or a persistent a complex system and because we're dealing with people and

people come from a variety of cultures and disciplines and backgrounds we're
not going to get it ready and so we do it by slow incremental steps we build
tests model I learn a lot and then repeat over and over and over again but to us
design therefore is a way of
thinking and it could be addressing any problem when you build something the
building can be a to be a set of protocols it could be a procedure it could be a way of
behaving that it
doesn't have to be a physical device so as we evolve this we decided that we
didn't want to call the people that we were studying we didn't want to call them users
we decided to call them
people or humans so we call it people center design or human centered design
today though as we look at bigger and
bigger problems focuses on people society and culture that's not enough we
need to add the environment we need to add all humanity so maybe HCD is not
just human centered design its humanity centric design but in all of this it's a
way of thinking so there's climate change is it caused by people
oh yeah science says so is continuities big manufacturing plants spewing carbon
dioxide and other noxious fumes into the
air well but what can designers do about that well in 1971 a very famous designer
of Viktor papinek wrote a book called design for the real world in the subtitle is
human ecology and social
change and he was really upset about what we were doing to the environment in the
early 70s he said in fact the very
first sentence of his book said there our profession is more harmful than
design but only a very few and what did
he mean by that well take a look at her cell phone the cellphone you have to destroy
the
environment in order to produce the materials are going to the cellphone very excited
materials that are only
available in a few countries of the world now we don't really need those materials to
make a cell phone
we need those materials to make a very tiny slim lightweight cell phone if we
would allow the cell phone to be a little bit thicker a little bit bigger we could make it
more environmentally friendly second we keep inventing more
and more wonderful materials that have all sorts of wonderful characteristics
great for building stuff except what are you doing that after you throw away after
you're finished using the device
so throw away plastics one single-use plastics we all know the problem is
there the cell phone it's very difficult to disassemble it and pull out the parts
I was in India recently and in Ahmedabad there's a big mountain of burning trash
the trash is thrown out electrical equipment burning emitting poisonous
fumes in the air so what we've done is we recycled our stuff by sending it to other
countries to take care of which is
not an appropriate answer so we have why don't we design things that are easy to
keep going to fix to repair and for that matter to recycle them into new devices
we have to start with that in the very beginning so one of the kinds of
problems that really are we facing today and again what kind of designers do and
one of
these honours need to know to face these problems United Nations has a list of 17
important societal issues run away
hmm speaking of Technology so these are
kinds of important issues that I want to talk about today now I'm not going to talk
about all 17 I'm going to focus on
two of them focus on climate action because after all the sequences quarter is on
climate control climate change and
I'm gonna talk about health because a lot of the work that we do in the design lab is
with the Medical School in the
hospital system and second that's of course of travel and everybody's mind
today the corona virus and the resulting coated 13 disease so let's take a look
at what designers might do but before I do that these products aren't you lots
of people are thinking about the problems of global hunger of education about
housing about healthcare so why do
we need designers there are government aid programs the United Nations programs
the foundations for rocker 4 Rockefeller
Gates and many non-government organizations and of course lots and lots of
experts so why do we need
designers they've all been working for a long time they're very good well that what do
they
produce they produce massive thick reports and they have multiple committees and
the reports recommend
massive budgets billions of dollars and as you take master teams for decades and
the result
is that basically there are very very few successes after years and years decades of
pulling on the experts and
massive overspending and massive overview they're always over behind you
them over their budget behind schedule and oftentimes with no result at the end
that is useful so the one thing that says actually succeeded in doing is it
created a whole industry people writing books trying to explain
why this has failed so one problem is that some of these problems are hard to
understand even the scientists disagree scientifically but a lot of factors about
climate change they disagree the
way to describe it I guess we have a lot of different factors that go into it they all
agree upon the common causes
but scientists were in fact we trained scientists to disagree with one another we don't
train scientists to agree when
you when you are trained in a science one of the things you learn to do is to read a
new scientific journal article
and to find the holes and to find the flaws to find the possible problems and
then go because we learn how to do experiments so we see if we can repeat the
results or see if we can understand
why they interpreted the results in the way they did or maybe there's a different
interpretation and which other
evidence would allow us to tell apart the part of science it's so powerful is
in fact this disagreement because the continual disagreement allows actually
refinement and improvement of the ideas but the public doesn't understand that the
public see scientists disagreeing
with each other all the time and saying well one scientists know they're always
arguing with each other no no that's how
so that's what science is science is a method it's not a body effects it's a method for
determining what is the most
accurate way of describing something with today's knowledge so there's a lot of
disagreements on top of that these
aren't just science problems so climate change is not just a scientific problem it's
also a cultural problem it's yes
has to do with the environment it has to do with the way that people live and people
make their living and people it's
it's a very complex issue require somebody you understand all the
different disciplines to put them together the second problem is I love
this book like how William easterly called the purity of experts of saying look an
expert has wonderful knowledge
that's why they're experts but they're abstract knowledge because you need an
abstraction in order to be able to apply
it to different situations over different times and that extraction is what gets a new
way
because you come into a new country or area and you understand what the problem
is about poverty or sanitation or hunger or education and you say these are the
issues and here is a solution that we know works and you prescribe it to the
company to the country well that has
lots of problems first of all the experts do not understand the local people they don't
understand their
cultures they don't understand what they're good at what they're bad at what the
resources are you know with seven
and a half billion people in the world there are really many many clever people all
around the world who really do
understand the problems that they are facing and they've already developed
beginnings of an approach to try to
solve them and so they don't like it they're an expert couple of Ministers oh here is
your problem and here is your
solution especially when these solutions often do not fit the way that they live so
what we are recommending is that what
we do is we go and find those wonderful people and actually this idea comes from
Eric von Hippel who's at the visiting
school at MIT the MIT Sloan School of Business so what he's been calling lead use
of innovation is to do just that to
find out how to approach some problem let's go around the world and find out more
that's a really big problem and
then find the people who are already starting to innovate and develop schemes if we
can help them and become mentors
and facilitators then guess what they will accept those so our design skills
are very important as facilitation as instructors as helpers but not as
dictators saying this is a result you should have believed in studying a problem we
said anthropologist and we
understand what you're doing we understand what you're not we understand what
you need and so if your solution to
the problem that you didn't know you had that doesn't work other issues too
there's a lot of concern that the scientific community and for that matter the economic
communities develop them a
lot of culture a standard way of thinking that's true throughout the technological
basically the developed world and that
monoculture is so severe that we don't even know that we have it but we all believe
in certain ways of behaving and
certain things of just natural that are intuitively say in certain ways that we actually
create things and our systems
of government we assume this is the natural way and it's not necessarily true what
we are doing is we're ignoring
different cultures and different ways of behaving and different ways of thinking and
that that's a problem in science we
often go down the wrong path for a long time which everybody's in agreement and
it's really difficult to disagree with
those very powerful people on the top and the monoculture is one of the
animation we've also ignoring the everyday people
and the end of great from a great variety of cultures on this earth so
there are lots of issues why the experts who have a monoculture of their own are
actually not necessarily the people to solve the problems so what can designers do
well we actually have designers here
so this is Lily irani who's a faculty member in the communication department
and a member of the design lab who has spent some time in India quite a bit of
time in India studying the way that the citizens of India could do innovation not the
not the powerful leaders the
everyday citizens and as the Wired magazine cutter to really stop to really
disrupt technology need to listen to people so in design complexity comes
from the people society culture and the systems and the economics and the
environment and therefore water designers have to be experts in all of this including
sustainability of the
planet so what's your future designers be able to do well let me give you two
examples I'm going to talk about Kim and Aaron so we believe that in the 21st
century the design challenges are going
to be things like so Kim might be developing a sanitation system for a rural
committee and
community in India because the community outhouses pollute the water supply but
the community is very suspicious of the government and very suspicious of foreign
experts and a foreigner is
anyone from outside the village anyone even from the next town over so how
would you deal with that and actually I was recently in India and I went to some
of these small towns but it's not easy to imagine how you would put in a new
sanitation system for example the home
like your one bedroom a one-room home and there's no place to put in Mike's
new sewer lines and they don't have running water and to bring it in running order it's
a very complex task they
don't have electricity either and so if you do that you're going to disrupt the entire
community yes in the end you
might argue they were better off but they wouldn't be for the many years it would
take to do this and maybe there
are other ways of doing it we have whole new ways of doing things today so that's a
major problem
it is a design problem but it's more than designed right it's a lot of working with
different people and trying
to find an appropriate solution for this particular community or take care of is
working with the United Nation is to tackle hunger which is their goal number two it's
gonna require a wide range of
multiple disciplines and probably different nations and agencies and this
means huge budgets and different groups of people and a lot of politics and cultural
differences in fact anytime you
have a large budget or something that's going to take a lot of time and involve a lot of
people it becomes a political
issue and I mean politics in the good sense because look if you're gonna help
a lot of people probably what are you to do isn't also harm a number of people they
may have to they may have to
destroy their homes and move them someplace else or they may change the way
they're they're employed and there's
just a large number of issues it has to require numerous compromises and you can't
say I know the
answer because there is no single answer if the answer has to be one that is
acceptable to the people who are going
to live with the results so why do we think that's what a designer is about
well let me start off with what the design lab can do and what we're already doing so
Michael Meyer and I thought
that one of the problems is our design education is not appropriate so I
described yeah Kim and Aaron do we train people today to solve the kinds of
problems that Kim and Aaron which I'll know there's no discipline in the university
that tackles these issues
especially from a people centered point of view so we've written a paper in the
journal Shaggy which is a Chinese design journal that are really excellent one called
changing design education for the
21st century no we didn't say how to do it we said here's a process we copied it
from the process that the medical system and journalists and legal system and the
business schools have all gone through over the last 100 150 years where they
take a look at business it started off much like design it was a bunch of perhaps
people or the business case
successful business people said I are a successful business so I can teach people
how to be successful no they
can't they usually have no idea what they did they just have to be lucky on the same
with physicians it was all sort
of folklore about the sort of things I did there was no new science behind the same
flaw it was all done by mentorship
and so all of these different people sat down usually foundation based had had a
huge study about what could be done to make this more evidence-based more
systematic a much better educational system to train the designers and the
educators and the business people and the journalists and the lawyers and the
doctors of the future and that's what we're proposal and actually we've been
working with IBM design which is to help us and help sponsor this and so
what we've started together with IBM design we put together a list of ten people on
the right-hand side of this
picture people from the United States from Europe from Asia they represented
academics and provenza practitioners they represent different many different
areas of design and then on the left the four people there are me and Carol Brent
redder Berg who is the director that IBM that's sponsoring this and we have two
observers from the world design organization she's based in Montreal but is indeed
across the world because
they're very much interested in what we're doing and they would like actually to help
us have this implemented across
the world we believe this is a two or three year project it's non-trivial we started with
10 people we're going to go
to the next stage with a hundred people and the next stage after that perhaps 200
people for several years to develop
a whole platform of conceivable curricula to train people who can do
everything from make the wonderful devices that we have today its products that are
home and to solve the problems
the 16 major problems that the United Nations has has listed the 17th one is
that we need to have lots of lots of programs in order to solve 16 so that's
one thing but engineers too were involved so the Lemelson foundation is
devising a scheme a whole new program engineering for one planet for
environmentally responsible engineering and actually just yesterday I agreed to
be on the advisory committee for this particular program so those are going to be
essential beginnings but then what
happens after that so again let me give some examples of what the design lab is
doing today one of them and the first
thing that we started that's relevant here is the project called the launch sponsored
by the National Cancer
Institute and the Federal Communications Commission and also Amgen and it's
done
the work is being done with the University of Kentucky Cancer Center and the design
lab and the Cancer
Center well the reason we're doing this is the National Cancer Institute said in
Eastern Kentucky in what I call the Appalachian Mountains Apple polisher
mountains it's a way they call it or that's closer anyway give it way they pronounce
and in that area of Kentucky
we have the highest rates of lung cancer in the country and also one of the
lowest amounts of high bandwidth internet in the country and the FCC said
well gee they're very isolated they live in they live in the mountains sometimes it's a
long couple mile one lane dirt
road to get to their homes in the winter they're snowed in they can't get access
to a Catholic Cancer Care the best Cancer Care is Lexington Kentucky which
is the western side which is three or four hours away hey and when it snows they
can't even
get out of their homes so maybe we could you tell the medicine well we think the
answer is more complex than that and so what we decided to do is to go in and to
do a bottom-up and a top-down approach we do have external experts the person
pictured there is from the University of Kentucky Cancer Center and we also have
the community workers the people who
live in the area who already are helping already understand the problems the people
living there they themselves have
lived there their entire lives and on the upper right our expert Jim who is a
very senior distinguished surgeon in cancer he's considered a farmer but even
though he lives in Kentucky he lives in Western Kentucky and these people are all in
Eastern Kentucky and so
foreigners are not liked it almost any part of the world and but a farmer doesn't have
to be very from very far
away so what we are doing is we use in the community to show us what the
problems are that they experience and have them help develop the answers and
what
Cyril experts do is where facilitators mentors advisors we instruct we help
build the platforms and tools that they the citizens can use and of course we help
spread the word because what we've
learned here can be applied elsewhere not exactly the same way the same
principles because each different culture is going to require modification but the
principles might apply and so
that's one of the projects we're doing in fact here's an example there is Melanie
McCarthy who's talking
this is in Kentucky and you can see they're doing a design exercise but you can see
the the different colored
markers and there are post-it notes which so markers and posted notes are the most
powerful tools of designers and
they're working together Nonie was a postdoc in our laboratory for many years
she has the PhD in anthropology from UCSD and she stabbed moved on to thermo
Fisher so she's working in local industry so what is the role of designer
in these areas well we have to have lots of different skills we have domain experts
community experts people
understand the politics the economics etc and what designers are really good
are doing good design as a method we don't really have any content what we can do
is we can bring together all
these people gather the important information from each of these experts and then
develop a system of
applications and actually can go after these very difficult complex problems again
we're doing that driven by the
community expertise another problem we call design for San Diego d4s D and this
is now the third year of the program and it involves people in downtown San Diego
who are trying to solve the problems that they have and so we're offering design
support in this case because of
Kovan 19 we modified the task it started on April 10th this was supposed to be an
in-person gathering of lots and lots of people like 100 200 people from the area
obviously this has been changed to a virtual system until the last Jam was on April
10th actually 11th it's okay it's
going to be old every Friday for three hours and there'll be community feedback
and we'll have a final proposal by May 8th we hope and then we'll actually start trying
to implement and do some of
this in the area of downtown San Diego and working together not only with the
people who live there but with the
mayor's office and other people other community organizations that are in the
downtown San Diego area another one as this is what was actually talked about
last week is a coded 19 rapid response team which is started by people from the
medical school and Eli Spencer who's a faculty member of the design lab and also a
physician and infectious disease
physician in the medical school and hospital system put together this website order
of 2.0 which is nice
motion for changing the world for what it is to what it should be which has
lots and lots of different components in it but one of the major things is we allow
people to compute send in the
problems that they have there might be something sick and doesn't understand the
symptoms and wants to have some answers but it might
be a physician Allah says look desperately running out of the following medication or
we're having really
trouble knowing how to sanitize these one tiny the single use mass so we can use
them over and over again where we're
having trouble with the ventilators and so we have a big crew of people it's a large
number of people from across the
country with many many different disciplines because in order to solve the problem
we need people who
understand behavior we need people who understand the medical issues we need
people who understand mechanical
engineering and for that matter thermodynamics and for that matter etc
etc etc and design is a really good way of putting all this together and so this
is a group of people but what's interesting is that of this group
the leadership four people are from the design lab and there's a much greater
long list of people and it goes on and on and on and I outlined in green all
the members of the design lab so design is already playing a major role in our
produce Tacoma 19 so humanity Center
design if we focus on the people society culture environment and humanity and
it's a way of thinking so in the 21st
century designers only have very different skills than what we're used to training
designers for us we have to
change the way we train designers and my goal of actually that everybody in the
university should learn the basics of
design because you can use design in any field you imagine because it's all about
thinking differently thinking about the real problem thinking about how people interact
writers need that are discrete