put in the role of gatekeeper and interpreter of what is consumable. This is a difficult position to be in. Do we risk pushing away the consumer by challenging them too much? Do we risk losing their interest by producing something commonplace? If we do include elements of something with history, with baggage, with complexity and flavor and fire, how much is the right amount? Navigating this balance is difficult, and when done poorly, the intent becomes dilution, even if it’s never explicitly stated—think mahjong minus the Chinese characters and symbolism, yoga minus the spiritualism and history. This cultural blanching is a way to remove the offensive foreignness while also making the consumer feel comfortable in their foray into the exotic. While intent focuses on future comfort, the other part is context, which is past discomfort. Appropriation disregards the negative experiences that people have had in the past of being castigated or mocked for what is now considered trendy or provocative. Kimchi was gross until it became fine dining, cornrows were ghetto until they were couture, tattoos were tribal until they were fashion, slanted eyes were chinky until they were trendy, bodegas were sketchy until they were convenient—the examples are prolific. In these cases, the double standard is obvious to those who have been on the receiving end of judgment and criticism, even though their discomfort has gone unnoticed and invisible to the powerful and comfortable majority. This inequity is the first to summon reactive emotion and is an arbiter and measuring stick by which people recognize appropriation. So without having had that contextual experience or that historic perspective, people lack the immediate reactive ability to judge whether or not something is inappropriately appropriational. These distinctions are sometimes hard to make. There are cases of appropriation that are just laughably blatant and offensive, but there are often cases where it’s not clear to everyone, even though it’s always obvious to the people it has offended. In short, if you know, you know. But this tautology can’t be the final conclusion, it doesn’t help people who are not in the know get in. In fact, it sets people up to continue to err since even wrongly asking for help or information can feel inappropriate. No person is
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perfect, and no one person is the arbiter of how to judge what is and what isn’t appropriation. Also, appropriation can be sneaky, and it might not be obvious day to day in our practice. Taking the time to self-interrogate can reveal missteps earlier on. If you’re unsure of how, here are some questions you can use as a starting point: 1. Why am I doing this? Appropriation often entails profit in some way, and profit extends beyond monetary gain to social capital, attention, awareness, and other hard-to-quantify outcomes. So if you’re looking at a cultural item, ritual, or entity as a medium to benefit only yourself, go directly to jail and don’t collect $200. 2. Who benefits from what I do? Again, circling back to the very first point, we’re in the business of selling stuff to people, so it’s not realistic to avoid benefit or profit entirely. But does the work put the spotlight on only you, or does it share with the origin artifact? Additionally, is your work marked up in comparison to the original simply for being ‘cleaned up’ or ‘refreshed’ or ‘made premium’? Capitalizing on this perceived value-add is bad form. Not only does it signal that the original culture is less valuable or undesirable, it also incentivizes the sterilization of foreignness in future designs. 3. Do I really know what I’m using? Don’t just name the artifact; really understand it. Having only a cursory understanding unravels quickly. Ignorance happens, but ignorance from lack of effort leads to missteps that are less forgivable. Deeper research will reveal what the durable features of the object are and why they have withstood time. From there, you can ask yourself if your design serves its purpose to users unlike yourself and if you’ve thought about the object in the context of where it comes from rather than where you want it to go. 4. Does someone know better than me? Probably, and that’s not a dig on you. The internet is a vast place filled with people who have a lot of time to study things. If you’re not the expert on your topic, it’s time to consult someone who is. You can start in your own circle; ask your more informed friends and mentors, but don’t
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depend on or expect them to spoon feed you everything. Besides, they might not be an expert either. Do your own work: Find resources that challenge you rather than enforce your perspective, verify your sources, and be open. 5. What can I do? Sometimes we’re in a place where we don’t own the final output and we feel like we have no good choice. Nonetheless, there’s probably still a right choice. As organizations and as individuals within those organizations, we have just as much obligation to take a stand and say something when things feel wrong. Self-education is critical, but applying it to positively affect conversations and change outcomes is the next step. 6. Who gets the final say? There are always haters who will shit on your work. But if you’re revamping something that isn’t yours and somebody who knows more tells you it is inappropriate appropriation, that’s not your call to deny. Just having put in time and work does not make it yours. If you are new to something, you lack context. Being called out is uncomfortable, but being on the receiving end of appropriation is even more uncomfortable. A big part of appropriation is the part that isn’t ever seen or heard or experienced by the appropriator. So if someone who knows more than you tells you that you fucked up, hear them and respect them, and respect yourself by learning more. 7. When is appropriation appropriate? Never. If ‘inspired by’ is done right, it’s not appropriation, it’s homage. Trade the comfort of not knowing for the discomfort of learning, and hopefully along the way you can make your work a little wise, a little worldlier, and a little more appropriate. —Fran Wang hello@franet.earth Fran Wang is a mechanical engineer at frog design and co-founder of Yona. She is not an expert in culture studies, but has opinions, clearly.
virtual event series IDSA’s Design Voices is a recurring series of 1-hour virtual events with top design leaders presenting, discussing, and debating current trends and specific practice areas. Each discussion is followed by a moderated Q&A where attendees can post questions and interact with the presenters. Design Voices live events are FREE for all current IDSA members and $10 per event for non-members.
2021 Design Voices Host & Curator Başak Altan, IDSA is a design strategist, educator, future thinker,
Upcoming sessions The Intersection of Service Design & ID Tuesday, April 20, 2021
and connector. For over 20 years she has been providing leadership in design and strategy services
Women in ID: Data Bias & Entrepreneurship Tuesday, May 25, 2021
at the intersection of business, technology, and education.
idsa.org/design-voices
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THE PROBLEM WITH OTHERING IN DESIGN
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s someone who has studied and practiced art and design for most of my life, I have long studied the works of the people we know as “the masters” as well as the periods in which they operated. In art, this
covers works from ancient civilizations—Egyptian, Greek, Roman—to prominent European periods such as Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and those of the 18th and 19th century, to American art of the 20th century. In design, this includes movements like the Arts and Crafts, Decorative Arts, and industrialization, all pointing toward what we know today as industrial design. While I always admired and appreciated the pioneering works of several designers, including Ray and Charles Eames, Dieter Rams, and Philippe Starck, deep down it bothered me that all the information I had been taking in was overwhelmingly Western.
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What Is Really Being Said Over the course of my career, I have never seen a project or product line develop without a concept development phase in which teams do a ton of research, like pulling references together to create a look-and-feel presentation. And I have rarely seen references that don’t represent a Western aesthetic. To broaden the team’s perspective, I always liked to include inspiration from all over the globe in my research, for it to only be rejected for “feeling too ethnic” for the brand and not in keeping with the audience’s preferences. Responses like these would get me to thinking, Why is this ethnic? and, moreover, What is considered to be ‘ethnic’ in the world of industrial design? Instances like this remind me of going to the grocery store where there is usually the one ‘ethnic’ aisle for all the Latin, Caribbean, Asian, Jewish, etc. products. Or the ‘ethnic’ haircare section of the drugstore that carries hair and beauty products targeted to the Black community (although recently some retailers have started using different terminology to define these aisles). No other section in the store is labeled this way. What all this points to is the underlying belief that anything Western is considered standard while everything else is viewed as other. The problem with the act of othering concepts, aesthetics, and ideas that aren’t Eurocentric is that they rarely get the same level of respect and importance as the perceived standard. This often plays out in scenarios like the concept development phase where the creative direction takes form—and is where the non-Western inspirations and references get filtered out. Add being the only, or one of a few, BIPOC designers in the room, and it gets even more challenging to defend the validity of these references. And so continues the cycle of a standard Western approach and the perception that it is the foundation, or origin, of good design. Getting to the Core The world is round. What many tend to forget is the sheer fact that design is global. It always has been. The act of designing and creating has been happening all over the world, in every culture, on every continent since humanity began. Yet somehow the lens has been skewed to primarily
focus on a Eurocentric approach. Design history hasn’t done a good job of covering much outside the Western world, even though so much occurred in the rest of the world. Why is that? One can speculate: Is it a subconscious belief that non-Western design is lesser? Is it not influential enough? Is it too niche? Is there a fear of alienating the mainstream audience and a desire to avoid backlash? Is it an attempt to create and perpetuate the narrative that Eurocentricity is the very nature of design? These are simply my guesses, but I can’t help but question this issue enough to try to get to the bottom of what’s really going on. Perhaps a good starting point for designers to respond to the lack of diverse design references and expand the concept of what good design is, is to be intentional about researching and including worldwide inspiration in their concept development. It might mean taking a step back from a Eurocentric viewpoint for a while to make space to cultivate a deep understanding and acknowledgement that design is international and intercultural. Give this the same attention and care that is afforded to understanding and researching Western design. Another activity is for everyone to start asking themselves questions about why industrial design has been heavily Western focused. How has that narrative been perpetuated, and what/who has been perpetuating it? Who gets to determine what design is worth seeing and what is valid? Why are we listening to them? Question it like a toddler who demands all the answers. It can be overwhelming to attempt to examine and break down deeply engrained and subconscious values. Hence, it is worth taking the time to question them and try to get to their root. And then be brave and intentional about finding solutions. —Tracy Llewellyn, IDSA llewellyn.tracy@gmail.com Tracy Llewellyn is the principal of Llewellyn Design Studio, LLC focusing on product and spatial design projects. She is also a leader on the IDSA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council.
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“RECRUIT A MIX,” THEY SAID
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he road to hell is paved with good intentions. You’d be hard-pressed to find a company that says it prefers to create sexist designs using racist design methods. But beyond the (very human) desire to appear inclusive, we must dig deeper to think about the ways our products are created. We must be intentionally antiracist, from kickoff to delivery. Shame and guilt are not effective motivators for making the right decisions. A desire for equality, inclusion, and, most of all, justice provides us with a purposeful path toward a decolonized future of design. Our role as human-centered researchers and designers is to advocate for this future in every decision-making task we take part in. At Bresslergroup, our research team is made up of anthropologists, designers, and cognitive scientists who have studied how to most effectively reduce bias in our research. We’re committed to continuing to learn new strategies to do so. In the wide range of design research that we practice—from global contextual inquiry to quantitative surveys—we work to mitigate bias in all that we do. Before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s important to acknowledge that the fields of research and design are historically traumatizing ones for marginalized communities. In general, ‘good research’ practices and ‘good design’ practices have been defined by white men and are rooted in the Eurocentric idea of ‘discovering’ other cultures. When it’s the researcher who determines how to interpret the narratives embedded in data, research risks stripping people of their agency to tell their own stories. One way we combat
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this is by acknowledging our biases as researchers and how they might—as well as how our positionality to our subjects might—affect our interpretation of the data we collect. Decolonizing Research Methods Researchers must understand that we’re not blank voids to be filled with data, but rather people whose experiences will color our data if we’re not careful. If we make the mistake of ignoring our own implicit biases in our research studies, we risk missing huge areas of opportunity—or worse, we create a product that’s not usable or is actively harmful to the population we aim to design for. To begin to combat these biases, our design research team bakes three strategies into all we do: 1. Strive to bring diverse voices to the decision table. 2. Foster awareness around potentially traumatic data collection. 3. Deliver what the client needs to hear, not what they want to hear. Diversity in Participant Population When recruiting participants for a research study, it is vital to first include the right voices and then use the right language to honor the lived experiences of those voices. Thoughtfully determining who you speak with and why you speak with them is the first step in creating a more inclusive research study. Dig deeper to understand the diversity in your participant population. Companies are now realizing that male/female
options for gender survey responses are inadequate. But why? When you don’t have access to the detailed information you need to appropriately segment or recruit your research participants, you may miss out on understanding a user population that you hadn’t yet considered. Yes, it’s easier for the researcher to present race as a single-choice option. But forcing participants to uncomfortably self-sort into a gender or racial binary for ease of analysis impacts the accuracy of a survey’s data and the depth of analysis possible. “Recruit a mix” isn’t the solution you think it is. If you’ve ever designed or read a recruiting screener document, you’ve likely seen the phrase “Recruit a mix.” This is the equivalent of slapping a dirty bandage on a wound and expecting it to heal on its own. “Recruit a mix” implies that any mix of gender, race, ability, or socioeconomic attributes will do for the study. The researcher wants a ‘spread’ of representation to show that they’ve considered the diversity of their participant pool but isn’t willing to put forth the thought required to determine how that spread should look. Here’s where we can get into the messy space of tokenization with the thinking “My study had a few Black people in it—I did my job!” One example that comes to mind is a haircare project our research team was bidding on. The client wanted to include three participants with natural hair in the study of 15 people. The product we were studying was not formulated for people with natural hair. The client wanted to “just see” how it would go.
We pushed back. What would you learn from talking to participants who know the product they’re assessing isn’t designed for them? How would that make those participants feel? What would you learn that you don’t already know? This user population represents an entirely different problem space with completely unique needs. Instead, we recommended creating a second study to focus on how the product can be reformulated to work with natural hair. This “I don’t see color” approach to recruitment is not an effective method of uncovering meaningful design opportunities. Be aware of your biases—we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s nearly impossible to know the impact that colonization has had on your study until you dig into it. We can plan as much as we like, but unless we’re open to the prospect of uncovering these uncomfortable findings, we can easily miss them. I worked on a study where an international company hosted a single server that needed to be deployed globally for transmitting large files. We traveled to countries around the world to assess how different groups within the organization used the system. The usability of the system in one country we visited far from the European server center was significantly impaired. Files took minutes to transfer, multiple people were hired to manage the crawling system, and efficiency went out the window. There had been some debate at the start of the study over whether it would be “worth it” to visit this country. Evidently, it was!
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Trauma-Sensitive Data Collection When collecting data from participants, it’s important that the right person is asking the right questions to ensure the comfort and safety of the participant (and researcher). We can easily and unintentionally trigger a trauma response in participants (or researchers) by discussing sensitive topics around their life experiences. These conversations may be important to have to solve for any design problems that contributed to those experiences, so we strive to assuage discomfort and anxiety through compassionate study planning. Ask yourself: Are you the right person to lead the study? Research is inherently biased. We all bring our life experiences with us into interviews whether or not we’d like to admit it. Our job is to mitigate those biases as much as possible. Because of this, we try to ensure that the right researcher is in the room to ask the right questions the right way. Has someone on your research team experienced similar challenges as your participants? Will they have less bias to overcome? Will they be more likely to set your participants at ease? For a study in which we spoke to people who had experienced difficult pregnancies, moderators were all people who had experienced pregnancy. In a study for a medical device specifically for those assigned female at birth (AFAB), all team members were AFAB themselves.
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Consent is fundamental. Always make it extremely clear at the start of the session that the participant is in control. They can choose to not answer a question, and they can leave the session at any time. This is especially important if the content of the interview touches on sensitive, potentially traumatic, or triggering experiences. Continue to provide participants with an out throughout the interview. Consent, as in all areas of life, is not a onetime event. It takes work to ensure that the participant is comfortable and aware of this throughout the session, especially if the researcher clearly does not have similar life experiences. Know that you might mess up. Then adjust. The work to decolonize our research is never done. Researchers must be willing to pivot and evolve as new information becomes available to them. In a study where we assessed the changes to daily life that occurred after the start of the global pandemic, we used the phrase “new normal” repeatedly throughout our data collection. One participant got a funny look on their face when we said this to them. They said, “You know I hear that all the time in my PTSD support group, right?” We paused our initial line of questioning, apologized to the participant, and asked if they would be willing to share more with us about the use of the phrase. We
stopped using the phrase “new normal” in future sessions to ensure that participants wouldn’t have a similar triggering moment during their interview about a relatively benign, everyday topic. Speak Truth in Your Delivery If you aim to act ethically as a design researcher, censoring your findings to appease your client or a design team is not an option. Sometimes, we uncover data that illustrates unpleasant societal ills or dangerous biases or that even exposes racism within the client’s initial hypothesis. We cannot run from these conversations just because they may be unsettling. We also cannot allow these insights to be forgotten in the commotion of a busy product design development cycle. Report what you find. It can be uncomfortable to tell a client something they don’t want to hear, but as a researcher, that’s our job. We’re the bad guys of the design process. Our inquiry can uncover unsavory facts about a situation that can’t always be solved by design alone. It’s still vital to present those findings, especially if they impact the context in which design decisions will be made. In the same study as referenced above with people who experienced difficult pregnancies, we learned about the significant impact that access to healthcare, healthy diet options, and transportation had on a pregnant person’s ability to care for themselves. We described these factors in our findings even though our client, who was designing a health device application, couldn’t do anything about them. This information helped them frame their design choices and make decisions about language that would be sensitive to the broader socioeconomic factors at play. Use humanizing language. When reporting on participants who have a particular disease or experience, employing people-first language reinforces clients’ and stakeholders’ desire to make human-centered decisions. Instead of “the homeless,” we say “people experiencing homelessness.” Instead of “diabetic,” we say “people with diabetes.” Simple changes in language may seem trivial, but when presenting work to clients unfamiliar with the humancentered design process, these seemingly minor adjustments ensure that the person being designed for is at the front of everyone’s minds.
Keep the right people in the room. However, it’s not enough to simply use people-first language. You need to design with those people. A hand-off to the client or design team without factoring in additional concept development research with the affected user populations is a missed opportunity. We, as researchers, are not the arbiters of truth. We do not own an unbiased view of a design problem. Without repeated, respectful engagement with an affected user group there’s always the possibility of designing a tone-deaf, unusable, or even actively harmful product. This also illustrates the need for research teams that are diverse in identity, background, ethnicity, and life experience. The more perspectives that can be advocated for from a place of “I,” the more difficult it is for poor design decisions to slip through the cracks. Bringing these perspectives together (and then actually listening to them!) is a challenge that many companies fail to fully comprehend. For full disclosure, although we are mostly women, the Bresslergroup research team is not as diverse as we’d like to be. We certainly have room to grow, and we’re evolving our inclusive hiring practices to get the right people at our decision-making tables. The Design Researcher’s Evolving Role Researchers are in a unique position to help clients change the way they think. In baking the above strategies into the work we do as a matter of course, we’ve helped our clients begin to understand that everyone can benefit when you design to decolonize. Acknowledging that this article was written by a college-educated white woman, there is always room to grow. We’re committed to listening to and learning from other researchers doing this important work and welcome any feedback on the strategies outlined in this article. This work is never done. All of us in the design community must do our part to continue to move the needle. Small decisions lead to bigger decisions, and big decisions can change the world. —Jemma Frost jfrost@bresslergroup.com Jemma Frost is a senior design researcher at Bresslergroup, a product design company based in Philadelphia. She teaches human-centered design courses at Drexel University.
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FOSTERING A MULTILINGUAL DESIGN STUDIO CLASSROOM
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nglish is not my first language. It’s actually not even my second. I spoke two very different dialects of Chinese at home before beginning any formal education in English. This, combined with being a firstgeneration student, made it pretty unlikely that industrial design would be my path. I didn’t see myself reflected in my professors or in Eurocentric design history; nor did I see myself in the field as a whole. I want to be to my students what I myself didn’t have. Since I began teaching in 2016, I have often provided emotional support for racialized students who experience discrimination and systemic, institutionalized oppression in their education. The future of industrial design looks like the increasingly diverse students in our classrooms. It is essential that our studio classroom environments allow them to be their full selves and affirm their lived experiences. White and English should not be the default; they are not what makes good design. Below I have outlined some strategies and considerations for cultivating a multilingual design studio classroom. Recognize Positionality As educators, we should be transparent in acknowledging our privilege and positionality as a model for self-reflection and awareness. Positionality is the social and political context that creates your identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc. Positionality influences your understanding and outlook of the world. For me it looks like this: I am the daughter of ethnically Chinese Vietnamese refugees born and raised on Treaty 7 territory in Southern Alberta, Canada. I am continuing to interrogate my own positionality as an able-bodied, light-skinned East Asian and cisgender woman who has had the privilege to pursue higher education. I bring my own lived experience as a racialized student and design professional to my practice as a designer and educator.
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I speak English with a Canadian accent and that affords me privilege too. Encouraging all students to consider their own intersections allows them to consider the position from which they give and receive critique. This becomes especially important in design research, where we, whether an educator or student, should take stock of our power and how that influences the spaces and communities we enter. Examine the Context Consider that students may be struggling in our studios not because of their abilities with concepts or language but because they have been trained in a different academic culture. Studio classrooms regularly require active and experimental participation—behavior that could be considered disrespectful or inappropriate in another cultural context. Establish expectations and course vocabulary from the beginning so any conversations that happen begin from the same baseline. What is a model? What is a prototype? Through presentations and critique, we’re encouraging students to practice the vocabulary of design. Students will be better able to participate if we first define the terms. I once heard that you should consider your first language to be the language you do math in. Similarly, I would expect creative ideas to arrive to us first in our native language. When you are making notations on sketches, before anything takes form, should you have to filter these through a translation first? Encouraging students to incorporate their multilingual experience into their work brings richness to their ideas. Allow them to write in the language that their ideas arrive in, translating later, if necessary, for their process documentation. Broaden Opportunities for Participation Creating more low-stakes alternatives for participation helps the students acclimatize to studio culture and become
comfortable with one another. Allow for different modes of feedback and vary critique methods throughout the term to see what’s effective for particular groups of students. Written feedback, Post-it critiques, small-group feedback, online forums, and Slack or Discord critiques can all be useful forms of encouraging and gathering feedback. Since the move to virtual and hybrid teaching, I use Discord for informal conversations and interim critiques. This allows students who are not typically comfortable speaking up the opportunity to share their thoughts, students who rely on translators for some terminology to use this technology, and students who are presenting to have an archive of peer feedback that they can review later without frantically scribbling notes during their crit. Before a group discussion, I often give students a few minutes to organize their thoughts (on paper, if necessary!) before they are asked to participate. I try to provide class discussion questions in writing—on the board or on the Zoom chat—rather than only asking verbally in order to accommodate the different ways a student might process the information. When assigning time-based presentations, I consider the extra barriers placed on multilingual students. This issue becomes particularly apparent in formats like Pecha Kucha, where students are only given 20 seconds per slide and 20 slides total. I don’t yet have a solid solution for keeping presentations concise without added pressure on multilingual students, but I make a point of helping them with strategies for preparing verbal content. I start the term with a written intro/input survey to get to know the students without putting them on the spot in front of the class. I always ask about names, pronouns, favorite projects, and what they’re hoping to learn and provide a space for any questions they would like to be answered anonymously in upcoming classes. Lately, I’ve also been asking about the music they like to listen to while they work and use the responses to create a class playlist for studio
time. Learning about the students this way has really been a great joy. I hope that being asked these questions also helps them feel seen and much more than just a name and student number on my roster. Keep It a Dialogue If you’re comfortable, emphasize your availability to the students—immediately after class, office hours, by email, on Discord, etc.—to help them feel more comfortable asking for clarity or help working through an issue. I’m very aware of the power structure in classrooms and remember how unlikely it was for me to approach a professor before I felt absolutely safe doing so. I can’t count the number of times in school and in my professional life that I have had an insight to share and couldn’t find the space to speak. A space wasn’t made for me, but it’s not too late for our students. Not only is it the just thing to do, it will add a richness to our studios that we might otherwise miss out on. How can we move beyond the traditional design studio classroom where only a select few voices are heard? How do we make a space for thoughtful contributions, curiosity, mutual empowerment, and community-building in the studio learning process? —Amanda Huynh, IDSA ahuynh16@pratt.edu Amanda Huynh is an assistant professor of industrial design at Pratt Institute and a leader on IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council. These concepts were presented at Pratt Institute’s Center for Teaching and Learning Fall Forum: Frameworks for Equity and Inclusion, September 2019.
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MAYBE GRASSROOTS COLLECTIVISM IS HOW WE EXPAND ACCESS TO DESIGN
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y favorite place to be when I was growing up was the Seabrook Park Community Center in Fayetteville, NC. As a kid, my brother, cousins, and I went to summer camp there, and it’s where I went to learn to play pickup basketball on the weekends and fell in love with the game. What I loved most was the way it was a central hub for my grandmother’s neighborhood that cultivated my first sense of community and connection. In the years since, I’ve often sought out that feeling of community. So much so that I’ve centered my work as a designer on what it means to foster community through creative practices, most recently learning about community-building practices, such as mutual aid and grassroots collectivism, which center and define the needs of communities on their own terms. As an adult living in Chicago during both a global health pandemic and one of the largest social justice movements in our lifetime, I’ve engaged with folks both inside and outside my circle of design friends in conversations questioning our role in this moment and this movement. I’ve watched community organizers and collectives step in to raise funds to cover rent for neighbors, put together COVID readiness kits for those experiencing houselessness, and gather to distribute food to those feeling the brunt of economic uncertainty due to this pandemic. I, like many others across various neighborhoods of this city, wanted to find my place in supporting my neighbors, community members that I had grown to know through either the research I do or from local events, not to mention the many small businesses that had helped me acclimate to the city as a newcomer. This moment got me thinking about
what collectivism means to our communities, and how even in my upbringing, this practice was inherent to the ways we define culture, mobility, and togetherness. Collectivism in Design In Design, When Everybody Designs, Ezio Manzini discusses the concept of diffuse design, design that is performed by everyone, as opposed to expert design, which is owned by those who are trained to be professional designers. He asks us to consider design as a cultural practice concerned with how things should be in order to sustain function and meaning of what design is and the social learning that takes place as a result of us engaging in design. By this definition, the actual practice of creation and innovation takes place within the process of co-design when all parties impacted by design have a seat at the table, so to speak, in the decisions that are made. Since the inception of co-design as a collective resource approach in the early 21st century, we’ve seen the art of participation in design take many different forms and seep into many different areas of creativity and innovation. We’ve learned that in its Scandinavian origin, participation in design was intended to ensure a certain level of democracy in design—a way to give everyone a voice. Yet in the current landscape of design, we see that the notion of design thinking and participation in this once democratic process now overemphasizes expertise and experience, separating the designer from the community that is being designed with. This way of seeing design not only creates its own form of gatekeeping, but it shifts design to something that we
Right: An in-person co-design workshop with older Black adults on the Southside of Chicago focused on reimaging health management
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package and sell—monetizing what is actually an inherent way of thinking and, more notably, a communal practice of ingenuity. Design is a part of the way people move about their day-to-day lives. We are constantly amending the way we interact with devices in our home and the environment itself. At the community level, many of us gather and brainstorm to create change and support certain social initiatives to redesign our current lived experiences to something more desirable, more ideal. It’s inherent in our DNA to consider the way things currently are and imagine a better future for our families and our communities. Design thinking is not something that should be gatekept or sold. The notion of design thinking must be more accessible. Community collectivism is a valuable approach to decolonizing the current landscape of design to its Scandinavian origin of democracy and inclusion. It suggests a consciousness of “we” in our obligations and responsibilities and the way we define what pushes our culture forward. And this, in its purest essence, is what design is about. The Denizen Designer Project A little over a year ago I started an oral documentation project called the Denizen Designer Project, exploring the reach of design to support the notion of community. I began talking to community practitioners that engaged in this way of thinking and practicing design. Most of these practitioners believe that design can address social, economic, and even political challenges when in the hands of the people who are living through these challenges. The Denizen Designer Project aims to guide those who are interested in implementing design as a catalyst for social change in their own environments. This is the next phase of innovation in our practice—making space for the fluidity of design as inherent thought. As a part of this project, we interviewed 33 community practitioners across the country and surveyed over 100 more to capture the ways they were introduced to design, their perspectives on where design is headed, and their opinions on how accessible design is to those outside of industry spaces. While I began the project speaking with urban planners, social designers, and design strategists in the nonprofit and social sectors, I was introduced to many people who did not formally define themselves as designers but rather as social workers, community organizers, and healers. I learned about projects that ranged from envisioning the healing of Black women and folks to addressing the current sociopolitical climate and police-sanctioned violence happening across the Unites States. I learned of the many techniques and strategies that cultivate collaboration among community stakeholders, laborers, and policymakers and
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how they’ve shaped the conversation of democracy in the design process. With each interview, I began to see more and more just how much community-driven approaches to participatory design allow us to effectively engage the communities most impacted by design in a way that centers them as the expert, historian, and thought leader. Dismantling the power imbalance between designer and non-designer reinforces the concept of diffuse design that Manzini discusses. Each of the people we talked to in this project reinforced the concept that design is an inherent way of thinking that doesn’t just come from formal education or training, but from knowing the circumstances that need to be changed by living in proximity to them. From the Denizen Designer Project, we also see how collectivism in design has the power to address and potentially heal the damage done by the social impact narrative that Black and Brown communities are less than and require outreach. Understanding community history by allowing community practitioners to lead helps the design field to challenge assumptions and find more effective ways to engage with people that are not condescending, stigmatizing, or intimidating. Moving to community design, design based on community collectivism, and a model of crowdsourcing design ideas decolonizes design by returning the process of planning and decision-making to the hands of the community itself. Design as a discipline is ever-changing because it’s had to be. At its core, design has always been a process and way of thinking that reinvents the products, systems, and spaces around us. Among the greatest shifts in the history of design has been the way design has positioned and engaged the individuals and communities it impacts— yet corporatizing this approach harms communities that are already disenfranchised in the United States. Decolonizing our practice for the next wave of design looks like moving away from seeing social impact design as a form of outreach to seeing it as a model of social learning. It also means amplifying community voices and supporting building collectivist approaches to changing the ways the world operates. Understanding that the ability to envision collective futures blurs the lines of who is considered a designer moves our practice back to its origins of democratic design. —Christina Harrington christina.harrington@depaul.edu Christina Harrington, PhD has over 10 years’ experience doing design research with individuals with disabilities and impairments and those marginalized along race, class, and age. She is an assistant professor in the School of Design at DePaul University.
June 9-10, 2021
We must leverage our resources, processes, and voice as industrial designers to establish new ways of thinking and methodologies in our studios, companies, and corporate settings that can help to ensure the ongoing health of our planet and its precious resources.
S u s t a i n a b i l i ty
idsa.org/SDD2021
Virtual Event
DIVE
DEEP
As the developers of products and services used by billions of people around the world, industrial designers hold a crucial position: one that demands we look for ways in which our work can ignite social, cultural, and institutional change.
D E C O L ONI ZI NG I NDUST R I A L D ESIGN
CELEBRATING AMERICA’S CULTURE DIVERSITY
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ultural appropriation may not sound too foreign to many people, especially to the Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the United States. Particularly over the past decade, there’s been a rise in the appropriation of Chinese culture, including a modernized mahjong set created by three white women who simply thought the traditional mahjong set didn’t reflect the fun they’d like to have during the game, a video named Kung-fu Vagina containing harmful stereotypes that marginalize Asian women, and a ‘clean’ Chinese restaurant opened by a white food blogger by labelling her approach to Chinese food superior to the ones made by Chinese people. It prompted me to think how I could raise more awareness about this issue. What Is Cultural Appropriation? To better understand what counts as cultural appropriation and how we might shine more light on this important issue, I researched what areas of cultures usually get appropriated the most. A wide range of examples came up during my search, from people wearing a Native American headdress as a costume on Halloween to non-Black celebrities misrepresenting and profiting off dance movements that are deeply connected to the Black culture history to white chefs from a well-known food network claiming the proper way of eating a dish that originates from another culture.
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Cultural appropriation refers to the use of objects or elements of a nondominant culture in a way that doesn’t respect their original meaning, doesn’t give credit to their source, reinforces stereotypes, or contributes to oppression. The line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation can get quite blurry sometimes. Cultural appropriation occurs when the appreciation becomes a fetishism, when a business profits off a culture they don’t belong to, or when cultures are erased and/or overgeneralized. Cultural appropriation can cause pain to various groups and individuals, including Indigenous people working for cultural preservation, nonwhite cultures, and those who have lived or are living under colonial rule. Is reverse cultural appropriation possible? After raising this question, I researched “reversing cultural appropriation,” but realized that it isn’t possible because appropriation is ultimately dependent on power. A group whose culture has been systematically minimized, disenfranchised, and marginalized can’t appropriate a culture that has the power to demean and disadvantage other cultures. This rationale is especially true in the United States, since American culture supports and enforces whiteness as the norm. However, when we acknowledge, appreciate, and exchange cultures in a respectful way, we could create so many more creative and exciting opportunities to celebrate cultural diversity. Therefore, I reframed the problem
statement and decided to take a positive spin on it by asking, “How might we encourage people to celebrate culture diversity in a white-dominant culture?” After landing on this design direction, I explored how we currently define American culture. The Hot Pot American culture is often referred to as a melting pot. Many people push back on that metaphor because it forces each individual and their culture to assimilate into one whole. This assimilation often requires folks to abandon pieces of themselves and their culture in order to fit in. Those who push back on this idea will instead describe American culture as a salad bowl, where each piece exists independently and contributes to the experience of the whole. After several conversations on this topic with my friend Hanya Moharram, we landed on a hope for American society to aspire to become like the Chinese hot pot. A hot pot is a popular meal where people gather to enjoy a variety of ingredients cooked in boiling broth shared in the center of the table. A hot pot creates a welcoming environment where conversation can flow easily and where people are able to participate in a shared experience while maintaining their own preferences. All the ingredients exist independently, take on the flavor of the broth, and also contribute flavor to the broth. Each element contributes to the whole and is also
improved by it. Also, hot pot is delicious. To take this concept further, I created a branding design that encourages people from various cultural backgrounds to share their own cultures and to engage in conversations that allow them to learn from each other’s cultural heritages. The design is composed of a hot pot illustration that celebrates cultural diversity as a new metaphor for American culture and an erasable sticker that lets people write down the culture they belong to as well as their favorite food, which may or may not be associated with their cultural background. I hope to see this branding design being incorporated into a variety of accessories and clothing, such as masks, tote bags, and phone cases, for people to carry around and/or wear, and I aspire to see everyone proudly and loudly embracing their cultures, breaking cultural generalizations and stereotypes, and engaging in meaningful conversations about different cultures.
Danielle Chen, IDSA daniellec.playdesign@gmail.com Danielle Chen is a designer who creates playful yet thoughtprovoking designs that advocate for cultural diversity and highlight various social issues.
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LIGHTING THE WAY TO TRANSPARENT, ETHICAL, AND FAIR TRADE
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hen I was 7 years old, my father purchased a rug for me at a women’s co-op in the valley of Ourika, about an hour’s drive from Marrakech, Morocco. I remember the big smiles and joy on the women’s faces, as they wrapped and bagged my rug. Seeing their feeling of pride for the recognition of their work and for earning a fair wage for their craft—the whole experience has stayed vivid in my memory all these years. Fast forward to October 2014 when I decided to start my personal brand, Dounia Home. The core mission in my mind was and still is to showcase the exquisite Moroccan artisanship through high-end home decor products and to sustain the artisan community from which it originated. I want my customers to experience those same feelings I had when I held that special woven rug more than two decades ago. And I want our company to employ and further support the Moroccan artisan community. For three months, I traveled throughout Morocco with a designer’s lens, exploring its crafts and discovering its centuries-old beauty. In meeting with and learning about the various artisan groups, I was astounded by the different disciplines and resources and the variety of products Moroccans created. One material kept catching my eye: metal. I fell in love with its beauty, durability, and sustainability. I knew that the global customer craved Moroccan lighting, and I also knew that the lighting space needed a designer’s eye to elevate its products. I decided to focus on metalworking and lighting design. While metalworking is traditionally a male-dominated, complex field, I saw an opportunity to make a difference and broaden the market for the craft. I was determined to learn about metalworking from the community, “speak their language,” and earn their respect. After a few months, we created a team environment: The artisans educated me on the art and process of metalworking, and I used
my experience in design and development to streamline and introduce new technologies to make production more efficient. From the start, Dounia Home was determined to create a new supply chain that was transparent, ethical, and fair. We cut out the intermediaries and trained a select group of artisans to handcraft quality products that met Dounia Home’s highest standards. Together, we established a fair turnaround time of four to six weeks, ensuring the artisans have enough time to produce quality products and preventing burnout and long working days. Working directly with the artisans ensures they are paid fairly and receive higher wages. They are a critical part of our process. We count on their expertise to guide us in creating our most complex fixtures, and together we push the boundaries of the craft. In this way, our products represent a connection from the hands of our artisans to the homes of our customers. Today, seven years into our business, we are transforming an industry that needed to start working for its people, empowering them and providing the resources they need to thrive, succeed, and live well. It’s up to all of us as citizens of the world to demand fair trade. We are what we love, and what we love is not what we say, but what we do. Together we can do good, feel good, and change the world. —Dounia Tamri-Loeper dounia@douniahome.com Dounia Tamri-Loeper is a Moroccan native with a BS in design from Drexel University. She spent several years in brand building at Michael Graves Architecture & Design before launching her company and making an impact on the Moroccan artisan community
Clockwise from top left: Dounia Tamri-Loeper founder and CEO of Dounia Home by the Moulay el Yazid Mosque in Kasbah, Marrakech; Dounia and Larbi, one of Dounia Home’s top-tier master artisans, during a product review session; Larbi sketching the Darj W Ktef pattern, a staple in Moroccan architecture.
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Clockwise: The Nur Reversed Pendant light in polished brass; Larbi welding the rim of the Nur Reversed shade to create a finished edge; Karim, a master patternmaker, applying the Darj W ktef pattern to the sphere-shaped brass Nur Reversed shade.
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INCLUSIVE DESIGN 3.0: BROADENING THE GOALS OF INCLUSIVITY IN DESIGN EDUCATION
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have been teaching design history for over three decades. The course content has continued to evolve in breadth and depth. I started with the Industrial Revolution and the London Exhibition of 1851, and in later courses expanded further back in history. Recent events have informed part of the evolution. Last summer I prepared to teach a new history course for the upcoming fall semester. It is oriented to first-year students in the School of Design in the College of DAAP at the University of Cincinnati. It was an opportunity to rethink how design students could learn art and design history given the undeniable truths that have emerged in the world. The goal was to provide a foundation to help understand the issues we are facing today. Students need to understand the precolonial world and the impact of colonization in order to effectively address the issues of decolonization and global disparity. I am sharing this experience with you because I would like to hear from practicing designers and educators on how they are addressing decolonization. The Background In 1976 while studying for my master’s at Pratt Institute, I acquired some broad perspectives on the state of industrial design at the time. I attended three design conferences:
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the 1976 IDSA Evolution Revolution conference, the Annual Aspen Design Conference, and the ICSID Conference in Dublin, Ireland. I became aware, for the first time, that there were both multiple theories and perspectives about design and the global dimension of design. In 1975 after reading Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek, I began to understand how my degree in design could be integrated with my undergraduate degree in psychology. In college and since, I have been fortunate to have had opportunities to focus on design in a variety of ways for the people Papanek described. I have seen the terms used to describe underserved people evolve from “handicapped” to “disabled” to “universal design” to “inclusive design,” and now they are included under the broader umbrella of “socially responsible design.” More recently, world events have illuminated the continuing impact of four centuries of colonization and imperialism practiced by Western countries and continuing with G20 nations and multinational companies. The recently increased publicizing of police mistreatment of people of color in the United States and the inequities of the impact of the new coronavirus have led to a global awakening and call to action to find ways to create fair distributions of treatment, wealth, and healthcare for the increasing number of people at the bottom.
In 2004 I started in a new position at the University of Cincinnati. When I began as the CDRI director in the College of Design Architecture Art and Planning (DAAP), I needed to develop a strategy and framework for this new role. I developed a diagram of a 3D conceptual space with three axes: (1) past, present, future; (2) from local to national to global; and (3) from design to interdisciplinary. I have continued to explore that conceptual space, connecting my teaching of graduate courses and studios with history. Part of this new role was to continue to teach design history, and I have been evolving the history courses since then. This article is the latest version of that evolutionary process. The Experiment The Art/Design History course is a required first-semester course with two primary themes. The first is focused on the precolonized world and introduces students to the idea that at this time cultures existed around the world in relative isolation and with varying degrees of sophistication. All these cultures used design within their societies, and most lived with the recognition of their context and ecosystem. The second theme is the emergence of global colonization with the domination of European cultures in the world. In the second part of the class, students learn how the advances in European countries allowed them to colonize countries around the world. Previous empires were mostly geographic expansions. The new colonization was transcontinental and required a base development of seafaring ships and navigation technology. Those advantages in combination with guns, germs, and steel, as described by Jared Diamond, created a new global economy. This new economic system required a new labor force to drive the work needed for global commerce. Since Columbus started the process in La Isabela in 1494, there have been four centuries of humans moving around the world, some by choice but most forced through slavery. The course was taught online and met for three hours once a week. This was not an ideal length for a class as no one should or can speak for three hours and most students have 20-minute-long attention spans. To teach effectively, I used a combination of lectures and videos, along with team projects. I did not show any video segment lasting longer than
five minutes. I pre-edited the videos to show the class the most relevant parts. Here are some of the videos that proved to be the most valuable (the full list is available at the end of the article). Humanity from Space is an excellent documentary produced by PBS. It covers the beginning of humans on earth as a species and continues through to the interconnected world of today. CBS Sunday Morning has produced three-to-five-minute-long segments that are well documented and accessible. One segment on the vanilla trade is an excellent example of current post-colonialism practices. The film Black Panther and its positive effect on Afrofuturism provides an excellent introduction to the origins of different African cultures. Since most students have seen the film, they can then research the dimensions of the movie that have made it so culturally important. “The Edifice,” a section of the video Why Man Creates by Saul Bass, was very well received as an introductory overview. The original introductory TED talk for Big History was also very effective. The students worked on one individual project and in teams for the rest of the assignments. For the individual project, each student had to trace their heritage with a focus on the design elements of the time and the countries their families came from. For the team projects, the class was divided into teams of four. The teams were given themes to explore during the class and projects to work on between classes. Below are the team assignments that received a positive response from the class: • Design a timeline tracing the origins of jeans from the current fashion of jeans with holes to the origins of indigo dye and the development of the fabric. This assignment begins with the question, Why are you buying and wearing blue jeans with holes in them? and asked students to trace denim fabric and indigo to their origins. • Develop a 10-slide PDF presentation that identifies examples of African artifacts used in Black Panther. Most of the students have seen the movie but few knew that the design and architecture depicted in the film was inspired by many countries in Africa. • Develop a 10-slide PDF that provides an overview of the culture and influence of the Iroquois Nation. In 1988 the Iroquois were recognized for their influence on the founders of the United States and Benjamin Franklin
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Design for the Real World Victor Papanek Creating Breakthrough Products Cagan and Vogel
The History of Things How We Got to Now Guns Germs and Steel
The Live Well Collaborative
Warmth of Other Suns
Design for Disabled
Just Mercy
University of Cincinnati Master of Design School of Design/DAAP
Inclusive Design
Master of Integrated Innovation formerly Integrated Product Development Carnegie Mellon University
Inclusive Design 3.0 Equity and Inclusion Post-colonization 1970’S – 2021
13 Netflix Universal Deign
20 years in China 30 Years in Asia Teaching Design History for 30 years
IDSA Trans-generational Design
ICISID
Masters Degree In Industrial Design
P&G Singapore Polytech
RESEARCH: Long term complex issues of interest to funding organizations, companies, CDes and UMN Result: Varied results could include; papers, books, Ph.D. dissertations, master thesis, articles, exhibits, seminars, conferences
BA in Liberal Arts
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Global
Past
Research Project
Inter disci
PROJECTS: Corporate sponsored, focused on short term contemporary issues of interest to companies, DAAP and University
plina
ry
Result : Clear product deliverables
CDe UX D s Grap esign hic D esign
Local Top: A diagram of the factors that led to the development of the course and the title of the argument. Bottom: This three-axis map for the Center for Design and Innovation for School of Design shows the interconnection of time, discipline, and geography. The spheres show the connection with research, exploring the boundaries and projects within, at the center as an interconnected symbiotic relationship. History is a key component of the past/ present/future continuum.
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in particular. Students learned that the Indigenous culture of North America had a highly functional gender balance and peaceful unity of several tribes in a democratic government predating the formation of the United States. • Develop a 10-slide PDF that presents and describes precolonization to middle school students. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else. This theme continues in the Introduction to Industrial Design course I teach during the spring semester. This course is part of the first of three courses in design history and theory that ID students will take in the ID curriculum. In addition, many studio courses are starting to integrate themes that allow students to integrate their knowledge into developing design solutions. The Result The course was successful. Students became aware of the issues they need to understand and are now empowered to find a way to use design as they develop over the next three and a half years and graduate into practice. I have agreed to teach this course again in the upcoming fall semester. I will continue to work with colleagues and students to evolve the course. I am grateful to several key faculty that contributed to the first iteration of the course: Beth Tauke, University of Buffalo; Lorraine Justice, FIDSA, RIT; Dr. Cecelia Wang, University of Minnesota; and Dr. Christopher Jackson, University of Cincinnati. I had significant interaction and support from Dr. Chris Lim at the University of Dundee. I look forward to hearing from other faculty and corporate designers about how they are responding to the issues of decolonization, equity, and inclusion and environmental responsibility. —Craig M. Vogel, FIDSA vogelcg@ucmail.uc.edu Craig Vogel is a professor in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati.
RESOURCES The below list includes both resources for general knowledge that formed the backdrop for lectures and specific examples of resources used in the course.
Books Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson Sapiens: Brief History of Mankind, Yuval Noah Harrari Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond How We Got to Now, Stephen Johnson A Short History on Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson Empire of Things, Frank Trentmann Design for the Real World, Victor Papanek Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough Creating Breakthrough Products, 2nd Edition, Jonathan Cagan and Craig Vogel
Movies, Videos, and Websites World Economic Forum Strategic Intelligence https://intelligence.weforum.org This site’s overview of issues, technology, history, and culture is one of the best resources on the web, and it is free to use. 13th Filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation’s prisons are disproportionately filled with African Americans. “The Flavorful Story of Vanilla,” CBS Sunday Morning www.cbs.com/shows/cbs-sunday-morning/video/ fPUI4FyJQNIrNRJMCegwV9Ez4gm4BFwa/the-flavorful-story-of-vanilla/ “A TO Z,” Nova www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/a-to-z/ Discover how writing—and eventually printing—revolutionized the spread of information. “The History of Our World in 18 Minutes,” David Christian www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_the_history_of_our_world_in_18_minutes David Christian worked with Bill Gates to develop the Big History Project online education site. “The Edifice,” in Why Man Creates, Saul Bass https://vimeo.com/272593512 This is a classic animation within the bigger story of exploring why man creates. How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson www.pbs.org/show/how-we-got-now/ The video series, with an accompanying book, provides a non-traditional look at history focusing on the evolution of a series of innovations that changed the world: glass, clean, cold, light, and sound. It shows how ideas intersect from multiple directions to accelerate change. Lucy, the final scene While the movie itself is not that good, the final scene is. The heroine, Lucy, travels back in time and meets the original Lucy, considered to be the first human and was found in Ethiopia in 1974.
Exhibits African American History, permanent exhibit, National Museum of African American Culture & History, Washington, DC Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal, Cincinnati Art Museum, Fall 2020
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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ABOUT DECOLONIZING DESIGN
O
ver the past few decades, the voices calling for the decolonization of design have gotten louder and their reach has spread further. If what you read in this issue piques your interest and you’re looking for ways to change the field, here is a (not-at-all exhaustive) list of designers and thought leaders to follow who have been leading the charge, calling for more a diverse, participatory, culturally inclusive, sustainable, and community-centered practice of design, design research, and design education.
“If we live in a society that benefits those in the most vulnerable physical, emotional, mental positions, then we actually create a society that works for everyone. We don’t necessarily have the capacity to address all the harm that happens in our movement spaces right now, but we do have the capacity to continuously try to be creative around how we co-create those things.”
PEOPLE MAKING A DIFFERENCE —adrienne maree brown ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
brown is a doula, scholar, women’s rights activist and Black feminist based in Detroit, MI. Her writings are based around the works of Octavia E. Butler and Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry and extend to community, social justice, disability justice, sustainability, and climate resilience. She has published extensively on sex, healing, self-care, trauma, and science fiction. She is the author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good; co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements; and host of the podcasts How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables.
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CHRIS RUDD
Rudd teaches industrial design at IIT’s Institute of Design, leads community-led design for the Chicago Design Lab, and is the founder of ChiByDesign. He is a community organizer who works with youth on the south and west sides of Chicago to engage with their communities through activism and technology. He speaks frequently on design and activism, community-empowered systems change, co-designing with community, and youth, design, and juvenile justice reform. ELIZABETH (DORI) TUNSTALL, PHD
Dori Tunstall is the dean of the Faculty of Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD), the first Black person and Black female dean of a faculty of design anywhere. Her tireless work as a design anthropologist, scholar, educator, and community advocate for respectful design and decolonized design education have become a model for designers all over the world. Her commitment to changing the face and practice of design can be seen in her diverse hiring practices through a series of cluster hires at OCAD to increase the parity of BIPOC faculty. She is also the co-founder of the Black Youth Design Initiative.
“The
biggest
difference
between
what
we
are
articulating and what is now a hegemonic point of view with respect to ‘human-centered design’ is decentering the human to introduce a relational model where the human is just part of the wider ecosystem.” —Dori Tunstall GEORGE AYE
Aye co-founded Greater Good Studio, with Sara Cantor Aye, to use design to heal, to be just, and to be restorative. He is deeply committed to using human-centered design to help the lives of people in need and works across multiple social issues from autism, criminal justice, education, public health, and healthcare. He is also a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects. JENNIFER RITTNER
Rittner is on the faculty at the School of the Visual Arts, a principal of products of design at Content Matters, and a writer. She teaches courses in design and politics, design of social value, and design history. She began her career as a museum educator where she led Art Access II, an initiative to increase museum attendance among underserved communities through education and outreach, before working for Pentagram and AIGA and then founding Content Matters. She teaches, speaks, and writes frequently on design, race, history, and social justice. LESLEY ANN NOEL, PHD
Noel is a professor of practice and associate director of the Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking for Social Impact at the Taylor Center, Tulane University. Her research practice is guided by an emancipatory philosophy. She focuses on developing design curriculum for nontraditional audiences and promoting the work of designers outside of Europe and North America. In 2019, she authored A
Designer’s Critical Alphabet, a deck combining design with critical race theory language to encourage an inclusive approach to design and social issues and to help students understand how positionality and identity can influence people’s needs and the products they use.
“If we allow people to only design for people who they know, what’s to prevent them from continuing to do this when they move onto professional life?” —Lesley Ann Noel MIYA OSAKI
Osaki is the chair of the Design for Social Innovation MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) and co-founder of Diagram, a New York-based women- and minority-owned healthcare experience design studio. She is also the co-host of the podcast Yah, No. In her teaching and practice, she brings her skills in interaction design, human-centered research, storytelling, and behavior design to improve health well-being, care, and quality of life for patients through inclusive co-creation.
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RICARDO GOMES, MFA, IDSA
SADIE RED WING
Gomes is a professor of design and industry at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and director of the Design Center for Global Needs and the Nathan Shapira Design Archive in the School of Design at SFSU. He is a leading expert on inclusive/universal design, healthcare, the aging, community development, social innovation, and the sustainability of the built environment. He leads a collective of Black activist artists and designers and lectures globally on design for aging in place, design for the majority world, design for social innovation, design thinking, global design and cultural identity, and social impact design. Gomes was awarded the IDSA Education Award in 2020.
Red Wing is a Lakota graphic designer and advocate from the Spirit Lake Nation of Fort Totten, ND, and an assistant director of the Native Student Programs at the University of Redlands. Her research is on cultural revitalization and visual sovereignty in design. She advocates for the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in design curriculum to decolonize design education. Her work has been featured in AIGA’s Eye on Design, “Why Can’t the U.S. Decolonize Its Design Education?” (2017) and Communication Arts, “Decolonizing Native American Design” (2017).
ROBERT D. BULLARD
Bullard is a pioneer of the environmental justice movement, having fought for universal access to healthy, sustainable communities since the 1970s. He is a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University and co-founder of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium. As a sociologist, he often writes and speaks on the relationship between design, the built environment, and climate justice. He is an award-winning author of 18 books that address sustainable development, environmental racism, urban land use, industrial facility siting, community reinvestment, housing, transportation, climate justice, disasters, emergency response and community resilience, smart growth, and regional equity.
“An environmental revolution is taking shape in the United States. This revolution has touched communities of color from New York to California and from Florida to Alaska – anywhere where African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans live and comprise a majority of the population. Collectively, these Americans represent the fastest growing segment of the population in the United States. They are also the groups most at risk from environmental problems.” —Robert D. Bullard
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SASHA COSTANZA-CHOCK
Costanza-Chock is a communications scholar, participatory designer, and activist focused on media studies, communication technology, social movements, media justice, and design. They are an associate professor of civic media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Their most recent book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), is freely available at design-justice.pubpub.org. It is an exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.
“One of the big problems we’re facing now is a normalization and elimination of anything that doesn’t fit normative models. Design justice as a proposal and as a set of practices is about challenging that, saying no, and pushing back to say that there are a lot of different types of knowledge. There are a lot of different types of design.” —Sasha Costanza-Chock
ORGANIZATIONS WORKING IN THIS SPACE
ADDITIONAL READING
AFTROTECTOPIA
“What Does It Mean to Decolonize Design? Dismantling design history 101” by Anoushka Khandwala eyeondesign.aiga.org/what-does-it-mean-to-decolonizedesign/
afrotectopia.org ALLIED MEDIA PROJECT
alliedmedia.org BLACK IGNITE
blackignite.com
“It’s Time to Define What ‘Good’ Means in Our Industry” by George Aye designobserver.com/feature/its-time-to-define-what-goodmeans-in-our-industry/40021/
BLKHAUS
blkhausstudios.com CREATIVE REACTION LAB
creativereactionlab.com COLLOQATE
colloqate.org DATA & SOCIETY
datasociety.net DECOLONIZING DESIGN
“These Identical Twins Built a Design Shop That Rejects Systemic Racism” by Elizabeth Segran www.fastcompany.com/90582383/these-identical-twinshave-built-a-design-shop-that-rejects-white-supremacy “10 New Rules of Design” by Mark Wilson www.fastcompany.com/90563364/10-new-rules-of-design “Indigenous People’s Day: An Interview with Brian Skeet, IDSA” www.idsa.org/news/member-news/indigenous-peoplesday-interview-brian-skeet-idsa
decolonisingdesign.com DESIGNALLY
designally.net
“DeColonizing Design Thinking,” an episode of The Conversation Factory podcast with Lesley-Ann Noel https://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/decolonizingdesign-thinking-with-dr-lesley-ann-noel
DESIGN EXPLORR
designexplorr.com DESIGN JUSTICE NETWORKS
designjustice.org DIVERSIFY X DESIGN
dxd.design HUE COLLECTIVE
thehuecollective.com INDIGENOUS DESIGN COLLABORATIVE
design.asu.edu/research-and-initiatives/indigenous-designcollaborative MUSEUM OF DESIGN ATLANTA
museumofdesign.org PROJECT PLURALIST
projectpluralist.com WHERE ARE THE BLACK DESIGNERS?
wherearetheblackdesigners.com
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A F I N A L THO UG HT
IT’S ALL IN THE NAME
M
assachusetts College of Art & Design’s education starts with a first-year foundation program. At this public university, roughly 40% of ID students discover the major after being exposed to it by a classmate or an instructor during their first semester or as late as their third. The ID certificate program, tailored to those with an existing undergraduate degree, contributes an additional 10%. ID student numbers rank seventh in the college’s 18 majors. When non-designers have collaborated with design disciplines at an academic as well as a professional level, many have said things like, “This is such a cool discipline, I wish I had known about it before now. This seems more like fun than work.” So why is the industrial design profession still so vague to most and hidden to many? There has been much movement in the profession since its emergence at the start of the 20th century. Its scope has broadened, taking on the design of services in addition to artifacts. Its impact has deepened, evaluating human factors and use scenarios to substantiate the why behind product solutions. However, one thing remains constant: Industrial designers are sought after to solve problems to enhance the human experience while increasing the company’s bottom line. They often are the glue in an agency’s multidisciplinary development team, the anchor in a start-up bringing the product across the finish line, or the visionary driving innovative solutions for unmet latent consumer needs in corporations. Once people are exposed to it, they understand its value. Yet, in my 15 years of undergraduate-level teaching, ID students still don’t quite understand how broad their future possibilities are. They look to design leaders for validation and recognition and often feel the field remains limited in who it considers an industrial designer. They wonder, “Should I bother competing for the IDSA Student Merit Award when my strongest work is synthesizing research to create areas for design exploration?” Digital platforms are prevalent in student design solutions, yet they worry that the lack of an artifact-based project in their portfolio makes them less of an industrial designer than their counterparts. Is their hesitancy to embrace the industrial design professional as their “people” hurting the ability to make industrial design more ubiquitous? Even the title of industrial designer can be confusing. The names “industrial designer” and “product designer”
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have often been used synonymously, but now have started to diverge. Product design is defined as the concern with user interaction and, in some locations, thought to be associated only with digital platforms. Industrial design, sparked by the Industrial Revolution, has an association with tangible products that are mass produced. The distinction resides in the products’ method of production, which also relates to the tools used to visualize and validate them, for example, paper prototyping verses ergonomic study models. User experience and user interface are now mainstream; healthcare and medical device companies, for example, are developing complex digital platforms that drive the functionality of elaborate artifacts and require UI and UX support. An ID degree, in many cases, provides foundational knowledge for this discipline on which students then build product-specific knowledge. Are UI, UX, design research, and design strategy related disciplines, or are they actually concentrations, minors, or tracks within ID? For students, could the problem lie in the titles? As they gravitate to the related disciplines, they feel disconnected from ID based on their interactions with ID professionals as well as faculty. The necessity of a deeper dive into disciplinespecific tools and methodologies is not being questioned. However, when students start feeling marginalized and when professionals who were educated as industrial designers feel excluded from the profession because their career took a non-traditional path, does this help the ID profession? We are educating creative thinkers to be visual communicators and collaborators, to lead with curiosity and empathy, and to practice a mindset to continually develop their skills and knowledge. Providing designers, especially recent graduates, the opportunity to master these capacities in a variety of design disciplines should foster connection within the profession. Unifying the different design disciplines will not only strengthen people’s understanding of what industrial design is but give proper acknowledgment to the UX designer, design researcher, design strategist, design fabricator, exhibit designer, etc. How can educators and design leaders work together to help ID students feel connected to the discipline and the ID community no matter where or how they implement their design knowledge? —Judith Anderson, IDSA janderson@massart.edu
EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM September 22, 2021
CALL F R EDUCATION PAPERS
BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS: Fostering collaborations for systematic change
Submissions accepted through Monday, April 26, 2021 idsa.org
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