January 21, 2021

Toggling

(Assuming)

“Auschwitz is not the product of rationality. Auschwitz is the result of the many products of rationality being used in irrational ways. Auschwitz is rationality hijacked by tribalism.” Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit , p. 75

“People may dislike the idea of ‘designing’ social systems. Designing social systems may seem mechanistic or authoritarian. However, all social systems have been designed… People have designed the systems within which they live. The shortcomings of those systems result from defective design, just as the shortcomings of a power plant result from erroneous design.” Jay W. Forrester   

Temple Grandin is esteemed for her breakthrough work applying empathic and ergonomic principles to the design and engineering of animal husbandry and livestock handling operations. It might be reasonably argued however that because Grandin’s designs did not alter the basic purpose of the system, that in doing so, she merely invented kinder, gentler killing machines (Duclos). Did Grandin introduce compassion into the agro-industrial meat production system or did she further enable a mega system with faulty objectives? Do free range farming practices represent an incremental failing forward on the way to a humane and ecologically viable food system -or mere rebranding of neo-barbaric and outmoded practices? What are the potential unintended consequences of terraforming Mars?

The ethical blind spots of human-centered design methodologies have been well documented. Design professionals configure artifice, therefore it’s useful to remember that unconscious designing has often translated into naïve, extremist and even reprehensible manifestations of power such as social engineering, colonial domination and Fascism. Is this dark history reason enough to dismiss social design as wrongheaded or a threat to freedom? Nope. Not necessarily. But it does require a fearless ‘both/and’ sensing into the seeming contradictions with our whole body-mind and the willingness to continuously revise our design strategies and actions based on our learnings. In the messy midst of forces of incremental and paradigmatic change that characterize the evolutionary-involutionary nature of reality, there is a tendency to seize on the latest iteration as the next normal. These attempts at stability tend to result in judgments, schisms and polarization.

Design, as a powerful instrument of world making, has certainly contributed to malevolence and abhorrent uses of power, authority and influence. However, it’s too easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When we conflate categories with outcomes it can create a lot of confusion in the minds of designers about their role and responsibility. As is true of any tool, design may be lent to the service of any values be they pre-conventional, conventional or post-conventional. Intentionality is the formidable challenge inherent of conscious designing.

Design theorist and historian Clive Dilnot has written about the death camps, Auschwitz in particular, in the context of design ethics, “…design did not design the Holocaust. But the planning and design of Auschwitz I and II and the future planning for the city of Auschwitz are as much the work of design as another design project. There is no magical break where one ended in the violence began.” (Dilnot) In this respect death camps can be seen as (horrifically) successful designs in as far as they instantiated the social ideals of an ethnocentric worldview enabled by the design and technological capabilities of a then-emerging Modern and global worldview. The death camps of the Holocaust were, from a strictly rational instrumentalist perspective, well designed to high performance standards, however unthinkable. Nazi death camps superb ‘success’ with respect to fitness for purpose.

It is important to discern the differences between poor design; — either poorly executed or conceived — good design; which may be successful in meeting its objectives although not necessarily life-positive, and conscious design; — successful in meeting its objectives while also sourced in the basic moral imperative. We have a tendency to conflate methods with results, leading to premature judgments and oversimplifications. An example would be making a critical judgment about a particular design research approach. This is a significant blind spot for change work because it applies a rigid or formulaic story about the past as an overlay on the future often resulting in generalizations, risk aversion, and impotence. There is also negativity bias —the tendency to overestimate risk and to underestimate possibility, often resulting in inertia.

This tendency to map the past onto the present is caused by not being awake to the immediacy of what is actually occurring in present time. Fear of unintended consequences of a particular design strategy can bring ideation to a halt. Fear of a worthy and socially just idea of being co-opted by the market often results in failure to take any action at all. And fear of unintended consequences is the basis of frequent self-censorship of incredibly viable new ideas. In the short term, mental elasticity is required in facing apparent set-backs and “failures”. Consider the Designer’s Accord and the Do Good Pledge. Is it true that at times such campaigns amount to little more than marketing and positioning rhetoric? Yes. And is it true that such campaigns are indicative of a massive ethical sea change in the professions? Yes. Scientitist and performer Uri Alon is his TED Global talk of 2013 invites us to say “yes and” in order to bypass the inner critic and avoid blocking or shutting down ideas.

Designers ‘shape things’ (Sterling) as portals to experiences. No design is ever ‘finished’ because it goes on inscribing impacts and remaking worlds. The ability to toggle between the design of local experiences and systems level effects is an essential capacity of conscious designing. It requires holding contingent factors as objects of awareness. Competing values are often understood as oppositional objectives requiring trade-offs such as near-term vs long-term, lifestyle vs climate futures, self vs other, competition vs cooperation. This is where we designers tend to get stuck or overwhelmed. Dynamically contingent and complex conditions are often reflexively treated as problems to solve, when in fact they are actually polarities to manage. Dr. Barry Johnson’s practice of Polarity Management allows us to see that diversity for example, is frequently treated as a problem to solve rather a polarity to manage and as a result we tend to create a lot of collective struggle around a poorly framed inquiry. We can get better results by framing contingent conditions as dynamic polarities to manage rather than problems to solve. By understanding dynamic polarities as challenges to be managed rather than problems to be solved, we can help move the organizations that we serve toward more constructive and rewarding engagements.

Reading this, I hope you’ll be inspired to bring more spaciousness into your everyday way of being. Spaciousness can immunize us from the black and white oversimplifications of the media, and from the reactionary or ideological positions that serve to keep old stories firmly in place. Identify a vicious cycle in your life that might be reframed as a polarity to manage rather than a problem to solve. Sit down with your feet flat on the floor. Breathe. Bring the issue to mind. Externalize it by mapping or diagramming. Identify actions you might take to enhance the upside effects and mitigate the downsides of the cycle.

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