January 21, 2021

Reskilling

(Deskilling)

“I seem to be a verb”

R. Buckminster Fuller

“All that was ‘normal’ has now evaporated; we have entered postnormal times, the in between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have not yet emerged, and nothing really makes sense. To have any notion of a viable future, we must grasp the significance of this period of transition which is characterized by three c’s: complexity, chaos and contradictions.” In his blog, “Welcome to Postnormal Times” Ziauddin Sardar lists seven features of our Postnormal Times as 1. Complexity, 2. Chaos, 3. Contradictions, 4. Uncertainty, 5. Progress 6. Virtues, 7. Imagination.

Living in these times also dubbed “chaordic” by Dee Hock, CEO of VISA corporation, we all experience oscillations of the dynamic polarity of chaos and order. Or consider “VUCA” the acronym used in military and increasingly in business contexts to denote the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous nature of reality today. Our VUCA world can be understood as an evolutionary achievement of higher orders of complexity. Life conditions are in some respects better than they’ve ever been, with global planetary consciousness in cooperation at unprecedented levels of synergy. Yet the climate debate is polarized, and effective teaming and collaboration are the exception rather than the norm. We experience the breakdown of categories and the breakdown of linear models and mechanistic concepts for explaining our world. Our collective human stories about linear time and linear progress lost meaning. Individually we experience these shifts as time acceleration, increased pace of change, obsolescence of technologies, simultaneity of communication, global flows of capital, and the rising power of trans-national corporations otherwise known as globalization. <Crisising - Opportuniting>

Not so long ago when the instrumental power of design was not well understood, the role of the industrial designer was limited to discrete and clearly bounded problems with well-articulated solutions — form giving in the context of housings for consumer electronics for example. VUCA times demand new design responses such as the scaling of planning and designing tools for equitable distribution of social benefit. The professional fields of design are in the process of being disrupted in the emergence of a post-normal designing praxis suited to the challenges of a VUCA world. Our creative methodologies, forms of organizing and ways of culture making adapt to increasing complexity or become irrelevant.

Design briefs are always situated within global spheres of influence that ultimately impact complex problems such as climate and ecosystem health. However, designers are not always aware of the situatedness of their designs and their potential impacts, nor are designers necessarily equipped to address complex social problems. Being trained as a designer does not defacto make one a “wicked problem” solver. As social, political, economic and educational contexts are groaning with the pressures of momentous change, professional design capacities are indeed poorly coupled with life conditions indicating that reorganization is imminent (Graves, Beck). The problem solving approach is just one of the redundant tools in the designer’s kit. Mike Hulme, founding Director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research has said, “I don’t think the Anthropocene is an idea that can be solved…it is helping us to rethink about ourselves, our relationships to each other and to the non-human. And indeed it is helping us to think about how we think about our relationship to the future.” (217).

Because ​on the societal level - at the scale of the social holon - all human beings are designers by virtue of lifestyle and behavioral habits that inscriptively beget worlds, identifying with the crisis system is a way of remaining congruent with our reality. Climate change is the crisis of our era, a mirror on our collective consciousness and a problem space ideally suited to conscious design thinking. Conscious designers are tolerant of complexity and enlivened by the challenge of working within the contingent contexts of complex problems. Design research from the 1960s forward has shaped our contemporary understanding of design as a non-linear, sense making activity surprisingly appropriate in a complex world. Design theorist Tony Fry has founded a crisis design platform in Tasmania called the Studio at the Edge of the World. The platform is an action research program focusing on design and education in what Fry call the Era of Unsettlement.

While we can be justifiably proud of our designerly creative agility, we lack well-articulated maps of the terrain ahead —especially the inner capacities necessary for meeting the complex challenges of the future. The world has changed. What got us here won’t get us to a life-affirming designed future. With eyes wide open we can acknowledge that things are going to get worse before they get better. This is not a doomsday scenario but more like an embodied settling into our Earthly home, in advance of turbulent times that call forth our creativity, courage and resolve. Its post-normal and post-postmodern forms will be humane, its dynamics compassionate, and its ‘clumsy solutions’ (Verweij) will be failure friendly. 

Growing complexity raises expectations for design pedagogy and practice, as well as demanding entirely new post normal skills and capacities. The complexity of present times demands ways of orienting ourselves as design beings in a sometimes overwhelming glut of information. How do we separate signal from noise? How do we as designers get our bearings on design briefs with contradictory sets of criteria? In order to embrace rather than run from complexity, we need meta-views on the systems we impact and influence. In order to practice game changing conscious designing, one must look at human experience in a whole-systems context such that performance, aesthetics, ethics and economy are lenses that we can overlay to help us orient to the fullness of the design space and its opportunities. Designers will want to be fluent across a broader range of domains than ever before such as along with dynamic systems theory and complexity science.

How does knowing relate to being and doing? In addition skilling up via acquisition of conventional lateral skills such as critical and strategic thinking, design research methods and prototyping skills, new essential capacities such as mindfulness, deep listening, facilitation, conflict resolution and advocacy will be necessary to thrive in the new complexity. The ability to embrace complexity and contingency is essential. As is the capacity to hold paradoxical realities in a spacious witness. New and diverse strategies for more complex scales of design engagement such as collective social futuring will require regular practices for cultivation of capacities for governance, decision-making, perspective taking and perspective coordination, negotiation, and subtle energy fluencies.

Our times elicit new stances of designing agency — trans-disciplinary, trans-partisan, collective and collaborative — affording qualities most needed where uncertainty prevails. Our life conditions challenges us to design for new levels of care and coherence. Ultimately, the work of conscious designing as crisising-opportuniting is an invitation to participate as integrated being —head, heart and hands.

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