Design is Not Going to Save the World – Info Entrepreneurship

Human-centered design has become the go-to operating system for innovation. Unfortunately, it is inadequate to help us solve the really big problems.

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Design can change the world.

When I was in design school, this statement filled me with energy and pride. I felt it in my core. How could you not? Over the last few decades design has been ascendant. To the point that it is now routinely viewed as one of the differentiators for companies and products.

Behind this ascension is design’s anointed operating system: human-centered design.

The fundamental idea behind human-centered design is that, to find the best solution, a designer needs to develop an empathetic understanding of the people they are designing for.

Designers do this through user interviews, contextual observations (watching users go about their business in their “normal” life) and a number of other tools that help the designer put themselves in the user’s shoes so they can understand their needs.

Once you can paint an empathetic picture of a user’s needs, the next step in the process is to identify a few key insights and use those insights to create a solution.

A famous example is the development of the Swiffer. Designers, tasked with improving household cleaning, observed customers cleaning their homes. A key insight they observed was that time was critical, and cleaning often cut into time for other activities. Any time savings would be a boon to the process. Mopping was identified as a time consuming part of cleaning with multiple steps and multiple pieces of equipment, not to mention waiting for the floor to dry. So designers created a “dry mop” (the Swiffer) that simplified the process and saved time. It was a huge commercial success.

Straightforward enough.

And the process works. Countless products and services that drive our daily lives were either born from this process, or were dramatically improved by it. Smartphones and many of their apps, social media services like Instagram and Twitter. The darlings of the sharing economy — Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. Not to mention a litany of physical products.

The way the world works and the way we work in it are fundamentally different today than they were even a decade ago, in large part because of the process of human-centered design.

So, we as designers puff out our chests and carry our heads high knowing that we have the power to change the world.

But, if you step back for a moment, you start to see a problem:

We’ve been designing the world, real hard, for decades now and we haven’t made a dent in a single real problem.

What do I mean by “real problem”?

I mean real problems. The big ones. The kind of problems that shake us to the core of our humanity and threaten our longterm viability.

Hunger. Climate change. Poverty. Income inequality. Illiteracy. Bigotry. Discrimination. Environmental degradation. The list goes on.

Right now there are people in the richest country on earth who are starving. People who can’t access or afford healthcare. People who are homeless. That’s the richest country.

Right now our oceans are choking to death from plastics. Our atmosphere is choking to death from CO2 and we have effectively lost 50% of the Earth’s biodiversity.

Guess what: Design hasn’t fixed any of it.

Not even a little bit.

And, unfortunately, design won’t fix any of it, because our operating system won’t allow it.

The problem with human-centered design

The big problems, the ones that threaten our existence, or the stability of our society, are systemic. They coarse through the veins of the entire system. Their causes are widespread and varied, and the people involved represent almost every segment of society.

These types of problem are multifaceted and do not have a silver bullet. There is no “ah-ha” insight hiding out there that we just need to uncover to suddenly see our way clear.

Solving these kind of systemic problems is like trying to contain a wildfire. While you’re working to contain one side of it, the other side has just burned another fifty square miles.

You can’t hope to make progress by just chipping away at one piece of the problem, while not addressing the others.

Eventually, like a wildfire, you’re just trying to mitigate as much damage as possible until the weather shifts and a rainstorm comes along, providing a truly systemic solution. A solution that addresses the problem from all sides.

Human-centered design is not architected to solve systemic problems. In fact, human-centered design is architected to solve the exact opposite type of problem.

Human-centered design is all about focus. It’s about observing the big picture and then zeroing in on a manageable set of insights and variables and solving for those. By definition this means the process pushes the designer to actively ignore many of the facets within a problem. This doesn’t work when you’re trying to solve a systemic issue.

A recent study on ride sharing apps, a category of companies heavy on user-centered design, found that ride sharing adds 2.6 vehicle miles to city traffic for every 1 mile of personal driving removed. Ride sharing apps actually make traffic in cities worse.

Ride sharing companies, like Lyft, were predicated on the idea that they could put a dent in the problem of human transportation by solving for traffic congestion, and they used human-centered design approaches to do it. How could they have gone wrong?

Human transportation is not a focused problem, it is a significant systemic issue. Through a human-centered design process, ride sharing apps landed on the insight that getting a cab, or finding a ride, was inefficient in many cities. They focused on this insight and then, as the process is designed to do, shut out the other facets of the problem.

‘If we can make getting a ride more efficient, less people will drive their own cars, reducing traffic.’

These are the kind of simplified, guiding statements human-centered design produces.

And guess what, they succeeded in making the process of getting a ride easier. Human-centered design works for a problem like that. But this focused approach meant they weren’t looking at the other aspects of the full transportation picture.

For example, as the study found, a number of people use non-automobile transportation, like bikes, buses and trains, specifically because they don’t have a car and getting a ride is a pain. Once that process was made easier by ride sharing apps, those people began to opt for car-based travel over the other options they were using. More people started using cars. The focus required by human-centered design kept this non-auto population obscured from view during the design process. And this represents just one of the problem facets left out of the solution.

A user-centered approach is great for focused problems like: How do we make the experience better for Airbnb customers, or how do we change the way people mop. But it cannot contain a systemic problem like human transportation. When faced with a big, hairy, multifaceted problem, our focused, iterative operating system is abysmally inadequate. Human-centered design can barely handle damage control.

And so we inch our way froward. Chipping away at one side, while the other burns out of control.

What we need

We don’t need to get rid of human-centered design. It works for what it is designed for. We have way better mops now (among many other things), and that is great. But, we need to understand the limits of the tools we have and start to think about new tools. Tools that can help us grok the breadth and complexity of really big problems and start to solve for them systemically.

There are some promising developments aimed at moving human-centered design forward. IDEO, one of the progenitors of human-centered design, is pushing a new concept: Circular Design. The idea behind Circular Design is to start thinking about designed objects through the lens of a ‘circular economy’. No longer driven by a create and dispose mentality, but a create and reuse mentality. It’s a rebrand of the cradle to cradle concept, focused on sustainability.

This is great, and an important step forward. But it falls short of the systemic design thinking we need. Circular Design still drives toward focused design insights from which to create solutions. It just asks the designer to start thinking about the full lifecycle of their solution and it’s long-term impact. Again, a indisputably important shift in the culture of design, but will it truly solve big problems?

If I design for the full lifecycle of my reusable water bottle, I have a more sustainable water bottle, but I have not created a systemic solution for our plastics problem. I have not changed the economic incentives driving plastic culture. I have not solved for the distribution and financial issues that make single use bottled water more accessible. I have not solved for the public health issues that make single use bottled water significantly safer in so many areas. I have not solved for all the other applications of single use plastics.

I’m back to damage control, and the fire keeps getting bigger.

How can we break the mold? If we continue the wildfire analogy, perhaps we can create a design framework that allows us to more rapidly innovate in small ways across all the facets of a problem, instead of trying to focus on a select few. Like a rainstorm, lots of tiny drops, delivered in a coordinated fashion can extinguish a very large fire.

Or maybe it’s not about creating a new system of design, but about doing away with our culture of competition and creating a new culture of collaboration. If we start ignoring the corporate and political silos separating us, we can collaboratively combine lots of focused solutions, allowing us to knit them together into a single tapestry that truly covers an entire problem. We have lots of solutions out there, we just don’t have a thread pulling them together.

Or maybe it’s about upending the economic incentives that drive design. Let’s not be naive about how industry works. To survive and thrive, design has gone where the money is. Is there money in solving systemic problems? There is definitely money in creating a better mop. I once spoke to a designer who had worked at a top tier design consultancy. One that touts it’s social innovation. She quit after a project where they were tasked with selling more cars to consumers in developing nations. It’s not their fault. There’s designing for change and then there’s designing to pay the bills. How can we flip this equation? Because when things like climate change come to a head, we will all probably wish we had reprioritized — or at least our children will.

Or maybe the solution is something totally different.

Admittedly, I don’t have the answers. But I do know that the way we are doing it right now isn’t cutting it. It is true that design can change the world, but if we want to design our way out of the big issues, we need to take a critical look at our approach. We need to upgrade our innovation operating system.