How would you measure the social impact of design in your everyday life?

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