DESIGN FOR LIVING COMPLEXITIES

Peter developed an experimental course, Design for Living Complexities, in 2013-14 when he realized that the graduate program Creative and Critical Thinking (CCT) could be called Critical and Creative Design. The course is about design, but not about the clever, creative, skillful design of wonderful logos or little machines. As fits CCT, this course addresses the intersection of design with critical thinking..

The CCT program is about practice more than it is about thinking; critical thinking and creative thinking are tools in changing practice. Students in the middle of their careers and lives try to change the direction of their practice and reflect on those attempts (CCT 2008). In short, people in the program are mindfully designing their lives, as well as their engagement in work places, schools, communities, and other settings.

Design for Living Complexities is not about the clever, creative, skillful design of wonderful logos or little machines. As fits CCT, this course addresses the intersection of design with critical thinking. Design in this course means intentionality in construction, which involves a range of materials, a sequence of steps, and principles that inform the choice of materials and the steps. Design also always involves putting people, as well as materials, into place. This happens by working with the known properties of people, as well as the known properties of material, and trying out new arrangements to work around their constraints (at least temporarily). Critical thinking, as I define it, involves understanding ideas and practices better when we examine them in relationship to alternatives (Critical Thinking as a Journey). Design cannot proceed without the idea that there are alternatives to the current way of doing things, even if you have not yet found those alternatives, or have not yet found the best ones, or have not yet been able to put them into practice. So critical thinking is in design from the start.

Alternative designs are exposed and explored during the course through multiple lenses. First, design is explored through historical cases that illustrate how things have by no means always been the way they are now. Second, the class does archaeology of the present to shed light on what we might have taken for granted, relegated as someone else’s responsibility, or deferred to someone who is a specialist. Third, the class compares how things are arranged in different organizations and different cultures. And finally, through their own design sketches, students examine ill-defined problems in cases of real-world living complexity that invite a range of responses. (The design sketches are intended to be quick responses to the issues presented in a case or scenario. Students report back at the beginning of the next session, sharing what they have come up with and their reflections on their process.) They are encouraged to articulate principles of critical thinking about design to add to those presented in the lectures, which are summarized in this thought-piece and elaborated in Taylor (2018).

A. Everything is connected to everything else

(which sets the scene for the subsequent alternation)
1. By-products as products

Waste is conventionally viewed as a byproduct generated in the process of making what is the intended product. However, waste can also be considered as a product because it is an unavoidable result of the design for making what we might call the focal product. Similarly, side-effects of drugs can be considered as effects.

B. Open out: Creativity is a process in context

2. Play

Design connotes intentional planning; holding that in tension with play becomes another theme for critical thinking about design. Play involves ongoing experimenting and adjustment, as well as putting people and materials into place. In that sense, intentional planning and play work together as a yin and yang of design.

3. Gathering into community

Putting people into place as designers, users, or co-designer/users, may happen by working with what you know about people, by facilitating the arrangements, or by working around their constraints, at least temporarily.

4. Enabling

All disabilities can be reframed as opportunities in two ways: first, to enable others and second, to enable those who are differently abled.

C. Focus in: Well-managed learning

5. Design-thinking education

To make design thinking available to all, ask students or collaborators to imagine that you do not say, “It’s not my problem”, or, “This seems too hard for me to solve.” Imagine instead, that, whatever your age or background, you can rise to the challenge and contribute through a series of steps to a prototype to be tested in the real world. Instead of the position, “It’s not my problem,” or “This is too hard for me to solve,” the alternative is to imagine you could be involved in designing solutions to problems.

6. Craft, improvisation, innovation and uptake

Craft, improvisation, innovation and uptake are all well-managed learning. This emphasis may make us think about resistance to learning, how to manage resistance to learning, and the challenge of bringing people into a learning process.

7. Standards, Conventions, Modularity and Infrastructure

“All invention is borrowing” (as David Pye, furniture designer, remarked). The infrastructure already in place, standards, and use of modularity enable the designer to know the properties of borrowed materials and have some sense of the possibilities and the limits of adaptation into new arrangements. Indeed Pye’s dictum reminds us to build on what is already in place, and not assume that the new is better.

D. Open out: Transversality

8. Local particularity

"All design is local" (to paraphrase Tip O'Neill)—ultimately what is designed has to work for particular people using the materials that can be made available in their particular setting.
To that end, extend Gathering into community: a) the knowledge of the people most affected by the given issue needs to be brought into play and b) participation needs to be facilitated in ways that ensure that the full range of participants are invested in collaborating to bring the resulting design to fruition.
Moreover, extend innovation and uptake: Do not rely on early adopters of innovations, but pay attention to users who, while prepared to adopt innovations, need them to be integrated with their own practical day-to-day concerns and specific situations.
Finally, acknowledging local distinctiveness or vernacular is a way of demanding that the new keeps places worked in, lived in, allows for diversity and non-conformity, maintains employment etc.

9. Spanning distance

People distant in space can have their cultures profoundly shifted by mediated connections, especially those made around new technologies and the commodities they give rise to. Reciprocally, profound shifts can happen to people distant in origins who come together through migration of people and culture.

10. Integration of diverse social and material worlds

Instead of dividing real world complexities into many local situations (as if they were well-bounded systems with other processes pushed into the background or hidden for the time being), we can examine “intersecting processes” that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time.
There is always a tension between, on one hand, local knowledge and solidarities forged through working and living together in particular places and, on the other hand, application of trans-local perspectives, abstractions, or other resources--or withholding such resources.
Within the intersecting processes, there are multiple potential points of engagement for a designer, which need to be linked together "transversally" in a manner that is intentional and explicit. In other words, if sustained engagement in local situations is desired to ensure that design is not a "solution.. for the problems that people don't have" (Myles Horton 1983), what else is needed to mitigate the consequences of decisions made in governments and corporations operating on a larger spatial and temporal arena?

E. Focus in: Refractive practice

11. Keeping track

Possibilities for surveillance are an unavoidable by-product of standards and of keeping track of the effects of one's design.

12. Improving by taking stock

Making space to reflect, using various tools or processes, before proceeding either from one phase to another or on from an activity or event, makes it more difficult to simply continue along previous lines, opening up possibilities of alternative paths to proceed.

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CCT (Critical and Creative Thinking Program) (2008). Overview. http://www.cct.umb.edu/overview.html (viewed 2 Sep 2008)
Horton, M. and B. Moyers (1983). “The adventures of a radical hillbilly: An interview with Myles Horton.” Appalachian Journal 9(4): 248-285. (See also Video, Public Broadcasting System, 1981)
Taylor, P. J. (2018). “Design for Living Complexities.” http://www.cct.umb.edu/design (viewed qqTBA)