Undesign thinking

Why? Engage with an alternative, regenerative premise for the things you design or build

How? Contact Aki to schedule a 30 min discovery call

When? a 90 min session 2-3 weeks after the discovery call

Context
What is right for design, in the broad sense of the word, in the time of the polycrisis? In the article Elimination by Design from 2003, Tony Fry writes: “Rather than create more ‘ green’ things that simply add to ‘consumer choice’ – houses, cars, shirts, shoes, breakfast cereals, lawnmowers, carpets etc. – the imperative is the elimination, by design, of the unsustainable.”

I have both practiced and taught design thinking in various settings during the past couple of decades, drawing from the work of such luminaries as Don Norman and Bill Buxton. I found Buxton’s approach to ‘sketching user experiences’ and the slogan he co-authored, ‘getting the right design and the design right’, particularly inspiring.

But the sense of what is right is changing. It used to mean, and predominantly still does, finding a design solution that optimally serves the needs of the users that it is designed to help while generating profits for both the design agencies and their (commercial) clients.

The undoing
This kind of right, however, has been mostly practiced in the service of modernity’s ideologies; ideologies that have damaged the planet and the vast majority of global citizens. Complementary and corrective approaches such as value-sensitive design or responsible innovation frameworks have not made a huge difference. They have mostly sought to design more instead of less, to increase productivity instead of contemplation, to drive consumption instead of frugality, and so on. Growth has been, and continues to be, the mantra guiding design practices and decisions.

We still need ideation and testing, and all the rest of it (a design thinking -like process) to build things, but from regenerative ends. We need to unthink and unsee many premises, and re-see the world and ourselves, as part of it, as a connected organism and metabolism, and then start undesigning the past ways of overreaching. I suggest that we require a process where several things are re-thought and re-done: we need to Reset, Remember, Reorient, Redesign, Regenerate, Regather, and Redistribute.

For more detail, please read my two-part essay on the topic:
Part 1: the contexts
Part 2: the undoing

Send me a note expressing your interest and we can schedule a conversation about your needs!