Massive Change - Life-Centred Design

Recently, Touchpoint publisher Prof. Birgit Mager sat down with design pioneer Bruce Mau to discuss his recent thinking about enterprise design, the significance of canoe-building and life-centred design.

Birgit: Bruce, you work across all silos of design and business. What made your approach so holistic?

Bruce: You know, it happened very organically. I think part of it has to do with not being educated. I only went to art school for a year and a half. So, I didn't really learn what the different disciplines were and what the boundaries were. I didn't know there were boundaries! I really fell in love with putting images and words together. And that turned out to be graphic design. So, I was called a graphic designer! Then clients started to ask me to do more and more. And to really start to design what they do and not just what they look like, so they would ask me to help them define their organisation, define their institution, their brand, their business. Sometimes it was triggered by a project to design what they look like and that engaged a set of questions about what they do, and then that became the real design project to help them do that

In MAU: MC24 you claim that the task of the designer is not to solve the problemthat the client is offering us, but to question that problem.

Yeah, I like to say that almost every client I've worked with expresses the problem as a solution. They say, “we need a new logo”. Or, “we need a new flag”. What they're really saying is that they think the solution is a logo. And often in the process, we discover actually they may need a new logo, but the real problem is elsewhere or in some ways much more complex. The methodology we developed — we began to call it enterprise design — was to really think about designing the enterprise as a holistic entity.

When it comes to the design process – today everybody talks about Design Thinking and the ‘double diamond’. Do you have a specific process when you talk about enterprise design?

We have a process that we call the opportunity phase to think about designing the opportunity. In that first definition of work, you're really locking in on what you're going to do, but you're also locking out everything else. What I find often is that people lock in too early. They lock in before they really thought about what the biggest opportunity is. So, we have a method to help them define that and to help them to articulate it.

I really like the positive approach to that. Often, in the ‘discovery’, ‘research’, or ‘exploration’ phase, the focus is on problems. But you pin right down: It's about discovering opportunities, and that is, of course, much more optimistic and energetic.

Yeah, it works quite well. It actually comes from our work with a man named Marc Matthieu, who was the Head of Global Brand at Coca-Cola. He commissioned us to help design the sustainability platform for Coke. When we finished the project, I was having drinks with Marc and he said, “You know, the most important thing that you did? You didn't tell us about, you didn't say you were going to do it. You didn't charge us for it. I'm not sure you even know that you did it.” “What is it?” I asked. He called it “branding the opportunity”. And he said, “What you were able to do was to define the opportunity in a way that inspired the entire team. Before you did that, we had one hundred and fifty people with one hundred and fifty directions. The moment you were able to walk into the room and to find the opportunity, everyone was suddenly pointing in the same direction.” And he said, “It's the most important thing and it's the reason we were successful.” After that, we realised we had to figure out how we were able to do that. Obviously, we knew how to do it, but we were not aware of it.

In MAU: MC24 this is the first of your strategies: to bring inspiration. And you also claim that this is how designers lead. Could you elaborate a little bit more on the designer as leader for change?

Well, what we realised was that hidden in the design process is a process of leadership. So we have a very pragmatic process for design to define the problem, the context, the possible solutions, et cetera; you know, the kind of ‘necktie’ model. But in there, what you realise is that in design we have one of the few - and maybe the only - real methodology of leadership: Not just good advice, but really the ability to envision a future and systematically execute the vision. That's the best definition of leadership that I could find. And what we realised is that we have that power as designers to envision the future. We have that power, but we mostly don't realise it. We don't take responsibility for it. And we don't do it consciously. We don't really say, “My job is to inspire, because I can't make them do things”. Even if I know the right thing to do, I can't make them do it and I don't have control. So, I have to actually inspire them to do it. And therefore, we need to take inspiration as a methodology seriously.

That leads into an interesting direction. You say massive change is needed and there's so many problems out there. If I would challenge you to put the finger on the three most relevant topics for your work and for design, what would those be?

That's a big, big question. What we're seeing right now is what we call the crisis stack, which is multiple problems stacking on top of one another simultaneously, which we've never really had to deal with in the past. But when you take the kind of pandemic crisis, and you put on top of that a crisis of racial injustice, and on top of that, a crisis of climate, and on top of that, a crisis of governance, and on top of that, a crisis of food insecurity, you get to a new magnitude of challenge. You see, what's really happening is this new kind of layer cake of trouble that is an incredibly dense, simultaneous set of problems that are all interconnected. You can't unlock them. I mean, those five problems are the big ones that we're confronted with. And I think the most important thing that we have to develop is a methodology of synthesis in context. In other words, we need to understand the context of our work. And so much of design has been going the other direction. It's about taking the problem out of context so that we can solve it. And the problem with that is that we externalise the implications. We say, “This is the problem”, and we have the solution and we lock them together. And we just cut away anything that is problematic or unresolved. The fact that our solution destroys the environment is somebody else's problem.

Design really needs to lean towards systems thinking. Developing new methods in order to work with that complexity within systems is a big challenge for design.

It's why one of the MC24 principles is ‘Quantify and Visualise’. To be able to see what's going on and actually visualise what's happening, is again, where designers have an extraordinary power. We can take a spreadsheet which is only ever accessible to individuals, and make it into a v isual that is socially accessible. We can make an image of the data that everyone can understand simultaneously, and that simultaneity of understanding is a really profound difference.

I would like to talk about the economics of economics. You say if you can't put the accounting into your project, then you can't make the project happen. Could you elaborate?

Well, you know, if you work in the design department, you have no idea what projects are coming. But if you go down to the accounting department, they know exactly what's going to happen. Because they have a write-off schedule. They know when things are going to go into the trash. And they can predict how long things are going to last. What we realised is that - wow! - if we work with the accountants, we can actually change the frame of the project. We can change the scope and the perspective of the project definition. It comes from understanding that what you're really doing is investing. I mean, what designers do is they allocate resources, they decide, “I'm going to put more money on this, and less on that. I want to make this important, I want to reduce that, I don't want to use these kinds of materials because they're damaging to the environment. I want to have more money invested in better materials”, etc.

Did you ever consider not to produce your books in the analogue to save resources?

Well, it really goes back to another of the MC24 principles which is ‘Compete with Beauty’. We make the book as a declaration. And part of that declaration is the weight, that we are actually making something physical in the world. It's surprising how powerful it is still. We could have done MC24 as a digital project. We worked on it and developed it first as a digital project. But it doesn't have the aura of significance. A physical thing does. A physical book declares our commitment. It occupies a space.

When someone brings it into their life, they're making a commitment to these ideas. When you talk about beauty as one of the approaches to massive change, you say that everybody can learn to judge beauty. You have these 13 principles – do you really believe everybody can learn that?

I don't think everyone can learn how to master the creation of beauty. But I do think anyone can learn the dimensions of beauty and start to think about them as part of their business. If you take contrast, for instance. Contrast is something that every client I've ever worked for is seeking. They're trying to stand out in the foreground against the noisy background. They're looking for contrast, they don't use that word, they don't think about that concept. They don't think of it as a visual, formal solution. But it is what they're asking for. And once you start to understand that, oh, these dimensions of beauty can be ideas that I understand and appreciate, I may not be able to produce them myself, but I can think about it and I can talk about it. And I can work with people who do know how to do it. I can integrate this into my business strategy. I mean, one of the things that we ask almost all of our clients is, “What's your beauty strategy?” Almost no one has an answer to that. We don't even think of beauty as part of our business, but if you look at the most valuable business ever created and you took beauty out of it you'd have a reasonably good technology company, and when you put the beauty back in, you have Apple. They understand where the value is being created and that is in the beauty. I mean, think about how careful they are about getting the beauty of their product just right, even to the point where Jobs insisted that the motherboard of the computer be beautiful. What he was really saying is it has to have coherence and what I'm looking for is real coherence, and a kind of synthesis to know that you have mastered it, and that's where the beauty really becomes a strategy.

Can you translate those to immaterial products, to services?

There's no doubt that you can do that. We all know what beauty is when we experience it. Especially in service. In the conventional experience of interacting with companies, almost all of us are bracing ourselves for abuse. When we go back to the idea that you design what you do, they tell you in what they do that they don't care about you. It's an abusive experience. I think it's a huge opportunity to differentiate by designing beautiful interaction.

You claim that design can make massive change happen. What needs to happen in education in order to educate designers that really can change and save the world?

I've been working with the McEwen School of Architecture in northern Canada. It's a tri-cultural project between French, English and indigenous leaders. They asked me to be on the board a few years ago. I joined partly because they have a forest as part of the school. In one of the projects that they do, the students go into the forest with an indigenous elder. They find a birch tree that is “ready to give up its bark”; in their words, there's a moment in the life of a birch tree where you literally can make one cut and remove the entire bark almost as one piece. And they proceed to do that. Then they build a birch-bark canoe in the way that it's been done for thousands of years. They then have a launching and naming ceremony for their canoe, and they get to experience one of the most beautiful objects ever created. An object that is not only beautiful, but also deeply useful. When that canoe is broken or wears out, it will go back to the forest floor. It will become food for the next generation of life. It is an operation that can happen in perpetuity. We can make that canoe forever and never damage the environment. The indigenous people have a different cosmology; they don't put humans at the centre, they put life at the centre. It was part of our process of developing what we call life-centred design and really understanding that we have to get out of the narcissism of human-centred design. We need to put life at the centre, not us. It should be about all of life and how we fit into that context. That's what MC24 is all about. It's about the principles of life-centred design.

In the past I've been talking about system-centred design, but I think life-centred design is so much stronger because it brings the living beings and the living nature into our thinking.

Yeah, that's really what we're working on. Once you put life at the centre you remove us from the kind of dominant narrative. We no longer own nature. The idea that we own it and we have dominion over the natural world, that we are the landlords of life, that we have ownership of everything that exists is one of the most damaging ideas in the history of humankind. It allowed us to do all the things that have produced the crisis stack that we're now facing.

I think that is a really strong approach. That leads to my last question. You said that designers tend to design the extraordinary. But what designers really need to design is the norm. Well, I thought that was really a strong point that you're making there.

#It was actually Geoffrey Moore in his book, Crossing the Chasm, who talked about how the pioneers and innovators are the worst people to make something accessible to the rest of the world. When I hear the words ‘massive change’, I get excited. But most people hold on to their wallet and back out of the room. They don't want any part of massive change. They don't want to risk anything. We have to completely change the kind of dialogue. Many innovators alienate the people that they're trying to help. By showing them how hard it is to be sustainable for instance. Well, the average person looks at that and says, “I don't want to be part of that. I want this to be easy.” So, it's really about understanding that we have to make the smart way of living also the easiest at the lowest cost, and the most beautiful and most compelling – not the most difficult or heroic.

That's really maybe a wonderful last sentence for this interview. Bruce, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for this sparkling and inspiring conversation.

Thank you. Really enjoyed it.