Doing No Harm (Doing Harm)

January 21, 2021

“ How can one design or manufacture in a way that loves all of the children, of all species, for all time?” William McDonough and Michael Braungart

To understand the consciousness of violent designing, walk through any dollar store anywhere on the planet. Here, productive forces, harnessed for the sake of production itself, find their tawdry anticlimax. The conversion of finite resources into cheap commodities, worth less than the packaging they come in, is a pervasive type of violent design. Having lived immersed in worlds revealed by designed artifacts, we have acquired a familiarity with —and an expectation of — access to an extraordinary range of modern designed conveniences — including those cheap expendables priced to externalize their true costs of production. Along with these expectations we also acquire something more unsettling — a tolerance for the neutral or indifferent equipmentality of designed things. Because professional design tends to focus on external factors such as aesthetics and performance, it’s easy to forget the relational, sensorial and psycho-spiritual dimensions of reality that are also revealed by design. Designed products and services that seek to elicit our participation in this full spectrum of factors might be called “nonviolent designing”.

Although the dollar store is at the extreme end of the commoditized spectrum, it may be useful to expand our concepts of violent designing agency from explicitly malevolent products and services such as weapons or malware to include seemingly innocuous everyday instances of violent designed artifacts such as disposable plastic water bottles. In fact, these quotidian forms of violence are much greater threats to our planetary future. Dollar stores are the global market’s answer to the uneasy coalition between intense demand by average families trying to cut costs during difficult recession times and underpaid laborers subsisting in the developing world. Nonviolence may be adjured as a weak platitude, yet upon further exploration we see it is anything but weak. Designed artifacts and services invite us into many possible enactments. They may inhibit full self-expression or actually encourage healthy non-conformity. They may invite a propensity toward alertness or numbness. Disposable cameras for example lend social legitimacy to casual indifference toward the things we throw away after a single use. Although usually not intentional, these callous user-performative scripts are largely unconsidered by the designer or manufacturer. They arise as natural derivatives of our ways of being modern humans with needs for comfort, safety and connection.

In 2008 while consulting to a Ch’An monastery on a new graduate school dedicated to ‘engaged Buddhist’ action research, our team developed a curriculum that rests on a non-violent ethos for designing based on the Ch’An Buddhist fundamentals: Compassion, Wisdom, Harmony and Respect. Since then, I have been expanding this thought experiment on just what a non-dual disposition toward designing might be like. We are violent by virtue of our animal nature. And paradoxically, we are also evolutionarily wired to care for the ecosystems that sustain our vitality. In the Chinese language, the word for heart and mind are one in the same. As the Ultimate Reality, the heart/mind is identified with benevolence and with the original substance common to people, heaven, earth and all things.

As the crystallization of the form of consciousness that created them, designed artifacts operationalize an ethos. Designed artifacts are where the rubber meets the road— where our intentional manipulation of raw materials or pixels meets the needs and concerns of the world —or indifferently turns away. The tangible and intangible outcomes of our designing — the products, programs, and practices that are eventually distributed in ways far beyond our control— exist within narratives that teach us how to be with other beings. This simple and obvious –but usually neglected– fact means that designed artifacts also enfold the latent potential to bring moments of opportunity, care and compassion. A nonviolent designing ethos stems from conscious awareness of objective metrics such as product lifecycles and service and manufacturing impacts, combined with an internalization of the felt sense that we, as the design team, are actually touching the lives of other beings.

What would a proactively “cruelty-free” designing ethos look like? Designing for a future of benevolent objects, products, systems and services, would perhaps be more sensitive to the kinds of interactions that we put into play as authors and consumers of designed artifacts. Perhaps more fluent in the myriad ways that every day utilitarian design scripts may inadvertently elicit callous behaviors or defensive responses. Perhaps refusing to help promote commoditized goods as a matter of principle. From a psychological perspective, we speak of projecting human traits upon inanimate objects. A nonviolent designing practice would incorporate product semantics, yet would have to go much deeper. Mobilizing artifacts as extensions of our very ways of being demands a willingness to touch and be touched at the heart level. Quality of interaction will figure prominently in any nonviolent designing ethos, as a form of being-with or abiding. As with practices of Non-violent Communication, non-violent design practices avoid combative and accusatory speech, marketing and propositions that polarize.

Non-violent package design for example, might seek biodegradable alternatives to the problem dubbed ‘monstrous hybrids’ (McDonough) - composite materials that cannot be safely recycled in either the technical or the organic ecological cycles. Industrial designer Tufan Orel has synthesized the interdisciplinary cutting edges of design, marketing, psychology and sociology in defining “…a new product category which he calls “vital self technologies” wherein care of the self and human well-being take precedence over convenience, speed or price point” (Buchanan et al). Likewise, Gianfranco Zaccai of Continuum design consultancy redirects our experience to the soul-deadening or soul- enlivening affordances of artifacts, spaces and protocols.

This is different and more than a mere tactic for bringing reform to a world “out there” by means of design. Design practices built upon nonviolent principles seek to establish inter-subjective repertoires by which care and concern are enacted as designing-in-action. Post-postmodern designed interactions both disclose and enhance our available range of expression of relatedness with other beings. In bringing the criterion of violence to the arena of product, system and service design we add another metric to the ways we assess our intentions and our ability to actually deliver life-positive experiences via design. As we develop more nuanced distinctions, things no longer look so black and white. There is more space from which to create designs for compassionate and caring human-product interactions. Assessing our designed environments from the perspective of the degree of potential harm can enhance a precautionary designing stance. Although we can never predetermine all the possible consequences of a designed offering, we can learn to account upfront for inevitable contingencies.

As a platform for design practice, nonviolent designing would focus our awareness on the quotidian ways we enact violence to the self and to other. Although doing no harm is a superordinate goal that we aspire to, yet never reach, it serves as an aligning principal suited to the power wielding developed world. A nonviolent design ethos would recognize designing as inherently violent and demanding of skillful practice. Non-violent design may well involve acts of destruction - in service of bringing more compassion to designed affordances. Treating the world as worthy of our care and respect, a nonviolent designing platform would go beyond meeting the minimum criteria of doing no conscious harm, to being of active benefit. Configured to invite the greatest benefit for the greatest number, nonviolent designing strategies broaden the range of choice architectures (Thaler, Sunstein) that our designed worlds give us the opportunity to enact.

Reading this I hope you’ll recognize that our design works exist within social narratives that lend legitimacy even as they teach us how to treat one another and how to relate to matter and life. For designers, just noticing our habituation to violent design in the form of say for example, needless production of entropy, is a creative thought experiment and a necessary first step to becoming more aware of how designed artifacts dispose us to a range of choices and behaviors. When I become aware of sensations or acts that I hadn’t realized might be, say violent; learn to label them that way, now, and feel uncomfortable (maybe feel dissonance with my values); I learn and devise design acts that I can label as “non-violent” by design. While not considering the impact of our designs can lead to unthinking complicity in violence, consciousness of design’s power brings the potential for us to work from a sense of care and compassion—to bring benefit and do good while also feeling good about our work.

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