January 21, 2021

Answering (Overlooking)

“The best way to predict the future is to design it.”

R Buckminster Fuller

Back in 1976, Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, controversially asserted that mitigation of harm was the designer’s responsibility. Calling for a code of ethics analogous to the Hippocratic Oath, he characterized consumerist design as “…comparable to what would happen if all medical doctors were to forsake general practice and surgery and concentrate exclusively on dermatology, plastic surgery, and cosmetics”(Whiteley, 99). Such criticisms can stir feelings of guilt, anger and outrage in hard working designers who may feel overburdened with expectations that seem beyond the ken of the design professions. Others offer that they’re already doing everything they can at the scale of the individual designer or firm to mitigate undesirable impacts and consequences of their designing. <Envisioning - Accepting>

Unfortunately, professional design does suffer from the sorts of diminished expectations and that come from having been instrumentalized in society. Treated as tools, we ontologically (be)come tools. Asleep to our power and potential, we look to blame someone, anyone, else. Lacking the power that acceptance of responsibility confers, we are liable to remain stuck in reactionary positions of impotence and blame. Further compromising shared understanding, our current debates are shallow, with little dialogue. Conflating responsibility with blame causes much suffering and self recrimination, and even worse, it discourages many bright creatives from entering emerging fields such as design for social innovation, for fear that they will be overwhelmed by the weight of ethical responsibility that professional practice entails. Lack of distinction between fault and responsibility results in allegations that design is at the root of many societal challenges. What if we could tease out the distinctions between accountability, responsibility and blame in order to arrive at better questions? <Inter-depending - Independing>

Challenges of contemporary society such as consumerism, overconsumption, individualism and narcissism represent the interests and accountabilities of systems of stakeholders. If every citizen is a designer, and if the environmental crisis is a designed outcome, then every citizen holds a share in this responsibility. Un-sustainability is a cybernetically designed result of a collective design that emerges to large extent from the market society. Acknowledging that un-sustainability is a designed result opens up a whole space from which to rethink whether this is the society that we wish to contribute to and inhabit. Principles of shared responsibilities and choices inform Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) new criteria for professional practices that are relevant to designing and that can be summarized as “…transparent, interactive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view to the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products in order to allow a proper embedding of scientific and technological advances in our society.”[4] (Wikipedia) According to Wikipedia, responsible research and innovation model has four dimensions: Anticipation, Reflexivity, Inclusion, Responsiveness. <Destroying - Creating>

From mindful awareness, taking responsibility is the only sane choice. For the many of us, situated in the privileged one percent of the economic pyramid, these ethical quandaries may be exacerbated by feelings of discomfort or shame about our relative comforts and advantages in the face of widespread global poverty. Bringing conscious awareness to confusing or uncomfortable feelings such as these, we can let ourselves feel - and in doing so reincorporate shadow aspects of ourselves. Working with difficult feelings such as guilt and shame (rather than ignoring or judging them) allows us to bring more coherence and energy to our designing practices. <Enowning - Conforming>

The urgent challenges posed by consumptive lifestyles, population growth, and the growing gap between rich and poor require the best and brightest design minds and hearts. Today, there is an ever-growing global recognition that our conventional design practices fail to account for the diffuse impacts of our designs. Unlike architects, designers are not licensed. Lack of explicit, shared professional codes of ethics for design practice makes for fuzzy lines of accountability and lack of commitment. Since the 1980s, individual designer-leaders at all levels of the product development process have been rejecting the false choice “guilty or blameless”. In Do Good Design, David Berman, a Canadian visual communications designer calls for global professional ethical standards for design professionals. Designers Accord and Architecture for Humanity typify a newer generation of professional organizations urging that designers pledge to uphold personal ethical standards in conduct, materials specification and client relations. <Inheriting - ?>

Choosing to take responsibility is a precondition of conscious designing. Answering with responsibility is a recognition of our situatedness. Claiming responsibility for the world around us is a shift into authorship - an opportunity to self-author our creative lives (Kegan). As professionals who help to determine the tangible substance of the product milieu, designers stand on the fulcrum between what exists and what does not exist. Taking responsibility means owning the archetypal role of creator /destroyer. From a perspective within the system, there is only answering or not answering, responding or not responding. Answering comes from an active, engaged stance. In answering we are not only discerning an opportunity to serve, but choosing to follow through with action. <Enacting - Acting>

Conscious whole-hearted designing restlessly seeks The Good. Taking responsibility is a refreshing alternative to blame. Being responsible results from our affirmation of our connectedness with all of life in and as the systems we constitute. Answering the hail to responsibility arises out of gratitude for the privilege of co-authoring the built environment in which we are already embedded. We are not only who we have been blaming - but also who we have been waiting for.

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