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Director, Graduate Program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design
Nov 15
2010
Design is very slippery when it comes to "measuring" participation and effectiveness, and yet this kind of assessment is central to understanding the impact of what we make, build, produce, and put out into the world. It also is a critical tool for seeking grant funding and government support from organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts. How would you measure the social impact of design if you needed to quantify its value in fostering change? Is it visits to historic buildings? Reading a well-designed magazine? Designing low-income housing units? Using a Michael Graves tea kettle from Target every morning to make tea? Redesigning a ballot?
How would you measure the social impact of design in your everyday life?
cameron gave the final word
…just as all major technological, infrastructural and business initiatives should complete ‘Social Impact Analyses.’ On that, it seems to me clear that designers must not be allowed any exceptionalism – do as other professions do, and use the tools, such as IRIS, that those other professions are slowly building consensus around, and thereby hopefully improving over time.
Wednesday, November 17 at 12:28am
cameron gave the Final Word
(I am assuming that this is a conversation about ‘impact’ understood broadly – the [positive] difference design makes – rather than about the more limited sense of the potential damage to community well-being that all designers should be anticipating flowing from market penetration of their designs; just as all major technological, infrastructural and business initiatives should complete ‘Social Impact Analyses.’ On that, it seems to me clear that designers must not be allowed any exceptionalism – do as other professions do, and use the tools, such as IRIS, that those other professions are slowly building consensus around, and thereby hopefully improving over time.)
Taking up Alexander’s nice celebration of small ‘d’ design:
The important bit about Raymond Loewy’s ‘MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable)’ is the ‘acceptable’ bit. Anyone can come up with a new idea, but it takes all the skill of a designer to embed the new in the old. And obviously, to be still new, the embedding is as much about modifying the old as it is about adapting the idea to that context in which it is to be taken up. So a good design is impactful, restructuring its social context of use.
But, being acceptable means that those restructurings, having taken place as a result of the design (or the product ecology behind, or along with, the design), are no longer noticed – they just are now how things are. Chris Alexander in _Notes on a Synthesis of Form_ observes that if good design is design that fits (into a preferred way of living or working, as Herbert Simon might say), this is problematic: because we don’t really notice fit, only misfit. A good design can only be measured by the absence of misfit. In the language of Martin Heidegger, good design withdraws into its usefulness, disappearing into being ready-to-hand, transparent before the actions it enables, the new worlds it discloses.
These obtuse references are all meant to make the point that the most successfully impactful design will be the design that is least noticed in the new social domain it sustains. In which case, there are perhaps two ways of answering Jamer’s question.
The first is how I interpret Alexander (Bohn)’s Heisenburg paradox: if people are still talking about your design, if it is being noticed, it has not yet been fully accepted into a restructured social existence. The design with highest social impact is the one that is least noticed (like the old fable of the doctor that everyone knows because he cures illness as opposed to the doctor that no-one knows because he keeps everybody healthy). So the metric is: the social impact of a design is inversely proportional to the extent to which people are talking about it.
The second is also Heisenburgian: you need to make an intervention into a social setting to measure the power a design in that setting. In short, go into a situation a steal or break a design that is in-use. If people are really affected by your violence, if they start wandering around helplessly (like we all do when we lose our mobile phones, or our car keys if we live in the suburbs, or a file after a computer crash when we have not been backing up), then the design you took or broke clearly has had a high level of social impact. People have come to rely on that design, to take it for granted. Their independence appears to depend on the kindness of design. So the metric is something like: You only know a good thing when it’s gone. Or as Robert Wilson subtitled his epic opera, “the CIVIL warS,” ‘a tree is best measured when it is down.’
Wednesday, November 17 at 12:28am
two very edifying responses … what most profoundly struck me was the nebulous and amorphous contextualization of design rendered by both responses… it appears, by what i read, the evolution of world and design are less antagonistic for dominance, and more in a responsive dialogue, adapting each other rather TO each other; albeit, one could surmise from the quoted thinkers, contradictory … is misfit misfit anymore once it fits? is once misfit, historionically, always misfit (like Madonna, like Carravagio, like DesCarte), although wildly celebrated and immersed into culture …
Mr Bohn: being a neophyte, what are some more small-d narratives you could offer to help me understand the concept?
mr. tonkinwise: the metric of social design having an inverted affect to the thought about it is interesting to me. Target was mentioned and maybe because of that i thought of IKEA. Living in Manhattan, there are actually boats that take you to IKEA, so thought it great; but as well, the affect IKEA has had on loft space and small apartment living is great … pragmatically, does IKEA bend that metric, or am i deconstructing the metric to fit the simplified example?
thank you for your thoughtful responses … i think i may need a redesigned coffee cup now …
david
Wednesday, November 17 at 10:07am
David,
It seems to me that on the one hand IKEA fits Alexander’s small-d. IKEA is a brand name for a bunch of stuff (and a way of selling it) that nevertheless remains more or less anonymous. IKEA struggles to try to presence the identity of the designers in their stores and catalogs (with rather lame pictures and short bios here and there). And what IKEA has mastered is the ability to create things that have enough style to be stylish, but not enough to draw attention to themselves. So IKEA things do withdraw into everyday use, and it is a bit surprisingly frustrating when they fail and re-draw attention to themselves. But it’s not like I’m at a complete loss when the laminate peels off my Billy; I just have to get the Ferry to Red Hook again. So in terms of my second metric, the social impact of IKEA products cannot be too high, because the incapacitation that I suffer when my desk is stolen is not very much.
I think I was trying to talk about design product categories rather than this or that brand of existing product types. Or, the kind of designs whose impact is worth measuring in the way Jamer was asking about, are those that are product-category-disruptive, that don’t fit existing categories, and so restructure social being when they get accepted.
But on the other hand, it is important to think about the design not only of things, but of services and systems. What is really impactful about IKEA is not what’s in the stores, but the business model. The design + DIY-transport-and-construct means that IKEA has been able to create the semi-durable in furniture. It’s cheap, but not nasty cheap. It is worth keeping around, and more or less classique enough not to be embarrassing to keep around. But it’s certainly not expensive enough to feel the need to keep around, nor is it so beyond-fashion as to not be subject to the need for 5-8 year renewals. IKEA’s business model and styling killed the second-hand furniture market, and brought furniture buying to markets that didn’t used to do furniture-buying, like students (colleges practically have accounts for students to kit out their dorms) and new families (who previously would be furnished with family hand-me-downs before being able to afford ‘proper’ life-long furniture).
These are all enormous social (and ecological, and economic) impacts, that my proposed metrics miss, because they focused on thing design, and not service system designs.
Thursday, November 18 at 1:26am
Director, Graduate Program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design
I would like to twist, slightly, my original question so that it conveys more precisely my interest in posting this particular question. It stems from discussions around design for social impact, and the near impossibility of measuring what we mean by “social impact,” (and leaving alone for the moment the impenetrable haziness of the modifier “social”).
And I am intrigued by this in part because of the work done in the field of medicine, where there are practitioners whose job it is to assess health outcomes and to measure the impact of changes in practice on groups of patients, communities, or even large populations. Granted, some health outcomes are relatively easy to define (worse/better, dead/alive, diseased/cured), but it seems to me that if the field of design is to be taken more seriously in its claim that it “solves problems” or that promotes beneficial change, then we need to start to identify, define, or measure what we mean by that. Have you ever heard of a designer or design consultancy following up on their work to measure whether their rhetoric of success matches the experience of its users or its impact on various communities of use? In architecture there does at least exist the notion of “post occupancy evaluation,” but do architectural firms build that in as a feedback loop into their practice?
This was prompted as well by a meeting at the National Endowment for the Arts regarding their Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, in which they try to figure out how best to measure the impact of the arts in the lives of US citizens. They are interested to fold design into that conversation as well (which is why I was there), but the standard ways of measuring arts participation (visits to museums, artworks purchased, classes taken, performances attended, and so on) don’t begin to capture the ubiquity and slipperiness of design’s presence in our everyday lives. And the ability to measure impact affects the likelihood of federal support for research and innovation which affects the practices of designers on the ground.
So is it impossible to “measure” design’s impact in any meaningful way? Can we even imagine something as exacting as a quantitative measure for it? Or are we hog-tied by the simple fact that design is too diffuse, dispersed, non-differentiated, and ubiquitous?
I don’t think this is simply a matter of big-D versus little-d design as Alexander point to, as both registers have impact. And I agree with Cameron point that it is naive to focus on design’s impact without recognizing that its effects often run counter to the claims of social beneficence. Taking away impactful design may not do the trick either, as people will adapt and do without, I would think; we habituate to the tools and affordances that surround us.
I keep throwing up my hands when I consider these questions–and the profession does not seem to be leading the way, which is why I posed the question. A clean-water filtration system; redesigned highway signage; better prescription bottles; more capable smart phones; design for disassembly production methods: does anybody track, measure, and assess these outcomes and make the argument that design does, in fact, catalyze positive change?
Thursday, November 18 at 12:14pm
Some quick examples:
In relation to sustainable buildings, the excellent work of Adrian Leaman and colleagues at
http://www.usablebuildings.co.uk/
who do post-occupancy evaluations of (normally mixed-mode) buildings benchmarking actual energy performance (and not just predicted energy performance as LEED does), but also correlated to surveys of occupier productivity and comfort. The result is literally a measure of the social success of the building. (The answer is a diligent building manager, not a smart building management system; and openable windows.)
Secondly, see this profile of Esther Duflo in _The New Yorker_
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/17/100517fa_fact_parker
who does evidence-based philanthropy in the context of emerging economies.
Thursday, November 18 at 6:16pm
I think it depends on where my every day life is being lived. When I am in Canada, I have different cues to help me personally measure impacts that are often different from the ones I note when I’m working on a project in Africa.
Additionally, I have noticed that there seems to be a distinction between personal and collective measurements and this can greatly affect how impact is measured (especially when looking to acquire or justify the use of funds). Sometimes there can be a disconnect. I’ll use the example of working on a project in Africa.
I was asked to design a website that was meant to essentially deliver an outcome of “change” that included economic development. This site would thereby increase the quality of life for a cooperative of 80+ women (and in turn their larger community). The collective (or granting body) would suggest that the measure of impact was that the site had been built (and this fact seemingly assumed that people would visit it and therefore the impact would be felt in the rural community). However, my personal measuring tool didn’t see this as satisfactory and while I suggested that other things might be needed to truly measure the impact, it wasn’t expected or necessarily desired by the collective.
This small example continues to be play out in other work I’ve done and more often than not I find that the collective can have a different desire than the individual, which creates another level of complexity in the desire to give account for social impact.
Thursday, November 18 at 12:00pm
Director, Graduate Program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design
Cameron and Kara’s examples help to put flesh to the bones of the perfunctory examples I used. Kara’s example in particular highlights a vexing case where the assessment of impact varies considerably between the designer and the community, and in ways that run counter to one’s expectation. And it demonstrates both sides of the “impact” phenomenon: the possibility for what one might call a material impact (economic development in an Arican community group, which could presumably be measured) versus symbolic impact (community pride in seeing itself represented in public media—harder to quantify).
It’s my hunch that the design community tends to focus more on symbolic impact, which runs closer to Alexander’s idea of big-D design, and which tends to be more like buzz than any quantifiable measure of impact. And certainly Cameron’s example of Adrian Leaman’s work leans more toward developing a metric that quantifies material impacts.
I don’t mean to fetishize the material over the symbolic or the quantitative over the qualitative, but in context of design media—where blasts of hot air tend to predominate over demonstrable material impacts—I do find myself grasping for some kind of hard, crunchy data. And where we really need maturation as a professional field is in the long-term follow up to cases like’s Kara’s. Are there good examples of design-for-social-change projects that go beyond the formulation that “success=launch” and that instead take a longer view (two, three, or even five years out) of their impact? That, to me, would start to approach a level of assessment that we need to make any kind of effective case for the impact of design on social change.
Friday, November 19 at 11:54am
Alexander Bohn
Designer
0
It’s easy to ask a question about design, like this one, and end up implicitly talking about Design with a big “D”. Historic buildings and iconic teakettles may catch the eye of other designers — but the stuff that design practitioners may miss are no less designed; no one really talked about ballots all that much until the American election in 2000. But I would submit that their role as designed objects was no less crucial just because there wasn’t any sort of handy media narrative available to elucidate it.
Which that’s sort of the rub with this question, I should say, in that people end up quantifying, worrying about, and otherwise measuring design-related axioms (social and otherwise) only once something emblematically capital-D Designy has perceptually broken out from amidst the endless undifferentiated mass of designed objects around it. I think that’s funny, because it’s like the opposite of the Heisenberg paradox: design gets measured when it’s manifestly distorted (instead of the other way around) in some perceptual way.
With that in mind, well-thought-out context is what you need if you’re formulating a rubric for social change. It’s easy to say yeah, wow, that Shepard Fairey Obama poster made a real impact — but to whom? Was it preaching to the converted or lost in the professional design-message noise that sleeplessly pours through the cable news?
I think the anonymous and non-sexy small-d design forces — those that frequently run counter to the big-D success stories of Design’s positive impact — are just as valuable to know about. They are even interesting, if you nerd out on them enough. The now-famous Target medicine bottle, which provided a big-D media narrative in the industry press, was borne out of its creators’ frustration with a completely unremarkable landscape of little-d designs whose illegibility threatened her relative’s safety. The act of talking about “design” in an arena that people generally wouldn’t describe using the word “design” was the crucial first step in this case.
I’d hazard, then, that this can be generalized to a basic litmus test: if you can talk about Design, qua that which is to be impacted, you’ve already taken the crucial first step towards making your impact.
Tuesday, November 16 at 7:14am