Design as a political Act

Can Democracy be a desired state (a promise /a “what if!” state) or can it be inter-woven in the design process itself? What about sustainability?

Both seems possible, though a desired state is usually shaped around “wants” of the most powerful stakeholder engaged in the design process. If there is a paying client, which normally is the case, the client will make sure that the desired state is aligned towards his/her benefit.

What should a designer or a design methodology do then? Designers yearn for more democracy, “Human-Centricity” and sustainability, but in the real world, we tend to act mostly client-centric and unsustainable.

Designers assumed that in graphical design, a logo well designed for viewers, promotes the client better and make the brand visually more memorable. In architecture, a space well designed, helps the client live an easier and more comfortable life in the designed space. In industrial design, a product well designed, helps users to use better and more of the product so that client could produce and sell more of it, and in all cases, clients could and should reap more benefits through design than users.

As “Design” moved into more complex realms, it became more evident that there is a tension between different stakeholders and thus former methodologies and mindsets about designing for a client do not work when users are getting more powerful to choose and systems get more complex.

For example, in designing services for a hospital, when patients, their families, nurses, doctors, managers, and the rest of staff have different “wants” and “needs” that are sometimes contradictory, what should a designer do? serve the purpose of design or serve the client and more powerful stakeholders? If you want to make the best experience of a hospital for patients and their families, sometimes you generate new tasks for nurses and doctors who are already heavily occupied with their routines. If not, you may add new expenses for a hospital which is already in debt and you might not even know it. Well, this is as much a design issue as it is a political one and to be successful, It seems that part of the process should be negotiating with different stakeholders while prototyping to get things going in the right direction.

It is a sort of change management process but a little bit harder as you are making different scenarios & propositions while you are testing them as a designer and your power of negotiating, lobbying and prototyping should not affect the longtime outcome of your design process. so what shall we do?

There is something missing in our methodology when it comes to these complications. In the real world this process of negotiation and lobbying goes on by powerful stakeholders to make things right (sort of prototyping & testing to reach a viable solution which works for all stakeholders not just the client), but it is our job to team up with different stakeholders, find out about needs and wants of different stakeholders, serve the purpose of a service or system (if we could ever define it) and make ways for it to always evolve or at least know when it is time for change.

In pursuit of designing a better service or system, I believe that we need to:

All in all, we can’t do much more than facilitating a Critical & Creative Communication in a Context so the whole system can evolve organically. We should make spaces for system stakeholders to communicate effectively when it is needed. Tools for facilitating this, are simple, but changing our minds, then our stakeholders’ and using these tools, takes time.

If we involve our stakeholders in the design process, they would feel more ownership for the outputs and more responsibility towards outcomes, therefore they would engage more in innovative & proactive behaviours to improve services and systems. I believe if we as designers, do this right, we might help in making better and more authentic services and systems.

Related posts:

Hello! Welcome to a series of blog posts where I will be going in depth and talking about my experiences with learning the Spring Framework! Of course, we all love Spring for its simplicity and the…

For these past 2 years, I have been focusing my study in creating an interactive documentary. As part of the Interactive Capstone class working with Soul of Athens project that I took this Spring…

Over the past few years, the economy has reeled from inflation, labor shortages, global conflict, and, yes, the Covid-19 pandemic. Even before the uncertainty of today’s climate, women were grappling…