The decline in Design (Thinking)

Design was my first love. She opened my eyes to the little things in life — how a mug handle curves to hold your hand; how a ketchup bottle stands on its lid; how you can fill a Cup Noodles and microwave it without needing a bowl. Design taught me to see things differently. Of course, I picked up other lenses along the way — music, history, economics— but I’ve recently come home to design to understand why we are the way we are.

My return to design is in part because of work and in part because of my reading habits. In the latter half of college, I worked at an innovation center where we practiced Human-Centered Design. At work, I’ve been working on a project to develop software — lots of user experience (UX) design considerations. And, perhaps it’s been obvious in my writing, I’ve been fascinated with the social, cultural, and public health implications of urban design — how the space around us shapes our habits to drive to work or grocery shop once a week.

Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, defines design as a practice “that is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology.” In more concrete terms, I believe design concerns itself with how something can best be created to enforce a predetermined use case. A bottle of toothpaste, for example, is so intuitive, even a toddler can squeeze toothpaste onto a toothbrush. A great bottle of toothpaste, however, may come with a slider at the end to use every last drop.

Design is not exclusive to everyday products, either. There’s industrial design, such as how boxy cars from the 1960s slowly became the curved, aerodynamic cars we have today. There’s user interface (UI) design, where designers concern themselves with whether the “Accept” button is on the right or left of a pop-up menu. And I can’t forget graphic design — my bread and butter during college — where art meets branding. So, in an effort to address a little bit of everything, this essay will attempt to survey how design, design thinking, and designers impact the world around us.

The Norman Door: An Introduction to Design Thinking

There’s an age-old example that designers will use to illustrate bad design: the “Norman Door.” Take a look at the picture above. Without the “Push” label, your first instinct would probably be to pull the door towards you. Its curved handle is practically inviting you to pull. Don Norman, mentioned previously, became so famous for calling out these unintuitive and shame-inducing doors, designers began to name them after him. According to Norman, the embarrassing act of pulling on a push door is not your fault. For example, the restroom in my company’s office has a push plate on the outside and a pull handle on the inside — no confusion possible. That’s a good door.

There are many doors we can point to as good doors. A revolving door, for example, is strangely intuitive despite some cognitive friction upon one’s first encounter. Though it requires some timing and coordination, there’s no mistake about what you do: push the door. No handles. No frills. Just push. The automatic revolving door, however, is less intuitive because pushing the door interrupts the signal. You can’t push. You can’t control the timing. And the sensors don’t always activate immediately. Not a good door.

Pocket doors, or sliding doors, are also fairly good doors. With one prescribed plane, sliding the door in and out becomes intuitive motions. Beaded curtain doorways — which are not actually doors but do separate entrants from inhabitants — are perhaps the most intuitive of doors because there is no pushing, pulling, or waiting involved. You simply walk through the doorway. And while we may not all want to replace our doors with curtain doorways, they are a perfect product to examine human behavior — a designer’s currency.

Norman originated the holy gospel of many designers, tech workers, consultants, and other knowledge workers: Human-Centered Design. It’s a five-step cycle — empathize, define, ideate, prototype, iterate — that seeks to understand human tendencies and build a streamlined product that complements those observed behaviors. Design thinking may find that listeners are actually willing to pay for music if it’s more convenient than piracy (e.g., Spotify). It may find that viewers only use five or six buttons to operate a television (e.g., Roku remotes). Or it may find that consumers care more about replaceable toothbrushes rather than singing ones (e.g., Oral toothbrush heads). Behind every good product is a team of behavioral experts waiting to design the next big innovation.

When Design Works Naturally

Hiking has become a mainstay for city dwellers and suburbanites to reconnect with nature. The mountainous outlooks. The unexpected waterfalls. The creatures and critters. Barring the occasional binoculars or stray cooler of free water bottles, it often feels like an escape from any and all man-made industry. That feeling is by design.

A good hiking trail, according to the National Park Service, accomplishes some key goals. It can sustain long-term use with minimal impact to the ecosystem. It takes patrons to scenic views with little rerouting. And it requires minimal maintenance, either from wildlife or erosion or water damage. Trails are man-made constructs, either in recent times to accommodate for heavy traffic or in centuries past as a result of Native care. A trail designer helps maintain both types of trails. It is up to a trail designer to ensure that the trail is composed of the right material (e.g., rock, sand, dirt) at the right direction (i.e., intersecting diagonally with water fall-lines) at the right angle (i.e., not too steep).

Trail designers are encouraged to inspire awe and wonder, taking hikers to unique environmental offerings. Trails may want to show off hydrological features — such as ponds or lake — or geologic features — such as large bluffs of limestone. Trails usually wander through vertical features as a method of way finding, such as large trees or rocky overhangs. And they especially want to take you to ridge lines, where panoramic views ensue over a safe and stable slope. There’s a sense of controlled risk that is nurtured through meticulously maintained routes.

Conversely, designers intend to discourage hikers from veering off course. Among a number of hostile environments and areas of invasive vegetation, hikers should probably not get too close to active farmland, swamps, or overtly steep slopes. Trails should stay at least 25 feet from the edge of a stream to prevent damage to the water system. And designers do not want folks wandering into private property or areas under construction. Without well designed and well maintained trails, there could be some serious ecological damage from adventurers who do not know any better.

And part of this is Human-Centered Design 101. Hikers like to see cool things, so construct trails that lead to tops of mountains. Explorers tend to get lost, so embed natural location markers. Private property owners get frustrated with unwanted visitors, so fence off trespassers. Designers are here to optimize experiences based on how we think and act.

At its best, human-centered design can be used to encourage exploration in safe, sustainable ways. It can simultaneously curb harmful human behavior. Designers account for our tendencies to provide a seamless positive experience pushed by unnoticeable forces.

Wait, Who Are We Talking About?

In the spring of 2021, a perfect storm hit media outlets. People were frustrated from twelve months of social distancing. Politics were irreconcilable after the insurrection and subsequent culture wars. And emerging news about a delta variant brought back waves of hygiene-related anxieties, forcing us to be even more conscious about washing our hands.

Enter: racist soap dispensers.

Soap dispensers have had a notorious past with years of controversy. There was the one at the Atlanta Marriott during Dragon Con 2015. Also, the one used by a Nigerian Facebook employee from 2017. Both were servicing Black users. It was clear that these new motion-sensor dispensers had difficulty picking up dark skin. The infrared light — emitted with the intent to be reflected back to the sensor and trigger the dispenser— never accounted for dark skin absorbing more light than light skin.

These examples are among many innovations that encode racial bias within the technology itself. For instance, Face ID was a groundbreaking biometric that could account for sunglasses, hijabs, and facial coverings, yet had a rough start differentiating Chinese users from one another. Google Photos, a pioneer in widely available image recognition software, takes the racism up a notch (or several) and mistakenly tags two Black teens as primates. It’s almost — almost — shocking to believe that these highly-regarded, well-resourced companies forgot about skin color when designing facial recognition. After all, technology firms are among the loudest to tout the principles and impact of human-centered design.

When a predominately white firm invokes “human-centered design”, it begs the question of which humans we are designing for. These innovations and innovators become hyper-focused with designing a solution to a problem— such as not wanting to physically touch a germ-filled soap dispenser handle — that they forget they’re in a room of white engineers.

Of course, the human-centered design process has built-in mechanisms to calibrate for real world impact. They’re called prototyping and iterating — steps 4 and 5. Designers are supposed to test these products over and over again to compensate for their biases. However, these steps simply do not matter if designers do not think to test a diverse set of users in the first place. It’s why most scissors are designed for right-handed users. And why body scanners tend to raise false alarms for Black hair and head coverings. Or why New York subway stations forget that people with wheelchairs cannot use the stairs. Design thinking has a massive blind spot — the designers.

The Sleazy Religion of Fixing The World

One thing that may not be well-known is how the design community has become a cult of beliefs over the last ten years. Design thinking is taught in consulting firms and business schools and corporate strategy teams and developer conferences. There are tens of TED Talks on design thinking, and they’re all the same video. Nowadays, anyone can be a designer, change the world, and make lots of money doing it.

In the MIT Technology Review, Rebecca Ackermann writes that democratizing design may have been a mistake — that these innovators or disrupters are often out of touch with reality and lack the conceptual expertise to inspire true change. That innovation agencies like IDEO sell walls of post-it notes and fancy jargon like “radical collaboration” in order to sell executives the idea they’re delivering an irresistible new product. That design thinking has become an odd, corporatized solution for world peace and an infallible religion for Silicon Valley startups.

The evangelicals have been working overtime. The promise of design thinking is why we are in a deluge of innovative solutions to non-existent problems. Did we really need a direct-to-consumer brewery that brews non-alcoholic craft beers to normalize and satisfy beer cravings at any hour of the day? Once a framework for improving experiences, design thinking is now another means to achieve a prescribed capitalist goal. It can be used to justify anything, so long as it’s “fixing” a problem.

This thesis becomes particularly awry when it seeps out of inconsequential UX design and into urban design choices created by policy-makers. They’ll tell you to admire the new benches with armrests that are replacing old seaters around the city. These features allow people to rest their arms. Never-mind the hostile effect these design choices have on the unhoused in need of a surface to sleep on. Also, city officials may proudly point to the metal guardrails or spikes around the park. They’ll argue that the additions are defensive design choices meant to lower crime, like nasty teenage skateboarders loitering. Contrary to what designers may write about in the Harvard Business Review or Stanford’s d.School, design is not a humanitarian endeavor. It’s just a tool. These new, disturbing urban design solutions have been seen in Vancouver, New York, and Washington, DC, working exactly as intended to exacerbate inequity and disrupt local communities.

When Design Fails

Hostile architecture, such as anti-homeless benches, are bashfully effective. However, some design choices are much more explicit about their harmful agenda. The discriminatory design of racist Robert Moses, an urban designer for New York, was so successful that it became a blueprint for segregation across America. Freelance journalist Ashish Valentine writes for NPR:

When the urban planner Robert Moses began building projects in New York during the 1920s, he bulldozed Black and Latino homes to make way for parks, and built highways through the middle of minority neighborhoods. According to one biography, Moses even made sure bridges on the parkways connecting New York City to beaches in Long Island were low enough to keep city buses — which would likely be carrying poor minorities — from passing underneath.

There lives no greater example than Baltimore’s I-70, infamously known as the Highway to Nowhere. Despite concerns that the completion of the highway was not 100% feasible, the project was green lit. The interstate first began construction in the 1960s, intended to quickly connect white suburbs to downtown Baltimore. Equally intentionally, the highway was set to travel through Black neighborhoods in West Baltimore, using eminent domain to force out home and business owners. Moses, a strong proponent of “Negro Removal,” argued that destroying more low-income Black neighborhoods would lead to a “healthier Baltimore” in the long run. When the highway was met with opposition in the 1970s, the project was discontinued — but not before destroying miles and miles of properties. To this day, the highway remains unfinished, cutting through West Baltimore as a permanent blemish for current and future urban designers.

Design fails when designers are blinded, whether it be their own biases or public policy or corporate interests. That’s not to say that designers — even Robert Moses who despite being vehemently racist was also responsible for much of New York’s public housing projects — are evildoers. I believe that even suburban sprawl was not planned by mustache-twirling villains but by planners who got swept up in a sea of blinders. The Federal Housing Administration was handing out massive subsidies on mortgage insurance programs which favored new development. Public opinion was rapidly turning against industry, where fumes and dirt and noise were killing people living in urban centers. The American Automobile Association’s new “Motordom” movement of the 1920s had begun an ideological revolution about how freedom meant that Americans should be able to move wherever they want, whenever they want, at whatever speed they want. In every direction, there was somebody telling an urban designer that new suburban development was the right thing to do. Design fails when designers don’t ask why.

In conclusion, the world of design is a powerful force that influences our daily lives in profound ways. It has the potential to shape experiences, address societal challenges, and foster positive change. However, as we have explored, there are critical areas where design falls short.

The design world must reconcile with its lack of diversity and its unintended or intended impacts on marginalized communities. It must refocus on service rather than disruption. Positively, the principles of design — empathizing, listening, adapting — are sound. However, the future of design and its success hinges on whether its educators and influencers can decolonize their work.

If you or someone you know is a designer, I recommend reading Decolonizing Design by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, available on print and ebook. Her book focuses on cultural expression and how design has impacted Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.

For a slightly lighter book, I recommend Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin, on print. Her book homes in on how technology, algorithms, and artificial intelligence create a continuous feedback loop that trains itself and its users on racial prejudice.

And for a bathroom-level read, check out The Design Thinking Movement is Absurd, by Lee Visel, on Medium. His article is a whimsical, hopeful reflection on the infectious nature of design thinking and the warped realities design thinkers live within.