Looking forward, glancing back — A reflection in design futures
In March 2019, the council in the Southwark borough of London declared a climate emergency and pledged to make the borough carbon neutral by 2030. As a part of the Design Futures unit in my MA Service Design programme at University of the Arts London, we were asked to speculate and generate ideas for what the future may look like for the borough in the travel & transport sector.
This unit is about speculative design and uses ‘research through design’ methodology to create conversations through provocations in the form of diegetic objects. All this sounded pretty alien to me at the start, however, I was excited to learn a new way to conduct design research. It’s not often that one gets to experiment with new ways of working in commercial design practice and is told it’s okay to have the wrong answers. So with that in mind, I started this 7 week long journey, ready to meddle with the future.
The methodology
Speculative design starts with asking ‘what if’ and relies on a designer’s informed imagination to address ‘wicked problems’ in the society. I say ‘informed’ because contrary to my belief at the start of the unit, speculative thinking is not about dreaming up fantastical, over the top narrative as much it is about critical look into the behaviours of today. Speculative design is also not about predicting the future, but rather using design to combat future challenges and head into a preferable future.
In this unit, we used research through design methodology to instigate public debate. Research through design methodology uses lab, field and showroom frameworks as means of conducting research. In the past, our research activities have been limited to conducting field research. However, in this unit, we also use the ‘showroom’ framework to collaborate with potential stakeholders. In their book ‘Design research through practice from the lab, field and showroom’, the authors claim, the ‘showroom’ framework uses prototypes to provoke reactions and conversation with the ultimate goal of making a positive difference in the world we live in (Koskinen et al., 2011, pp. 9)
I found this way of conducting research valuable, as it encourages designers to learn by doing rather than by analysis. Doing this helped clarify our own understanding of the future rather than getting stuck with the details. From the perspective of a service designer, it’s a great way to engage and collaborate with people, confront our own biases and have the ability to look beyond them in the service of the people.
At the start…
Armed with this new knowledge, a group of 4 Service Design Students (Freddie, Giselle, Sayali and myself) set out to create a future world situated in Southwark 2030.
As I said before, speculative design is about ‘informed imagination’, so our first step was to inform ourselves through a thorough scan of the existing horizon. With focus on travel and transport, we looked at innovation and policies both from a local and international context. This framework helped looking at travel and transport holistically and identify interdependencies of the sectors. We further broke down our findings into 6 major buckets — Economic, Political, Environmental, Social, Technological and Behavioural.
We found that there is a general trend to incentivise and encourage the use of sustainable alternatives by the governments around the world. This, for example, can be seen in China by an increase in the sale of EVs due to the subsidies provided by the government. (Hertzke, Müller, Schenk and Wu, 2018)
It was interesting to note that governments and users rarely viewed transport systems holistically in a way that cuts across transportation modes. By including and facilitating active transport as means of mobility, greenhouse emissions could be drastically reduced. (Nicol, Salemme and Featherby, 2020)
We found that people are driven by convenience, rewards and cost. These behaviours have become commonplace due to the rise of digitally enabled services in the transportation sector. ((Nicol, Salemme and Featherby, 2020)
We also informed ourselves of the situation in Southwark. Approximately half of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter air pollution in London is estimated to stem from road transport(Greater London Authority, 2020). We also found that about 60% of the households do not own cars. (The 15-minute city: a London case study, 2020)
With this information in mind, we decided to focus on active transport and asked ourselves, how do we reduce barriers to active transport and motivate people to travel sustainably?
What if..
Our horizon scanning brought forth some obvious ‘what if’ questions. These were a direct result of all the information we had gained. What if sustainable behaviour could be rewarded? What if cities were designed for walking? What if carbon information was made visible? What if cities were safe and crime free? What if people had no cars?
As kids we would often come with bizarre ‘what if’ questions. What if I had a superpower? What if I slept and woke up in the future? What if scenarios help to push the boundaries of our thinking and allow its reader to step into an imaginary world which has new rules and possibly new behaviours. They are great triggers for exploratory, ideation exercises.
It’s a lot harder to do this when you have a lot of information. As adults, our minds try to make sense of the world. While logic and rationale are important, they limit our imagination to a myriad of possibilities. A good way to exercise our imagination was to step outside of our sphere of transport and explore other contexts that could help us ideate.
We used brainstorming techniques like ‘related worlds’ and ‘swapping empathy’ in order to come up more provocative what if questions.
You may be wondering why it’s so important to get what if questions right? In my opinion the what if question is like a key, it helps you unlock the doors to Narnia and transport you to possible future worlds.
Using artefacts to make the future tangible
Now that we had a starting point, our challenge was to bring that world to life. In ‘research through design’ methodology we do that through artefacts that exist in this world. These objects are more than their physical attributes. They tell stories about the context and provide insights into future behaviours. In their book ‘Speculative Everything’ Dunne and Raby say, “Props used in design speculations are functional and skilfully designed; they facilitate imagining and help us entertain ideas about everyday life that might not be obvious. They help us think about alternative possibilities — they challenge the ideal, values and beliefs that our society embodied in material culture.” (2013, pp. 35)
If you’ve ever seen Black Mirror on Netflix, you know what I’m talking about. It is a show that explores a twisted, high-tech near-future where humanity’s greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide. It is an excellent example of future worlds and gives a glimpse into the new behaviours that exist in them. However, it is extremely challenging to think about what the ‘new normal’ might be in the future. We were constantly contemplating what the simplest indicators of change are, that would explain what our future world is.
We learnt that to prototype these objects, we must have a clearer understanding of the world we were envisioning and the concept we wanted a reaction on. For eg. By creating a digital object rather than a physical one, we realised we would shift the conversation to digital exclusion or digital literacy rather than keeping the audience focused on the core subject of sustainability. It was therefore important to understand and consider the essence of the behaviours we wanted to focus on.
As designers we are often explaining and selling our concept to the ‘client’. But by creating objects and letting people react to them, the outcome is quite different — we move away from getting validation to getting authentic feedback. We get to know about people’s values and we discover what we’re missing. In doing this designers become guides rather than prescribers of change.
The other aspect of creating objects is creating a sense of relatability. Not everyone we engage with in our project is a designer and so by showing people something tangible, it makes it easier to trigger their imagination and get a response. In this way, making physical objects helped us engage people whose voices would otherwise have been excluded.
The concept and early prototypes
One of the first few concepts we presented originated from the provocation — what if walking was rewarded? We introduced the concept of a ‘Step Coin’, a currency you earned through your steps that you could use to buy things.
When we put it in pictures, it seemed as though it all fit well. Carbon cars would be taxed and its value would go towards the currency. This would shift the power dynamic in the society and take the wealth away from car owners to encourage people who were choosing sustainable modes of transport.
On sharing this concept with our tutors and Tom Taylor from the Southwark Council, several concerns were raised. We had unknowingly excluded several groups of people for eg. people with mobility issues or single mothers who probably didn’t have the time to walk to places. Looking at it from the lens of social justice, we had also wrongly made assumptions about how the concept would impact homeless people and how taxation may adversely affect those with lesser means. We had gotten too optimistic and failed to look at our artefacts objectively. To consider deviances and look at everything through a critical lens is an important aspect of speculative design. The authors of Speculative Everything argue that criticality is not the same as cynicism but rather critical thinking, that is, not taking things for granted, being skeptical and always questioning what is given (Dunne and Raby, 2013).
To mitigate some of our biases we looked at ways in which ‘Step Coin’ could be used to balance the inequalities.
Even with these iterations, it was not clear who we were designing for. Who would benefit from the service and why should they benefit?
Sometimes, when we are working on concepts, our vision becomes myopic and we start focussing on the details rather than addressing larger issues. Our design process allowed us to go back to those primary questions and rethink the whole system.
To clarify the stakeholders and the systemic issues that would be the focus of our project. We created a system map that allowed us to look at the whole ecosystem holistically. Travel isn’t and has never been about just modes of transport, so why don’t we also look at where people might go and what their motivation will be to go there, using active modes of transport?
More objects, more feedback — The continuous loop
We introduced the concept of using Step Coin to help support local businesses on the high street. We realised that local currencies could be used to create a ‘walking economy’. Our research showed us, currencies such as the Brixton or Bristol pound are the first step to a social economy, with money circulating back into local businesses (Hickey, 2015).
We put this new system to the test with several stakeholders that knew more about how the travel system works. Jeremy Leach from Living Streets, a charity dedicated to walking, added to our knowledge of the politics in play in Southwark when it comes to active transport. He talked about the sense of entitlement in car owners when it comes to roads and how infrastructure would need to change to accommodate growing pedestrian traffic. He also highlighted ways in which unsustainable behaviour could be penalised. This feedback was critical because it helped us clarify the future world even further. We had thought about increasing active transport, but hadn’t considered the implications of that on how the streets would look.
Jack Skillen from Team London Bridge told us about the complexity of the tax systems. He forced us to think about how these taxes would be imposed and how they would be received by residents. This also brought forward the conundrum of carrot or the stick. We had to critically think about what would create real behaviour change and whether we wanted to focus more on rewards or penalties.
Furthermore, while speaking to Tim Long from the transport and planning department of the council, we were confronted with the question of where the funding might come from. While this was a detail we felt was taking away from the larger conversation we wanted to have. It helped us arrive at a completely new angle that we hadn’t considered before — one of health.
The frustration of finishing
With each round of feedback, we desperately kept iterating in order to get it right. Frustrations flew and cynicism took over. Looking back, I feel like we were missing the purpose of the exercise. As designers, we are used to iterating repeatedly in order to perfect the solution we design. However, in ‘research through design’ methodology, each round of iteration is a way to gain knowledge and integrate even more perspectives and voices from stakeholders. There isn’t much value in finishing, because that means that the conversation is over. In their book ‘Design research through practice from the lab, field and showroom’ the authors claim that dialogue makes research socially robust. Whether it (design research) raises debate is more important than facts and knowledge. They further argue that a successful programme is one that participates in public discourse and interprets society rather than act as legislator. (Koskinen et al., 2011, pp. 48)
We realised that our prototypes opened up the conversation to include a lot more people than we earlier envisioned. We were able to speak to local businesses on Walworth and Old Kent Road to hear what they had to say about our concept. Unlike the experts, we were able to share physical prototypes with them and felt that it was the only way of getting their point of view in their contextual setting. This was important because as students we were able to capture the true reaction of the people that perhaps the council would not be in the position to do. By conducting research through us, they were able to mitigate the power dynamic that would’ve been in play and truly democratise decision making.
As designers, our role was to amplify the voices of all the people who could potentially have an opinion or stake in this future. For eg — taking forward the health angle to the project, we found that in Southwark the estimated cost of physical inactivity exceeds £17 million each year (Southwark public Health, 2017). Our project would now be of interest to local public health bodies like the Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust.
I realised that our project had the capacity to break down silos and emphasise the interdependencies within these stakeholders.
Southwark 2034
This time around our prototypes took into account all the feedback we had received, considering all the different aspects of the problem namely sustainability, public health and regeneration of the high street. It’s unimaginable that a concept that started with just a simple phrase — what if people could use their steps as currency? Was now a part of a much larger conversation.
With the final prototype, we tried to make sure that we looked at the lens of design justice and included the diversity that Southwark boasts. We also considered the role of peripheral bodies that may have a role to play in the planning or implementation of the scheme.
Each picture either built the narrative or spoke of the behaviours of this future world. Our final feedback session brought forth more opportunities involving creating green maps and creating further linkages with green energy stores on the high street. There was also a recommendation to allow use of Southwark Coin for local British produce, further connecting our concept to teams working on consumption.
All these ideas made me realise the essence of collaboration in the creation of future worlds. If anything, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for different organisations and people to work together in order to effectively handle this emergency situation. This is the evidence we need to run more such projects that foster the coming together of otherwise independent bodies.
What thinking about the future has taught me
At the start, I spoke about how this methodology was alien to me, but now we’re at the end and I have to say, it’s easier to understand the concept of ‘research through design’ in retrospect. It’s a roller coaster journey and you are only able to capture the true value of it when you look at it in totality. I felt that by including the stakeholders at the beginning of the design process rather than the end we are able to truly create user-centered design.
There are a few things I learnt about myself as a designer as well. Through the course of this project there were several conversations about our responsibility as a designer and our own value system. The project shed light on my inherent biases and what matters to me as a designer.
Here’s another thing I thought I’d never say — There is learning in failure. I have heard many people say this to me in the past but I never quite understood until now. The most important aspect of research through design is failure. To be imperfect and quick. The traits I don’t boast myself to have. Forcing the perfectionist in me to RIP, I learnt that it’s more important to progress and have the conversations than present the perfect design artefact for people to admire.
Finally, I learnt that my understanding of service design was limited at the start of this programme. There are so many different ways which service design methodologies can be used in service of the people, this makes our role as designers real and relevant. I don’t necessarily believe that climate change can be combated by single entities working independently but it will take a collective effort that can be led by designers and for that, future gazing and backcasting is one way of bringing criticality to what we do and help change the world for the better.
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