The following is a transcript of a talk I gave at Prototypes and Popcorn, May 2019

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Hi! I’m going to talk to you about some things that I’ve been thinking about lately. 

Before I get going – a few content warnings. I’m going to talk about the criminal justice system. I’m also going to talk about climate change – so sorry in advance for exacerbating any angst you might be feeling after Jussi’s talk. 

I also might talk about neoliberalism. 

This means I might swear a bit, because talking about neoliberalism makes me angry.

There might be a lack of precision in my talk today – there are a lot of ideas here that I’m working through, though I hear from Dan that’s ok for this forum. 

To be honest, the reason I’m here is because Dan invited me, because Paper Giant has this newsletter that goes out fortnightly. 

And in the intro to that newsletter, I wrote something, and linked to an article by Jussi, and I talked about something that’s been on my mind for a long time.

What I said was, if we face truly complex challenges (and we do!), we need to develop a community-centred and community-enabling form of design – one that de-centres the human and takes into account the wider systems of influence and change.  

And the reason that I’ve been thinking about that is that my company, Paper Giant, has done some work that pushed me in that direction. 

Dan liked the sound of that talk. So did a lot of people. So do I actually. 

So here I am, to try to talk about it with you. These are big questions, and this is a short talk,  so sorry in advance for all the things I should be talking about, and are relevant here, but don’t cover today.

My talk is in 3 parts

A sad part. An angry part. And a hopeful part.

Sad part first

In which I explain why I’m here, and acknowledge an existential crisis I’ve been feeling (and I think some of you have been feeling too)

So – a tiny bit of context – where I’m from, how I got here.

I’m a co-founder of Paper Giant. We’re a strategic design agency based here in Melbourne. 

We do research, we do design work, we do strategic work, we do evaluation work. 

And over the years, we being doing work that, for me, has been in spaces that are increasingly fraught and ethically complex.

In the last few years, we worked on: multiple projects that help people know and exercise their legal rights; we’ve worked with disability providers to help them supply more effective services in a complex policy environment; we’ve worked on tools for fairer refugee assessment, we’ve worked with governments to make things better for people dealing with death, we’ve worked with scientists to make better use of more climate modelling for future planning decisions.

In this context, we totally use Human Centred Design, all the time, ] and in some cases, to help generate profits. 

This all sounds like great work – and it is. It’s an amazing privilege to do it, to get to do it, to work with the amazing team at Paper Giant that delivers this stuff.

But… this is supposed to be the sad part of the talk.

And the reason it’s sad, is the more that I work in these areas, the more the problems we are dealing with seem impossible, intractable, and the systems in which we operate to try to improve things seem truly broken. 

I’m going to talk about just one project example, some work we are doing right now. 

Fun fact: “33% of women and 42% of men in Victorian prisons have been found to have an Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), compared with 2% in the general Australian community”.

This sounds to me like problematic overrepresentation.

Effectively, prisons have become the defacto social service for people with complex support needs. These are people that should be protected and supported, should be getting the highest levels of supported care through systems like the NDIS. And yet. 

What if we were to apply a Human Centred Design lens to this problem? What might we get from that?

A human centred approach asks ‘how could this be better for the individual?’ ‘How can we make the system more efficient?’ ‘How can we improve the experience for people?’ Or even – ‘How can we add ‘delight’ to this experience?’

You can look for pain points – but what if it’s all pain?

Our criminal justice system is oppressive. It’s rife with fundamental violations of human rights of people with a disability, and others as well. 

We’ve been looking at the whole system. And it’s a complex web of many interlocking organisations, that doesn’t lend itself to focusing on a user journey and improving things that way. 

Sure, we could improve the experience for people travelling through an unjust system, we want to make it less traumatic. But that’s not good enough.

A systemic approach says ‘Why is the system broken in the first place?’ ‘what are the factors of influence that are causal?’ ‘Why does it perpetuate?’

The design work we are doing right now is an attempt to change the mindset of professionals working in the system – a mindset change from a legal one to one of care and support and respect and responsibility. But that’s not enough either.

Sometimes working through these issues feels like looking at an AI generated scene. You recognise all the bits that are wrong, but you just can’t quite name them.

The funny thing is, as we do this work, we find something interesting – The system isn’t broken because people don’t know what the solution is. We know full well what the solutions are. Fund housing! Fund mental health and disability support services! Fund Therapeutic justice! Educate judges!

And if we all know these solutions, why aren’t they being actioned?

They don’t get actioned,  because there is a systemic, societal surrounds to this problem, and at the individual level, they seem intractable.

• People with justice involvement (for example, those who’ve been in prison) are stigmatised.
• This increases negative community perceptions of crime
• These negative perceptions lead to knee jerk policy responses by governments who want to seem ‘tough on crime’
• This policy environment means the justice system becomes increasingly overloaded and complex
• This overloading and confusion, especially for those with support needs, for a variety of reasons, leads to more likelihood of recidivism
• Which in turn leads to more stigmatisation, as people return to the justice system again and again

Of course, it’s way more complex than that. But this is happening. And it’s important to acknowledge these deep structures within the system where we are working.

What’s the point of being “human centred” within systems of cyclic oppression? Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We can design for all the ‘humans’ we want here, but the system will continue.

That’s not to say we can’t design our way out of this – we are trying our level best to do so. But we have to look at things differently to how we’ve been trained. We are not looking at the ‘journey’ of people in the system and trying to improve their user experience. We are trying to stop the system from oppressing them. 

And it’s hard, and it’s sad that we have to be here at all.

The angry part of the talk

In which I blame myself, and others, for the sorry state of the world.

People that know me know I talk a lot about how design intervenes in the world. Sometimes, more cynically, I use the term ‘interferes’. I use these words as a way of reflecting on the fact that design – especially strategic design – is explicitly about changing existing ways of doing things in order to have an impact: on people, on the future, on organisations, on the planet.

I’m increasingly afraid that Human Centred Design gives us false narratives of change and can give us a false sense of ‘positive impact’. 

Sometimes the easy thing is to focus on the user-experience, the personal, the improvements for individuals. 

“At least I helped that guy!” we say. “I’m doing good work in a limited scope!” we cry.

But, behind this approach lies systemic oppression. 

It’s perpetuated by HCD because HCD is often a  fig-leaf large companies and governments to hide behind, so that they can continue with their extractive and oppressive actions, while designers work at the edges to pick up the slack.

How many of you work in design and could easily reframe your work from ‘human centred’ to ‘profit centred’ without changing anything about what you do?

Well, I don’t want more and better business as usual. I want systemic change.

I don’t want to design better health insurance products. I want free, high quality, public healthcare. 

I don’t want to design better prisons. I want to abolish prisons. 

I don’t want to design better energy price comparisons. I want a complete transition to 100% renewables. 

KPIs. Key Performance Indicators.

Can a court system that has KPI of efficiency deliver true justice?

Can a world economic system that has a KPI of limitless extraction and the expense of the environment deliver sustainability? 

The wrong KPIs are breaking everything. Human centred KPIs are literally killing us.

John Seddon has this great quote.

“When you incentivise behaviour, you get less of the work that you want – people focus on the incentive, they don’t focus on the work”

Or as I like to put it – “If you measure output, not outcomes, people will game the system”. We get so focussed on the measures of success within our immediate purview, we lose sight of the outcomes we actually want to achieve.  

Want to fix this climate emergency? Stop burning carbon. Stop. Stop it! 

I’m 38 years old. I’m angry, because for my entire life, carbon producing organisations, fossil fuel companies, have known that this is happening. And they focussed on the needs of their stakeholders, and (perhaps), the needs of their customers. They hid the negative effects, created fear, uncertainty and doubt around climate science, and increased production and profit… business as usual, rolling along. 

Meanwhile, the dominant economic and political thought – a kind-of rebellion to the collective notions of the 60s and 70s – neoliberalism – has led to feelings of powerlessness in the populace, because the key to this mode of thought is that it’s individuals who have power and agency. 

• We burn fossil fuels
• Burning fossil fuels increases GDP – a key measure of the economy, a key measure of ‘progress’ 
• Watching GDP go up, cements the idea that  neoliberal economic models are good and right
• This thinking and ideology suggests that individual action is the only way to make change
• This increases feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, we retreat into ourselves and ignore collective opportunities for change
• Bau continues
• Atmospheric carbon keeps going up

We need to end this cycle. 

And I have to say, “fuck you” to the 100 or so companies, in particular, that have known about this for my entire life, and yet… they have human-centred-designed their way to the demise of all of us.

GDP is a KPI, and profit is a KPI, and those KPIs do not take into account the actual effect on everything outside of a narrow extraction silo. Unfortunately, the ‘thing outside’ of that silo just happens to survival.

This is not hyperbole – if we want to survive as a species, we must break this cycle. The worst thing we can possibly do now is retreat into individual action and despair.

And if you think I’m a hypocrite, or that you are – you are missing the point, you are falling for the neoliberal trick. 

It’s the system that’s broken – you can’t fix it on your own, interventions that change the cycles in the system are the only way.

There is no easy way out. Disengagement is not a solution, and individual action won’t get us the transitions we need to survive the anthropocene. 

Yes I participate in this system. Hell, I run a profit making company. We do good socially conscious work. We also work for banks and energy companies. I participate in the system. But I hate the system and it fucking sucks.

The hopeful part of the talk

In which I’m struggling with this question: is it possible to run a design agency that ‘does good’, when HCD is not good enough?

How can we attempt to reconfigure design to be community centred?

The good thing is ‘we’ don’t have to do it. It’s happening all around us. The communities are doing driving positive change already. (Look up extinction rebellion.) We just need to join in.

But I think we need to reframe design in this context.

Designers needs to work harder to tell the truth. Tell the truth to your clients, even if it makes them uncomfortable. Tell the truth to yourself, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

Always. Look outside your silo, your purview, your tightly defined project scope. You are intervening in systems all the time in your work. So intervene somewhere useful, somewhere that makes things better for the system, not just a very specific bunch of humans.

I’ll acknowledge that in this business, the can be a misalignment between what we think is the right thing to do as a designer, and the power that we have or can exercise in a specific situation. 

The only way I can find through this problem is to expand our models, outside of HCD, to look at systems and use that knowledge to drive real change – political change, inside orgs and at the state or nation or world level.

Tell the truth, and make your interventions count.

Don’t empathise. Include. 

We do co-design. Co-design is necessary right now, because organisations actively exclude people. 

I’d much rather live in a world where co-design wasn’t necessary. In the meantime, include as many people with lived experience as you can in the design of solutions that affect them. 

In the justice project I talked about – we are trying this ‘community centredness’ – bringing together all the players to work together to fix the incentives in the system. 

We have people on our project team with lived experience of cognitive disability and justice involvement. We are working directly, at the highest levels we can access, with decisionmakers across the courts, corrections, social services. 

We are identifying solutions to issues within our funding scope, and being very explicit and active about pointing to points of systemic leverage outside our scope, but within the purview of our stakeholders, that could make the very problems we are addressing cease to exist. 

Give up on ‘empathising’ with people that have fundamentally different lived experience to you. Just include them, enable them, hire them.

Disrupt, but not to destroy – disrupt to challenge the incentives in the system. 

Design needs to go back to providing visions – community led visions of a better world. 

There has been some valid criticism of ‘speculative design’ lately in that it presents visions, but presents no way to make change – it requires a long-tail trickle-down effect for those visions to reach fruition. 

We need empower communities to create visions of change and use everything we know about implementation – through co-design and HCD – to make those visions of better, regenerative, community centred futures a reality. 

Stop disrupting to tear stuff down – instead work to change from within and without, to build new systems.

Understand what the incentives are that are driving your system. Design systems with incentives that reinforce positive social and environmental outcomes. And measure the outcomes, not output. 

Because It’s going to get bad. If we don’t act, it will get worse. We still have influence over how bad it gets.

But this means we must also have influence over how good it gets, if we want to.