Design + Politics

One of the most important aspects of design is feeding your internal core of inspiration and knowledge; I'm not the first to point out that this new material comes from being in situations that are uncomfortable and out of your personal gestalt of worldly understanding.

I'm experiencing one of those situations now. I'm at the Design Research Society conference in Montreal. The title is both innocuous and misleading; what Design Research has come to mean in practice (observing people during design, working with people in a form of co-design, applied ethnography) is not at all what DR means to the attendees of this conference (which has been run since 2002). Design research here is the flipside of the coin of design practice - it's a group of people (mostly, but not all, academics) who are attempting to advance the profession of design by examining what designers do and how they do it, and introducing methods, frameworks, and new ways of thinking. You might consider it the "meta-design" - it's the design of design, sort of. And the reason I'm out of my comfort zone is because I rarely get the luxury to reflect on my professional work without "reflection-in-action", and even _considering_ it a luxury is, in fact, a luxury.

But in the morning session on the first day, I've already found a gem of a talk, one that's recast design for me in a new way.

This was a short talk by Chris Urbina Meierling, who works as a design researcher (the kind that looks at people, not the kind that looks at people looking at people) in the President's office of Arizona State University. Chris observed, interviewed, and collaborated with politicians in the Arizona Legislature, and began to draw comparisons and contradictions between a designerly process and the political process of legislation. For those of us that studied with Richard Buchanan, it's nothing new to consider integrating design into non-business contexts like public policy, but there hasn't been a great deal of discourse written about the logistics - the opportunities, and challenges - of actually making this transition occur. Chris's talk, and paper, fills this important gap.

Chris, citing some of my favorite literature from both Buchanan and Rittel, spoke to some of the commonalities between design and policy. But the differences are those that helped me see a new opportunity for design. First, he described the legislative cycle. At a high level, this is a one year process that includes the identification of a policy issue (such as illegal immigration in Arizona); the House or Senate cycle of debate and legislation creation; the vote; and the implementation of the idea. The qualities of this cycle make it incredibly difficult to perform iterative design - to try, fail, and improve upon an idea. How do you test a law? And if you are successful in testing it - you successfully identify problems that should be fixed - how can you ensure that your elected position will still be available a year later for another iteration?

In addition to the timeline issue, Chris also identified cultural issues that are quite similar to that of a conservative Fortune company. New idea generation inherently introduces risk into an existing process. An idea can be seen as "better" than one that's already selected, challenging those with cultural or economic ties to the status quo. The politicians that Chris worked with were generally risk-averse, and so casting a wide net of changes through ideation would likely be met with hesitance, or rejected completely. A design idea in policy needs to evolve through consensus and committee discussion, and these gates are long and filled with opportunity for derailment.

Perhaps most critical to the challenging of applying design in policy is personal nature in which an issue and a person become conflated. In design, with rare exceptions of some flamboyant "design rock stars", our work is anonymous. We create artifacts, even during ideation, which exist independent of ourselves. While we may have a great deal of passion about something we've made, we aren't actually that artifact, and seasoned designers learn to take criticism as a learning and growth process. But in politics, a politician becomes the face - the form, if you like - of a policy decision. This creates an inextricable connection between a person and a set of ideas, which makes changes to those ideas seem hypocritical or "flip flopping". A critique of the idea is a critique of the person, of their ideology and of their character. This truly limits any view of iterative, progressive, or incremental design.

Chris had no answers, but he posed the problems - which, in many ways, helps extract design from the unfortunately limiting (and entirely artificial) context of business. When we consider addressing large-scale social problems, policy and service design are two major levers we have to control the outcome of our work. We must better understand what a "designerly" approach to policy is, how it works, and how we can continue to pursue this type of thinking in government.

[You can download Chris' paper here]