Are designers doing development? Do development professionals practise design? Designers and development practitioners have in common that they try to (re)shape the future. They make financial, material, practical, processual, and institutional interventions to change lives and improve outcomes, usually for other people and places.
This is the first of two blogs on design and development. Read the second here:
Yet, they are trained in different disciplines, concepts, and methods, and they follow distinct professional tracks. How then are the professions, disciplines, approaches, methods, sensibilities and practices of designers and development professionals similar and different from one another? Could they learn from one another?
A half-day seminar at IDS on 13 November 2024 explored these questions. Professionals from design and development backgrounds shared their perspectives and discussed what we might we learn from one another about our approaches, assumptions, practices, and pedagogy.
Design as a development issue
Critical development theorists and practitioners have long reflected on the legitimacy and accountability of schemes supposedly designed for the betterment of humanity. IDS has been at the heart of many of these debates. Robert Chambers—an emeritus fellow of IDS, whose insights about participatory development have been highly influential—warned development professionals to be wary of what he called ‘normal professionalism’. He meant the hubris of experts, with their naïve and blinkered assumptions—which are nonetheless backed by professional status and institutional power—about how to improve other people’s situations.
Imprinted by the legacy of these critical discussions, many development scholars and practitioners today would condemn the imposition of top-down projects and programmes by arrogant and out-of-touch development agencies. In fact, Development Studies has come so far that many development scholars are reflexively reluctant even to admit that they are experts of any kind.
Yet, by acknowledging that expertise exists in many different kinds, people, and places, are development professionals in danger of obscuring the fact, perhaps even from themselves, that development is centrally concerned with mobilising expert knowledge (albeit of many kinds, including the experiential knowledge of ordinary people) to stimulate change in the lives of others?
Robert Chambers said that development means ‘good change’. That implies that development is about designing and making interventions to achieve better outcomes. In their work, development practitioners, like design professionals, are carriers of specialised skills, training, experiences, and practices, which are distinct and valuable to development processes. Like designers, their role, among other contributions, is to raise awareness of new and alternative possibilities that might be unfamiliar to lay people, which could enable new and better outcomes for individual people and families, local communities, and whole societies.
On the other hand, design professionals, such as architects, urban planners, product developers and traffic engineers are notoriously liable to accusations of hubris. Exercising an individual commitment to professional ethical standards can help designers to avoid causing harm. But only to a degree: for economic and institutional reasons, designers typically depend for their own livelihoods on wealthy clients and powerful public bodies, rather than being accountable to poor and marginalised people, communities, and places that may be profoundly affected—beneficially or adversely—by their designs.
Beyond the development world, businesses, entrepreneurs and philanthrocapitalists are designing and rolling out futures for humanity that owe very little to the quibbles of critical development discourse. Among other striking developments, the ‘tech bros’ of Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are using new avatars of artificial intelligence to create algorithmically designed products and services that are shaping tomorrow’s world. Designers of the future may well be computers using machine learning.
Against this background, development scholars and design professionals need to navigate thoughtfully and carefully between the alternative errors of failing to stimulate good change and actually causing harm.
Good design as problem-solving
It may be said that design is about creative and thoughtful problem-solving. That definition positions design as an essential activity for human wellbeing. Bureaucratic decision-making stereotypically seeks an optimal solution from a known set of choices, which can be called convergent thinking; whereas design encourages divergent thinking, which is an open-ended exploration of new possibilities and alternative options.
Designing as a professional activity begins with investigating and understanding the needs and capabilities of the client (or other intended users). In this process, knowledge shared by the client is an essential resource, because local people are uniquely positioned to describe their problems, analyse their situations, and assess potential solutions. Ideally, solutions are co-designed and co-produced. At the outset of this process, the problem might not be well understood, and the solution is not apparent. Solutions may be discovered and co-created through engagement between designers and intended users or other stakeholders and beneficiaries. That kind of collaboration takes patience, openness, and time.
Masters students at IDS learn about the STEPS Pathways Approach, which recognises the complexity of wicked problems and seeks to open up decision-making to a plurality of views and a diversity of potential solutions, instead of narrowing debate and forcing decision-makers to consider only a small number of pre-selected, singular, supposedly optimised, technical solutions. But in IDS’s teaching, we do not approach wicked problems from a design perspective. Perhaps we should.
Move fast and mend things?
Alongside data-gathering and analysis, designers typically use prototyping and iteration to move as rapidly as possible from testing initial concepts to a final design. This iterative process involves loops of feedback, reinterpretation, and adaptation.
Such a working method involves a readiness to experiment before a comprehensive understanding has been attained. In fact, experimentation and iteration are essential steps towards achieving a full understanding of the problem via a practical co-creation of a solution.
Here, our colloquium exposed a contrast between the designer’s willingness to make interventions before fully understanding the problem and the social science researcher’s cautious reluctance to intervene until all possible information has been gathered, turned into robust evidence, and rigorously analysed.
Is there a lesson here that scholars and researchers working in the development field might learn from designers? A wariness of acting in haste should not lead to a hesitance to act at all. There is also a cost to not acting when problems need solving. People are in need; they need solutions quickly.
We remembered that Robert Chambers’ advocacy of appraisal methods that were rapid as well as participatory was motivated in part by his insight that social science research processes were often too slow to be of much practical use to people who needed help urgently. Robert explained that, by the time a rigorous and robust scholarly study had been completed, months or even years might have passed. The situation on the ground might already have changed irrevocably. Robert advocated methods of rapid and participatory enquiry that could mobilise local expertise and generate just enough information, quickly enough to be of some practical use.
About the authors
The authors of this post formed a panel of five speakers, who seeded the discussion in our IDS seminar on Design and Development. All of us have worked in development contexts but all have engaged, in different ways, with design thinking.
Dominic Glover is an IDS fellow whose work on agricultural technology and innovation has led him to explore design concepts, including affordance as an analytical tool that can help to explain why a single technological design might have very different implications for different people, groups, and situations.
Robert Mull is an architect, educator and urbanist, who has worked and taught widely in the UK and internationally, including in projects with refugees and in prisons, schools, and communities. Robert is currently working with partners in Ukraine to support the Kharkiv School of Architecture.
Sadaf Khan trained and practised as an architect in Pakistan and completed her PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London before joining the fellowship at IDS, where she uses GIS mapping tools and spatial analysis for studies on urban environments and migration.
Dolf te Lintelo is an IDS fellow who studies the governance of urban displacement, transforming city and associated wellbeing dynamics. Dolf has collaborated with architects, designers, city planners, humanitarian practitioners, as well as local communities in Africa, Asia, Scandinavia and the UK.
Tessa Lewin has earned a Masters degree in Digital Moving Image and a PhD in Media Studies. As an IDS fellow, Tessa uses audio-visual and other participatory and creative arts-based research methods to investigate topics such as visual activism, gender politics, sexuality, and children’s rights.
