Planting in the Forest: A Life-Centered Design Approach

Last year... December 2009. My baby is almost one year old, finally came her age of toys! I am excited to shop for toys; I go to the shopping mall... I have passed through the toys corridor in the shopping mall many times but I have not realized before that they divided the toys according to gender. Does it matter at the age of one if you play with a car or a doll? Does it matter at any age? I am trying to be gender neutral so I also walk through the boys’ section to buy a car for my baby girl... but why are there so many cars? I get disconnected. I will not buy any of the cars making up almost half of the toys in boys section. I would not buy one even if my baby were a boy. I want the earth and life to survive, so I decide to buy a small bicycle that she can roll like a car. I look over all of the corridors but I cannot find any. I go online to shop for a small bicycle but I find only a few, which are over expensive. I then start searching wooden toys and see that Barthes’ (1972) notion of “French toys” is now applied to wooden toys. The substance and the colors are indeed warmer; however, the majority of the wooden toys are designed very much like plastic toys; they “do not allow the child to identify herself as creator but as owner or as user" (p.54). The material does not matter anymore. The message transferred with the artifact is important. I can buy a wooden car, but it still supports a certain set of values. The ultimate particular is important, but I wonder who decides on the general or even the universal... (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003)

This year... December 2010. At the beginning of the semester (Fall, 2010), when our professor, Erik Stolterman, of design theory class introduced our final assignment, which would be a personal position paper about our own design philosophy that we would be able to understand/reflect on during the course semester, I thought that it would be very simple for me to write, since I had my own philosophy of life, which I also use while teaching and parenting and thought that I could use this for design too. And I have actually started writing the day I have heard about the assignment in the first week. I wrote two things on this document concerning my philosophy in life:

1. Respect life.
2. Take good care of earth.

And further I have noted down:

“I could have written: do not show discrimination according to race, gender, sex, age, disability, etc.; show respect to different thoughts, make environment friendly things (recyclable, reusable, durable, ...), do not use toxic chemicals like BPA, phthalates, PVC; take care of people’s physical health so choose the ergonomic design even though it will cost the $2.4 million*,... and keep writing thousands of things under these two things. But whatever I will write will go under either the first or the second. So it is good to keep it simple with only these two!

Now, I am at the last week of the semester, looking at the same document, with the same principles in life but this time what I think is that it is not simple. Moreover, it is complex! A design situation offers “potentially infinite and limitless sources of information, requirements, demands, wants and needs, limitations, and opportunities” (Stolterman, 2008, p.57). The designer has to choose from this infinite space of design and doing the ‘right thing’ is based on designer’s judgment (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003, p.233). And design rationality is expandable (Hatchuel, 2001).

Or is it? I agree, in theory, there are infinitely many choices a designer could take; however, looking at the design outcomes that have already been produced, like in the example of toy cars or even real cars, I am going to argue if there are boundaries that limit the design space in practice.

The Forest
In order to watch the beautiful colors of fall season, we went to a forest nearby Bloomington, IN. It was my first time in US to see a warning sign that was saying “Wipe Your Feet! Please brush your boots before entering this natural area”. Different than my home country, people were entering the indoor places with their shoes and I have not seen any signs concerning cleanness of any area before. That’s why I was surprised to see this sign and even more surprised to see it for an outdoor place. Then, I learned that it is to protect the forest from invader seeds that may be carried by boots.

Using the metaphor of forest for the field of design, and Buxton’s (2007) branching tree model of “design as branching exploration and comparison” (p.388), what I think is that, before proceeding on to the branches of a tree, first, the designer should know the forest, the soil and learn about the flora and the weather conditions and other conditions that affect the forest; only then s/he can start planting new seeds; otherwise, there is always a risk of invasion or exclusion.

Here, I have to open a parenthesis and say that, the idea of “expandable rationality” or ‘infinitely many’ choices a designer could take is encouraging and promising; however, before exploring the ‘infinitely many’ alternatives, walking around the forest and seeing the big picture is important. That’s why; I want to continue my paper with discussing the ‘boundaries’ of “expandable rationality” in terms of meaning created by different stakeholders and the system as well as the designer’s own lifeworld, which have certain places in the big picture.

Design as ideological world-system apparatus.
In his essay of “In Praise of Idleness”, Bertrand Russell (1932) brings a new perspective to Adam Smith’s pin manufacturing example, which is used to explain the division of labor to produce more pins. With an illustration, Russell explains that if a new system is discovered to produce twice as much pins at the same amount of time, and the need for pins is met, then in a rational world, the pin factory workers do not need to work eight hours a day; therefore, the daily work time could be reduced to four hours. However, in the actual world this scenario does not work like this. The employees still work eight hours and too many pins are produced. But the system finds some other solutions for this overproduction (Leonard, 2007, 2010):

• Externalizing the costs
• Selling the product under its value by cutting down the wages or insurance costs of workers
• Designing disposable pins
• Designing the pins easily breakable
• Designing for the dumb

One can see that the majority of the solutions are related to the design of the things. Althusser (1971) said it is the ideological state apparatuses (religious, educational, family, legal, political, trade-union, communications, cultural ISA) that shape our lives and reproduce the conditions of production and the means of production, but actually it is not just the state or states or governments anymore; it is the world-system, the capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein, 1979), in which design plays an important role.

The above picture drawn for pin production and consumption is not much different in the area of electronics too. In 1960s when Gordon Moore said that the processor speed could double approximately every two years, he did not mean that we should discard our electronic devices every two years (Leonard, 2010). And if the release dates of iPhone and its several generations are observed, it is easily seen that the electronics are now even more frequently discarded. And iPhone was designed with the idea of downloadable applications so that people do not need to update their devices frequently.

Of course, these results are not surprising. It is the government and the world-system working together telling people to “produce more consumer goods to ramp up the economy” since at least the World War II, or “to shop” in order to overcome the shock of 9/11 (Leonard, 2007). However, neither the world is an infinite resource, nor is it an infinite garbage can (Chomsky, 1988). And buying green or living simple is not going to solve this problem (Jensen, 2009).

Also it is not only the physical artifacts that pollute the planet. What about the software? Don’t they cause the pollution of the planet in an indirect way? When one sits in front of the computer for several hours, can she still be energetic? If the technology makes her life easy, she should be “delightful in her leisure” so that her quality of life will increase and so the worlds’ “moral qualities” (Russell, 1932)? Where do people spend their leisure times; in front of computers? Does technology pollute life? And there are so many questions that could be asked but at this point what I want to ask is, who is responsible for all these? Is it the user, the designer or the client?

‘Naïve’ designer facing the “evil of design”.
Design is very powerful; it has the power to change the world but at the same time it has consequences that occur naturally, accidentally or intentionally, which Nelson and Stolterman refer as “the evil of design” (2003, ch.12).

When Madam Curie discovered radioactive elements, she would not know that her discovery was going to be used in building nuclear weapons, nor did she know that it was going to cost her life because of the radioactivity she was exposed when she was working with those elements (Bloom, 2008). Can we say that Madam Curie is accountable for the nuclear weapons, or Einstein for the atom bomb? It may be easier to decide on these situations then to decide on a design situation. The design case is more complex. “In the design process, the client is responsible for making judgments, but the designer has [also] an impact on the client’s realm of judgments” (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003, ch.8).

McCarthy and Wright (2008) cite Mattelmäki and Battarbee, saying that “they see design empathy as a personal connection between designer and user that facilitates seeing and understanding users [...] as people with feelings rather than test subjects”. Usability engineering is criticized in design field (Buxton, 2007; Greenberg & Buxton, 2008). Although I agree with them, I do not think that the alternative so called ‘user-centered’ approaches are that naïve, since one part of understanding users is to sell the design. And the evil of design in this area may go wild and target even small children, either selling them unhealthy or poisonous things and worse, raising them as life-long consumers (Consuming Kids, 2008). In this case, the designer conducting a user-centered design process, running focus groups, arranging parties to get feedback from children is not that naïve, so should be hold at least as much accountable as clients and different stakeholders.

The boundaries are not always created by the system or stakeholders directly or indirectly in a design situation; the design space is also limited to the designer’s lifeworld. And in order to cultivate our lifeworlds, expand our horizons we need to see the big picture. Otherwise, even though we do it for the design, with our best wills, the forest will be under risk.

A life-centered design approach
User-centered approaches or experience design approaches are generally centered on people. However, the consequences of design do not only affect people. It affects the whole life. Just one example, discussed in news this year was the decline in bee population. There were other causes, such as agricultural pesticides, the effects of climate change, associated with the decline of the bee population but researchers at Panjab University conducted a three months experiment and found that cell phone radiation also causes the bees to stop producing honey, queen bee halving the egg production and as a result hive size reducing dramatically (Herriman, 2010). What was more dramatic though, the bees were discussed in terms of their economic values and how the problem is going to affect people’s lives.

Life may mean different things to different people. Hereby, I should stop and explain what I mean by life. I do not want to write a definition that will restrict the future findings, however, I should say that, life is not an attribute that is associated with animals and plants and all living things; this is only one part of life, which belongs to a larger system. And the earth does not belong to us; it belongs to this larger system, universe as we now so far. If we continue seeing life as something belonging to people, our existence in the forest will be ‘invasion’ and this means that there will be no ‘forest’ soon.

Another thing I want to say about life is that it is not something material. For example, the effects of technology are not always physically observed. Each day, new software is being released to block people’s relationship with some websites. After Web 2.0 Suicide Machine (Savicic, 2009), which 90,000 people are waiting to have the service to delete their online identities (Beanlan, 2010), new software, Anti-Social, was released this year with a similar purpose (Stutzman, 2010). Also one can easily find out by using a search engine, that there is high demand for Internet blocking or filtering software. We need to take a closer look at the interaction between human and computer, however, these results still tell us something. At least we can see that there are people who want to be onlife, not online.

* * *

Design situation is indeed complex. However, “complexity does not always brings problems, it also brings positive experience” (Stolterman, 2008 p.57). Taking this positive experience and challenge of complexity, I want to continue my research on life-centered design.

To grow alternative seeds in the forest, we need to work more. For now, I can say that we need to come up with good design that has soul, and at the same time engaging. If we want to make a toy that is alternative to car or cars, it should be at least as engaging as cars. If the engaging is the message now, and the message is determined by culture, politics and the world-system, in order to disseminate our alternative seeds, we need to build our design culture and design artifacts with the idea of “ensouled design”, which is related to the notion of caring (Nelson & Stolterman, p.285). If we care for life and forest, it is urgent that we see the big picture and change our focus to life-centered design approaches.

_____________________

* In a real world problem (Project Ernestine), GOMS model was used to show that the proposed design for telephone operators would cost the company $2.4 million a year. The company did not switch to the proposed design even though it was ergonomic for the operators. (Atwood, Gray & John, 1996; John, 2003).

** This paper was written for HCI Design Theory class taught by Eric Stolterman at School of Informatics and Computing at IUB.


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