April 23, 2005
Designer as Moral Agent
Notes from discussions on ethics, politics, and organizations from Dick Buchanan's organizational design class:
The first formal discussions about ethics in design were in the mid-90s, but ethics has become a matter we just can't not discuss. It's how we can distinguish between well-done design and design that shouldn't be done. It's about what can be done when we're asked to do work that is questionable. It's about consequences; if there were no consequences to what we design, there'd be no need for ethics.
In discussing ethics, we need to make the distinction between preferences and values, although this can be very difficult. Preferences reside in us. They are personal choices that range from whether one likes chocolate ice cream to whether one believes in the death penalty. Most of the things we run into in the world are preferences, and they have their roots in psychology and culture. Values reside in things in the world. Values spring from two sources: faith and reason.
This of course, brings us to the problem of pluralism. We know there is a pluralism of preferences, but is there a pluralism of values? Is there one truth with many ways of saying it?
Values and preferences gives rise to judgments, and design is about making judgments. Not judgments after the fact, but before. To be a moral agent means to make choices informed by ethics. Thus, designers should be moral agents.
There are four parts to being a moral agent as a designer:
- Personal Morality. In other words, the personal preferences of the designer.
- Performance Integrity. Obligations to other designers, clients, users, research subjects, and to the art itself. Acting professionally, in other words. Codes of ethics are about Performance Integrity.
- Product Integrity. Usability and safety in the structure/form. Is the product dangerous to use or can we use it at all? Aesthetics also play a role here: the place of feelings in products is an ethical matter. Designers need to be sensitive to the people and the culture they design for.
- Ultimate Design Standards. This is about where and when we should practice design, and there's great debate in the design community about this. Some think all products should be Good, Good meaning help affirm our place in the world. Other designers think the role of design is to affirm human dignity. Others think that products are morally-neutral: people can use things how they want; it's not up to designers to make these choices, society should. (All these approaches to design have political overtones.)
How does one talk about or evaluate a moral act? By looking at three things: the nature of the act, the circumstances of the act, and the motives for the act. Motives can be personal or ethical.
How do designers deal with the clients they serve? Do designers adopt the client's preferences? Nazi design was both exquisite and horrible. How then do we relate to clients and the organizations that hire us when we have a responsibility to create a world that is better and does less harm? There needs to be a balance between the designer's personal ethics and the company's ethics. And if a balance cannot be struck, a designer may have to change the values of an organization.
One of the roles design can play is to draw out operating values. Designers can encourage conversations that help identify what values the group really holds. When a value is held collectively, it's no longer a preference. How do you find the common values between people? You can do what designers do: visualize them with diagrams, images, words. Seeing them makes people less cynical and can help facilitate the workings of people.
Ethics is about how we deal with emotions in the workplace: how we handle our own emotions and the emotions of other people. What emotions are appropriate, and when and why. Emotions are a central part of our work.
Posted by Dan at 11:32 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 20, 2005
General System Theory
In the past, there was a school of management thought called Administration Science, made up Operations Research and Decision Sciences. Operations Research gave managers quantitative information about the resources (or parts) of an organization, then the managers used decision science to make decisions based on those parts/resources. ("If we have three tons of steel, we should make some cars.") System theory rose an an alternative to this.
General System Theory says that there are properties common to all systems, regardless of specifics in a particular subject matter (biology, chemistry, sociology, etc.). It is a comprehensive notion of a system ("The Meaning of General System Theory" by Ludwig von Bertallanffy). Others (such as Fremont E. Kast and James E. Rosenzweig) refute this idea, saying there are different types of systems, not one general system, that different phenomena need to be discussed in different ways.
There are two types of systems: closed and open. Closed systems will gradually decay if left alone. Open systems are affected by outside environments. It's hard to tell the boundary of a system; you need wisdom to do it, lest you exclude data based on personal preferences and prejudices. But for the purpose of analysis (and design) you have to treat open systems as closed.
It's important to remember that however broad system theory seems to be, it remains in the context of resource usage; individuals and groups (except as resources) play little part in systems thinking. It's a distinct type of thinking about organizations, rooted in materials. However, systems thinking and chaos theory are growing in importance to Design.
But although system theory has significance, Dick Buchanan says it is a stretch of imagination to see how some of it applies to the problems designers face. It takes us out of the things we experience day-to-day and gives a high-level view of the situation--sometimes too high-level. It can be too big; it's often more helpful to find and understand the pathways through the system on a human scale because you can easier design for those. Go to the human experience and let design thinking restructure the system as a whole.
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January 16, 2005
The History of Design
Dick Buchanan: There are two great currents of design thinking that come out of the ancient world:
- Making Stuff/Fabricating Things. Comes from crafts and more formalized activities such as architecture and engineering. These became fragmented during the Industrial Revolution.
- Organizing People. How you gather and manage groups of people into organizations.
An organization is defined as a group of people seeking a common goal through a structure of divided and coordinated activities (a form), supported by various resources (artifacts, tools, rooms, information, etc.).
From these two great currents emerged Three Great Design Practices:
- Engineering. The creation of roads, sewage systems, aqueducts, and other acts of civil engineering. It also has a lot to do with moving troops long distances and over obstacles.
- Management. Managers have uncanny connections to designers: both seek to turn situations that are not so good into something better.
- Design Proper. The great proliferation of design types, defined by what is made: fashion design, interaction design, industrial design, etc.
Each type of practice is fragmented, but all three are starting to coalesce. In engineering, natural science (physics, math, chemistry, and recently biology) define its foundation. Management has coalesced around the social and behavioral sciences: sociology, psychology, and economic. The foundation of design proper is art and has been for centuries.
Design firms are no longer finding their work confined to producing one type of product. Recent design practice calls for people who can more and more cross over traditional design disciplines and even cross into the other two practices, engineering and management. As Clement Mok says in the "Time for Change" article, maybe we should rethink the fragmentation of design itself. Instead of defining ourselves by what we make, think instead about the problems we solve. It's not about the medium we work in.
Dick suggests we reorganize design into The Four Orders of Design:
- Communication. The creation of signs and symbols, with its roots in mass communication and mass production.
- Construction. Concerned with the creation of things. Traditional industrial design.
- Interaction. Concerned with actions and behaviors and things that change over time. People relating to people, mediated by products. Emerged around 1970 in response to computers.
- "Organization" or "System" or "Environmental." This area of design is so new there isn't even a proper language for it yet. It's concerned with thoughts and organizing thoughts into environments, organizations, systems, and even cultures.
Posted by Dan at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 29, 2004
Chaos Theory for Sustainable Design
John Body, assistant commissioner for information management for the Australian Taxation Office and CMU School of Design research fellow, gave a really interesting talk on understanding design through chaos theory yesterday. I'll summarize his thoughts.
The discipline of design is changing its face because design thinking is being applied to more complex challenges, challenges with multiple intents and many stakeholders that have to deal with experiences, products and services, processes, technologies, and people. The bigger the system you are dealing with, the more design needs different tools and techniques.
There are currently several ways of working with this complexity: strategic conversation, systems thinking, systems mapping and modeling, management theory, complexity theory (systems of many agents), and what John discussed: chaos theory. Chaos theory really began in 1961 with Edward Lorenz and really took off thanks to computing. Computers could run the many simulations and iterations that chaos theory requires. It could be shown over time that small changes have large consequences to systems (the famous butterfly effect).
There are four principles of chaos theory:
- Order and Chaos. Both things are in all systems, but too much of either thing is a bad thing. You need the proper balance. Too much chaos leads to being out of control. Too much order is equally unsustainable and leads to rigidity, a lack of variety, and ultimately death. Things get more interesting as they reach the edge of chaos, because there are more states the system or object can move into. Chaos has more variety. A glass on the edge of the table is more interesting than a glass in the center of the table.
- Attractors. Attractors are things within a system around which other things, people, or activities cluster. Attractors give order and form to systems. It is much easier to work with attractors than against them.
- Fractals. Fractals are about zooming in and out, showing a macro view, then a micro view. The two views are similar, but not identical. You don't find simplicity by zooming it; there is always more depth. Too high a view is bad. So is too low.
- Non-Linear - Bifurcation. Systems are non-linear and seemingly direct paths often diverge, going in different places than what you expect. Expect the unexpected.
So what does this mean for design? Here's some lessons that came out of the discussion.
- Working at extremes, too high or too low, isn't very effective. You can either get locked into categories or else get out of control. You need to dip in and out of chaos and order.
- Sometimes a design team needs to stir things up, sometimes it needs to provide order. You need to know which one is required and use different strategies for each. If a product is too stable and at the end of its useful life, it might need to be disordered.
- In any project, define the attractors. Seek out what attractors have been missed and which have operative force. Find the relevant ones and use them. Look for attractors that offer opportunities because they are neglected. There are often unspoken attractors like values that can affect a project and put blinkers on evaluation. Formal structure in organization can be a key factor of attractors, but isn't often the primary one.
- If something is becoming more stable, that usually means it's working.
- At what level do you begin looking? You need to zoom in and out during the design process so that you can see multiple levels of the project. Zooming can break down the scope of the project. If you are too high, you get scope creep. If you are too low, you get lost in the weeds of detail.
- Encourage people to push towards instability. Non-linear shifts can lead to new innovations and inventions.
- Design for the rare 1% of the time, not just the 99% normal times. You have to design for sub-optimal environments. Not efficiency, but redundancy.
By understanding chaos theory and its implications, you can design so that the system continues to be successful, not just one product of the system. Chaos theory helps us understand how you can sustain a system over a long period of time: by getting the right balance of order and chaos, by working with attractors, by looking at multiple levels of the project, and by expecting the unexpected.
We can use chaos theory to support what we already know. But we can also use it to add something extra. In all systems, there are a whole lot of elements working randomly, but somehow all working together. Everything is interconnected, therefore unpredictable things happen.
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