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 second of two blogs exploring what design and development professionals can learn from each other about our approaches, assumptions, practices, and pedagogy.
Read the first:
Design ethics
Some designers would say that the faster you act, and cycle through iterative prototypes, the better. The designer’s role in this free-flowing process is to bring curiosity, observation, and playfulness, and sometimes to act intuitively and instinctively. Take risks! says the designer: don’t allow a fear of failure to lead to paralysis. Make mistakes! says the designer—then take those mistakes seriously as a source of rapid learning.
But intervening without understanding can and does cause harm. Is it okay to be playful and to use gut instincts when livelihoods, wellbeing, values, identities, sometimes even lives, might be at stake? This led us to reflect on the ethics of design.
Some social scientists studying the politics of designing and implementing sustainable societal transformations in the face of wicked problems, such as climate change, have called for an ethic of care to replace governmental and technocratic illusions of top-down control, which pretend to be able to steer a managed transition to sustainability.
An ethic of care would involve caring about and for others and for mutual wellbeing. Some scholars have argued that development actors pushing for sustainability transformations should go beyond care to practise conviviality, which to us implies not merely that designers and development professionals must care for the people affected by their interventions, but that they should work with and alongside them in mutual solidarity; and thereby strive to enable and support mutual self-actualisation, as well as shared material wellbeing. That seems to be what a deep professional commitment to co-designed and co-created solutions would entail.
One practical way in which such an ethic may be expressed in the development field is in rigorously using monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) to understand and learn from the effects of our interventions, sensitively and quickly. The iterative and cyclical processes used by designers and some MEL specialists have a lot in common. They both involve loops of prototyping, experimentation, feedback, reflection, and adaptation. Both should be founded on an ethical commitment to bringing about good change while avoiding harm. That demands engagement with stakeholders, reflexivity in checking and verifying one’s assumptions, beliefs, and values, and a commitment to learn lessons and change course in the light of new information.
Design, function, and aesthetics
Focusing on design is sometimes taken to imply a fixation on aesthetics, the surface of things. This is sometimes derided as superficial, trivial, and unserious. Serious and practical people are supposed to prefer function and utility.
That black-and-white distinction might be considered unfair. Famously, modernist designers sought to unite form and function in crisp, streamlined designs, which turned out to have a beauty of their own. Nonetheless, many have criticised the modernists’ aversion to decoration. Beauty as well as utility can be functional to wellbeing. Artefacts, buildings and spaces that express distinctive cultural styles can engage with the histories of people and places and reflect local preferences. A design that is local and familiar could be more functional than a purely utilitarian design, because it stimulates engagement and invites affection.
People are entitled to good design
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has argued that development means enlarging people’s freedom to pursue goals they have reason to value. Sen’s axiom can provide a practical yardstick for assessing whether design-as-problem-solving is contributing to good change. Good designs can enlarge people’s freedom; they can extend a community’s capacity to meet its own needs; they can increase people’s ability to realise the kinds of lifestyles and livelihoods they value.
This reflects a conception of design’s role through the lens of affordances, which designer Donald Norman has defined as “a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of [an] agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used.” In other words, affordances are possibilities or opportunities wherein a person or people may take action to pursue their goals. In fact, the affordances available in a situation define the range of things a person may do or be.
Recognising that affordances arise not only from human relations with objects but from relations with places, institutions, technologies, laws, and policies (among other natural and created things), we may conclude confidently that the project of human development is centrally about enlarging and improving affordances for people and communities, so that they are better able to pursue the goals they have reason to value.
In other words, good design is not an indulgence but central to development work. In the words of prize-winning architect Yasmeen Lari,
“it is not only the privileged who have a right to enjoy well-designed environments. The disadvantaged and those that live on the margins need more, not less, design to achieve a better quality of life.”
Our exchanges during our Design and Development seminar have convinced us to continue exploring how designers and development professionals can learn from one another across teaching, learning, research, MEL, and practice. We want to raise the profile of design skills within IDS and of design approaches in Development Studies.
