• Design Won’t Save the World
  • Jesse Weaver
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: QiaoN
  • Proofreader: Moonliujk, Fengziyin1234

Human-centered design is great for mops and mobile phones, but it won’t solve society’s biggest problems.

Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

“Design can change the world”

When I was in design school, this quote filled me with endless energy and pride. It existed deep inside me. How could it not be? Over the past few decades, design, and design thinking, has come to be seen as an important differentiator between companies and products.

Behind this improvement is the operating system of the design bonus: human-centered design.

The basic idea behind human-centered design is that in order to find the best solution, designers need to deepen their understanding of the people who use their designs.

Designers do this through user interviews, contextual observation (observing users at work in their “normal” lives), and other tools that help designers understand users in their shoes. Once you can paint a picture of your users’ immediate needs, the next step is to identify some key insights and use them to create a solution.

The development of the Swiffer mop is a famous example. The designer responsible for improving the house-cleaning process observed clients cleaning their homes. A key insight is the importance of time. Cleaning often reduces time for other activities, so any time savings are welcome. Mopping is considered a time-consuming part of cleaning, with multiple steps and complicated tools, not to mention waiting for floors to dry. So designers created a “dry mop” (aka a Swiffer) to simplify processes and save time. It was a huge commercial success.

Very straightforward.

The process works. Countless products and services that power our daily lives have either emerged from this process or been dramatically improved upon. Smartphones and the many apps that run on them, social services like Instagram and Twitter, sharing economy darlings like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb, not to mention a host of physical products.

The way the world works today and the way we work is very different than it was a decade ago. Largely because of the human-centered design process.

So we designers can hold our heads high and think we have the power to change the world.

But if you step back and think about it, you start to see a problem: We’ve been working very hard for decades to design the world, and we haven’t reduced any of the real problems.

What do I mean by “the real problem”?

I mean the real problem. Big problems, the kind that can shake humanity to its foundations and threaten our long-term viability.

Hunger. Climate change. Poverty. Income gap. Illiteracy. Paranoid. Discrimination. Environmental degradation. The list continues to grow.

Right now, the richest countries on earth have people who are starving, people who can’t get or afford health care, people who are homeless. This is the richest country in the world.

Right now, our oceans are dying because of plastic. Our atmosphere is dying because of carbon dioxide, and we’ve lost half of the planet’s biodiversity.

Guess what: Design doesn’t solve any of these problems.

Not even a little bit.

And, unfortunately, the design doesn’t fix any of them. Because our operating system doesn’t allow it.

The problem of human-centered design

The big problems that threaten our survival or social stability are systemic. They run roughshod through the system. Their causes are wide and varied, and the people involved represent almost every section of society.

The problems are multifaceted. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. There are no amazing insights that can suddenly help us solve our problems and give us light at the end of the tunnel.

Instead, fixing these systems is like trying to control a wildfire. And while you’re trying to fight one side of it, the other side burns 50 square miles. You can’t hope to make progress by reducing one part of the problem and ignoring the rest.

In the end, like wildfire, you just try to minimize the damage until the weather changes and the rains come and provide a real systemic solution that addresses all aspects of the problem.

Human-centered design is not created to solve systemic problems. In fact, human-centered design is created to solve the exact opposite problem.

Human-centered design is the focus. It’s looking at the big picture, then zeroing out a manageable set of insights and variables and solving them. By definition, this means that the process encourages the designer to actively ignore many aspects of the problem. This short-range focus doesn’t work when you’re trying to solve some systemic problem.

A recent study of a series of ride-sharing apps that emphasize user-centric design found that for every mile of personal driving that is removed from ride-sharing, total urban traffic increases by 2.6 miles. Ride-sharing apps are actually making urban traffic worse.

Ride-sharing companies like Lyft envisioned that they could alleviate people’s traffic problems by solving traffic jams, and they adopted a human-centered design approach to do so. How could they go wrong?

It is clear that people’s transportation is not a focal issue, but an important system issue. Through a human-centered design process, ride-sharing apps focus on the fact that in many cities, getting a taxi isn’t efficient. Because they focus too much on these, as they design the process, to the exclusion of other aspects of the problem.

“If we can make travel more efficient, fewer people will drive their own cars, thus reducing traffic,” they conclude.

This is a simple, instructional description that emerges from human-centered design.

Guess what? Uber and Lyft have succeeded in making hitchhiking easier. Human-centered design applies to such consumer-facing problems. However, they ignore other aspects of the transportation ecosystem.

For example, as the study found, many people use non-motorized transport such as bicycles, buses or trains mainly because they don’t own a car (and it’s not convenient to get around). Once it was easy to get a private car using ride-sharing apps, those who had previously used public transport began to opt for car-based travel. The short-range focus of human-centered design cannot include such non-motorized users in the design process. This is just one example of one aspect that the solution leaves out, and there are other aspects that the solution doesn’t cover.

A user-centric approach is perfect for providing a better experience for Airbnb customers, or improving people’s mops. But it doesn’t solve systemic problems like people getting around. When faced with a large, detailed, multi-faceted problem, our iteration-focused operating system is grossly inadequate. Human-centered design can barely handle damage control.

So we took a step forward on our course. Dealing with one side and losing control of the other.

What do we need instead?

I’m not saying we need to do away with human-centered design. This design approach is useful for problems that fit it. We now have mops that are far better than before (among other things), which is great. But we need to understand the limitations of our tools and start thinking about new tools, tools that can help us understand the breadth and complexity of the really big problems, and then start systematically solving those big problems.

Some people in the design world are working to advance human-centered design. IDEO, one of the pioneers of human-centered design, is pushing a new concept: circular design. The idea behind circular design is to think about design objects from the perspective of “circular economy”. It’s not a create-and-destroy mentality anymore, it’s a create-and-reuse mentality. It is a reinvention of the cradle-to-cradle concept with a focus on sustainability.

This is a very important step forward, but it doesn’t get us to the system design thinking we need. Just like the myopic aspect of human-centered design, circular design creates solutions with focused design insights. The difference is only that circular design requires designers to consider the full life cycle and long-term impact of a solution. Sure, this is an indisputably important shift in design culture, but does it really solve the big, unclear questions?

If I had designed the entire life cycle for my reusable water bottle, I might have had a more sustainable water bottle, but I didn’t create a systemic solution to the plastic problem. I don’t change the economic incentives that drive plastic culture. I didn’t solve the distribution and price problem, so disposable bottled water is more popular. I’m not addressing public health issues, so disposable bottled water is very safe in many places. Nor have I addressed all the other applications of single-use plastics.

I circled back to damage control. And the fire is getting bigger and bigger.

How do we break existing patterns?

If the analogy is wildfire expansion, perhaps we can create a design framework that allows us to innovate faster in smaller ways across all aspects of a problem, rather than just trying to focus on a select few aspects. Like a storm, many dense raindrops — falling in a coordinated fashion — can douse a huge fire.

Perhaps this is to get rid of the existing culture of competition and create a new culture of cooperation. By starting to ignore the corporate or political silos that separate us, we can collaboratively combine many focused solutions to become a truly single solution that covers the entire problem. There are plenty of solutions out there, we just don’t have the behavior to bring them together.

Perhaps this could subvert the economic incentives that drive design. Human-centered design was created to serve the existing economic system. There is an interest in creating a better mop. But there is no profit in solving homelessness. We need to design better mops all the time for economic prosperity, so we built a framework to do it.

If we have the right incentives, how quickly can we build a framework for systems design thinking?

Design can change the world. But the way we’re using it right now isn’t working. If we are to devise a solution to a major problem, we need to critically examine our approach. We need to upgrade our innovative operating system.

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