January 21, 2021

Configuring

(Deploying)

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Herbert A. Simon

“Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem — the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible — his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time and so forth.” Charles Eames

Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian engineer, won the ROLEX Award for Enterprise in 2000 for his redesign of the zeer; a type of evaporative food cooler, basically a double-walled style of clay thermos used for centuries in hot climates, for use in contemporary Nigeria. Hailing from a family of ceramic potters, Bah Abba earned his PhD in engineering. Upon returning to his village, he observed the arduous daily processes involved in gathering and preparing food. Fresh vegetables were especially difficult to obtain because family members, usually young women and girls had to walk long distances to harvest edibles. This inspired him to update an appropriate technology for modern use. Bah Abba integrated local labor into his concept for a simple double-walled thermos-like cooler fashioned from local clay. The comprehensive sustainability of his scheme would have been enough to illustrate the genius combination of empathic observation and a prepared mind. But the astounding beauty of the Pot-in-Pot Cooler is not that it keeps fresh vegetables fresh for a number of days, or even that it engages local enterprise and material resources sustainably, but that it does all that while enabling a generation of young women to attend school for the first time instead of porting food. Bah Abba readied the concept for the market by means of a Shell Award for Sustainable Development in 2001.

There are many lessons for designers in this marvelous case study. The inscriptive force of this design for a humble food cooler far surpasses its function as a typology or a basic commodity. Further, it’s based on and works with, existing lifestyles and behaviors rather than imposing a predetermined, imported solution. Ba Abba had to surpass his engineering training to think and to design in an open-ended, divergent way that remained curious about local conditions while bracketing known typologies and known solutions to similar design problems. Had he overtly set out to design a food cooler, his design research process would not have been nearly as ethnographically rich or revealing. Because he brought a kind of ‘beginner’s mind’ to observations in his familiar home village he was able to connect many more dots in order to arrive at a designed offering strategically positioned to function as a “liberating structure”, a designed outcome whose positive impact extends exponentially beyond its discrete function to enfold emancipatory potentials. The production employs the local workforce while at the same time liberating young women from the time-consuming task of porting food in order that they might attend school for the very first time. This is a clear example of how typology is almost always the wrong place to look if you want to innovate. It’s not about how the design looks or what type of “thing” it is, but rather what it does, how it performs, what it makes possible.

Our worlding - our relational configurations of objects, systems, processes, structures and interactions - was designed into being by our anthropocentric nature extended as technologies, values, and ways of habitation. Configuration within constraint is the bedrock work of designing. Configuration necessitates the high level work of discriminating the affordances — the topological relations of possibility - between entities in a given designed scenario. All designs have inscriptive force because they create or restrict the conditions of possibility in a given milieu. Aptness describes that quality of designed artifact or scripts that are appropriately fitted to context. This speaks to the deeply contextual nature of any design and the necessity to be, do, think systemically. There is much to be learned from forensic analysis of any designed system. What point of use choices does the designed configuration afford? or foreclose? Regardless of what the design is (typology) it’s about what the design does — what relations it allows or affords (topology).

As configuration within constraints, design actively models how change happens. As human intentionality made actionable, design can be understood as problem boundary framing and process development. As an instrument of conscious group and systemic change, design, has awesome potential. Conscious designing builds care and respect into the cultural, technological and economic transactions of globalization. In fact, going beyond conventional planning, ‘post-problem solving’ design methods are transformative in the re-direction of product platforms, systems, processes and services where leading edge solutions transcend and include the purely transactional. Consciously designed configurations can yield profound reframes, often by means of contextual sensitivity. As the iterative and qualitative how of process innovation, designed configurations can be inclusive, empathic, transparent and contextually aware. Recognizing and responsibly playing in this field of configuration of relations is a learning edge for conscious designers.

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