Where Must Design Go Next?

Jarrett Fuller:

Welcome to With Intent, a podcast from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech about how design permeates our world, whether we call it design or not. My name is Jarrett Fuller and I’m your guest host for With Intent’s second season. This season I’m turning the mics back on ID’s faculty for a series of round table discussions and interviews to explore questions facing designers, design educators, and design students today.

For the final episode of this season, we are both going deeper on the questions we’ve been asking over the last few weeks and expanding upon them by asking, how do you design design? What is the future of design practice? What is the role of design education within the design industry? How do you set up academic institutions to thrive under rapid technological and cultural change? What can we learn from design history that can point us towards a better future?

I am honored to be joined for this last episode by Anijo Matthew, the recently appointed Dean of the Institute of Design. Anijo has been with ID since 2008 as a faculty member, and recently returned from a two year break during which he served as the head of the Department of Art and Design at the College of Architecture Art and Design at the American University of Sharjah from 2019 to 2021. In 2021, he returned to ID as interim dean and was officially appointed the new Dean in December 2022. We used this opportunity, both his new appointment and ID’s 85th anniversary to look back and to look ahead.

Here, Anijo paints what I think is an optimistic and encouraging picture for where both design education and design practice are headed next. It’s a great conversation that serves as a wonderful capstone to these last few weeks of conversations. It has been my pleasure to be your guest host this season, as well as ID’s 2022-2023 Latham Fellow. Thank you so much for listening and for following along, and I hope you enjoy this final episode with Anijo Matthew.

Anijo, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here today.

Anijo Mathew:

Thanks, Jarrett. Looking forward to it.

Jarrett Fuller:

So you, just about a month ago, were appointed the new dean of the Institute of Design. Congratulations. I’m curious. You were interim for the last year, now that you’re settling into this new position, can you tell me a little bit about what you want to do as Dean or how you see your role stepping into this new position?

Anijo Mathew:

Thank you, Jarrett. That’s really nice of you and I’m very excited to take on this role. Being the Dean of the Institute of Design is both a privilege and an honor, but it’s also a little bit scary because you’re standing on the shoulders of giants who came before me. And the way I describe it is former directors have had films made about them and books written about them. So it’s a little intimidating.

Jarrett Fuller:

Well, it’s coming. Your film could be coming.

Anijo Mathew:

Maybe, but to convince people that they need to make a film about me, I need to do something first. This is where it’s super exciting for me because I feel that one of the big things that I inherited is the transitions over time that the Institute of Design has gone through. One way to think about these transitions, and I don’t want to focus on just the Institute of Design, is to think about the transitions that the design field has had over the last few years. And ID is symbolic or emblematic of those transitions. We often tend to be ahead of most of the other design schools because of the nature of the work we do and the kind of faculty that we attract, but it is not very different from other design schools.

What I am in is the fourth era of the Institute of Design, and I like to call it an era in process because I’m not a hundred percent sure what to call it yet. But in order to understand this era, we need to understand the three preceding errors that came before it. The first era was that of experimentation, and as you may know, the Institute of Design was founded as The New Bauhaus and the direct descendant of the Bauhaus in Germany by the Hungarian immigrant László Moholy-Nagy. His whole driving factor for the Institute of Design, or the New Bauhaus at that time, was that the Industrial Revolution was making it incredibly cheap and accessible. Products were becoming accessible to a lot of people, and yet the production had this robotics mundane aspects to it. What he wanted The New Bauhaus to do is to bring a little bit of craft, a little bit of design into that production value. As you know, this was the birth of modernism. So a lot of the ideas came from Europe, from Switzerland, from Germany, and that translated into an era of experimentation at ID.

And somewhere in the 1950s, a new director came in. His name was Jay Doblin, and he brought in the idea that it is not just enough to be experimenting or prototyping, you need to think of products and services from a systems level. This is the second era. This is where ID pioneered the concept of systems design. And at this time, Dublin and the faculty members at that time were really good at creating these large system solutions to the problems of art of the time.

Then in the 1990s, another significant change happened at ID. And this was early two thousands when the first articles were published, and this was the pioneering of the human-centered design era, or as we know it now, design thinking. This was Patrick Whitney and several faculty members here at ID who said that it’s not enough to look at systems. We have to understand the users and the human beings that are in the system using these things. That also allowed organizations to shift from, at that time, shareholder point of views to human point of views. This was significant because you could make products of services that were making a profit for the company, but not really addressing the needs of the user. And the human-centered era actually brought in that. And for many schools, as you know, this is the era that we are in.

What I am now leading is what we call the fourth era of ID. And this is very interesting. This is an era where we are seeing that it’s not just enough to deal with the complexities of the systems or the velocities required for production, but to bring both of those things together. So our curriculum is now tackling both of those at the two different dimensions that they bring. That you need to think about complexity. Say you are designing for public health or you’re designing new food systems, or you are employing generative AI. This is a completely different type of design. It’s designed around complexity, understanding a large number of stakeholders. Value exchanges are not easy. There’s no easy transactions of value, and you have to map all of that.

And at the same time, our students are getting hired into companies like Apple. So for example, the product manager for Apple Watch Series is an ID alum, and her challenge is she has to come up with a new watch every year. So this is the balancing act that we have to do. There’s the velocity aspect, but there’s a complexity aspect. So if I were to take a shot at defining this era, it is that we are now dealing with multi-generational change. We are dealing with things that will not just affect one generation, but multiple generations in the future. So if you designed a bottle, let’s say a smart water bottle, the impact of that design is probably going to be felt by one generation of users. But if you design a health system for India, the impact of that is going to be felt by multiple generations of users. This is where design is playing a role, and this is where ID is moving, and I think this is the kind of thing that I feel that all design should be focused on in the future.

Jarrett Fuller:

It’s interesting because I think you can mark these three previous phases, and you said this, experimentation, systems design, human-centered design, this is the history of ID, but this is also the history of design. It’s the history of design theory, it’s the history of design pedagogy, it’s the history of design practice and that we’re sort of in this new phase that is yet to be defined or is still being defined. What strikes me in hearing you talk about this now is how each of these phases are not necessarily replacing the other. They’re not some wholly new thing that came out of nowhere. They’re all building on or expanding upon the previous one. We need experimentation to get to systems design. We need systems design to get to human-centered design. So this new phase is building on this history, which is what you’re just saying. A couple years ago you wrote a piece on Medium called “Design Plus: The New Normal,” which to me reads perhaps a way to start to articulate this new phase. Can you tell me what you mean by Design Plus?

Anijo Mathew:

Absolutely. And you’re completely right. And just to qualify what you’re saying, I’m going to call on one of my favorite media theorists, Marshall McLuhan. Now he is a controversial figure of course.

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah, I love him too. So it’s okay. Go for it.

Anijo Mathew:

But Marshall McLuhan has a theory that the previous medium becomes the content of the new medium. So if you think about the written word, it became the content of theater. The theater became the content of film. Film became the content of digital media, digital video and so on. Now, if you take the same analogy into design, you can say that experimentation was the primary force by which systems design could be developed, and systems designed by itself would not have developed if experimentation was not thought of and built by the previous generation of designers. And then human-centered design use systems design.

Now, I think this new era of design, which I like to call Design Plus, is going to pull from human-centered design, which uses principles of systems design and which uses concepts of experimentation within it. But the way it’s going to translate into our everyday life is that these problems that we are facing are too complex to be solved by designers alone. One of the big changes that design education needs to go through is a release of the hubris that we can actually do it all. If you think about the standard design studio, it’s about an individual student learning how to become a designer. When I went through architecture school, the only thing that I heard is that, “Oh, you know these great architects that came before you? [inaudible 00:12:29] and Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, one day you’re going to become one of those. And your goal through the studio is to figure out how to get to that point.”

The truth of the matter is most of us are never going to become a Rem Koolhaas or a [inaudible 00:12:46] or a Jony Ive, but we will have impact in the world. The way we have impact in the world is by collaborating with other people who look very different from us. And this is what Design Plus means. Design Plus is the idea that Design Plus and Allied Field can actually create more value than design doing anything on its own. So the concept is quite simple, right? It is the combination of these fields coming together that allow us to solve complex problems.

One of the things that both fields have to do, but designers in particular have to do, is release the hubris so that we create new mechanisms to collaborate with these fields. I believe personally that the next era of design is going to be the development of theories, frameworks, tools, methods for this collaborative stance. It is the ability for designers to express to an allied field, let’s say computer science or public health or engineering, that this is what we bring to the table and this is what we ask of you. When we do that, you can actually come together in interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary ways to solve complex problems.

Jarrett Fuller:

Something that I really liked in the Design Plus piece that you wrote on Medium that you’re starting to get to, and so I want to hear you talk more about it, is you used the metaphor of the API and that designers should think like APIs. Can you tell me about this metaphor and why this is so helpful for you for this new era that’s emerging?

Anijo Mathew:

Yeah. This is something that I built as a way for us to easily translate what this new era might look like. An API is an Application Programmable Interface. And the easiest way to explain this is that when you have two software systems that talk to each other, each calls for certain data from the other without actually giving up all the data. So the idea is that not all proprietary information is shared, but enough is shared that the other software system can take that information and translate it for its own use.

An example of this is let’s say you have a New York Times map on crime data. What New York Times is doing is it’s calling Google Maps and saying, “Hey, give me the map for New York or Manhattan and drop in these stories that we have of crime that happened in Manhattan into the map.” So Google Maps gives to New York Times the map data, the geolocation data, and New York Times gives to Google Map or that collaborative establishment or that collaborative experience, the data that they have in forms of stories and narratives. Together, they come up with this visual representation of crime data in New York.

Now, if you take that same idea and translate it into design, the API model means that designers have to understand what the linkages are when they connect with another allied field. You can’t just walk into a room and say, “Let’s collaborate.” When you do that, in most cases what happens is that it’s a multidisciplinary collaboration. The disciplinary boundaries never really go away and the people just do what they were taught to do.

Jarrett Fuller:

Right, right.

Anijo Mathew:

One of the things we want to get to is this concept where those disciplinary boundaries slowly disappear and we try to address the problem as a cohesive unit. In order to do that, you need to understand what the linkages are. You need to know how you can translate your disciplinary knowledge into that non-disciplinary person’s vocabulary. You need to have mechanisms by which you can parse that allied field’s vocabulary and parse that into design knowledge. And you need to express values that eventually become outcomes that are expressed internally and externally. What that means is if you are not gaining anything from this relationship, you’re never going to go back to this relationship, and you need to have outcomes that are expressed externally so that the coming together of these two disciplines actually gave birth to something bigger than if each of those disciplines try to do this on their own. So this is the API model that I present in my article.

Jarrett Fuller:

What really is interesting to me, and maybe I’m thinking about this through the lens of you being in this new position, but when I hear you talk about the way designers thinking about the way that teams collaborate or thinking about shared outcomes and shared values, I can’t help thinking about this through the lens of somebody who is leading an institution and having to think about these things and thinking about collaboration with people, thinking about the budgets for the Institute of Design academics, curriculum. Is being Dean a type of design? Can you be a little meta for a second and tell me about how you’re actually thinking about this in your role almost as a design problem?

Anijo Mathew:

100%. I use the same conceptual frameworks in the structure of my activities every day as well. So let me give you an example of this. The first thing that I did when I became Dean was to reach out to the other Deans in the university and say, “Design is a catalyst. It’s only when we work together can design actually lead to output. So what are some of the ways that we can work together?” This has led to some very interesting ideas of how we can build a collaboration with computer science or where new programming might emerge out of the business goal or how engineering can take design knowledge and incorporate it into their education and so on.

So in some sense, I am trying very hard to model the same things that I write in my articles and talk to my students in my own work process. To say that being the Dean of a design school, I could say, “We want to go inwards, we want to look inwards and build relationships inwards and inside the unit.” But instead what I’m saying is, “We need to invest in the outward and build collaborations outside of our comfort zones so that we can actually get to the bigger multi-generational problems.”

Now, what’s really interesting for me is that the world has a better appreciation of what design can bring to the table. Thanks to things like design thinking, which you may or may not subscribe to. We definitely don’t at ID. We think design thinking is a reduction of the complexities of design, but it has enabled non-designers to understand the value of design. So a big part of my job is to reach out to these organizations and these companies and say, “How can ID work with you?” So this manifests in collaborations that probably wouldn’t have existed in previous times. So University of Chicago has established a Design Lab at ID to help with healthcare outcomes at the hospital at University of Chicago. We have companies that are interested in prosthetics design, reaching out to ID to help them think about generative design and human-centered approaches to creating these prosthetics. None of this is unique, but in the sense that it leads up to this whole concept of complexity and velocity working together to create multi-generational change, that’s where it gets super exciting.

Jarrett Fuller:

What’s really interesting to me, and I’m hoping I can form this into a question, so bear with me for a second, but what’s really interesting to me in everything you’ve been talking about so far is that technology is not central here. And I don’t mean that to sound Luddite, that it’s not driven by technology, it’s still driven by people, it’s driven by collaboration. And often when you hear people talk about the future of design, they’re talking about it through the lens of technology. How is artificial intelligence going to change design? How is virtual reality going to change design? How are new material developments going to change design? I just personally sometimes find those conversations boring because obviously technology and design are so related.

Can you talk a little bit about the role of technology here and maybe how that fits into this larger cultural shift in design that you’re talking about? The reason I ask you this, just to help maybe articulate the question a little bit, is I’ve heard you speak before about these big changes in design revolving around distributed trust networks, artificial intelligence, which is the very technology one of the three, and then conscious actioning. And it’s interesting to me that technology is really only one of those pillars. Can you talk about how those fit together and the role of technology in all of this that you’re talking about?

Anijo Mathew:

To understand all of this, one must contextualize it. That without basing it on a technological revolution that we are in, none of this would be possible. The foundation of all of this is the technology that is driving it. But the role of the designer is not to romance the technology. That’s the role of the engineer or the software scientist. If we start romancing the technology, then there’s nobody thinking about how it’ll be applied in the real world. This is what I tell my students is that it’s not our job to romance the technology. It is our job to critique the technology in both positive and negative ways so that it can be applied in the context of human activity or humanity-centered activities, whether that be for sustainability, climate change, healthcare, public health, education, whatever it is, it is our job to do that. An engineer may not think about that, and that’s not their job to think about that.

So to take the three things that you described, I believe that there are three seismic forces that are acting upon design, and we should be conscious. All designers should be conscious of these changes that are coming. The first one, again, driven by technology surely, is distributed trust. This notion that trust in institutions is eroding is something we should pay attention to. What that means is we already have technologies that question the foundational belief we have in financial institutions. Think of cryptocurrencies or blockchain. Or we have a group of people that are starting to question how public health can move away from hospitals to community-based care. What all of this is leading to is the emergence of a new type of network which is centered around distributed trust. That trust is not centered around one individual, one institution, but dispersed in the community, whether it be through blockchain, where we can certify that a certain action was done as a community or in the form of health outcomes or food systems that is governed by a group of people rather than an institution. That’s one change.

The second change is artificial intelligence. We saw the birth of some revolutionary ideas these last few months that is going to change the way we think about everything including design. With ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 and Midjourney and all of these systems just starting to evolve. Remember, we’re only in the third month or maybe the first year of the introduction of these technologies. The very foundation of how we think about design is going to change. What are you going to do if DALL-E 2 can create hundred options in 10 seconds? What is the role of the designer then? Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, says that it is the intersection of humans and technology that’s going to lead to the changes that he envisions through ChatGPT. It’s the interpretation of that data. It is the manipulation of that data. It’s the use of predictive analytics to say that, “Hey, we have 1,000 options, but the only three that work in the context of rural Africa are these three.” Because we know what the human system is, inherently what the human system looks like.

This leads to the third seismic change that’s happening. It’s this concept of conscious actioning. As a society, we are now holding our leaders to a higher standard of action than ever before in human history, at least I think so. We are asking them to be more judicious about the decisions that they’re making thinking about race, ethnicity, health, climate change. It’s no longer about the individual anymore. It is about actions that are more conscious and will affect a larger group of people. Here too design is going to get impacted. This whole concept of human-centered revolved around the idea that individually, we are going to take charge of the values that are being transferred over to us and that individually we are going to ask for better values. But conscious actioning means that we are going to think beyond the individual to more community-based experiences or more humanity based experiences.

Then the notion of what value design brings to that conversation is bigger than human-centered design. It’s about co-design or engaging communities in the conversation. It’s about changing the value exchanges that come from shareholder value to stakeholder value. It’s about corporations understanding that this production of wealth and goods is not of an outcome that is conducive to human development as a species. We need to rethink some of these frames and design is required in that.

I believe that in all three of these changes, design will play a major role in the future. The role of the design school is going to change from helping designers create widgets for apps to helping them be part of the team that writes executive orders at the White House. That’s the level of change that we are going to see in the next few years.

Jarrett Fuller:

This is the last episode in a series of conversations that I’ve had with all of the faculty at ID. What strikes me now in reflecting back over all of those conversations and hearing you lay out this vision is both the diversity of thought about where design’s value lies. I’m interested in how you think about ID as a brand, ID as an institution, ID as something that is known, that is a thought leader, that is pushing these ideas forward as a group of people. But then also the realization that the ID brand is filled with a bunch of individuals who have their own research agendas, their own interests, their own things that they’re bringing into the program, whether that’s faculty or students or administrators. What makes ID ID? What is that overlap between the individual and the institution or the brand?

Anijo Mathew:

I think it’s really important to think about these things as an administrator of an entity that is filled with entrepreneurs. If you think of every individual faculty member, we encourage them to be their own entrepreneur. We encourage them to have free thought. And personally, I think this is something that we should nurture. Having interacted with education systems around the world, I have noticed one thing. The United States has something precious that is the idea of academia being free to do what they want to do. This is somewhat unique to the US in the sense that faculty members are able to do what they want to do. It’s this notion of academic independence, this academic experimentation. It has nothing to do with tenure or all of the other procedural conversations that we have in universities now. That’s not what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is this combination of freedom, entrepreneurship, the ability for a faculty member to say that I’m going to use my lab or my classroom as a sandbox to think about things that other people are not able to think about. And this creates incredible value because it stretches our points of view beyond what capitalism can do. Now, capitalism is a great driving force for change, but it is bound by the idea of economic development or shareholder value or capital development. And education or academia has the ability to think beyond that, to question some of the things that a capitalistic enterprise might do or even stretch or force or encourage that enterprise to think beyond what it’s doing right now. I think this is the ideal of the ID brand. The ID brand is this ability for us to be ahead of industry.

We are not a training ground for industry. We are ahead of the industry telling the industry that this is coming, pay attention to this. And the only way that we can do this is to bring a group of really interesting, crazy people who are willing to take risks and give them the freedom to do what they want to do within boundary conditions of ethics and education and knowledge creation and outcome oriented structures that all knowledge must be free and open to everybody. Of course, that is true, but you also enable these pioneers and entrepreneurs to thrive and give them the resources and the people and the prestige that is associated with that.

To me, this is how ID differentiates itself from other design schools. We have a group of faculty members who are encouraged, and it is not unique to ID, but I like to think that ID is unique in the sense that we are thinking about these multi-generational problems that other design schools may or may not be thinking about. But it gives this platform, this sandbox approach and tells the faculty members that, “Hey, if you want funding for this, I’ll find you the funding. That’s my job to get you the money to do this radical thing. You don’t have to worry about that. If you want to do this without funding, albeit, that’s fine too.” If a student body comes in and says, as they do at ID, that diversity is an important conversation to have and that diversity should be part of our core curriculum, we talk about that as a faculty. We don’t ignore the students and just say, “Hey, here’s what we have taught for the last 20 years and nothing’s going to change.”

I think that’s the idea of ID that keeps me here. I didn’t go to ID. I’m not an ID graduate, but I love ID because of that idea.

Jarrett Fuller:

I just want to underscore that one piece of that that you said that I thought is really important is that this is not a training ground for industry, but is actually a playground to change industry. This speaks to both everything we’ve talked about and everything I talked about with the rest of the faculty over the course of this season of episodes is that all of these changes in design, these phases that we’re talking about are all building on each other, but they’re also correcting blind spots, making adjustments. They’re all working towards a better future. That’s what design school is for. It’s to change the industry. It’s to kind of underscore so many of these changes. You know what I mean?

Anijo Mathew:

Yeah. And the interesting thing is that this also leads to incredible career outcomes for our students. Because we are training them to take on leadership roles, they actually get into senior positions in companies. The average increase in salary is about 166% if you come to ID. Nearly 3x.

Jarrett Fuller:

Oh, wow.

Anijo Mathew:

And we have the highest median income range. Wall Street Journal tracked income range for design schools, and we have by far the highest median income range for any design school in the country.

Jarrett Fuller:

Wow.

Anijo Mathew:

It also speaks to this kind of industry mindset. If you give them people to do the work, they will hire you and they’ll make you do work. If you give them people who can question the practices, they will hire you and ask you to question practices. So in some sense, it is a decision the faculty has to make about where we want to move. And both are viable options. You still need the people to come up with the output that the industry needs. And I think that’s very valuable. In fact, as the Head of the American University of Sharjah’s Art and Design program, that is where my focus was. But here, it’s different. It is to bring this leadership conversation, this critique, this idea that, “Hey, what if we brought artificial intelligence into supply chain management, and what would that look like for our users?” And that’s a different conversation from, how do you design a website for the user?

Jarrett Fuller:

I think that is a great way to both wrap up this conversation and honestly, to wrap up all the conversations I’ve had this season. Anijo, thank you so much for doing this. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for being on the show.

Anijo Mathew:

Thank you so much, Jarrett. Thanks for taking on this role and being the 2022–2023 Latham Fellow. I hope you enjoyed it and we’re really excited that you decided to do this and agreed to help us with this. Looking back at ourselves initiative.

Jarrett Fuller:

With Intent is a production of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. This season is produced in collaboration with the School’s 85th Anniversary as part of the 2022–2023 Latham Fellowship. A special thanks to all of our guests this season and everyone at ID for their support. My name is Jarrett Fuller. Thanks for listening.