Design Vertigo

More and more, I notice the design work I’m coming in contact with is changing. Very slowly, but very surely, the design challenges we’re tackling are expanding in scope and scale. What once was a product design task has expanded to include an entire product and service ecosystem. We used to create new consumer experiences, now we’re designing whole new business ventures to deliver those new experiences. This isn’t a new observation;  as design’s influence has grown, it’s being used to puzzle through larger problems.

I’ve been wondering why this change is underway. Obviously humans are ambitious creatures and we love ever-bigger challenges, but there has to be something more. Never has any of our technology, engineering or research abilities been more acute than it is now. Why add another, possibly more meta, trade to add to our mix?

Then I started to wonder if maybe if we as a culture have become more interested in design practices because they help us harness potential across our tool sets. When you design you’re more interested in the interactions of things than the tools that create those interactions. In these moments, a design practice allows our instruments to become more than the sum of their parts.

Design is probably being challenged to solve ever-larger problems because as a culture we’re creating more platforms for creation. In so many areas, the barriers to design and develop have been almost eliminated. Software and prototyping tools have turned four-month jobs into two-week tasks. Other platforms allow us to sell and ship our products without ever physically holding them. All these platforms allow us to create more integrated experiences.

It’s always tempting to make design challenges systemic because design is always questioning the greater context of use. And as you focus on how something’s used you move a containing layer of a system. With all these platforms for creations and service, in theory we should be able tackle these problems differently.

Sort of sounds like a great thing, no? That we might now attack systems problems at the systems level, sort of an iron-on-iron moment. That finally, after all this waiting, we can just unleash this hell-hath-no-fury design awesomeness to finally fix all this brokenness that plagues our daily lives?!

I think about this a lot. The sad cold reality is that if designing human-scale interactions was hard, designing systems is mind-bendingly hard. Systems play out over time, they involve moving organics parts, there’s little control and lots of chaos.  Possibly most sinister of all these challenges is the vertigo that comes from trying to think through systems.

I ran across a brilliant, brilliant talk by Matt Jones from Berg London late last year (the talk is older, that’s just when I discovered it). He had a really inspiring example of this vertigo that’s stuck with me for months. (The example is about 5 minutes in, the whole thing is worth a watch). In the talk, Jones refers to a passage by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson that describes a space elevator. He talks about how the engineering of such a structure defies human proportion – if you’re close enough to interact with it, you can’t understand what it’s doing, and if you were far enough away to see how it works, it would be invisible to you. “We’re in it, but we can’t see it”, Jones astutely puts it.

This is sort of the difficulty of dealing and designing for these systems. We have to use design to make progress against the problem at hand, but the problem has so many moving bits, it’s hard to understand how one interaction influences another. In some ways this very much becomes an exercise in faith. You can’t see how all these things work together, but you know they can and they will if the conditions are right.

So, this is what I’ve been humbled and inspired by lately – gnarly problems with lots of mind-bending vertigo. These problems have always been around, but I think we’ll see more of them as a society because we’re becoming better at understanding how these systems work. (we’re also better at discovering linkages between systems. We’re finding it at ever-larger scales (global economies) and ever-smaller scales (microbes and genetics.)

For me, the exciting thing is that as we as a culture wrap our heads around these problems, we’ll fashion tools to help us cope and create within the vertigo. It’s so perplexing now, but things are moving so fast I wouldn’t be surprised if this post isn’t laughable in 5 years. We live in amazing times.