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With Intent Podcast

With Intent is a podcast from ID. In Season 3, forthcoming in fall 2024, co-hosts Albert Shum and Thamer Abanami will discuss the best designs from yesterday and how they can tell us what responsible design looks like tomorrow.

In Season 2, Scratching the Surface podcast host Jarrett Fuller, ID’s 2022–23 Latham Fellow, hosted conversations about the state of design and ID’s latest chapter as we celebrated 85 Years of Making the Future. These conversations are also collected in the book, Where Must Design Go Next?

In Season 1, host and producer Kristin Gecan talked to a range of people—writers, business strategists, policymakers, doctors, community organizers—about how they use design in their work.

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Jarrett Fuller talking and gesturing
  • Where Must Design Go Next?

    In the final episode of our second season of With Intent, Jarrett Fuller asks ID Dean Anijo Mathew, Where Must Design Go Next? Anijo discusses ID’s pioneering history and where it’s headed next—summarizing ID’s four eras, defining what he calls Design Plus, and contextualizing the three forces acting on design today and where they will lead us.

    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.

  • How Can Design Make the Biggest Impact?

    In the fifth episode of our second season of With Intent, Jarrett Fuller asks ID Associate Professor of Environmental Management and Sustainability Weslynne Ashton and Associate Professor of Design for Technology and Society John Payne, How Can Design Make the Biggest Impact?

    Weslynne and John discuss working in the private versus the public sector, systems design, service design, why design isn’t just problem solving, and where design is headed next.

    Jarrett Fuller, host of Scratching the Surface, is the 2022–23 Latham fellow at the Institute of Design and hosts With Intent this season.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Hi. 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 am turning the mics back on ID’s faculty for a series of roundtable discussions and interviews that explore questions facing designers, design educators, and design students today.

    On today’s episode, we are looking at how design can influence civic engagement. Over the last decade or so, there’s been an increasing awareness that design can and should not be exclusively employed to maximize profit. The tools of the designer can aid in making the world better from a more equitable society to environmental considerations. Design for social good is a growing area of design practice. But this also doesn’t mean that we leave business behind. What is the role of more traditional design practices within a more socially conscious design field?

    Today on the show, I am joined by John Payne and Weslynne Ashton, two designers and ID professors working at the forefront of these questions. Weslynne is an associate professor with joint appointments in ID and the Stuart School of Business. As a sustainable system scientist, her research thinking and practice are oriented around transitioning socio-ecological systems towards sustainability and equity. And her current work focuses on urban food systems and regenerative economies.

    John Payne, who joined the ID faculty in 2020, is also the Director of Experience Design at Verizon and serves as chair of the board of directors at the Public Policy Lab, a nonprofit service design consultancy. A leader in human-centered interaction design, John’s work embodies this intersection of business and social good that is so interesting to so many designers today. I hope you find this conversation with Weslynne and John as insightful as I did.

    So Weslynne and John, welcome to this episode of With Intent. It’s nice to talk to both of you today. The theme of this episode is around design for social good, the way design has involved itself in ways to help humanity, help the population, ways to think about design outside of commercial or purely business context. And so Weslynne, I’d like to actually start with a question from you. Your background is not in design. You come from an environmental engineering, environmental science background. And I’m wondering if you could talk about where design came into your work and how that background that you have maybe influences your perspective on design and the role of design?

    Weslynne Ashton:

    Good to be here in conversation with you all. I started my career as an environmental engineer, and I would say that I’ve been practicing design without knowing that it was design for a long time.

    In my final semester of undergraduate, I took a course that was called The Politics of Sustainable Development, and within there, I was introduced to the concept of industrial ecology, which is how do we design our industrial system so that they might be more ecological, so operating more in harmony with nature. I just loved this concept because up until that point, the work that I had been doing was all about understanding environmental impacts of various activities that we are engaged in, how to clean up a lot of the pollution that we had created, and here’s this concept that says, “All right, let’s not just clean up the pollution, but let’s think about how can we design out the pollution from the get-go.”

    And so for graduate school, I looked for and chose a program in industrial ecology with this mindset of design without having any of the design tools. And I really didn’t formally get introduced to design until several years into my position at Illinois Tech. And we have this interprofessional projects program at the undergraduate level that all of our undergraduates have to take, and maybe two years into being an assistant professor here, I was invited as a faculty member to participate in what was then called the IPRO 2.0, which was really trying to bring in more design tools into the IPRO. And so Jeremy Alexis led that, and we had maybe about five or six faculty from across the institution who were trained in design thinking as a part of this IPRO redevelopment process.

    And so that was my first foray into formal design tools and I take little snippets here and there and try to inject into my classes. And I officially joined ID in the fall of 2020 after some more in-depth interaction with faculty and students, and being on a PhD committee at ID. So yeah, had a kind of circuitous path.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I have a couple questions about that, but I want to turn it to John for a second. John, you’re the director of, is it Service Design at Verizon?

    John Payne:

    That’s correct. I’m the Director of Service Design at Verizon, have been for about four and a half years now.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    And so you’re doing that and then you’re also the chair of the Public Policy Lab. And I’m interested in how these roles fit together for you. With the Public Policy Lab, from what I understand, you’ve done a lot of work around designing for healthcare. How does that relate to work at Verizon and vice versa? How do you see these things fitting together?

    John Payne:

    Well, let me tell you a little bit about Public Policy Lab by way of answering the question.

    The Public Policy Lab is a nonprofit, essentially service design consultancy that works exclusively with government agencies, philanthropies, research institutions to develop human-centered strategies for social innovation. In particular, they focus on developing policies and services through the research, designing and testing phases. And bringing service design into that realm is a fairly new construct. It’s not the typical way that government agencies do this work.

    I’d say the thread between the two roles that I currently hold as chair of the board at Public Policy Lab and as head of service design at Verizon is just that it’s service design being the primary focus of work at Public Policy Lab. At Verizon, service design is also a fairly new discipline. It’s housed within a much larger design organization that is much more well established. But over the past four years or so, we’ve introduced service design approaches to address the deeply complex problems that a telecom faces when interacting with their customer base. The customer base of Verizon is about a third of the country. So there’s a significant amount of complexity in interacting with that broad set of people.

    None of our favorite interactions are customer service interactions with a telecom company. So it’s actually a really wonderful laboratory for bringing service practices into the organization because there’s so much coordination that is required. And service design is a practice that allows a group of people to all engage with both the design artifacts, the events around those artifacts and the outcomes in peer-based ways when facilitated as a practice. And so the thread there is really the practice of service design applied to two very different realms.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I have a follow-up question that I think will actually lead into the bigger discussion here. It would be really easy at face value to see those as two very different goals, very different activities. I think you did a nice job of talking about the service design connection and the interactivity of both of them, the events of both of them.

    And I think what I often hear when I talk with students, when I talk with younger people interested in design is a frustration with the big corporations that are governing so much of our lives and the profit motive that we see. And so it’s like, “Great, Facebook is great for connecting with each other, but they also want us to spend more of our time on Facebook.” And I’m wondering how you think about that, and I’m not asking you to speak for Verizon, but at a for-profit company versus a nonprofit, does service design mean different things, or how do you see those and the goals of a for-profit versus a nonprofit overlapping at all, if they do? Does that make sense?

    John Payne:

    I think it does. I’ll try to answer it or at least talk around it and you tell me if I’m getting anywhere close.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    All I’m asking is for you to talk around it. That’s great.

    John Payne:

    I would say, interestingly, after having introduced service design practices at Verizon, of course, as a human-centered design practice, it’s going to have useful effects on the consumer experience, so I feel like that’s the baseline.

    But the effect it’s having within the organization is a unifying effect that I started to allude to in my earlier statement, where the different groups from our technology organization, from our product management organization, from a marketing organization, as well as our customer experience organization which I’m a part of, all have roles to play in how an experience of a consumer unfolds. And the choreography of those roles, the practices, lends itself to allowing the teams to see where their roles manifest, how those touchpoints reach out to the customer, and how those interactions as a customer has all need to coordinate with each other. In a way, then simply the practice of the work helps to unify the approach of the organization in producing services.

    So within the organization, I would say it’s having that significantly different effect, than when applied to government services, it’s also having novel effects which are less about coordinating many disparate parties and more about representing the needs and desires and lives of the public, in particular, at risk and underrepresented communities in the design process of the creation of public services. I’d say while the process is the same, it’s actually having very different impacts on the two simply because of the way the organizations are structured. One is Verizon’s essentially a laboratory for how to do this at a significant scale. And the Public Policy Lab as a small nonprofit consultancy is really doubling down on the true nature of human-centered service design, in that it’s about bringing the public into the process and allowing them a voice through policy creation processes and public service creation processes, where the way they had voice in the past wasn’t as far up in the innovation process. It wasn’t near the beginning. So I’ll stop rambling there, but hopefully that gets some of the-

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah, it does. And it leads in really nicely to what I wanted to hear Weslynne talk about a little bit because I studied graphic design, specifically graphic design, and went to school in an era where there was this message that, “Oh, design can change the world.” It was right at the beginning of these ideas around designing for social good is what it was referred to at the time. And I think that was all really good, and I think having design students think about those things was really important.

    I think now I see a criticality around some of these ideas, not in that designers shouldn’t be working on big meaningful problems like this, but the ego of the designer that design alone can solve these problems or that these problems are specifically problems of design. And so Weslynne, I was really fascinated when you said that you were doing design before you realized it was design. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about, now that you have seen both sides of this from your environmental engineering, environmental science background and now working with designers, how do you see how design fits in here or the role of the designer in these big complex problems?

    Weslynne Ashton:

    Yeah. I think that designers have an important role and you’re precisely right, but you can’t do it alone. And so there are specific roles and opportunities. As I was listening to John talk, I was like, yeah, I mean the perspective that I come in from is more of systems design. So thinking about how do we understand how the current systems that we’re in are operating, what are their goals? Who are the key stakeholders? What are their interactions? What are the feedback mechanisms? And also, what are the opportunities for change? And so with that framing and is a more systemic perspective, how are things interacting? I think designers have an important role to help show these relationships, what is the system as it is, to really visualize that in a way that people can see and relate with.

    There’s also a role around visioning and thinking about how we can create possible futures, create new visions of the future. Prototyping, looking at changes that can be made at various scales, making those changes, learning from them, adapting and where is it in the innovation cycle.

    I also see designers having an important role facilitating and convening and bringing different groups of people together, different types of stakeholders to help bring out better understanding of systems, creating plural visions of the future and pathways to help get there. But certainly, something that they cannot do on their own. One of the courses that I teach right now at ID is around design for a change in climate. So there, I asked, “What are the fundamental things that designers need to know about climate change? And then how are the set of skills and way of working that designers have that can be applied to climate change, either within a private company or with a government agency or a broader system?” And so we’re playing around with different types of tools to help build design capacity for climate change as well as applying design tools to address climate challenges.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    That’s really interesting. And I have a really admittedly weird question that you might not be able to answer or maybe you don’t even want to try. But as you were saying that, I was thinking about your earlier comment, and I’m sorry to keep going back to this, that you were doing design before you realized it was design. And I’m wondering if these processes, these ways of working, that doesn’t need to be done by designers necessarily. And I’m wondering how you think about that. Are you teaching primarily people who will be self-identifying as designers or how do you think about using some of these tools and methodologies in context where there is no designer presence?

    Weslynne Ashton:

    I have a multi-level answer to that.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Okay, go for it.

    Weslynne Ashton:

    I actually sit in a joint appointment between design and the Stuart School of Business and navigating these two worlds. So I’m teaching business school students on one hand and design students. And on the ID side, trying to expose designers to broader systems thinking, environmental, social issues, how we measure the impacts, and then can develop design tools to mitigate those impacts. And on the business side, it is also exposing them to sustainability issues, but also design thinking and the role of design in there. And so that’s within the realm of the university and the traditional learners that we have within the university.

    But then through various projects that I have been working on in Chicago and beyond, but mostly in Chicago, there has been a concerted effort to bridge design, practice and share those design skills with our partners. And so using more of a co-design approach. So recognizing that we can build design capacity, so mindsets and skills and particular tools with partners. And so sharing that capacity with our partners. And so that has been having organically. It’s like, okay, what do we need on a particular project. And working with our partners to help them take on some of the responsibility or get some experience facilitating sessions and using particular design tools.

    I remember one of my research collaboratives and it’s like, okay, well let’s do an empathy mapping about who is this research for and how are they being engaged and what do we know about them? And that was a really valuable exercise for us to think about our own mindsets. So I feel there’s an opportunity for designers to take these tools and have a deeper engagement with partners when we can do that on a sharing basis. So it’s not like I’m coming in as the design expert, but I’m here to share the tools, the mindsets, the approaches with the folks that I’m working with.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I often talk about that idea of the design expert coming in. I call that the designer savior complex that like, the designer can come in here and solve all of these problems in one fell swoop. John, I’m curious how you think about that in your work, both at Verizon and at the Public Policy Lab. How are you interfacing with people who are designers and people who are not designers? And then, how do you think about, I don’t know, open sourcing these ideas, making some of these practices and methodologies available to more people? I’m going to just tell you my bias here and my experience. I see people talking a lot about wanting to make everyone a designer, make these design tools available, let’s be multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary. And then when they actually get into the projects themselves, things become very territorial and, this is what designers do, designers don’t do this. How do you think about the organization of these teams and the role of design in these complex problems?

    John Payne:

    That’s a great question and I’ve been looking forward to this conversation to hear a bit more about Weslynne’s perspective on what the role of the complexity and the systems-based approach. So I’ll start with a quote from something that I use in one of my classes. I just finished a digital service design course and the quote is from an article by Kevin Slavin called Design as Participation. And he says, “Designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They’re hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes from an array of interrelated systems.”

    And I start with that quote because that’s a framing mechanism that I use in both spheres. In Public Policy Lab, any introduction of a new public service or a revision to a public service exists in a very complex existing ecosystem. And our ability as designers, even if we wanted to be the design saviors, we couldn’t really adopt that perspective. We are participants in a complex system and we’re able to change parts of it, introduce new stimuli, and hopefully move things towards, in that case, a social good outcome.

    And Verizon, the complexity of delivery, there’s a lot of it on the inside of the organization in how we reveal to the consumer the coordination of our experiences. And it’s quite similar. I’d say the role of designer in both instances has a strong facilitation component and definitely has an amount of expertise they’re bringing in to offer coming from a different mindset in a way than many of our collaborators, both in government and in business.

    There’s a notion from a publication by Fred Collopy from a few years ago where that designers tend to think about how things could be different and they look into the world for ideas to manifest those new things as different. And what I’ve found in my career and what he writes about in this article is that in the business world and in the government space, people often look around the world for ideas to select and decide on as opposed to create and that the mindset of the designer, and it’s a mindset that we can share through collaboration, is that we are going to get together and create something as opposed to deciding on something. And that that’s one of the core ideas that I think underlies both of those instances. And again, not from the perspective of the designer with the capital D, but from the perspective of helping people step up to this different mindset and employ tactics that they might not be used to employing.

    Weslynne Ashton:

    I think that the mindsets are really important, and I think it speaks to how we are training designers to show up. Are we training them to show up as the experts with particular skills or as these participants and facilitators on equal footing? John, I love what you said that designers help to create. And so I think the recognition that everyone can create, and has that potential, but we don’t necessarily have the skills and opportunity to do it. And I think particularly, when we think about under-resourced communities, both in the US and abroad, there’s a dearth of opportunities for people to exercise that creativity, which is not to say that it doesn’t happen. There are breakthrough cases of people who, despite whatever their circumstances, are able to come up with new inventions and escape from wherever they are with inventions, innovations. But that training for creativity, maybe it’s something that we need to start a lot earlier in life. Do we need to be teaching design thinking to elementary school so that mindset is more pervasive throughout society?

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah, it’s so interesting. It makes me think about this, I mean it’s almost cliche at this point, that design is problem solving. And yes, design is problem solving, but that’s actually just a very small part of it and it’s sort of the hammer and nail. If you keep telling yourself that design is problem solving, then if you’re a hammer, every problem is a nail or whatever that’s saying, where it’s like everything can be solved with design.

    But what I love about what both of you’re saying is that the solution is much more complex, if there even is a solution, it’s much more interdisciplinary. And what design’s role is not actually in the solving, it is in the invention, it is in the platform creation. So this idea of design as platform creator or design as I don’t know, cultural inventor seems much more generative and generous than design as hero. I don’t know either of you have thoughts on that.

    John Payne:

    I couldn’t agree more. I’m dating myself, but I’ve been a designer long enough to have been at the beginnings of the introduction of human-centered design as a practice and now it is really the primary expression of design and it has that idea at its center, the idea of problem solving. That enabled the practice of design to be much more widely adopted, which is wonderful. But it is to your point, quite limiting. And we are not caring for the other side of it that you described, and I thought put quite well, design as cultural invention. There are many disciplines that solve problems. There are many fewer disciplines that create cultural artifacts, processes, services, events. And design, it isn’t the only one that does, but that side of our practice needs to be recognized and talked about and brought to the fore. And we need tools for that just as much as we need tools for the problem solving side.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    That is so well put and well articulated. Weslynne, you started talking about this a little bit. I’d love to hear from both of you about, if we think about this, what are the things that we should be teaching designers who are working in these big complex problems that are societal? It’s not just about how to move somebody through a checkout flow. That’s just one part of design now. But thinking about food systems, thinking about voting, thinking about these democratic issues that designers are increasingly involving themselves in are default is to think about how can we solve it, but what are the skills or the ideas or the methods that we could be teaching designers to be thinking more expansively when they are injecting themselves or being asked to be a part of these larger multi-disciplinary teams?

    Weslynne Ashton:

    The entry point for most designers working either in the public or private sector is that you are issued a problem to solve. And often, there’s a scope of work, a brief that sets the parameters of what the understanding of what the challenge is. There’s a certain number of hours that you’re expected to spend working on that project. And it takes much more than that to really be able to understand the systemic challenge. Sometimes, if there’s space and opportunity to educate your client about the larger perspective.

    And so I’m thinking that a couple weeks ago I had Jessica Nelson, who’s one of our recent alums who works for ChiByDesign, which is the Chicago-based design firm where a number of our alums, along with Chris Rudd, who used to teach at ID. And so she was sharing with our systems theory class now some of the work that they’re doing and when you’re given a particular challenge, given a problem to solve, but seeing that that problem is also intertwined with the justice system, the incarceration complex, racism, you can’t just solve for one thing that’s embedded in this larger system. And so there are some organizations that might be willing to take on that larger challenge.

    And so in a way, a designer has to make the case for why the organization should take a more systems based approach or try to tackle something that’s bigger than what they got in the design brief. One of the things that we talk about, sorry… So we talk about mindsets, how you’re showing up as a designer, as a savior, as a participant and facilitator.

    Now, we talk about using design to better understand the problem and reframe the problem for your clients or whomever you’re working with, helping to envision futures. But I think it’s also important to understand what are the intervention points and what are the opportunities for leverage. So if you change the rules as opposed to trying to reduce the number of people who are being served by a particular service, that requires some different skills like different tools and there may be distinct opportunities.

    So there are times where all you might be able to do is try to reduce the service time, the amount of time spent on dealing with a particular problem. And there may be other opportunities, perhaps you need to show to make a proof that you can create value with the specific thing that the client wants, but also show them the opportunity for making a larger change, trying to tackle the rules, the values that are underlying that problem and be able to make the case by for why they ought to invest in that additional work. And that’s not only like an additional contract workflow for you as a designer, but also really involves a lot of hard work and time from the people in the client’s organization. So I think mindset, these tools, but also being able to sell the value of design and more of that systems-based approach.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah. It reminds me from John’s quote about designers hinting at things. I think this idea of selling making the case speaks to that. John, do you have any thoughts on skills and methodologies that we can be teaching the next generation of designers so they’re better equipped to work on these teams, dealing with these complex problems?

    John Payne:

    Absolutely. One of the things that I’m working on in a couple of my classes are developing methodologies for developing more cultural and social sensitivity around the impact that the things we put into the world will, could have. We can’t ever guarantee or predict the impacts things will have. But clearly, the designers who created the Facebook interface probably didn’t ever consider the effect it might have on American political life. The designers of the Uber product probably didn’t think far enough ahead to imagine that its participation in labor practices around the world. So our practices currently are excellent at designing our individual and sometimes small group interactions with a product or service. But we don’t, as a design practice, yet have very many robust methodologies for thinking about and developing ways to make decisions and be intentional about the impacts that our work might have.

    And so the idea of a consequence scan where you look at analogous products that might have rolled out into the market. And generally, as products scaled, that’s when the impacts are felt most strongly looking at what analogous product impacts might have been. Working on something around the social structures that underlie services. We can engage in a service if it conforms to norms that we’re used to. But if it introduces new behaviors or new mental models, then we struggle to figure out how to engage with it and it might have a potentially detrimental effect on something that we didn’t intend it to have. So these are emergent, these kinds of practices, but they’re important I think to add to our quiver.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah, I love that because it so connects to what Weslynne was talking about the systemic issues below the problem that you are working on, sort of the turtles all the way down. There’s all these other things that have to be considered that don’t always fit into these methodologies. And so actually thinking about designers creating new ways of working to solve for these new problems is a really fascinating prospect.

    I have one last question. Something I’ve noticed in the history of ID and the history of your program is for a long time, it was very business-focused, it was very connected to industry. And there is a newer focus and excitement around civic design and design in these other forms. And I’m wondering if both of you could just talk about the relationship between business and civics, this move happening at ID, but also happening generally in design, towards working on systemic cultural, societal problems does not mean to just completely stop designing for industry. So how do those fit together? How are those in dialogue or what is the role of each of them in the other? Do you have thoughts on this expansion of design as opposed to just replacing old forms of design?

    John Payne:

    I can start. So I’m a graduate of ID from the era you speak of where it was very business-focused and I found it, at the time, so just a very quick little personal history, industrial designer by training originally from a very methodology, traditional industrial design program at Auburn University. Being introduced to design at ID and how it applies to business in the early days of human-centered design and design thinking was quite refreshing to imagine design having an impact on that type of problem, that type of-

    Jarrett Fuller:

    As opposed to just designing an artifact.

    John Payne:

    Exactly. I actually really love designing things too, but the idea that design could be applied to something as abstract as a business model was fascinating. And in a way, I see this as concentric circles radiating out so that’s pretty well established and now we’re moving to, there’s some analogous types of things in the civic space that are quite similar to business problems that design, There’s a easy jumping over point. It’s an easy bridge from design thinking for corporate life, corporate policy, corporate strategy to thinking about, let’s say in government. But then there’s the more complex wicked problem space of social problems, of potential cultural impacts of climate change, to Weslynne’s point that feel like a layer, or 100 out, on the onion past our ability to have an impact with the ways that we work now. So it seems like a logical progression and it’s an exciting one, just the way I felt early on when I discovered and started to practice design in the business space.

    Weslynne Ashton:

    Now, Anijo Mathew, who’s the Dean of ID, talks about this 85-year history as eras, and that we don’t leave things behind but we’re building upon. And so we expect to continue to work with industry and to use human-centered design tools, but we’re in a yet unnamed era of design, that is more civic engaged, that is thinking about how do we tackle these bigger problems than developing a product or developing a service for particular client. We see organizations, particularly like the big tech companies who give their employees a certain number of hours every week to work on side projects or volunteer, that there’s a recognition that on many levels, so like on an individual level, people are looking for more purpose. That on an organizational level, we’re seeing organizations really grapple with what’s their purpose and how to live up to that purpose. So is it’s not just about being the most profitable, but that’s still really important.

    How do you be profitable with serving a bigger purpose and then a larger scale? I love the onions. So if we go up to a larger scale, there’s so many challenges. So the challenge of plastics, what do we do with plastic? So we have manufacturers, we need to think about supply chain, we need to think about governments. And so there’s many of the problems that we have that are going to take multi-stakeholder collaborations to address. And so within each of these, that purpose I think needs to be the North Star, like what are we working towards? And there are going to be roles that business will maintain and roles that the public sector, and there’re going to be collaborations across the two.

    And for individuals working in many of these spaces, I think we’re seeing, and John, I guess you’re a good example of this now doing both. So working for a large corporation while also sharing this board, this nonprofit. And so we’re going to see more and more people going throughout their careers between public and private sector, and that line is really blurred. And so I think there’s definitely still space and opportunities for our work to be valuable to industry. And most of our students are going to look for jobs in the private sector, but more and more, there are opportunities in the public and places for them to connect.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I think that’s great and I think that’s a great way to end this conversation. Also, I really, really enjoyed talking with both of you about your work. So thanks for having this conversation and thanks for being on the show.

    Weslynne Ashton:

    Thank you.

    John Payne:

    Thanks for having us.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Absolutely. 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.

  • Why Is Design Always Talking About Complexity?

    In the fourth episode of our second season of With Intent, Jarret Fuller asks ID Associate Professor of Healthcare Design and Design Methods Kim Erwin and Associate Professor of Civic and Community Design Maura Shea, Why Is Design Always Talking About Complexity?

    Kim and Maura discuss making change in large communities and systems through Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), the value of modeling complex systems, and what a designer’s creative output looks like today.

    Jarrett Fuller, host of Scratching the Surface, is the 2022–23 Latham fellow at the Institute of Design and hosts With Intent this season.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Hi. 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’s Jarrett Fuller and I’m your guest host for With Intent‘s second season. This season I am turning the mics back on ID’s faculty for a series of roundtable discussions and interviews that explore questions facing designers, design educators, and design students today.

    Over the last two decades or so, design has found its way into increasingly complex systems, moving from something that at times could feel superficial, something that came at the end of the process, to something that is core to the development of organizations, processes, and systems.

    What does it mean to be a designer when the thing you are designing isn’t always a clear physical object? How does a designer find their place and their purpose within a system where what they are asked to do isn’t always clear? How does the role of the designer change when design’s role moves from object to system?

    Thankfully, I’m joined by two ID faculty who have not only worked within and around these types of complex problems, but have also thought deeply about design’s role in them.

    Kim Erwin is an Associate Professor of Practice at ID and an expert in healthcare design where she applies design methods to complex systems, and develops novel solutions to address healthcare’s frontline problems.

    Maura Shea is also an Associate Professor of Practice at ID, where her work and research focuses on evolving community-led development methods and approaches. She’s interested in how human-centered design can support equity and inclusion through the experiences of belonging and community wellbeing. At ID, she also co-leads the Food Systems Action Lab that explores ways to make local food systems more visible to the networks of organizations, institutions, and individuals within them.

    This is a really fascinating conversation that tackles the role of the designer in a complex world while offering practical insights on how to move into this type of work. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Maura Shea and Kim Erwin.

    So Maura and Kim, welcome to the show. I’m very excited to talk to both of you. The theme of this episode is design’s role in complex systems. And I think the thing that I’m really interested in speaking to you both about is how the evolution of design has changed design’s role and the sectors where design can live. And both of you are doing a lot of that work. You’re working in ways that are thinking about design very expansively, and you’re working in systems that are very complex and complicated systems. You’re working on this inside massive challenges and massive teams.

    And so to frame the conversation, I would actually like to begin by hearing a little bit about both of your work and the type of work you’re doing, and then how you think about design in that work.

    And so Maura, let’s start with you. You’ve done a lot of work on thinking about things around belonging and community and collaboration. Can you talk a little bit about your work and research, and the types of classes that you’re teaching?

    Maura Shea:

    Yeah, sure. So at the Institute of Design, I’m teaching some core research courses, but I’m also teaching a course that focuses on how we can actually scrutinize the design process and the role of designer from an approach that’s come out of the School of Social Policy, actually at Northwestern University and is currently at the DePaul University Steans Center, and that is Asset-Based Community Development.

    And I came across a guidebook that was published in the early ’90s, I think, when I was nosing around the YMCA of the USA’s archives. And it resonated with me because I recognized, in my work, in national nonprofit networks, how important the position of design needs to be so informed by the assets that exist in any community. So that’s a long answer, but I’m really interested in being influenced by other fields and other ways of thinking about the human experience beyond what human-centered design has offered me.

    So this Asset-Based Community Development is a way to recognize the assets that already exist in a community, how can we start there? And rather than looking at a community or in a group of people around a problem, that’s very deficit-minded.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Right, right.

    Maura Shea:

    And so to instead be asset-minded, it helps us to actually say, “What are the conditions for change, and where are those voices within a community that actually can drive, direct, and ideally, sustain, whatever changes they want to make? How can design build a context, build support for, and enable, in whatever way is appropriate, the kind of conditions for social impact and social change?”

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Oh, that’s so interesting and connects to a lot of the other conversations that I’ve been having for the show. And so I think we’ll come back and talk about this idea of assets in a bit.

    But Kim, I’d like to hear from you. You’ve done a lot of work around healthcare design. Can you talk a little bit about that work in the classes that you’re teaching?

    Kim Erwin:

    Sure. So I stumbled into healthcare in 2013. I was invited to participate in a randomized clinical trial to help develop the core intervention in that trial, which turned out to be a piece of communication that is supposed to be delivered by doctors to patients in the emergency department, especially if it’s a pediatric patient population.

    I really didn’t know why I was involved. I went to the first meeting. I was in a meeting with 45 other people, which in my history as an innovation consultant, I was like, “That’s not really a promising start to have that many people involved.” But they passed the intervention around that was pulled from a Canadian study. And I took one look at it. I was like, “Okay, I know what I could do here.”

    It was just something that had maybe a lot of technical and thoughtful information from somebody who thinks about things in a medical sense, but wasn’t really even remotely usable from an information design, a human factors perspective; but also just from a cultural perspective, of “How do you give this to parents?”, especially in the low-income communities that we were supposed to be targeting.

    That was the introduction, and it snowballed from there. And the way that I have been incorporating that into coursework at the Institute of Design, I just finished teaching my first ever Healthcare Design class. And the focus of that course is really introducing them to, especially in the US, the complex, invisible, living web of systems that hold current practices in place. And so the reason I do this is because pretty much anyone with four fingers of forehead can walk into a health system and go, “We could do better than this.”

    But there’s a reason that it’s the way it is, and it’s not for the lack of knowledge. No one more than healthcare providers understand how poorly structured the care delivery system is in the United States. It’s not willful. It’s not intentional.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Right, right, right.

    Kim Erwin:

    It just seems intractable. So that particular course is really about introducing students to how to apprehend the multi-system that is healthcare, as well as what is design’s role in impacting that, because it’s different. Designers don’t own the agenda in healthcare, and shouldn’t. We’re not qualified. But you need background knowledge, you need domain knowledge, and that is what I attempt to do.

    And then I also run healthcare workshops, which bring in sponsored projects, because the real world conditions for design… It’s just designed for constraints. It’s not blue sky thinking. As I like to tell my students, “The problem in healthcare is not the lack of ideas. It’s getting anything to happen at all.”

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I think that’s really interesting, especially in thinking about this idea of identifying assets, because like you said, you go into a healthcare system, it’s really easy to point out all the problems with it. Anybody can do that.

    And so Maura, I wonder if we could go back to this idea of asset identifying. For so long and for so many different types of design, whether we’re talking about design generally or my background in graphic design or I work closely with industrial designers and user experience designers, the sort of cliche that we always hear is that “design is problem solving”. And that leads to particular types of practice, particular types of processes. What changes when we shift from being problem solvers to asset identifiers? How does that change the role of the designer, or the way the designer works within these systems?

    Maura Shea:

    Right. So it’s not that problems don’t exist. It’s not some overly-optimistic stance. It’s starting from a position of acknowledging and actually inventorying the assets that exist. And when you’re working within social systems, which are communities or health systems… Are social as well, or university systems, any of these systems that have social dynamics that include people, are complex. And so by visualizing those assets across multi-layered systems, we can begin to perceive the context we’re working in, in new ways.

    And that inherently will affect the ways we define what opportunities there are for design, who should be involved, what kind of objectives and outcomes we’re after, and how we would possibly measure any results that we’re pursuing. And it does pick up a little bit of what Kim was saying about designing for constraints: it’s taking a very feet-on-the-ground approach. When I was at IDEO, we would say, “Design is about keeping your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground.”

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Oh, right. I’ve heard that. Yeah.

    Maura Shea:

    And that’s cute. But what we’re trying to do is make positive systemic societal change. And so we have to be reality-focused, and we have to also know who is owning any intervention, any solution, any shift of the context or the conditions for the system to function within. And that’s not the designer.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Right, right. Can you talk a little bit… And Maura, I’m going to ask this to you first, just because you just said it, but I want to hear Kim’s thought on this, also. Kim mentioned earlier that designers can’t solve healthcare. Designers aren’t qualified, they do not have that knowledge. And I think that’s what I see often, is what’s complicating for designers is, “Well, what is our role? What do we bring to these complex systems? What are the ways we can identify our set of skills and match those to the issues at hand?”

    How do you think about that? Or maybe to be more specific, how do you work with students to give them the tools to be able to enter into a diverse, complex, complicated community, and find their place, or find where design is helpful? And maybe in finding where design is helpful, it’s also identifying where design is not helpful and not needed sometimes, also.

    Maura Shea:

    Yeah. Well, like Kim just said, we as designers, we’re not qualified to really impact the health system from a health practice standpoint. And so in terms of what roles design can play in these complex systems, I think a lot of it I’ve seen in the work that I’ve done both here at ID and previous, is about helping to build capacities to see what alternatives are available. So you’re role modeling alternative ways of doing things.

    So I’m co-leading a Food Systems Action Lab here at ID with Professor Weslynne Ashton. And what we’re really trying to do there is help to facilitate how food waste is prevented, or often upcycled or directed in the right directions. And that’s workflow process. And just like Kim said about the health system, those workflows are designed in very specific ways over many, many years and for good reason. And so students or designers generally have to get acquainted with those workflows.

    Those are considered, also, an asset. A workflow is a way of connecting nodes. And so understanding how players, actors in a system, and those interactions between those actors exist. It’s really taking an inventory of how are those things interacting. What does the system look like today? And then we can understand where might those shifts in the system work differently, what would the outcome be if we took a different way.

    And that’s an imagineering role. That’s taking a different approach and saying, “I’m willing to question these norms,” what our colleague Larry Keeley has always called “orthodoxies”, these operational orthodoxies, and saying, “Let’s try it differently.” That is very hard for the folks who are doing the day-to-day work. They’re very committed to keeping the trains running on time. And so to shift operations like this takes some courage, and not everybody has that creative courage.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Kim, how does this play out in your work? And in healthcare, perhaps more specifically, how do you think about how designers find their place in a system like that, that is cultural, political, there’s expertise on the healthcare and medicine side? How do you think about how to help designers find their place in a system like that?

    Kim Erwin:

    That’s such a great question, and I think that’s emerging. I don’t think there is a solid answer to that yet. So in the course of teaching ID students, I really focus on this idea of the multisystem. And if I could just digress for a moment here, Jay Doblin in 1987, before he passed away, left us with one last brilliant piece of writing that he called, in true Jay Doblin terms, “A Short, Grandiose Theory of Design.”

    And in it, he outlined something that I use today, and I think it’s part of the DNA of the school. And he said, “The designers have to understand that there’s at least three levels of complexity.” And he said, “Products is one level and products are pretty tangible.” Well, at the time they were.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    We’ll get to that. That was my next question for you, Kim, actually.

    Kim Erwin:

    But at the product level, there’s a finite number of features and performance features that somebody needs to manage and these sorts of things.

    And he said, “Now we’re moving into systems level design. And systems level design puts a product into a context and says, “There’s many more forces at work that this product has to be situated in.” So if you’re designing an airline seat, you have to start thinking about, “Well, how do people order food, and where do they put their luggage, and how does the seat fit into the temporary communal aspect of taking a flight?

    And he said, “But there’s a third one that’s coming.” And he was prescient. The third one he called the multisystem and he said, “The multisystem is a system of systems.” And he compared it to not just an airline seat in an airplane, but in an airline system where there is baggage check and TSA and retail and scheduling systems.

    And he said, “That’s a different role for a designer.” He didn’t necessarily have answers for it, but he saw it coming. And so when I work with my students, I talk about the multisystem and I say, “Healthcare’s too big to know.” It just is. It’s ginormous. So you need new tools, especially questions, frameworks, checklists, to help you manage the sheer volume of factors that are going to affect your thinking. And that’s what we do.

    We’ve developed a few in-house, and I am borrowing from other fields, systems engineering has got a long history in dealing with complexity. So to me, it’s a mindset: on the one hand, of thinking about things as a multi-system; and being aware that your design has to be systems-aware. You have to know what’s upfront, what’s downstream, what’s adjacent, and you need things to help remind you of that. So that’s where the frameworks come in.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    That perfectly leads into what my next question was going to be. And so Kim, I’m curious, your thoughts on this. As I was thinking about this conversation, as I was thinking about both of your work and as I was even just thinking about the history of design, generally, one of the big shifts over the last 5, 10, 15, maybe we can say 20, 30 years, is designs move away from objects to systems. And that increasingly, the designer’s role, the thing the designer produces, is increasingly immaterial. It is the system, it is the visualization.

    And I think that’s what’s complicated design’s role in a lot of these types of processes now. Because before you could say, “Oh, well, we’re designing the chair.” That’s what the designer does. Or “We’re designing the logo, the building, or whatever.” And that that’s harder to do, because a lot of times it’s not that anymore. It is imagining new ways of doing things, it’s imagining systems, it’s suggesting alternatives.

    How does that complicate the role of the designer? Or maybe that’s even… I’m assuming too much. How does that change the role of the designer when the thing the designer is producing is maybe not always something that you can very clearly point to as the thing the designer is producing? You know what I mean? Does that make sense?

    Kim Erwin:

    Yeah, and I actually… Maura has a more developed answer on this, but Maura is very promotive, and Maura, if I can speak for you since you’re on the phone, Maura is really focused on the value of modeling, modeling complex systems. And I think she’s right. We have to be able to describe a system before we can think about how to impact it. And so I’ll let her develop that more fully.

    I think that one of the challenges, and this is going to feel like it’s not a direct answer, but I want to build on Maura’s other point, which is this idea of regular operations being in the way of doing anything at all, that the designer’s role, then, has got to shift from just being about the problem solving and the solution, to being about all the human beings and the organization involved in launching that solution. And pushing yourself as a designer. I do this: I spend a lot of time building the relationships, going through and having conversations about what is and what… There’s a current state, and then there’s a preferred state, and asking people about their preferred state. Because so much of what you’re doing is not designing a solution; it’s preparing the organization to implement. And that is a different skillset.

    So not only is that not designing an object; it’s people-focused. And not people in abstraction or people as users; that’s your implementers. You’ve got to know your implementers. And I think there used to be… One of the things I do think carries over, and maybe we lost in the interim, is that when you were a pure product designer, you had to think about the mechanism of implementation. That was part of your job. And then we moved into front-end planning, and people had stopped immersing themselves and developing the skillset to know what questions to ask about implementation. I think we need to go back to that part.

    Maura Shea:

    I’m trying to understand what are the contextual influences we’re in right now. At ID, we talk about how we’re in an era that we aren’t sure yet what to call it. And I think that’s quite right, because just hearing your question, it was reminding me of when I would work side-by-side with mechanical engineers. Design was about making not only one prototype, but multiple types of prototypes: works like prototypes, appearance prototypes, material prototypes, because it was like Kim saying, about what’s the manufacture ability of this concept. And that, of course, was another constraint to consider.

    And then with digital, with the experience economy, as manufacturing was essentially moving away from the US, and the digital economy was on the rise, and we were, as we said, focused more on upfront planning and on product portfolios and the variability that digital design has offered a whole generation of designers… What’s next with the context that design is trying to function in?

    So much of it, I appreciate Kim saying it’s relational, because that’s absolutely right. We are decolonizing design, human-centered design, and reckoning with the privileged positions that design has always claimed. And so that’s one absolute and important influence.

    And the others are, as they have been before, economic. How are we going to be influenced by the ways of the context we’re working in, and trying to even feel out for some of those is very interesting. My theory about visualizing them is that it gives us a way to try and make tangible and shareable, and hopefully thus democratic, the systems we’re working within. And the democratic component is that it’s a collective meaning-making. It’s not up the designer to interpret and conclude and summarize and present; it’s rather this much more facilitative, interactive interpretation that is led by the folks who will be impacted most by the solutions they devise.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I think that’s exactly right, and really well said. And I like this idea of collective meaning-making. I think really connects to what Kim was saying about the relational aspect of this.

    And what this makes me think about is how this completely just flips the script of what we should and could be teaching designers and teaching the next generation of designers. This is a tension that I think about all the time, is I feel like I never know when I’m throwing the baby out with the bath water. What are the things we need to keep and what are the new things we should be teaching? And so it would be really easy to say, “Well, we don’t need to teach… I don’t know, rendering, drawing anymore. It’s not about that.” Or in my field of graphic design, it’s like, “Well, what are the principles of typography that are still important? Do you still need to learn how to print something properly?” And these are all debatable.

    I’m wondering how you both think about this in this broader design context. What are the new additions in a design curriculum that are needed, and what are the things from the past that are still important? And I think this idea of prototyping that you’re talking about that maybe we’ve lost, is that something that needs to stay? I realize this is a big question, but do either of you have thoughts on how these ideas are brought into existing curriculums?

    Maura Shea:

    I’m a graduate of the Institute of Design from the previous millennia, and I graduated with a Master’s in Design as one of the last photographers. Now I was using photography as a social design research tool, and I was presenting my graduate thesis at the Conference of Visual Sociology, and I was way into it as a method, storytelling and visual storytelling. But one of my students recently was talking about AI-generated imagery and was just able to, within seconds, of course, just construct an image that reflected the keywords that he insert, input. And there we were.

    And now it’s a totally different process and a different experience, et cetera, et cetera. But I was really fascinated by what the artifact itself was able to provide our discussion. How are images used as a communication tool both in generative discussion and in summative discussion? And the photograph really did a great job, actually, in covering its intended use in that context. And that left me numb for a little bit, because I really was trying to figure out, “Okay, so I’m going to stand by craft and production and making as a core skill of design, but are the tools now shifting that relationship so tremendously that I don’t even recognize that process?” It might still be the same process. I haven’t thought enough about it, but that was one moment that I thought I’d share.

    Kim Erwin:

    I haven’t thought exhaustively about this, but I think maybe the skillset that I think we should keep teaching, but maybe teach it more expansively, is this reliance on user research. And the user research has ethnographic roots. Most ethnographers would cringe at the fortune of their practices in design. But let’s, for a moment…

    An ethnographic perspective says you’re going to look at functional aspects of an activity system. So if I’m going into an emergency department, I’m going to look at all the users and all their activities and all their interactions and objects, blah, blah, blah. It also says that we would look at that as a human system, that maybe an appropriate lens that we are failing to stress is that it’s a workplace. And as a workplace, it has culture. And as a culture, it has relationships.

    And those are things that I think that our general skillset around user observation and other exploratory mechanisms that we call user research, we really should be also teaching people how to turn that on your organization that you’re working with, and make your organization use your skillset to equally be open and curious and understand the human interactions in your organization. They will help you be a better designer. They will help you understand who needs to see what. All of those skill sets transfer, but we don’t teach them that way. We are always focused on end users, without thinking about the organization as being a stakeholder that we should be considering.

    I actually want to go back to Maura’s notion of systems modeling. I think that that’s such an important skillset when you’re dealing with complex systems, and I want to clarify that.

    I think it’s less about the visualization and more about the visualizing. Much of the craft or creative output that we are asking about is still relevant, but it’s not the user research, it’s the researching. It’s not the prototype, it’s the prototyping.

    And I think it’s similar for systems modeling. It’s not maybe the model, though, that has… It’s nice to think that everyone’s all thinking about the same system model. That’s a big assumption to think that everybody’s thought bubbles contain the same visual or set of references. But I think it’s the systems modeling that causes a lot of analysis and decision making to happen. What belongs in the model? What are we leaving out of the model? How do two things connect in a model? And so it is the modeling that I think is a really important thinking tool.

    And then the last one, only because you brought it up, Jarrett, is I believe we still have to teach print. Here’s why. First of all, I’m really tired of students sending me files that don’t make any sense. But that aside, a lot of work in low-income communities, you cannot assume digital infrastructure.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Right. Yeah. It’s like nothing… This is a digression now, but that’s what I always tell my students, too, who are complete digital natives at this point, is that we can’t assume that that the way that you interact online is universal. It’s not universal. And each new technology doesn’t replace what’s previous; it just changes what’s come before or how we interact with what’s come before.

    What strikes me in this, and I’m hesitant to ask you this question, because I’m not totally sure I know how to frame it correctly, is it makes me question the value of designers. And I don’t mean that negatively, but I mean that in these ideas that you’re talking about, these ways of working that you’re talking about, when I hear them, I wonder, do these need to be limited to people who self-identify as designers? Or are these actually principles that are more widely helpful? And do we even need to think of them as design, or can these ideas actually be expanded, so different types of people and different types of industries who would never use the word design can actually apply them in their work, in their communities, in their organizations, in their systems?

    How do you think about that? Are you thinking that the people that you’re teaching will become designers? Or is there some sense that these are ideas that are maybe more broadly valuable? You know what I mean?

    Maura Shea:

    I left ID and spent almost a decade at IDEO. So innovation was really the work. We were talking about it from a human-centered design practice, or a human-centered design methodology. But in my work in the real world, I was able to encounter all kinds of innovationists or innovators who came from different fields. So people who came from creative problem solving, or group facilitation experts, or business perspectives or et cetera, et cetera.

    And so design is one approach to addressing the challenges that we’re talking about and to engaging across sectors to solve some of these problems. I don’t know that design has a monopoly on anything, but it does have some skillsets that can be brought in to be contributive.

    Kim Erwin:

    I think building on that, Herbert Simon defined design as the mechanism that takes something from a current state to a preferred state. That’s designing, not necessarily designers. And what we saw in the nineties was this proliferation of the term “design thinking” and a dissemination of basic design, like “Design 101” strategy into the population.

    And people have different points of view on that. I think it’s nice that people actually know that that’s a term now, so it’s definitely broadened the target market. I, for one, struggle with running into people who took a weekend IDEO course or a [inaudible 00:33:43] course calling themselves designers.

    And so do I think design has a distinctive role? Yeah, I do. And it’s called a field of practice and a field of knowledge. And it’s why it takes two years in a graduate program to actually come into contact with all that knowledge, because, like medicine, design has developed specialties. And part of, at least in healthcare, the discussion I have with people is they keep calling us all designers. And I’m like, “Yeah, you’re not going to like that as a hiring strategy. You’re going to want to know… If you’ve got somebody in a strategy, if you’re going to put somebody in the org chart in a strategy unit, you’re going to want a design strategist, and you’re not going to be happy with your UX designer there.” If you’re staffing an innovation group, then a UX designer and a service designer are a really good idea.

    So I think that design does have… There are aspects of it that a normal human could practice, and frankly, maybe always has. But I think that there are, for especially more complex problems, there are strategies that you can’t learn on a weekend or a week. And I think that that is what we should be calling design. Some people argue and say that’s design process. It’s not design, and that’s a whole other conversation.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Why’d you bring this up right at the end of our conversation, Kim? That’s a whole other episode. I love that. I would love to do that episode. Maybe we should.

    Kim Erwin:

    Yeah.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Okay. I have one more question that just builds on that, that I’m curious what your thoughts are, and maybe this is what I was trying to get at in the last question, or maybe it’s an addendum to the last question.

    I think, Kim, you hit on something interesting there, with just this word “design” has become so broad, even, and I think design thinking as a part of that is just sort of raising the consciousness of design for people. But there is a difference between a design strategist and an interface designer and a graphic designer, and I think there’s this move to be multidisciplinary, which I am, I’m very supportive of, and I like this idea of a generalist designer. But that’s so hard to actually do now.

    How do we think about organizing design, while also being multidisciplinary and generative and not territorial? What is that balance between being a part of the team, having these different roles, while also not entrenching different fields of study, if that makes sense? Do either of you have thoughts on that?

    Kim Erwin:

    I think that a designer who wants to work in the fields like Maura and myself, so in food sustainability and healthcare, you have to assume you are one of many people at a table, and you need to be curious about those adjacent fields. So if you’re a designer working in healthcare, you probably want to understand what epidemiologists do. You probably want to understand what statisticians or health service researchers do. You don’t need to be a leading expert in health economics, but you need to know when to turn to them and you need to know what they are, what their role is likely to be. So I think that looking at different specialties and being adjacent-aware is something that has to be taught. I don’t think it’s necessarily native for designers.

    And then it would be really nice to come to some kind of consensus about how many forms of design there are. I wrote down 21 on a list and I handed it to somebody because they were so confused. I was like, “Look, historically, design has been taught and organized around output. So you had interiors, you had communication, you had product.” And I think the modern era is better served by maybe stepping away from output as being the focal point of the training.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah, that’s actually very helpful in my thinking, and what I was arguing in that question. That’s really smart. Maura, did you have anything?

    Maura Shea:

    Yeah, the only thing I would add to that, because I totally agree with how Kim’s discussing it, is really what is it that you’re looking for as a designer? What’s not only the curiosity you bring, but the lens through which you’re observing the world? What’s your way of learning and thinking about a given environment or context?

    And to me, I’m always looking for what are the incentives that are activating or catalyzing a system? Where are the barriers, whether they’re intentional or not? How can players or actors in a system find purpose, and how does that context of interaction play out?

    That’s different. That’s not an output. I think that’s why Asset-Based Community Development is so interesting to me, because I’m looking at the pieces and interactions of the contexts. Kim and I both were students of Chuck Owen, who was all about the structures and elements and functions of systems, and so we were educated to look at the world that way. And I think that’s really the legacy of ID, is in thinking about our world in those detailed parts, and recognizing how intentional or unintentional those were all designed.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah. I love that. And I think that’s a great way to wrap up this conversation.

    Kim and Maura, thank you so much for doing this and talking about these ideas and wrestling with a lot of these thoughts. I think this was a really fascinating conversation, so thanks for doing this with me.

    Kim Erwin:

    It’s been a pleasure, Jarrett.

    Maura Shea:

    Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.

    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.

  • What If Human-Centered Design Isn’t Enough?

    In the third episode of our second season of With Intent, Jarrett Fuller asks ID Associate Professor of Behavioral Design Ruth Schmidt and Charles L. Owen Professor of Systems Design Carlos Teixeira, What If Human-Centered Design Isn’t Enough? Ruth and Carlos discuss the capabilities and limits of human-centered design, the concept of humanity-centered design, and how the evolving role design plays in our organizations and corporations will shape our collective future.

    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 am turning the mics back on ID’s faculty for a series of roundtable discussions and interviews that explore questions facing designers, design educators and design students today.

    Today we are talking about human-centered design. Across every design field, at every level, we can hear about this idea of human-centered design, but what does that term really mean? How is human-centered design different than just any other type of design? And perhaps more importantly, is human-centered design really the goal that we should be focused on? Does it somehow overlook non-human design, for example, or ignore environmental issues? How can we think about design that is perhaps ecology-centered, or as one of my guests refers to it today, humanity-centered design?

    To talk through these questions, I am joined by ID faculty, Ruth Schmidt and Carlos Teixeira. Ruth Schmidt has been teaching at ID since 2009 and developed courses in behavioral design, communication theory, and semiotics. Her current research is on the intersection of what she calls humanity-centered design with behavioral economics.

    Carlos Teixeira joined ID in 2016 and works across design strategy, open innovation, and sustainable solutions, and is the faculty director of Action Labs. His current research revolves around the question, how can design affect the lives and wellbeing of people and communities by leveraging the interconnectivity of markets, technology, environment, finance, and social networks? And that is the question that we use in many ways to guide this conversation. So here is my conversation with Ruth and Carlos.

    Ruth, I want to start with a question for you. This episode is centered around human-centered design and what that means and the limits of that and where we go with that. And as I was preparing for this, Ruth, I noticed in your bio that you say that you’re interested in something called humanity-centered design. And I was wondering if you could talk about what humanity-centered design is and that choice of the word humanity over the more common usage of human-centered design, if there’s some thinking behind that.

    Ruth Schmidt:

    Yes. So it is intentional. And it’s funny because when I was learning about human-centered design, I actually graduated from the program that I now teach. So I got a master’s here at ID, and human-centered design was the name of the game. That really was where the action was at the time. But yeah, more recently, I think partly because of where human-centered design as a whole is going, and also partly because of where my natural interests and research were leading, it’s been demonstrated in a variety of settings, some ways more dramatic than others, that only designing for humans can actually lead us down a dangerous path because we satisfy human needs at the expense of others; and others being non-human elements like the planet, it can also mean that we’re not thinking about systemic effects. And you could argue that human-centered design has actually led to a bunch of dangerous habits when it comes to using digital devices, for example.

    We can lean into human tendencies by having them use infinite scroll, and we all know that that’s actually not such a great thing for people to do. So yeah, humanity-centered design is intentional. It’s probably also a part step to the right place where we want to go. But essentially the intent behind it was to say, okay, look, humans are still important. And my particular area of research is around behavioral design. So yeah, there are people. Where there are people, there’s behavior. Where there’s behavior, there are people. So we’re not throwing them away. But it’s also an effort to connect what has normally been centered on people to say, okay, humanity is a much bigger set of concerns because it’s about maybe the sustainability of our planet or how we interact and work in systems. So it’s a part step there, but at least, it’ll be the bigger picture I think than human-centered design is capable of saying.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Right. And I want to come back to a lot of things that you actually said there. But let me ask you one other quick question before I turn it over to Carlos with another question. So much of your work is about this intersection or overlap or relationship between behavioral science and design. Could you talk a little bit more about those two fields and how you sort of work across them and how you see those coming together? What does that actually look like in your work?

    Ruth Schmidt:

    Yeah. The behavioral design is a fairly new field. So it came out of… I sometimes joke. I’m actually older than behavioral science. Because the field itself started in the ’70s, and basically it’s a much more scientific way of understanding people’s behavior. So it’s looking at all the ways in which we’re, quote unquote, irrational by saying, okay, we grab the cookie instead of the apple, even though we know we shouldn’t. We’re terrible about planning for the future, even though we know better. So there’s a whole field basically that’s saying, how do we understand all of these tendencies that we have that are not necessarily in our best interest? And we know that, and yet, we still act in ways that are unhealthy. And that field hit the mainstream in about 2008, which is when I was here getting my master’s. So part of the answer to your question is that, I was already steeped in human-centered design. I started to become aware of this other field, and they’re a beautiful complement.

    For people of a certain age, when I say it’s like peanut butter getting in your chocolate and chocolate getting in your peanut butter, not everyone gets that commercial metaphor anymore. But it’s a really beautiful way of understanding different aspects of how people act, make decisions and make judgments. So I rode that wave basically. So what I do now, after spending a bunch of time using those insights in professional practice, I now focus on essentially how do I make designers conversant and comfortable with behavioral science so they can bring that into their practice. And then the other half of it is how do I talk to behavioral scientists and help them understand the importance and the value of design, that if you’re only designing for behavior, you’re actually leaving a bunch of really, really important stuff out. So it’s cross… I talk to different audiences in different ways, but it’s really the conversation between those two fields that I think is really rich and really exciting.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Maybe this is an interesting way to connect to the work that Carlos is doing. So Carlos, on your bio, it says that your research is centered around this question, how can design affect the lives and wellbeing of people and communities by leveraging the interconnectivity of markets, technology, environment, finance, and social networks? And so I’m going to ask you that. How can design affect the lives and wellbeing of people and communities by leveraging the interconnectivity of markets, technology, environments, finance, and social networks? What does that research look like right now?

    Carlos Teixeira:

    Great, great question.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    It’s your question, Carlos. That was your question.

    Carlos Teixeira:

    That’s true. That’s true. To put a little bit in context, this question, it’s based on trying to move the understanding of products and services beyond the initial industrial design that was focusing a lot on the product in itself, designing the products for industrial production. And then on the second stage, you have the human-centered design approach, understanding those products as they interact with humans in their daily lives and their experiences. But what we are saying is that those products, in reality, they happen at the intersection of multiple systems. So I like to think about projects and service as things in context, things in a larger context, and then playing a major role of being at the intersection of those multiple systems. The examples of that is, if you just think about bike sharing, bike sharing, we can think about a service for micro-mobility. But in reality, it is something that has multiple intersections.

    It’s related to payments that you do; it relates to exercise that you use the bike; it relates to mobility and it relates to commerce depending on where you’re putting those bike stations and the local commerce that you are enabling around that. So when you start to look about those products and service in the larger context that they exist, not only as it relates to the user experience, then you’re going to see that there are multiple intersections happening over there. The type of challenge that we have now require us to think this new paradigm of products and services, those large intersections.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    There’s something that’s coming through in both of your answers to that first question that I would love to run by you. I’ve said this to my students, and I say this flippantly, and it’s a little bit of a joke, but not really, is that a lot of what we call human-centered design is really a corporation-centered design. And so Ruth, that’s your example of the infinite scrolling. And I think when we don’t think about design in these systems and in these contexts, often this what we are centering is profit, attention, eyeballs, kind of things like that. And I’m wondering if either of you have thoughts on that. And Ruth, I want to take it to you first because you said something about the direction that human-centered design was going was why you were interested in this new term humanity-centered design. What do you think about this trajectory of human-centered design and its relationship to, in most cases, to profit and business use cases?

    Ruth Schmidt:

    It’s a really wonderful question in part because there are probably many causes. Part of it though, and it’s interesting, because even this I think is part of the DNA of ID, where design and business and strategy were very much part of… Jay Doblin was here and led the school for several years. So generations of designers ago at this point. But the idea that you could combine business and design and strategy was at the time really new and exciting and novel. And maybe what we’re seeing is that urge and that instinct, which is interesting and powerful, but also has maybe gone off and taken on a life of its own. Because yeah, it’s interesting, even as I think about where our students graduate or where they go after they graduate, many of them are now very excited and interested in things like social innovation and civic design. But they’re still a pretty hefty set.

    And I was one of these people who went into consulting, for example. And so I think how clients have directed human-centered design or have human-centered design because people need to get jobs after graduating, ends up. You end up being working in the service of somebody who, yes, is there to make a profit. And using human-centered design may be in ways that are not… It’s not about evil or good, but certainly taking the skillset of what designers are good at and sending it in a direction where there is a lot of capitalist momentum behind where design is going. Because getting eyeballs on things and selling things that people want to purchase has gotten very, very intertwined, I think, with where human-centered design has kind of led. So it’s not exclusive to that, but that’s definitely been a contributing factor.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Carlos, I want to hear your thoughts on this. But I want to come back to what you’re saying about the business side of this, because I think it’s easy to just push that aside. But that’s a part of it also. Carlos, do you have thoughts on this? Especially just thinking about this contextual thinking about design, how that maybe shifts, what we mean when we say human-centered, or my tongue in cheek term, corporation-centered?

    Carlos Teixeira:

    Yeah. No, I think that Ruth already covered very important and relevant points. I would like to expand on what she was saying by saying that one of the key novelties about human-centered design was the idea that when we are designing, we need to shift our focus from looking at the product in itself and considering more of the products in the context of daily activities. So this notion of human-centered design was not a commercial issue, was not a corporate issue. It was more about how to understand the products as they exist and the role that the agency that they have on the daily life of people. So the shift towards activities, we have to keep in mind that products in the past, they were designed as the result of industrial production and as also part of market competition. So everything was about what is the market share, where and how do we beat the competition.

    When you start to shift… And this not necessary always created the best type of product for the consumer. It’s just creating something that competes better in the marketplace. The shift into the activities made everybody start to focus on the user. This became picked up by the corporations as a business strategy. So innovation started to emerge by looking at the activities and finding products that fit better in the daily life of people and entire markets could be created around that.

    So we didn’t have much about this concept of breakthrough innovations because it was all about competition. The other thing that I want to highlight, that human-centered design and the focus on activities was happening at the same time that digital technology was emerging. And digital technology was very disruptive in terms of how we do things in our daily lives. We might think about the digital natives these days, but if you go back 30 years ago, the fact that you could buy a airline ticket online [inaudible 00:15:41] something that was very different from you having to plan ahead, go to a travel agency and get a paper ticket and all that.

    So a lot of behavior was changed. So daily activities were being changed. And so there was this perfect marriage between design, the transformations of digital technology, the disruptions of daily practice through the digital technology and the ability of design focused on the activities rather than the products. So it was interesting marriage that corporate America pick up that and then it roll out. I think that there is still a need for all the other sectors such as government and society to pick up on that focus on the activities.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Do you have a sense of… And I’m making a blanket statement here because I think there are still certainly designers who are operating that way, but how to get back to this idea of focusing on activities about making things more streamlined, easier, et cetera, responding to the needs of people as opposed to market share. It seems like some of that has gotten lost in the discourse and the education. How are you making sure that stays a focus in the classroom? Or do you see ways to course correct some of this a little bit?

    Carlos Teixeira:

    I think that this know-how of designing, of doing human-centered design, I think it’s very well established. So it’s a matter of educating a larger group of professionals, leaders in all sectors. So I think this is still an ongoing process. The problem with that direction is that, at the same time, they [inaudible 00:17:27] still growing the use and application of human-centered design, we also discovering what the limitations of that. So there’s this kind of disparity and this kind of dichotomy between these focus on activities are very important and they can really improve the quality of life and the products. But we are detecting also that there are unintended consequences of focusing on the user experience. For example, when we design for the user, a lot of the drivers of that is convenience. So making everything very convenient for the user. One of the unintended consequences of convenience is that we generate a lot of waste. For us to make… Think about when you carry out food, you’d have a lot of package, and you eat a meal, and 5, 10 minutes later, you are disposing a lot of materials.

    So convenience is an example that it’s made wonders focusing on the activity, but it started to create unintended consequences such as environmental degradation and the ways that we generate. If you think about the bike sharing example that I gave, and people having the convenience of paying with credit card, this is fantastic. But this is also discriminatory because people that don’t have credit, they don’t have a credit card. And so people with without credit and financial inclusion, financial access, they are discriminated on the ability of using bike sharing. So those are things that we were not aware that we were creating as a consequence of focusing so much on the daily activities and became something that privileged, the ones that can be consumers, consumers that can afford the better quality products.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    That’s so interesting and I think it hits to what Ruth was talking about with this sort of slight shift from human-centered, which sounds like a single person, to humanity-centered, where it is about all of us collectively. What does that mean when we’re thinking about us as a species as opposed to us as a human? Which our default is to think about convenience and streamlining. And I’m wondering if that can even be pushed further. And Ruth, you started to get to this in your first answer. But what does a eco-centered design look like or a environment-centered design, where it is not saying that humans are not important or are not the user, but de-centers that immediate convenience in realization to all of those unintended consequences that Carlos is talking about? Ruth, do you have thoughts on that?

    Ruth Schmidt:

    I have lots of thoughts.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Go for it. Go for it.

    Ruth Schmidt:

    No, I think part of what… And this is maybe building on what Carlos was saying also, that’s a key aspect to this. Because Carlos, you mentioned the rise of digital technology, and I would even argue that questions about what progress even looks like are really important to consider here because we tend to consider progress. How do I do it faster? How do I get more, cheaper? All of these things that feel beneficial to that end consumer maybe, but are at the risk of or at the expense of larger systems. So I think that’s one piece of it, is even to think about what progress really should mean and not to equate it with technology or with bigger, faster, cheaper, which is where it tends to go. But yeah, another aspect, again building off of Carlos, what you were describing too, is that in trying to make things faster, more streamlined, A, we don’t always recognize the importance of reflection.

    I actually think that’s an incredibly important part of design, both as a designer but also just, well, as a person, as a human. We don’t often get the chance to reflect when things are happening in a speedy way. This is not to pick on Amazon, but anyone who has one click Amazon setup, it [inaudible 00:21:48] as soon as you click it and it’s purchased. There’s no friction to that process. And that can be both for the sustainability reasons and the waste reasons, but also, it can mean that we don’t always temper our own behavior. And we don’t always think as carefully as perhaps we ought about do we actually need that thing, or are we just getting it because it’s quick? And one last thought maybe to add on to that is that this question about who has access is also incredibly important because increasingly, there’s the recognition absolutely that who is considered a viable consumer or who has purchasing power.

    Things like the switch from cash to credit cards, which has been coming up in a variety of ways over the past couple of years is a really great example of that. Because it can seem again like we’re leaning into progress. Everything is, you wave a phone, it’s something you can buy it. But it leaves whole swaths of populations out and it means that the increased difference between who the haves and the have nots are enormous. And when that gets built into the infrastructure, I sometimes talk about this notion of choice infrastructure, which is basically not targeted behavior change, but the whole set of conditions that surround how we make decisions or what we have access to. So again, yeah, I guess that sense of humanity is not just about what’s good for me or people like me, but recognizing the inequity that gets built into those systems altogether. If human-centered design is not focusing on those things, it’s not doing a great job of making sure that we as a society are actually standing up for what we should.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    It reminds me of… There’s a line from the systems theorist, Stafford Beer. He wrote that, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” And at face value, that seems like, yes, of course. But it raises all these questions about unintended consequences. The purpose of a system is not what we say it does or what it is supposed to do or what we set out to do, but actually what it does when it is in the world doing what it does. And so it raises all these questions about, well what were these unintended consequences? Is this actually what it was designed to do? And this hits to what you were just talking about with this idea of reflection. And I’m wondering if you could talk about that just a little bit more, and the need for that, not just in consumers, but also in designers and in the design process. How do you think about that or how do you encourage that in the classroom and with your students?

    Ruth Schmidt:

    So in the classroom… Yeah, so, A, I agree. Yeah, it is actually something that I think designers can and should do. And we’re maybe the barrier between not letting things go forward that really do need to be thought. I find it very important. And I realize this is very much from my personal background too. But I think being a good designer means being a good critical thinker. When I look back to my own classes, whether it was in college, graduate school, or even learning, I realize that the things that make me a really strong designer are less about specific skills, but it’s because I’ve trained myself. And I’m not putting myself on a pedestal here. I realize the things that I find important are about really looking at all of these things and interrogating the choices you’re making, and having different lenses to understand the implications of choices. Because even the term unintended consequences, you could argue, maybe they were unintended. But sometimes we could’ve seen that that was going to happen.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Right, exactly. Exactly.

    Ruth Schmidt:

    It’s not totally mysterious. So sometimes, yes, in the rush to put things into market, that can be one component of it. But I find also in my behavioral design classes in particular, a lot of what we work through is how to understand both what it is that we’re designing into, but also how to understand, for example, where there are uncertainties and how to design for uncertainty both the humankind, but also, again, what are the conditions, what are the infrastructures and how is that going to support things that maybe we didn’t intend but are likely to happen because we’re functioning in spaces that encourage certain kinds of behavior over others.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I a hundred percent agree with all of that. I think that’s exactly right and speaks to my own background also. And so it was really nice to get some confirmation in my own thinking. Carlos, I want to connect this to something that you said earlier about thinking about these design systems within particular context. And it strikes me that this reflection that Ruth is talking about is a very valuable skill that I think designers tried to have. And I’m wondering if you see a sort of responsibility or role of the designer to be part of the space for that reflection when they are working in these complex systems where everybody is moving really fast and there’s all these different parts and different teams have different goals, where designers or design generally can step into say, “Hey, wait a minute. We need to think about this.” Or there’s something about the designer who can have that overall view of how these systems are coming together, that seems like an interesting place to start to raise these questions. What do you think?

    Carlos Teixeira:

    So this is something that we engage in very deep and extended conversation with our students because the tendency when we look about those systems is for us to try to be the superhero. Position design is the one that can understand the whole, can understand all the specifics, can be fully interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and be at the center and do everything and solve all the problems. So there is this kind of [inaudible 00:27:57] of the superhero in overloading with design with multiple areas of expertise. I think this is one very dangerous and very problematic extreme.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    We’re going to do a whole episode on the problems with designer superhero, Carlos. So thank you for previewing that.

    Carlos Teixeira:

    Wonderful. And this also brings the notion that every time that we’re talking about those complex issues, we tend to think about that we have to have a theory for everything or the theory of everything. So everything connects to everything. Everything can be related. And there are a lot of talking points and reflection points. But this is not a liberal arts school. So when we are exercising multiple perspectives about the same thing, design is about [inaudible 00:28:45]; design is about integration; design is about coming up with solutions. So for me, what designers have as a unique position, at least that’s how I approach with my students in the classrooms, is to bring the expertise on products and service. I think we have a long history of that. I think we need to be able to leverage that expertise as it relates to systems. So for example, I see a lot of other fields that they can deal with systems much better than designers.

    For example, policy makers, engineers, and many others, they can think the totality of systems, they can think about the parts and their connections. They have ways of measuring those things like climate. This is something that designers are not going to be expert, period. Okay. But you can bring systems thinking to that. What I think is exclusive to designers is that most of the people that are thinking about systems, they are thinking at the macro level and the meso level. But they’re not thinking at the micro level, where products and service exists. And when I see everybody explaining complex issues, they always stop at the meso level, and they can never explain how the like button has a major impact of how people are categorized in different groups, and they create echo chambers of discussions that create this kind of very conflicting interaction in social media. This [inaudible 00:30:24] less, as Ruth was saying, of the button is an example.

    So for me, I think that we have the unique ability of understanding product, service, and communications as they happen at the activity level in everybody’s daily life. But we need to be able to connect that into the largest systems, understand how this is related to races and to [inaudible 00:30:50] practice, to economic systems, to climate systems, and work with the other disciplines to show how those things in daily life, they have agency in the largest system. So whatever we create here will have impact and have agency. But there is very little talk about that. So for me, as we are entering this new era of design, I strongly believe that designers need to leverage the expertise on product, service, and communication. But they need to contextualize that in larger systems and work with the other disciplines to show the role that those things play in creating [inaudible 00:31:33].

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I love that. I think that’s great. And I have a question. This question is for both of you. And I’m not totally sure how to ask it. Ruth, you mentioned this earlier about having a consulting background and both of you have talked about students going into business settings. And I think it’s really easy to… Capitalism like, that’s just like, stop working in business. And it’s not that easy. That’s a really complicated problem. And I’m wondering… I want to be careful to not villainize businesses or people who work in those contexts. And I’m wondering about how design can help if they even can. Businesses think beyond short term profit or, Carlos, what you were just talking about, about how the service level, the product level can speak to these larger systems. How do some of these ideas that are thinking about climate change, thinking about inequalities, thinking about democracy, using this lens of human-centered design in a business context, how do you see those things fitting together? Do you have thoughts on that?

    Ruth Schmidt:

    I can give a stab and we can maybe go back and forth on this because, A, it’s just a huge question.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah. I know.

    Ruth Schmidt:

    So part of it is that, similarly to Carlos, what you were just describing where there’s the macro, meso, micro in terms of systems. If we also think about what’s happening within commercial organizations, there are decisions that are happening at that high strategic level. There’s the middle level of deciding how to execute on things or how organizationally they’re organized to do that. And then there’s the lowest level of let’s actually do those things and get stuff out the door. Essentially we’re making decisions around whatever it is, how to build an app or how to deliver services. And part of what I think makes it complicated is that when we train our students here, they go into practice and whether it’s consulting or a commercial setting or a civic setting for that matter. They don’t jump right to the top of the food chain.

    So part of it is also I think having… How design is conceived and seen as a valuable component of making things broadly, whether it’s experiences, services, offerings. The value of design may look very different and be talked about in a very different way when you’re thinking about designing an app versus how it works and that mid-level of how to bring design and distribute design knowledge within an organization versus how to think about design at a more strategic level. So part of, I think, what makes it a very complicated question… I guess I’m answering your question by asking more questions.

    Part of what makes it so challenging is that there’s not one kind of design. So how people are thinking, the people who are at the top levels of organizations are there primarily to make sure that the business is sustainable, not so much that the world is sustainable necessarily. So there can be conflicting tensions there in terms of how people see the value of design, which is itself a Pandora’s box. ‘Cause I think how people even think about how design is valuable has always been a little tricky because it’s not always easily measurable. And so whether that’s value towards really positive, beneficial ends that are more broad in societal or how we think about design use to create individual services or offerings.

    That’s another part of it too. I do know just to close this, and I’d love Carlos to hear what you’re thinking as well. But we’re having so many more conversations at school about these issues than we certainly did when I was here as a student. So for what it’s worth, I don’t know. Maybe I’m forgetting something. But when I was here about 13 years ago as a student, we just didn’t talk as much about power or equity or how design can both contribute to those or help to get them to be more [inaudible 00:35:53].

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I see that. For what it’s worth, I see that too. I see that too here. It’s the exact same thing.

    Ruth Schmidt:

    So there’s been a real change I think just in terms of like, “Hey, this is something that we can’t control only by ourselves.” It is a much wider range of things, but, damn it, we better talk about it because we can’t be sending people out into the world who are not considering the implications of what they bring. So, yeah, Carlos, I’m going to pass it to you because I would love to hear what you think.

    Carlos Teixeira:

    To build up on what Ruth is saying, I think that we have evolved a lot on the aspect, for example, of human-centered design, service design, and there is a growing sector of the civic design. So all those things are very useful for what they are for. But I think that there is a need for us to deconstruct all those practices and start imagine new practice. Because the type of thing that we were discussing before about those infrastructures, about these intersections, about those systems, about those unintended consequences, the new types of solutions. And we haven’t even talked today about all the technological developments that are going on, and how they transform the things that we do, that we create, and the design practice that are needed. So for me, I think there is a need for deconstructing a lot of the design practice and rebuilding them around the new needs.

    That’s one point. The second point is, I strongly believe that what is going to be the way that we’re going to deal with those large systems, what I call complex spaces of innovation, because they are at the intersection of multiple systems, we’re going to depend on large corporations or large organizations, let me say in that way, to be able to deal with this type of problem. I say large organizations because they are the ones that have the resources; they are the ones that have the talent; they are the ones that can do long-term investment; they have the expertise to do implementation, and they can stand resiliently through a process of transformation. So it can be government agencies, can be universities, can be corporations, foundations. So I strongly believe that those transformations is going to happen through those large organizations. And we have to think about where design is situated in them and how can we have the greatest impact by situating design strategically in where those reframing are happening, and the strategic decisions are also taking place.

    Because I strongly believe that design is the field that’s going to bring choices rather than just decisions to those organizations. And the last point about that is that one of the areas that we haven’t considered design at all, and this is a whole new area that we are starting to explore an Institute of Design, is to understand how design works in investments. So private long-term investment on infrastructures is going to be one of the most transformative forces of the 21st century. And design is not there. Design is not participating on the decisions where investments are made and where large sums of capital is put on that is locking in what is going to be supported and develop and encourage and incentivize it in the next 30 to 50 years. So we have been starting to work on this notion of design in capital markets, design as it relates to investment, and working on the design abilities and design competencies in that area. That’s what I’m saying that, we need to deconstruct a lot of the current design practice and we imagine new design practice in different kind of organizations.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I think that’s exactly right. And I think this conversation had a risk of being a real downer and being really depressing talking about the problems with human-centered design and the problems with the environment and social inequalities. And that ended on a really, really nice way forward. And so I think that’s a really nice way to end this conversation. Ruth and Carlos, it was really great to hear more about your work and your thinking around these ideas. So thanks for doing this with me.

    Carlos Teixeira:

    Thank you very much.

    Ruth Schmidt:

    Thanks for having us.

    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.

  • How Do You Teach Design for Tomorrow?

    The second episode of our second season of With Intent asks ID Associate Dean Matt Mayfield and Assistant Professor Zach Pino, How Do You Teach Design for Tomorrow?

    Matt and Zach discuss ID’s ever-evolving curriculum, the relationship of design to art, how students learn about technology at ID, the recent “seismic shift” in students’ goals, and the challenges and opportunities of a field in flux.

    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 roundtable discussions and interviews that explore questions facing designers, design educators, and design students today.

    Today we’re asking the big question, what does it mean to teach design today? What do today’s design students need to know to practice design? What does the future of design look like and what is the value of a design education and its role in the industry?

    For this episode, I’m joined by two people who have thought a lot about these questions and we have a fascinating, inspiring, and ultimately optimistic conversation about why studying design is so exciting right now. Matt Mayfield is the Associate Dean of Academics and Administration at ID, a position he’s held since 2017, after joining ID in 2001. He leads all the curriculum development with the full-time faculty and has developed courses at ID in product and portfolio planning, contextual research design, and computer aided design processes.

    Zach Pino is an Assistant Professor of Design and serves as ID’s lead digital tools instructor and digital product facilitator. His work centers around how contemporary objects can embed data in their fabrication, functionality, and form.

    Together the three of us talk about how to think about design education today and look towards the future of this ever-changing practice. I hope you enjoy it.

    Matt and Zach, welcome to the show. Today we’re talking about what it means to teach design today. I want to start, Matt, with a sort of big question. You’re the Associate Dean of Academics and Administration. You sort of oversee all the curriculum at ID. I’m wondering how you think about curriculum. When you’re sort of zooming out, looking over a student’s whole tenure at ID, how do you think about structuring that? Or can you talk a little bit about the process of putting curriculum together in an institution like that?

    Matt Mayfield:

    Sure. Well, thanks. Yeah, I’d be happy to. And one of the things that I think just my personal experience here is that I didn’t start from scratch. Actually, none of us did, right? We came into a school that was very established and doing very well and had found its way through the changes of design over the years. So part of the challenge is how do we continue that progress? How do we continue the strength of it while also being open to changes in the new things? It’s one of the things that, in kind of moving into this role, I really wanted to stay focused on was preserving that flexibility or that ability to continually refresh without having to rethink the entire thing.

    That’s where I think sometimes curriculum and schools can get in trouble is they’re like, okay, we feel a little out of step, let’s rethink the whole thing. And it takes two years and lots of debate and all the while students are going through and they’re learning. And so I’m happy that we’ve got such a gracious faculty that’s willing to go along with the idea that we do have to adjust and integrate new ideas as they come in. And so that’s been a big piece of philosophy there.

    And then the other is, as you said, thinking about the student journey and where they’re coming from. As a graduate-only school, we also have a bit of a luxury, which we protect a lot, is the notion that most of these students have professional experience, they’ve had some time to mature, and so we’re not going to worry as much about basics. About whether design is something that they should consider as a focus in their education, or whether they think they can build a career out of it. They’ve worked through that already and now we’re picking up with, yes, we all agree, design’s a really interesting field. There’s lots to learn here and lots to use. Now let’s take that step.

    So I have been lucky to start with those very strong points of flexibility and a fairly well-developed student body so that we can step into some bigger issues. We still have challenges, of course, like anybody else, it’s hard to change, but it’s kind of where we’re starting from.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I have a quick follow up question on that that I thought was really interesting about not starting from scratch and ID has this long history of innovation in design education and this legacy. Can you talk a little bit about what the connection threads are between its history that you think are still important and relevant in the curriculum today? And then where you are innovating, where you are trying new things that wouldn’t have been there 20 years, even 10 years ago?

    Matt Mayfield:

    Yeah. Okay. A great question. Yeah. I think that some of the through lines that, certainly with our latest an 85th anniversary and we did a 75th anniversary a while back, we’re able to take some stock and reflect a bit on our history. And so some of the through lines in the curriculum has been, how do I want to say this? Kind of experimentation, not in the complete invention space, but in the notion that, and this goes all the way back to the [inaudible 00:05:57], the capabilities of technology and industry, if you will, are really fascinating. And how as designers can we take advantage of these capabilities to build the things we want to build or at least articulate the futures we see that are more desirable than where we are now. So that’s kind of always been there and I think that continues.

    Back in the early days of the school where it was much more about physical production and how can we make things more reliable and more ergonomic and things like that. And I remember as a student, we would be looking at production methods and ways to incorporate all sorts of different really exotic materials like plastic and rubber and all that stuff.

    But I feel the same kind of questions here now though we’re talking about digital capabilities of managing massive amounts of data and interpreting that for an individual specific context. So those are still there.

    I think the other part that we’ve been very lucky to align with is the notion that we were never really, well, I shouldn’t say never, but we broke free of a strong arts background a while ago, and that was, I think a very important divergence where we still, and this is where I want to get my colleagues, Zach in here, because we’re coming back to this where that pure kind of artist’s reflection of the world through expression of materials and ideas it’s still there. It’s never been super strong in our program because we’ve been more pragmatic, we’re more functional in our approach to design for a good and worse, good and bad. And so that served us well when we come into things like design thinking and our relationship with business where we could say design can help make whatever those products and services are better. We still have to define what better is, but that’s what designers are really good at. And so what I’m getting to is that we weren’t kind of beholden to notions of artistic expression and that helped us to define other ways of contributing and authoring our work.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I want to come back to that idea, but Zach, I have another a question to build on something that Matt said that I’m curious your thoughts on, which is this sort of move from experimentation materially to experimentation digitally. And that’s not exactly how you phrased it, Matt, but this sort of the way we use new technologies in the design process.

    And Zach, you have a background in computer science, you’re teaching a lot of digital tools and sort of emerging technologies. And I’m wondering how you think about that and how to think about where is the value for the designer? And just to frame this question, I’ve seen this happen two ways where designers sort of learn about new technologies purely conceptually, that these things exist and you should know about artificial intelligence or something like that. Or you should look know about big data. Or really, really technically where it’s like you need to learn how to use this software or you need to code in this language. And it seems like there’s some sort of balance between those two. And I’m wondering how you approach that or how you think about introducing new technologies into a curriculum.

    Zach Pino:

    That’s a fantastic question. I do want to point out at the head here that both Matt and I have backgrounds in computer science. So would love to hear Matt’s response.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I did not know that Matt.

    Zach Pino:

    And we in fact both share a significant overlap in not only the computer science part, but in the fine arts side. So we both have had experience on both sides, at the University of Chicago in fact. So lots of overlap. But to get to the question.

    So I think fundamentally when I came into ID seven years ago, I came into a school that as Matt described, was very much from my point of view, kind of a naive point of view, tied much more to the business side than the personal expression side. And so a lot of students at that time saw their opportunities as a designer tied to opportunities in consulting, opportunities in entrepreneurship, opportunities in joining in-house design teams that were fairly well-established. And over the last seven years at ID, we’ve seen this kind of seismic shift in what our students’ goals are as designers.

    And so when I joined ID, students were very interested in picking up very hard technical skills because they knew that in some ways they would be going into the world to deploy design, whether that meant entrepreneurially building a digital product or needing to know enough about technology to communicate with an engineering team within their organization. And so in those early years, Matt was really open and flexible to us introducing courses in Python and JavaScript, those kind of very hard technical skills.

    In more recent years, however, though we’ve seen students much, much less, almost zero interest in that kind of engagement with technology. Very much we suspect tied to changing social dynamics relationships with technology presumptions and perceptions of technology. And instead we see our students wanting to be working at a higher level and engaging engineering processes and engineering teams with critical oversight. And so our curriculum has needed to shift to accommodate that new goal that our students might have in their professional careers after graduate school, which means we are teaching not, this is how to write this kind of function in Python, though we certainly still do that, but we also now have courses such as surveys in emergent technology, studio courses in data visualization where we’re not teaching students how to necessarily write all of the code for making interactive data visualizations, but exposing students to data visualization tools and discipline norms, but then allowing them to explore what would it mean to hand draw a data visualization, as Matt hinted at, returning almost to the personal expression and personal agency associated with a traditional art and design program.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    You started answering my next question, but I’m curious if you could just clarify this a little bit more because I think one of the challenges in design education today, and this comes up in so many conversations that I have with educators, is just the field of design is so big. The areas for which students can go into is infinite. And you could go into data visualization, you could go into systems design, you could go into, I come from a graphic design background. You go into interface design. This sort of, I don’t want to say balance because that oversimplifies it, but the sort of tension between surveying all the opportunities or presenting or kind of visualizing the range of work while also having to go deep on some of those because it can’t just be the sort of cursory look. How do you think about those kind of survey classes, Zach, that you’re talking about? Introducing these with that sort of range of practice that is available to students?

    Zach Pino:

    Yeah. I’d love to hear Matt’s response to this as well, specifically regarding how we’re thinking about deep T and shallow T shaped people, which I’m not well-equipped to discuss. 

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Let me ask you a version of the question. Because I do want to hear Matt’s sort of larger view, but I think Zach, for you, how much of it is student-driven? Are students sort of coming into the class saying, we’re interested in these things, and then you’re tailoring these surveys to that versus things where you sort of say, here are some things that I think are interesting, here are some emerging practices, emerging technologies, and I’m going to kind of show these to you. Can you talk a little bit about that sort of relationship and dialogue?

    Zach Pino:

    I’m confident that in our courses, the model student is needing exposure to contemporary technologies more than they’re needing any degree of mastery over those technologies. And trends in technological development today have facilitated that kind of new orientation for our student body. We’ve seen this kind of incredible convergence of what was several years ago, as you described, a very wide diverse but disparate set of technical competencies. So just like you said, data visualization is going to be different than interaction design, which is going to be different from CAD, 3D modeling for fabrication.

    In the last several years, certainly in the COVID and post- COVID time, there’s been this massive alignment and convergence in data-oriented practice, where every discipline of design and every technical vertical that a student might be interested in pursuing is going to be centered deeply in engagement with data and engagement with computational intelligence and computational creativity. And because of that alignment, it becomes a lot easier for us to teach that. The exposure that I mentioned, because we can go deep into this is what data is, these are the dimensions of data quality. These are the metrics by which we would evaluate to what degree a data set is valuable in design insight making, but we don’t need to necessarily cover the waterfront.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah. Matt, can you talk a little bit about this shallow and wide versus deep and narrow and how you sort of think about that?

    Matt Mayfield:

    Sure. And I concur with everything that Zach is saying is that there has been, I think a beneficial shift in this kind of more integrated way of thinking about data and technology as it’s kind of finding its way into all sorts of corners, which weirdly enough makes it a little easier to teach because it’s more pervasive. But I’m also interested, it is a balance I think about a lot, and I agree it can be perhaps too easily framed as this notion of deep versus shallow, lots versus little, or focused versus breadth. And I do think there is an interaction there.

    I believe designers can be, I think more inspired when they have a little bit more than just awareness of something. They have to play with it. They have to say, oh, wait, wait, wait, this can do this. What if I do this? That’s where we get that fun creativity. So for me, I want to get our students to the point where they can play with technology. We’re not going to ever say, “Oh, okay, you are a certified engineer putting out commercial grade solutions.” Absolutely not. But we do want them to be able to engage engineers or whomever is involved with the development at these different levels, as Zach said, at a higher level in terms of more, are we doing this ethically? Are we being equitable? Where are our blind spots with how we are using this technology or the ways we see it progressing? But also at a slightly lower level where it is more of, hey, did we ever think about trying this? Would that be valuable?

    And that’s the key question I think for all of our students is where is the value of it? And that is a very, I’m purposefully making that a very ambiguous term because that’s the discussion. What do we mean by value? Where is it? How can we get to it? Does everyone agree on that value?

    And so being able to poke around in the technology enough to get a feel for it enough to understand the power there, because a lot of it is abstract when you say, oh, yes, well, machine learning takes in troves and troves of information. It’s like, oh, do you really know what that means? You could say it, but do you really feel it? And so that’s where I get most excited about is in that middle ground in exploring, and as Zach has done a fabulous job there in helping us find those spaces, and we do try to respond to students where they’re at and where they’re going, but to challenge and ask as well, why are we learning this? Where is this going to help us in our practice as designers?

    Jarrett Fuller:

    This next question is perhaps the biggest question of the conversation, but I want to ask you about that word value a little bit and sort of turn it back on the education experience. And you can speak about this specifically at ID or you could even, I’d be curious to hear both of your thoughts on this in design education generally.

    But I think sort of graduate design education is in this sort of interesting spot where it can also do all sorts of things. Is the role, and I’m hearing bits of all of these things in both of your answers throughout this conversation. There is some sense of job preparation, sort of understanding the field and giving you skills to go work in the field. There’s some sense of experimentation that grad school is a type of laboratory to try things, to be critical, to be provocative, to challenge things. There’s some sense of graduate school being a chance to redefine the field, to redefine design, to challenge industry, to push industry forward. It’s a little of all of those plus more, but I’m wondering how you think about the role of graduate design education. What is the value that students get out of those two years? And I don’t mean that to sound critical. You know what I mean?

    Matt Mayfield:

    No, it’s a good question. It’s a great question and I’ll jump in. I think, and I could really only comfortably speak from our school. I have guesses at what others are, but I’m not going to pretend to know it. For our school and the students that we attract and the students that are successful coming through our program, we do see a lot, as Zach has also indicated, they’re not coming to us, or at least the bulk of them are not coming to us saying, “I want to get a job in UX and I’m going to come here to get trained to do that.” We think that’s a bit of a flag because yes, it’s possible to do that, but that’s really not what the full experience can be.

    That full experience is a time to reflect, and that’s again why we’re so excited when we have somebody that has been practicing design for a little while and saying, “Hey, you know what? I think I want to learn more about my field and my practice. I want to explore a little bit, broaden my horizons.” We love that. I think those students do the best in our program, and it’s that reflective nature.

    And to me, that’s where the value is. If we want to kind of get it down to the crass exchange here, they are choosing to spend, depending on the program, a couple of years to step back from their practice, not to not do their practice, but to not be stuck in the constraints of a job-oriented right workload, and to give themselves a little bit of freedom to explore and think.

    For some students, parts of their design practice they stumbled on, they learned on their own. They never really had a chance to examine it in a more formal setting. And so we can support that, and it’s not just the faculty, but with other students.

    And I think that’s where our program is strongest, is within the cohort, the community of students that are able to bring different perspectives, different experiences. And so to me, that’s where the real value is. It’s always student-focused.

    And as I think about the curriculum and as I work with the faculty, my drive is these students want to be masters in design. Can we capture that? How do we get them to be masters? And what does that mean? The ability to have a lot of perspective and be able to ask really great in questions that open up conversations that move things forward, that bring insight to the debate, that are able to inspire others to see maybe the opportunities in a different way.

    To me, if a student walks out of here doing that, they’ve gotten what they came for, and they are well positioned to influence wherever they land, wherever they work with, because they won’t be doing it alone. They will be doing it with others, and we think that’s super important. So that’s where I kind of anchor the value of at least our program. And I think for the most part, graduate education, I think I would argue, kind of falls into that.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    It reminds me of something I read in an interview a long time ago, and I apologize, I forget where this was or who said it, but they were talking about when you should go to graduate schools, and I repeat this to my undergrads all the time, who want to go to graduate school. I was like, “You go to graduate school when you’ve worked in the industry long enough to be frustrated by it.” And then you can go back and use that time. Zach, do you have thoughts on that?

    Zach Pino:

    On the timing question in particular?

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I mean timing, but even just that sort of value of that time, what do you want students to get out of that?

    Zach Pino:

    Yeah, I mean, what’s so hard about any sort of engagement with a graduate curriculum is that you are, in the case of many of our students, you are coming into a new discipline or, as you’re describing, some kind of minor to extreme reorientation within your discipline. But everyone at that graduate program is going to be talking almost exclusively about how quickly the field is changing. And that is especially true of design.

    Design was very well-defined and established in the nineties and then aughts, and as ever since, has really been challenged in almost every flank. Whether that’s kind of the implications of being a creator in a world with significant sustainability challenges or being a responsible researcher, but also being tied to certain kinds of perhaps ill-defined business metrics and timelines.

    And so our students are coming in and they’re seeking clarity. They’re seeking a lane to place themselves in, and all we can do is tell them there are no lanes right now, or the lanes are yet to be established. And the students who are, I’d love to hear Matt’s feedback on this as well, but the students that are most effective here at ID from my point of view, are those that are willing to embrace that ambiguity and recognize that their time with us is in fact to help establish those lanes for the next generation of designers and design students.

    Matt Mayfield:

    Absolutely. If I may.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah, please.

    Matt Mayfield:

    I want to highlight that because I do think that’s where design is most exciting. It is in the new intersections, in the new applications, in the new types of jobs. When I graduated from my undergraduate in design, we essentially at the time had kind of design thinking as our focus, but no one talked about it that way. No one recognized it that way. No companies were hiring design thinkers. It wasn’t there. But it was the confidence that I could add value. And I just took time to figure out how to define that in the terms of the day. But I completely agree with Zach. It is challenging in that it’s a field in flux, but I think that’s the most exciting part is that flux gives you opportunity.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I mean, I always say every generation of designers gets to redefine design for that generation. It is this sort of constant change. I have two more sort of quick questions. I want to go back to this thread that’s come up again and again in this conversation about this sort of push and pull of artistic expression. And I forget the exact sort of matrix that you use there.

    But I come from a graphic design background, and so much of early graphic design theory and history was really about separating graphic design from art that this was not personal expression, we said. There’s a lot of graphic design that has sort of moved back towards that. There’s now sort of a range of opinions on that. But I think on the surface level, those can feel so at odds with each other. This idea of human-centered, of developing personas and user experience and all of these things with the designer’s point of view, with this idea of expression. And I’m wondering how you think about the blending of these, the fact that both of these things can happen at the same time. How do you think about that both as a sort of institution but then also on a project by project basis?

    Matt Mayfield:

    It’s a great question, and I could tell in the way that I deal with my students is that, and I teach more kind of classes that are much more oriented towards business. So how to plan product lines and how to think about what’s next with products being really much more sophisticated nowadays, those permutations become really, really interesting.

    But that being said, I talk a lot about that the work we do in design and thinking about what’s possible certainly has to be grounded in research and information. We want to make good decisions. I said, but there is a point in every project, in every work that you as a designer, you are interpreting this. You have an authorship role in how this work is being handled, how you adjust and how you conform to your constraints, that’s you making choices. And I think we should embrace that. That is something that is important.

    And it may not be the free form expression of art, but there is an authorship. There is a decision to say, this is the way I’m looking at this problem. This is the way that I chose to shape it or kind of interpret what we’re seeing with a team or without a team. And I tell my students, I said, “You should embrace that. You do have a place in this. You do have a voice. We just want to make sure we understand how much of that voice, we obviously have biases and we have all sorts of blind spots, so you have to be aware of that, and so pay attention to that, but don’t ever suppress your voice. You are not a machine to make this work and to be very objective.” Design is still very much, I believe, a subjective field. It is. It’s an interpretation of what we think should be or could be or ought to be. And those are the things that designers should be thinking about, and you can’t remove yourself from that conversation.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah, I love that. That’s really well said. Zach, what about you?

    Zach Pino:

    I, like many of our students, entered design not from a straight line, not from a straight path. And so the field that I entered circa mid-2010s was really a field that had over-expressed and overexerted itself and so much into adjacent disciplines, whether that was the social sciences or engineering, that it had in some ways lost a sense of itself and its own core value and competencies.

    And so as you described, Jarrett, this kind of retreat that many of the design disciplines have gone through in the last 10 years or so, really reflects this kind of recognition that design had not only overexerted itself, but it had become reliant on a very kind of convoluted self-justification. That I’m going to go out into the world and I’m going to say this is what the world is asking for. That’s the problem. I’m calling that the problem, and it’s not my problem that I’m identifying. It’s the world’s problem, and now I’m going to solve it, and here’s my answer to that problem. And it’s the kind of weird circular logic that’s still deeply embedded in a lot of, especially traditional design practice and business-oriented design practice and this kind of weird slippage that happens in authorship space and agency space. When you lose track of the fact that you are not working in service of you are in fact a creator, you are identifying this particular set of issues to address with your creative outputs.

    That, for many of our students, is incredibly refreshing because they’re wanting to bring this kind of values orientation, value-driven motivation, ethics-driven motivation. They’re working on behalf of inclusion, equity, sustainability. And so we are seeing not only retreats to these traditional justifications for our value, but also students are really wanting to be personally expressive. They’re wanting the work to reflect their vision and not mask that in, this is what the company is asking me for in the brief, or this is the set of personas that I’ve developed and artificial problems I’ve identified.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Right. I’m so mad you brought this up right at the end. That’s a whole other conversation.

    Zach Pino:

    Sorry.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I have so many things to talk about with that.

    Zach Pino:

    Sorry. Sorry.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I agree with you a hundred percent.

    Zach Pino:

    Yeah, but I think that that’s where not to, I know we’re at time here, but a lot of the technical skills that are relevant to today’s designers are all about redefining this intermediation, this indirectness that is so central to design action in the world that by choosing a dataset and bringing that into your generative design practice, in my case, you are kind of delegating a huge amount of your authorship to that dataset and the people who produced it. And with that indirectness, in the same way a printmaker is working very differently than a painter, we find that our outcomes tend to be a much more defendable, a much more flexible, and much more responsive to reality.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    Yeah, I love that. Let me ask you both. One quick question to wrap up, Matt, I want to hear from you first. We’re talking about this sort of rapid change of design. What about design is exciting you right now?

    Matt Mayfield:

    Oh my goodness. Outside of this conversation? This is great. No, I think it is this, and I do like the word Zach used that there’s a refreshing-ness happening. There’s an optimism that’s coming in. And it’s less, and this is something I’m also very excited about with our school, is that we don’t stop at kind of the outrage or the critical thinking. We say, okay, great. Now what do we do about that? Where do we go? And that’s so awesome. That’s just great. I feel very encouraged that these students are going to go out and make fantastic impacts in the world because they can bring that optimism and their values into their work.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I love that. Zach, what about you? What’s exciting about design to you right now?

    Zach Pino:

    I am extraordinarily driven at this particular moment in design as a discipline’s trajectory by the fact that today’s design does not need to be resolved fully or even fully understood by the designer when it is introduced into the world. And I know that that sounds really scary and that I might be promulgating a certain kind of sloppiness with design practice, but with so many data-oriented tools and computational kind of intelligent tools today, we have this remarkable capability to design and experience 80%, 50%, 20%, and then let context and dynamics and preferences and dimensions of the human engaging our designs fill in that remaining space and have algorithms react in response. And so as I say, that is often scary in the moment, and we’re seeing the limitations and weaknesses and over-exuberance by many computational designers in this moment. But this kind of opportunity to create not singular, fully understood designs, but rather incredibly intricate, complicated, flexible, dynamic multiples of our experience, that as a designer I might not ever fully comprehend, is really just a tremendous moment in design.

    Jarrett Fuller:

    I love this. This is such an optimistic ending to this conversation. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. This was great. Matt and Zach, thanks so much for doing this. Sure.

    Matt Mayfield:

    Sure, thank you.

    Zach Pino:

    It’s great. Thank you so much.

    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.

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