Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This is quite a long piece which has been in the works for some time. It’s about a particular game professionals like to play in which conceptual elaboration has come to become the natural response to complex social problems. If you enjoy it, please consider sharing and subscribing.
I was first introduced to the concept of ‘design thinking’ in my mid-twenties when I was working for a hip, boutique innovation consultancy. Historically, I associated design with the the design of material things: Things which can be seen, touched, felt, and held. Designers design bags, chairs, curtains, living rooms and classic motorcycles. This is why we commonly think of interior design or architectural design.
When I asked my boss to explain how design became design thinking, she gave the example of the modern bottom-mount fridge. When the first residential fridges were sold in the mid 20th century, almost all of them were designed with a freezer on top and the fridge on the bottom. It was a designer who noticed that for the elderly and immobile, bending down to access the fridge was an ongoing daily nuisance. The designer suggested that the engineers flip the fridge and put the freezer on the bottom so that the main compartment was more accessible. The designer came to this insight by closely observing and empathising with fridge users. Design thinking, my boss said, was a way of creating new products by thinking from the perspective of the end-user.
A colleague, Matt Norman, succinctly described design as “rendering the intent” of the user in a product, system or process so it better meets their needs. In the words of Catriona Mackenzie and Sarah Sorial, design involves “imagining from the perspective of the other in the other’s situation.”1
Design thinking, then, also permits design to extends design beyond material things and into other areas of life: services, digital products, and experiences. If the fridge designer imagined an elderly person retrieving vegetables from the bottom drawer of a fridge, the contemporary designer instead imagines an elderly person using a mobile phone to call about a delayed pension cheque. The latter situation involves a mix of material, digital, and social processes. This designer, in order to “render intent,” must “imagine themselves from the perspective of the other” in a long, complex chain of process and systems. The designer must imagine the phone (button size, text size, audio volume, weight, and so on), the digital infrastructure (cell connectivity, signal loads, call centre internal processes), and social factors (the user may be on a prepaid plan and unable to afford to remain on hold for too long, for example).
Unsurprisingly, these kinds of challenges — consequences of the unfurling, ever more-complex techno-social milieu we live within — really stretch a designer’s imagination. The designer may get 95% of the brief right but may fail to account for, for example, translation services for an elderly person who doesn’t speak English, or for situations where the cheque is delayed is due to congestion in the physical mail delivery system. In a chain that long, only one or two links need to be broken for the entire experience to fail for the elderly person.
Mackenzie and Sorial suggest that the complexity of our techno-social milieu strains the imaginative capacity of the designer past breaking point:
“There is a risk of assuming that, through imaginative thought experiments we can conduct deliberative dialogues with diverse others in our own heads. The risk is that instead of genuinely simulating others’ perspectives, or imaginingbeingothers, we project our own perspective onto those others, potentially resulting in colonising forms of imaginative projection that usurp others’ political agency.”
One might observe that the authors’ language there — and I’ll return to this — is quote complicated (‘imaginingbeingothers,’ presumably, means something other than empathy). Their point, however, is that there are limitations to the empathic imagination of the designer which seriously impacts on their ability to do their job well. A fridge is considerably less complex than a delayed pension cheque.
So, designers have moved towards what is today called Co-design, in which the people who designers design for are invited into the process so they can be designed with. “Design with, not for” is a common catch-cry of contemporary design. The field of design expands from design to design thinking, and expands again to Co-design.
This is the trend I find interesting. When design as a discipline encountered its own structural limitations, it invented for itself new kinds of language and understanding to overcome those limitations. Design thinking permitted the extension of design into the immaterial: digital products, services, and experiences. When the empathy in design thinking reached structural breaking point, Co-design was jerry-rigged onto the discipline. Additional side-steps and branches could be included into this story, but have been pruned for convenience — the story of design also includes service design, human-centred design, decolonised design, user experience design, and others.
This is how we enter into a situation where Esther Anatotlis, a professor of Art and Design at RMIT, comes to state that:
“Contemporary Design goes far beyond the visual… [It] facilitates vital civic processes of participation and collaboration; it enables the provision of humane and human-centred policies and services; it rethinks strategy and systems across all types and scales of organisation, and so on… Design is essential to enable the major changes which we must see across almost every sector of the economy and Australian life.”
At this point, we could ask the question: What isn’t within the remit of Design? How did Design go from Gucci handbags and upside-down fridges to civic life, power and democracy itself?
It may seem I am being unfair to designers, but I use design here only as a case study. Indeed, I was at a workshop the other last week where I met a librarian. If you assumed designers mostly work with material things, you might be forgiven for thinking librarians work with, well, libraries, which are presumably full of books, newspapers and magazines. This was certainly my assumption.
As it happens, I was quite naive as to the responsibilities of the contemporary librarian. The modern librarian has a concern for what is called in library studies ‘adult literacy.’ Adult literacy doesn’t refer to the capacity for adults to understand language, but rather refers to the literacy of adulthood itself — what every monstera-loving millennial ironically calls “adulting.”
The contemporary librarian exists, now, to help adults navigate the systems and processes that structure contemporary life. This means libraries exists to support adults getting bank cards, finding contractors for home repair, knowing how and when to flag a bus, learning how to send their kids to school, and so on. If the mid-century librarian was concerned with information contained within books contained within libraries, the contemporary librarian is concerned with distributed information networks contained within the internet and any/all informational systems built on the internet — a web that extends well beyond the library. “Adult literacy” is the term for this new set of responsibilities; the mess that is adulting. The librarian, presumably, has a shared interest with the designer in the welfare of the elderly pension recipient — but an entirely different language to describe and solve their problems. More on that later.
We see this general trend elsewhere. There is a push for Occupational Health and Safety professionals to also consider psychological harms2, so that the people who visit offices and look at step depth and balustrade height also look at office employees' passive-agressive emails. In parallel, Psychology long ago spawned Organisational Psychology, expanding the concept of mind to include the shared culture of professional organisations. I teach Community Psychology, which is yet another branch in the expansionist story of Psychology. While I hesitate to trash my own field, I can't help but recognise that I am in one way or another contributing to a complicated theoretical mess which nobody is willing to acknowledge, much less clean.
It’s perhaps time to put a pin in this butterfly. What I’m gesturing towards here is the general tendency for professional fields to develop ever more specialised language and conceptual frameworks for dealing with the increasing complexity — and frailty — of our techno-social milieu. This is what I have taken to calling The Mind Palace: A discipline-specific labyrinth of concepts, processes and frameworks which end up looking something like Escher’s House of Stairs.
We enter the room via. the Design foyer, and branch off into Design thinking, where we must then branch again into Co-design. Today, with Co-design largely having failed to live up to its promises, we must now speak of “faux co-design” or “co-creation,” which is another branch off another room. We fling open doors, moving into ever more niche conceptual spaces, hoping to escape into some society where we can all — finally — get along.
This is a game many of us play, but my fear is that it is a game we cannot win.
Designers, librarians and psychologists are all responding to basically the same set of problems — runaway technology, deepening inequality and the breakdown of social consensus. This diagnosis of our techno-social milieu is neither mine nor is it particularly novel3. However, I want to gesture towards a few consequences of this general trend which I feel haven’t gotten appropriate attention, and particularly the ways in which they bear on the lives of professionals who claim to be invested in the social good.
The first observation is that the construction of Mind Palaces reinforces the idea that professional life and professional structures are the seat, and origin, of most social change. As an example, I was at a conference a few weeks ago and the ‘activist’ invited to speak on a panel was a professional staffer for a non-government organisation. Activism, which to me has always been constitutively a movement of ordinary people, has become something we associate with funded institutions staffed by people with professional training in campaigning or community organising.
It is becoming increasingly necessary that one hold a Masters degree if one wants to comment on anything whatsoever of social relevance. Indeed, one academic even suggested that Universities should make democracy education a required unit for all students4 — an idea that seems fair enough until one realises that the author is implicitly suggesting that the price of civic participation should be a University degree.
Almost any social sciences discipline can claim a kind of centrality to social change by defining itself sufficiently broadly. “Psychology” can mean “anything concerning human behaviour,” and “Design” can mean “the rendering of any intent, in any system, at any scale,” and Library Studies can mean “the provision of public access to useful information.”
Any discipline defining itself sufficiently broadly is one preparing to build a vast Mind Palace of interconnected frameworks and concepts. This is like a tyrannical landlord clearfelling a forest to build a vast estate. That multiple disciplines engage in this jostling for relevance means that everything important becomes a question to be answered by one or more professionals. Even those professions which claim to include the marginalised and vulnerable must first claim the authority to be the ones that can delegate this authority. Cultural theorist Catherine Liu calls them ‘Virtue Hoarders5.’
The second observation is more insidious: It is the tendency, particularly by those of us in professional life, to focus on language over the things language is intended to represent. This is the palatial element to the mind palace: A privileged place aloof from life, built on the clearfelled forests described above.
I remember teaching a Community Psychology class where one student, hearing about the high rates of incarceration of Indigenous people in Australia, mused that such a thing was likely to be disastrous for stereotypes about Indigenous people. His first consideration was that people might incorrectly perceive Indigenous people to be criminals. The direct harm — Indigenous people actually in prison — was an afterthought. This is one example of signs, symbols and frameworks taking primacy in public dialogue. The idea of a problem becomes more important than the reality of it.
Iain McGilchrist put it this way:
The world now becomes self-enclosed in such a way that symbols refer to other symbols, signs to other signs, ideas to other ideas, language to other language, without so to speak breaking out of this hermetic space to what lies beyond6.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò also points out how this “self-enclosing” in language, the “hermetic space,” which I am calling here “The Mind Palace,” ends up supporting and enabling the privilege of the professional classes:
Perhaps the lucky few who get jobs finding the most culturally authentic and cosmetically radical description of the continuing carnage are really winning one for the culture. Then, after we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South’s megacities, to its countryside. But probably not7.
When Táíwò talks about “cosmetically radical,” I find myself thinking back to Mackenzie and Sorial’s use of “imaginingbeingothers” above.
One perspective on this problem is given by the Daoist trickster-sage Zhuangzi, who observed something similar in China around 2500 years go:
A fish trap is there for the fish. When you have got hold of the fish, you forget the trap. A snare is there for the rabbits. When you have got hold of the rabbits, you forget the snare. Words are there for the intent. When you have got hold of the intent, you forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so I may have a few words with him?8
What we have here between these three quotes is a remarkable convergence between an Anglo-saxon Neuroscientist, a Nigerian-American Philosopher, and an ancient Chinese sage. All are gesturing towards, to paraphrase Táíwò, a “false exchange rate,” between language and material life, and the obscene focus of professionals on the former at the expense of the latter.
A third and final observation is the development of niche industries of translation. If the Designer and the Librarian need to collaborate to help the pensioner get her cheque, then anyone who can speak to both the librarian and the designer is likely to hold a lot of structural power. There is, similarly, an opportunity for the person who can communicate the value of the library to institutional stakeholders, or who can speak about the library in plain language. Niche translators — and I count myself amongst them — are like emissaries who can move between mind palaces at will.
Of course, this person is another professional.
In the Book of Genesis, the descendants of Noah built a great city. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens,” to “make a name” for themselves. God, offended by their hubris, punished them by making them unable to speak to each other:
Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech9.
The Tower of Babel becomes a story about babble. That Genesis encoded a lesson about this suggests that this has been an issue for us for some time. Perhaps we can go even further back. There is a passage in one of the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus, where Plato documents Socrates’s words:
“I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.”
In listening only to men and not “trees and open country,” Socrates is laying the foundations for a Mind Palace. I suspect the trees and open country beyond the Mind Palace are essential to our escape as they provide us something to escape to. The Mind Palace is airless, stale, musty, and lifeless. Like all buildings, only the movement of people within them gives them the illusion of life and vitality. We potter about and renovate our Mind Palaces because we are unwilling to acknowledge we have given ourselves over to something dead, which will crumble the moment we turn our backs on it.
The trees and open country, by contrast, are fecund with life, are life, and do not demand us but invite us. The good question for any professional to ponder is to consider whether their concepts are living, dying, or already dead—and for the dying, how they might be hospiced, and for the dead, how they might be composted, in order that death may once again, as it always has, enable life to spring anew.
The empathy dilemma: democratic deliberation, epistemic injustice and the problem of empathetic imagination. Catriona Mackenzie & Sarah Sorial.
e.g. Safe Work Australia.
Jonathan Haidt’s Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Has Been Uniquely Stupid is a pretty good primer on all this.
Universities should make democracy education a requirement, University World News.
Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu.
The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist.
Being-In-The-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò.
Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, by Zhuangzi (Author), Brook Ziporyn (Translator).
Jonathan Haidt’s article (fn 3) alerted me to this story, which I think is apt in this context as well.