Brands are constantly telling us about their design consciousness. By “design consciousness” I mean our awareness that we – technologically savvy, culturally engaged, sometimes neurotic human beings – are creating the world of day to day experience in our own likeness, whatever that happens to be in the moment. Even though it doesn’t always feel as if we’re in charge of the situation, we are. All the stuff you see around you where you’re sitting right now, the cool stuff and the crap, was created and put where it is now by someone, on purpose, by design. That’s design consciousness.

Microsoft just launched a campaign to tell us that we’re all creatives creating the world, using the powerful technology that they provide us. It’s a beautiful minute of glossy video urgently narrated to an empty concert hall by Common the rapper, the prolific all-round artist and good guy.

“…Its not about what technology can do, it’s about what you can do with it. You’re the voice, and it’s the microphone. When you’re the artist, its the paintbrush…We have mixed reality that changes how we see the world and AI empowering us to change the world we see. You have more power at your fingertips than entire generations that came before you. So here’s the question. WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH IT?”

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Pick something close at hand that makes you think, “this is nice!” Take a few moments to feel its heft in your hand, its texture against your skin, perhaps how it smells, how it sounds when you tap on it; how it makes you feel when you look at it and what it makes you want to do with it. These experiences are all a function of its design.

Everything that you see around you that isn’t a person, a creature or a plant was designed, by someone, whether they did it knowingly, or not. It’s a big deal. It’s how we create the world of day to day experience. Yet, it’s only recently, in the last century or so, that we’ve had a distinct discipline that we call design and a category of people we call designers. Now you hear all the time that this, or that or whatever was done by design or that it was designed to achieve a certain outcome. But, what does that even mean.

What is design, really? And why on earth do we do it? What did we do before there were designers designing things in a deliberate, intentional manner? Can the answers to these questions help us understand how we should be doing it better, today? Over the course of a long career doing, teaching and consulting about design and it’s latest extension, design thinking, I’ve often asked myself questions like these. When I raise them with others – trained designers and non-designers alike – I get curiosity and interest, but few satisfying ideas. So a few years back I decided to seriously look for answers. I’m finally ready to share.

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This is for anyone who has ever felt that design isn’t being used to its full potential. By “design” I mean the disciplined practice that underlies all intentionally creative work whether you call it design thinking, UX/UI, industrial design, architecture or graphics design. This is for all the times you’ve sat through a project briefing thinking “this is really dumb!” Or a review that goes south after you’ve delivered some of your best work and you note quietly to yourself “In a sane world, this would be criminal”.

There are reasons why every design team has found themselves frustrated by factors that are much bigger than themselves, embedded in “that’s just the way it is” rationalization. They aren’t worth railing at (though we often do) because, well, it is just the way it is, there’s little we can do about it in the short-run and we’ve got work to do that we’re being paid for. Like the times that funding dries up for the project that is most important to people’s well-being. Or the VP of something or other has an entirely different frame for the project than what the creative team knows is right. Or at the most basic level, the design solutions to world hunger, global warming, malaria in Africa or urban sprawl that you know would work if we only gave them a try are not even a starter for consideration by serious people with their feet firmly planted in “the real world”.

Having asked myself these questions countless times, done my share of railing, and explored a good number of paths to find satisfactory answers, I’ve decided to take a step back from the problem; I’m taking a look at what the longer-run issues underlying what it is that stops us from  designing the most wonderful possible so that we can attend to the cultural, political and technological changes that take much longer than a single product cycle, or even a single generation of designers. I figure that it’s taken decades, centuries, even millennia for design discipline to get where it is today. In the spirit of the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock, we may as well take a longer view to the way we go about shaping the world of day to day experience.

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The age old nature versus nurture debate presents itself to me as a question writ large on a giant billboard at the side of the road. Orr, my eighteen year old son zooms by on the way to the rest of his life. Four months ago he left for college. What part of this curious, creative, earnest, effort avoidant young man is a product of the upbringing we provide him in organic Berkeley? What part is simply his true nature shining through. Nature verses nurture was presented to me in a segment of the Hidden Brain podcast that I’d been listening to on my early morning bike rides to give me something to think about. Pod-host, Shankar Vidantam, is a thoughtful storyteller with an incisive mind and matter-of-fact discipline.

Today he discussed sex and gender, and to what extent our genes or our upbringing form the basis of identity, personality and ability. He set the frame for a science-based discussion with the brouhaha caused by the recent firing of a Google engineer James Damore who posted a memo to an internal message board arguing that women may not be well represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering. His firing made him a cause celebre for the “nature” crowd. He took umbrage in the science that shows that women are simply different to men and claimed that he was innocently acknowledging undeniable differences to better identify solutions to the technology gap. The “nurture” people countered with science of their own.

First up was neuroscientist Dr. Deborah Son who has shown that testosterone masculinizes the brain. For counter-point Vidantam talked with historian Jo Paoletti who has been keeping track of baby fashions to show that assignment of pink and blue to little girls and boys is actually quite random. Finally Lise Eliot’s neuro-plasticity studies are cited to support and nature AND nurture position.  As I listened to what felt like a futile back and forth, it struck me is how directly the design consciousness framework that I’ve been working on illuminates this intractable debate.

Design consciousness, in a nutshell, suggests that design practice is the expression of an evolutionary instinct we acquired while hunting and gathering on the African savanna. By our own creativity we adapted ourselves to our environment, and our environment to us as a sort of short-cut to Darwinian evolution. Our long climb from primate to person, Ardipithicus to Homo-designer, has been a co-creative story between our nature and the culture we have created to make our lives safer, more abundant and more pleasurable. Design consciousness arises when we wake to ourselves as a creator species able to use our tremendous technological prowess to design the world of our dreams or at least the one that we can best imagine.

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I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?
-Mark Zuckerberg

In a manifesto posted last Thursday, the youthful founder of Facebook asked the question “are we building the world we all want? “ that closely echoes the conversation starter I posted here myself just two weeks ago. I’m pretty certain though, that publication of his 5,000 word manifesto so close on the heels of my challenge was pure coincidence. Or it could be the “zeitgeist” that I tried to name shortly after the Trump triumph (that you can read HERE).

In an upside down world where we can’t seem to rely anymore on what we know to be true, proven science is questioned more vehemently than fake-news, we’re finding it necessary to lay out some guidelines for how we’d like to see this drama play out in the end. That’s what Mark Zuckerberg did in calling for “bringing us closer together and building a global community” that is “supportive…safe…informed…civically-engaged…inclusive”.  [Read more…]