Designing For The Unknown

Introduction

The projects I’m most passionate about tackling aren’t ‘normal’, and that’s intentional. The projects that need to be tackled are the most complex problems, and we need to explore which emerging technologies could have the most impact on a long-term horizon with undefined, unknown and uncertain outcomes. ‘Design’ — as it is broadly understood — exists to make things beautiful, produce products at scale, and put the finishing touches on something. It’s typically employed when projects switch from ‘research’ to ‘product’ when we select materials, finishes, form and function and polish the interaction design. So why does the creative shop have designers, storytellers, and tinkers? Well, in a word, we prototype. Prototyping is often regarded as the realm of the engineer. For example, a loosely cobbled-together linkage made from Lego and tape, a cardboard version of a gadget, or a sketchy code. But I view prototyping in its broadest possible terms. For us, a prototype can involve everything from an imaginary corporate website to a receipt for a future dinner. Let’s discuss this.

The Purpose of Prototyping

Prototyping is a catch-all term for rapidly trying something to see if it works, but a good prototype also offers a secondary function. Creating an embodied thing helps people move beyond conversation and loose ideas. It brings people together behind a single articulation of what might otherwise be a broad range of possibilities and helps them point at the parts where they disagree. It encourages detailed discussion as opposed to abstract opinions. We use prototypes to do this regularly at the Invisible Univeristy of Coding, jumping forward in time to show where we think something might be going without being sure. Many times during a project we reach a point where we can’t be exact about something. There are too many unknowns and no clear path forward, which can be paralysing. Our approach is to put ‘something’ there, our best guess, just for now. Let’s be provisionally specific. This can be a model of something, a photoreal 3D image, or a piece of software which appears to work (although someone might be pulling strings in the background like the Wizard of Oz). It can be focused on a tiny detail or the big project vision, but making something — anything — can almost always accelerate thinking, help make decisions, uncover blindspots and bring teams together. Our design work is many things, but in most cases it’s prototypical. The scale varies from the granular to the grand, from the near term to the long future, but importantly, this work is non-linear. There has been a trend in design circles over the last couple of decades towards analytical and sequential tools, frameworks and processes with their phases, stages, and arrows. To some extent, these approaches offer a generalised introduction to design, but we find them inadequate in an environment such as this. In truth, thinking/designing is messy. It follows no clear path and doesn’t flow naturally from one step to the next. In this new inflection, we must be nimble, jumping from detail to exploration to strategy to fiction in an hour. In many regards, we rely on instinct. We pull on our collective experience and deploy approaches ad hoc, often creating methods and tactics on the fly. We reference emerging techniques in academia and develop the tools that best fit our needs. Some approaches we’ve been introducing into the design community over the last few decades fall under the enticing banner of a ‘near new project’.

The True Purpose of Design?

Design (sometimes called critical design) has been around for over twenty years and pulls on a grand history that goes back to the Italian radicals of the 1960s and beyond. These approaches serve a powerful function. They use the tools and techniques of design not to solve some well-defined problems (make this fit in there, or make this thing work) but to ask essential questions. In some sense - to borrow engineering or business language - they serve to ‘de-risk’ a project. Speculative design prototypes often look and feel like the prototype I described earlier. However, they don’t exist as a statement of ‘things-to-be-made’; they exist to provoke, as a means to facilitate conversations, and to pre-visualize issues and impact. They help teams tackle problems before they become problems, understand the second and third-order impacts of their new ideas, and understand the whole shape of disruption caused by new technologies when deployed at scale. 

Design Fiction

On occasion, I’ve adopted a speculative design technique called design fiction. This involves assuming a project is fully deployed and adopted and then imagining what that world feels like. We produce prototypes from that future-changed world to help us have a conversation about it today before we’ve even finished. The power of speculative design is that it also allows us to tackle our projects' neutral and negative outcomes. By speculating on the impact of these interventions, we can think beyond the ‘perfect’ solution, discuss externalities, and consider people who might be averse to the idea or whose livelihoods may be negatively affected. By producing prototypes of these events (a newspaper headline, a protest poster, a poor review), the design team can think more broadly about the shape of their work, explore how to avoid missteps and focus their engineering efforts. It’s not a perfect or foolproof approach; any project will have countless unseen blindspots. However, producing these prototypes forces awkward conversations to become tangible, unavoidable, and focused, hopefully making our teams at the Invisible University of Coding (IUC) more able to address them. Imagine a Moonshot team focusing on the subcultural implications of all possible futures. In this way, the weather report can play a key role in helping IUC understand our world in new ways and prepare for the coming times. We can use the power of stories and the techniques of popular media to explore the cultural implications of new technologies. We need to understand these technologies and the various futures they set in motion so that we may become more critical consumers and producers of our kinds of futures. We need to misread technologies so we can start asking more questions about the technologies that will define our lives, spaces, and cities. The future does not rush over us like water. It’s something we all must actively shape and define. When I think about the future of the creative industry, are we customers or citizens? The tools of fiction and speculation can preempt what might come so that we’re not just waiting in line for the next iPhone to be released. The aim is to start scaffolding ways to think about how we might get the technologies we want rather than focusing on the technologies themselves. 

Conclusion

Design is about formulating alternatives to the prevailing situation and examining them against the constraints of the need. An Artistic designer looks inside themself for inspiration and vision. An Alexandrian designer, on the other hand, looks at their users. Like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, designers must observe their users' lives and needs. And that’s when designing happens. This is required worldwide: a bridge between the user's necessities and businesses' resources. Perhaps this is what Phil Gilbert intended to say: “Design is about creating relationships that drive businesses.”

So, in the words of Christopher Alexander, “We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe”

Thanks for Reading.

— Q