Adapted from "Deviant
Design"
MA Masters thesis by Samu Mielonen
University of Industrial Arts, 1999
Revolutionary ideas are usually labelled
implicitly successful in everyday talk. People talk about revolutionary
ideas driving progress as if success and advancement where the defining
factors of how revolutionary something is (or definable and attainable
in the first place). Personally I tend to look at this from a different
perspective: ideas can be revolutionary (as in previously unimaginable
opposition to that which prevails currently), but they do not always
result in a revolution nor does revolution necessarily result in
something that can be considered unanimously a success. Thus,
revolutions are not points of great development for me, rather than
instances of greater potential change on a large time scale that have
compound effects beyond their initial changes.
In effect this might seem that I’m a pure value
relativist that does not believe in betterment of our lives, society
and its artefacts. However, this is not the case. Even though I do not
believe there can be a simplistic model of advancement or success that
is easily definable, I do believe that we can form a better symbiosis
with our living environment through the process of change and variety.
This change can be catalysed by certain ideals or values that we aim to
attain, but these values should also be re-configurable based on the
feedback we get from the environment. We should not just adapt the
world to ourselves nor should we only adapt to the world - we should to
both.
So, from this point of view even design practice
can be seen as a process of evolution that is not necessarily
single-minded advancement, but adaptation through a process of gradual
redefinition and abrupt changes (or revolutions if you will). On a
short time scale, adaptation to the environment can be considered
success, but what if the environment changes completely? The successes
of the past are now the failures of tomorrow if the previously adapted
are unable to survive in the new environment. By introducing various
different design concepts into the environment (by a process of
conceptual revolutions or deviations), I believe designers can support
a greater variety of uses and needs. From this point of view, design
revolutions are points of divergence in the solution landscape that
offers increased variety and chances for users to adapt to their
environment. Still, designers are not the main cause of revolution as
they can only propose things for people to use. People are the final
source of revolution.
The revolutionary grade of a product will be
defined in use by its users: how it is used, why it is used by whom,
what is accomplished through it and what are the more profound effects
it has on people and society in the long run. Marshall McLuhan’s often
misquoted "The medium is the message" defines this: it is not the
medium (any product that mediates messages or actions) that is
important. It is not even the medium’s effect on the message that is
important. It is the effect of the medium has on society (what it
enhances, what it makes obsolete, what it borrows from the past and
what it reverses into when taken into its logical extreme) that is
important. This is defined in and by the culture of use that forms
around a designed product.
Let us consider an example. The automobile may not
have been the greatest technological invention, but a combination of
various inventions put together in order to create a new innovation. It
wasn't created out of thin air, but combined from several existing
technologies and ideas (wheel, combustion engine, lubrication,
electricity, etc). Regardless of this automobile had (and still has) a
huge impact on the society throughout the 20th century: personal movement, the birth
of suburbs, creation of more extensive and vaster system of movement -
not to mention environmental pollution. The car was put to use by
people in ways that was not implied by the initial idea of a car as a
replacement for a horse carriage. The users of cars took the nature of
the car into their hands and made it into a personal movement vehicle,
a life style accessory and a piece of sports equipment, just to mention
a few specialised uses.
The process of users appropriating products for
their own needs (i.e. re-appropriation) in a way that was not included
in the initial product concept is fairly common. One could postulate
that for a new product, such as the car, to become successful
appropriation must happen. This is not to say that this creation of
revolutionary product called the car was easy. On the contrary, it
faced a lot of opposition from several forces, some warning about its
dangers, some blaming it for noise and others just considering it just
a plain fad. Still, the more a product fits various remodelled uses the
more likely it is to find new users and to remain supported by a larger
number of people.
The resistance from existing systems and the
adaptation/creation of users is sort of a measure of revolutionary grade
in a solution: revolutionary tools are often violently resisted by
existing systems that differ from it. Revolutionary solutions do not
only revolutionise the product/solution landscape, but the use, the
user and the needs. Examples of this kind of innovation might be car,
television and even Internet. All of them have redefined the society,
its institutions, power structures, living habits and our social
existence. Who could have imagined 60 years ago that people feel that
television could transform the social life of families as it has and
that people would even admit being addicted to it. Thus, their impact
has been far greater than their simple technological innovation might
initially lead us to assume.
Revolutionary products are however born under
difficult circumstances: the more potential for revolution they
contain, the more likely and fiercely they are to be resisted by
existing cultures of use and the participants of such networks. The
networks themselves passively resist the change due to (technological)
lock-in, standards compliance and perceived use/user scripts i.e.
inscriptions of how users should and do behave with (new) products
(Akrich, 1995). The participants of networks further actively resist
the change due to associated cognitive load or economic risk associated
with revolutionary products. This is due to revolutionary products
often supplanting the existing ones and creating a new culture of use,
which in turn pushes the current users to adapt to the new environment.
Resistance to revolutions makes thinking about
revolutionary design ideas or processes for revolution quite
problematic. Why even try to attain something that is more than likely
to be faced with fierce opposition? Indeed, design as it most commonly
happens is a manifestation of this observation: most design products
are just gradually “improved” (altered) new versions of earlier
successfully used product in order not to face resistance. However, at
certain points in time disruptions appear that give an opportunity for
more revolutionary concepts to take hold and even obsolete some earlier
solutions. This process of slow gradual changes interrupted by abrupt
changes is called evolution.
Having arrived at the above outline for speciation
from evolution sciences I had to try and more closely combine this with
my original ideas about evolution and revolution in design work. At
this point, evolutionary design had to be substituted with the more apt
term gradualistic design to show its nature of changing current product
landscape very slowly by iterative product refinements. Please note
that I use the word “gradualistic” to imply that the design process
mimics the process of gradual evolution, rather than being gradual by
itself. This means that gradualistic design produces gradually evolving
products, even though the actual design process may change quickly
rather than remaining the same over a long period of time. The term
"revolutionary design" I had already labelled "deviant design", in order
to get away from the notion of "new" and to illustrate the intentional
divergence from the accepted norm of design even at the risk of being
labelled (socially) unacceptable.
Gradualism and deviance were the titles I had
chosen to denote the kinds of design activities that I wanted to
bridge. Gradualism at this point of my thinking implied the kind of
design work that build explicitly and implicitly on existing users,
needs and solutions. Deviant design was to be a method that would
diverge from this "building only on things that exists" mode of design
and attempt to introduce a twist to the design - a twist that would
change the perceived use and need of a design rather than just it's
mere appearance. I hoped to gain ideas from speciation in forming my
outline for deviant design (e.g. using mutation, adaptation and
selection as conceptual analogies in my design framework).
I had already abandoned the idea of trying to
implement a design framework that would be an opposite of gradual
design. This was due to the realisation that it is extremely difficult
to design things out of something that does not yet exist (and opposite
to "existing”). Furthermore, even if one were to succeed with such a
clean sheet design, the result would highly likely face all sorts of
resistance and fail in the market place. Therefor I had concluded that
deviant design would be sufficient for my needs: a way of designing
that alters the designer's perception of a user and results in a design
proposition that in itself may modify the user again.
With this distinction in mind I had to map out
what is gradualism in design practice and how could the practice of
deviant design be different from this? The following chapters outline
my thinking on gradualism and the initial model for constructing a
deviant design process.
The usual design process is gradualistic usually
from the outset: the current users, needs and solutions are implicitly
and explicitly included in the design of new solutions. This is usually
done partly unknowingly as the designer is unable to call into question
some of the truisms of the work, and partly knowingly as designers are
more than willing to accept some ready-made initial constraints for
their design process.
In the usual gradualistic design process, people
are seen as users of current solutions that fulfil their current needs,
which in turn are usually defined by the current solutions themselves
(note the cyclical definition of needs and solutions, which makes it
difficult to untangle people's needs). As needs are articulated by
current solutions, people are seen only as extensions of these needs
(i.e. users of particular solutions). General or even universal needs
can be proposed, but by themselves they are usually too vague to give
rise to specific design challenges and thus design solutions (Brown,
1991).
Some of the current design methods for
gradualistic design are user-centred design, participatory design and
even contextual design. Actually I should be more precise and claim
that these methods are used in a gradualistic mindset. The starting
point for gradualistic design is the (current picture of a) user, the
(currently defined) needs, the (currently available) solutions and to
large extent the (current) market place. In short, design is based on
what exists now and the process concerns with slightly altering that
what exists to achieve a new solution that does not conflict with the
current state of affairs. Most often this altering process is done
under very strict, but implicit rules that prohibit the designer from
proposing radically deviating design ideas. Some examples of these
rules are market and technology constraints, user models or even
factors affecting social acceptability.
Gradual design also stresses the process of
designing the solution rather than designing the culture of use around
the solution. A culture of use could be shortly explained as prevailing
social patterns that define how user(s) use the product in question in
their everyday life. Cultures are perhaps with good reason considered
to be more stable and resistant to change so that they cannot be
designed. However, if the solution is designed to perfectly fit the
current cultures of use there is not much headroom for the designer to
move in conceptually. Nevertheless, this can be very practical approach
as the culture of use (e.g. how people use solutions in actual life) is
often very hard to change and changing cultures by design may even be
considered ethically problematic.
It is important to notice that gradualism in
design is by no means bad in itself or an approach that should be
avoided. I am merely trying to illustrate how gradualistic design is
based on current needs, users and solutions rather than trying to
challenge these notions as the basis for design work.
The gradualism in the design process almost
invariably results in gradually evolving design solutions. This is no
surprise considering that the basis for the new solutions is usually
the previous solutions. Perhaps a more precise way of saying this is
that current solutions are usually seen as the prototype solutions
rather than as members of a larger category of similar solutions. This
inability to see the wood from the trees results in copying most of the
features of current solutions into the newly designed solution. From
this perspective a household cooking pot is seen as a cooking device
with a material holding closure, a handle and an optional lid, rather
than as a device that makes food ingredient into more edible form by
transforming they structure through a thermal process.
A designer designing a new low level solution to
the problem that a cooking pot solves designs a better (in her opinion)
pot. A designer designing a categorical level solution to the
aforementioned problem could just as well design a chemical compound
that is injected into a food item producing the same “cooking” result
as the pot. The first one is clearly an evolutionary solution (it
looks, acts and can be used like any other existing solution). The
second approach borrows a role of a nurse/doctor into the food making
process (inject a “cure”) and deviates from the usual design solution
by not inherently supporting other existing solution interfaces
(stoves, water taps, sinks, etc.) and
cultures of use binding these solutions together.
So, gradualism in the solutions is due to using
the earlier solutions as an archetypal starting point as well as not
being able to abstract the higher level role of the solution in the
actual process of use. What we have as solutions in use today are
usually “things” of problematic nature. These solutions have their pros
and cons, their good and ill effects, unforeseen consequences and long
term effects that are slow to emerge. Regardless of this, the picture
that we have of the solution (when designing) is usually centred on
what it is now and how it is used now. We are often unable to stretch
our imaginations to include uses and effects that do not yet exits,
which are nevertheless inherent in the solutions as seeds for more
diverse use. Thus, having this picture of a solution as it is now
defined, usually ends up strengthening the current use and role of the
solution, when we derive another variation of that solution by way of
gradualistic design.
Gradualism in the solutions is also a natural
consequence of gradualistic methods of design. Benchmarking is a good
example of a method, in which current solutions are inspected to
identify their strengths, which are then combined to form a basis for
new solution*. Another example is
test-based methods, which form the starting point for a new design by
examining only one particular design solution with its strengths and
weaknesses. This solution is then gradually evolved into a another one
through feedback from testing by adding and removing functions while
taking special care as not to change the actual role of the product.
* Benchmarking is an interesting example as it could also be used to combine ideas of very different nature, resulting perhaps in diverging solutions. However, this potential of the method is rarely used in actual benchmarking practise.
Gradualism of the culture of use is perhaps the
most problematic area for designers and even users themselves, as it is
mostly left uncharted. A culture of use could be defined as a actions
and ways of thinking that bind together several design solutions into a
loose category. Thus the culture of "cooking" takes particular forms in
different parts of the earth by binding different products (pans,
stoves, fires, knives, etc) together by known actions (stir frying,
baking, broiling and cutting) and thinking processes (to make dessert,
to wok, to broil, etc.). Cultures seem to script how the solution is
used, who uses it for what purposes, how does it interface with other
solutions and is it a part of a longer chain of uses that ties together
different people, needs, uses and complete cultures.
What questions arise from the role of culture of
use in defining design solutions? Can designers design the culture of
use? Is it possible to embed such features in a product that makes it
more likely to succeed in a deviating culture of use? Is it possible to
embed in the design solution such properties that make certain cultures
more likely than others? If so, can this embedding be used to guide the
use into new paths diverging from the existing uses (and eventually
solutions)?
These are some of the interesting questions I'm
still asking myself repeatedly. In a way I feel as if the ghost of
modernism is haunting behind my shoulder, whispering these ideas into
my ear: "Wouldn't it be nice if we could design a better society
through products?" This is harking back to the idea of designer
controlling not only the idea of the user and the solution, but also (a
part of) the actual use of the products. I felt this was dangerous, but
rather interesting and potentially even constructive. I feel that this
could serve as a starting point for the designer to incorporate her
values into the design process.
Status quo or slow changes are very common in the
culture of use. People’s ideas of how to use new solutions are always
shaped by the way they use current solutions. The ability of a new
innovation to break apart from the mould is thus partly defined by how
it can separate it self from the culture of use of previous solutions.
If a new solution can be used like an existing solution it will be used
as such – the potential for change will be lost amidst the repetition
of learned routines of use. New becomes quickly old when it is used and
subsequently understood as “old”.
Why is this so? Why do cultures of use resist
change? One could argue that this is partly due to the human
need/ability to lower the cognitive load by learning things into
transparent routines. When something is learned as a routine, it
becomes a subconscious action that takes a lot of conscious effort to
unlearn. New solutions requiring new uses often need this unlearning or
they will not spawn new cultures of use. I would call this personal
level resistance to new ideas a psychological (or even neurological)
resistance.
One could propose further that the resistance in
the cultures of use happen partly due to the intertwining of different
uses into chains of uses or mega-cultures of use. Consider the car as
an example. Various different people use it for various different needs
(not just transportation). It is supported by various manufacturers,
suppliers and services. A whole network of actors (bus drivers,
mechanics, car wax salesmen, gas stations, repair shops, etc.),
sub-cultures (auto shops, public transport, etc.) and uses (rally
driving, personal transportation, goods logistics) are build around it.
It becomes very difficult to propose an alternative to the car, without
supporting all the connecting actors and networks at the same time. One
alternative is naturally to focus only on one particular need/use of the
car and try and replace that. I would call this resistance to new
solutions a cultural resistance.
A third kind of resistance could also be proposed.
Technological resistance is caused by one prevailing standard, which all
other technologies must submit to. A standard is usually glue that
holds intertwining networks more closely together and strengthens the
bonds between different cultures of use. An example of this could be
pointed out in the computer operating system front, in which innovation
has almost completely come to a halt due to interoperability demands.
Technological resistance is usually very strong in heavy oligopolies,
where a large number of organisations support particular standard as a
way to ensure profit. This resistance is further strengthened if these
standards are close (e.g. protected with patent portfolios) and are out
of bounds for new entrants.
A fourth form of resistance in the cultures of use
stems from personal/cultural level. User resistance comes from the idea
of a prototype or ideal user with certain needs, roles, functions,
responsibilities and subsequently – an identity. User resistance
happens in a situation in which users prohibit from themselves certain
behaviours or possibilities, not because the standards nor even because
of culture deems it improper, but because they have an identity of
something else. Users are consumers, not producers. Users enjoy they
don’t interact. Users consume they don’t create. These identities are
usually born out of megacultures of use (e.g.
tv-production/consumption) and especially opposing role pairs (e.g.
user-producer, consumer-creator) that are used for circular definitions
of user behaviours.
It is easy to understand that designers feel overwhelmed by such opposition and resistance, leaving the design of cultures of use a mere afterthought if anything at all. However, things need not to look so bleak for the designer aiming to diverge from the mass of current products. Even though it is probably impossible to actually design these cultures of use, it can be extremely fruitful an exercise for the designer to try and influence them. This is the part of design process where the designer can immerse herself in the discussion of values, society and future. How would the designer prefer her solutions were used? What kind of effects would she consider desirable/undesirable? Are aspects of the solution such that they fight clearly against designer's values when the solution is used? Should the solution, the potential for use or even values be redesigned to better accommodate harmony between them? Is the inherent contradiction between them actually a desirable goal?
My starting points for deviant design at this
point were simple. I had drawn an analogy between evolution of species
and design work. In addition, I had described how I thought traditional
design work created products (i.e. gradualistic design). The major
points of gradualistic design are summarised below as design phases and
the subsequent production phases (note that I've included phases of
product design that are often considered external to the traditional
design work, such as marketing and appropriation).
Appropriation of the product in the market place
is done by people who may or may not fit the script's description of a
user. In this phase the nature and the use of the product if further
refined by people who use the product as they see fit, thus eventually
defining and refining the actual nature of the product. The process of
appropriation may subsequently affect redesign efforts of the product
and perhaps result in altering the product to better support unforeseen
consumer needs and uses
The above is of course a simplistic scenario and it could be further
improved with such phases as user observations, consumer tests,
competitive analysis and such. These additional phases however do not
diverge from the underlying idea that users, needs and solutions are
givens that are rarely challenged in the research, design,
manufacturing and marketing phases.
Deviation from existing solutions has been
achieved through various means through out the history. Technology
centred process of research and development can often result in
revolutionary designs. Examples of this are telephone and television,
both of which were conceived with no initial picture of need, user or
use in mind. This focusing on the technology itself created a seed for
revolution that was created into a total revolution of communication
through the process of scripting and product adaptation. Now, decades
later distinct cultures of use have formed around television and
telephone although both are now being supplanted or replaced by new
products (iTV, mobile phone) and new cultures of use around them.
Deviation from existing solutions has been achieved through other than just technology centred design methods. Legends of the single creative scientist or inventor are abundant, but the actual process is often not described. What seems to be a unifying factor for most of these methods is the role of the user: in most cases users as they exist today are either forgotten (technology centred process) or supplanted with distinctively different visions (the creative genius reinventing the world to his/her own needs). Sometimes revolutionary concepts have arisen out of creating for users that were not earlier considered as such (designing for the handicapped, animals or for some other than just normal average users). In short, designing for a new user seemed like a potential point of departure for my process of deviant design.
For deviant design my aim is to get away from
gradualistic design mode by not necessarily changing the whole concept
of design process, but deviating from the norm at each phase of the
process. Again I have borrowed concepts from the theory of speciation.
However, this time I have chosen not to try and start from the product
or the solution, but from the picture of a user (just as gradualistic
design process most often starts with the idea of a target audience or
users).
I have chosen the user as a starting point,
because I have drawn an analogy from species that products live within
user spaces and in order to deviate from a product by guiding mutation
I need to change the environment it lives in. This means changing the
user and the user culture. I hypothesise that isolating a product from
other products by dropping it into a deviated user culture could result
in a deviated product (or rather a design proposition at this point).
All that is needed is enough mutation of the products' current traits
and selection of mutated products in order to map out which ones would
adopt to the environment.
In order to get a better fit between the model of
evolution/speciation and that of design/deviation I had concluded that I
needed to draw analogous models of these two processes. I had already
done a small analogy between evolutionary landscape and the product
landscape, but I needed to extend this into the realm of design. My aim
is to get from an evolution that “just happens” in the marketplace into
an evolution that can be partially guided (designed) in the
marketplace.
Below I outline the most important terms from
evolution and try to come up with proper counterparts in my rough
deviant design work. I have used my idea of users as forming the living
space for products as a starting point for defining the counterparts.
Then I try to explain the process of evolution and especially some
aspects of speciation (on those parts that I have limited my study to
by selecting only some key terms). Finally I try to map this process to
design work and produce an analogous process for it.
Design ideas that are developed for several generations in "isolation" from the conceptual space from which the original design idea diverged from resulting in structurally/conceptually incompatible ideas that form a basis for a new class of products.
A conceptual living space
for products consisting of users and supporting cultures of use. Each
living space has it's own distinctive environmental conditions under
which products can evolve and new product ideas can emerge.
Environmental conditions ~ user attributes/culture of use
The attributes of a product/consumer marketplace, that are at least partly defined by user attributes (such as values, beliefs and patterns of action). These attributes define how products need to adapt to (or how products need to mould their) surroundings and what kind of ideas live over to future generations.
Introduction of differing (from existing) ideas to a design solution through a process of product concept deconstruction and abstraction that may result in the solution being better/worse suited to it's current mode of use and fitness among similar solutions.
Changes in the frequency of certain type of product features due to favouring some form of product use / culture of use by the designers as well as the users.
The process of getting new product features by combining two or more product features together (usually from products of the same class, but also from products of different class).
The likelihood of a product to succeed in a a living space consisting of users in a way that results in new generations (versions) of the product and it’s designed/acquired concepts (NB! Product evolution does not have to include the constraints of biological evolution, thus supporting Lamarckian evolution can be beneficial for attaining design goals).
The process of deciding
whether a product instance is good enough to pass it’s designed traits
to future products based on it’s ability to fit into or change the user
culture (according to it’s needs). This phase includes a possible
redefinition of product’s concepts in order to make it pass selection
(I would call this a quick generational fix that gives the designer a
chance to a new version/generation of the product before letting it to
market in order to increase it’s selection chances).
The process of market competition under which similar but slightly differing design solutions compete with some solutions winning over time and stabilising as the core concept of a product class (as long as market does not change radically) through users appropriation of the product and it’s use. Actually one could say that user appropriation comes first and from that follows competitive advantage through which products finally emerge.
A class of things that shares common ways of being used and perceived. They are unlikely to be successfully combined with another class due to how they are used and perceived. A species is born out of a design proposition that is forged into an actual solution by users through re-appropriation and finally becomes a conceptually isolated product through use stabilisation, sustaining support network and culture of use.
The above analogies between evolutionary
processes/entities and possible deviant design counterparts were to be
my starting point for designing the process of deviant design. I had
already given myself liberties by not trying to model speciation
perfectly and by allowing falsified theories (such as acquired traits
being passed on to future generations) to be included in my analogous
model. Noting and accepting this was important, because I realised that
my aim was not to model an exact copy of the evolution process, but to
use that theoretical framework as a source of ideas that would
hopefully constrain my thinking enough to guide it to a differing model
for design. Thus, I had already hypothesised unknowingly that by
forcing my design thinking into the conceptual realm of evolutionary
biology it would enable me to isolate my thinking from the traditional
design process at least partially/temporally.