UXA2022_Day 1_ Lara Penin - Thinking Design for this Century

Two decades into this century, our lives have been impacted by a constellation of interconnected emerging issues: from the current global pandemic to the most recent Black Lives Matter uprising, from the “Me Too” movement, to climate emergency and the ongoing economic and democracy crises.

This talk will consider how design might intervene in, and respond to contemporary contexts and crises, departing from disciplinary norms and cannons of earlier design movements and eras and reacting to current demands for a society of greater equity, care and justice for all.

The talk is based on a course in the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program at Parsons School of Design, The New School.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2022 – Hybrid Conference Thursday, 25 August 2022 Captioned by: Kasey Allen & Carmel Downes
2. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 2 home that impact that design can bring into our lives. I'm very happy to kick off our program today with a talk from Professor Lara Penin, who is joining us from New York. She will be talking to us about design for this century. How the work that we do fits into that broader social construct and social contract that we engage in as designers. Please join me in welcoming, from New York, Professor Lara Penin. LARA PENIN: How are you all? I can't seem to turn my video on. STEVE BATY: This is the challenge of a hybrid event. It is slightly unchartered territory. We are fortunate, while we wait, we have about a 40/60 split in terms of the people who are here and the people joining us online and we have about a fifty-fifty split between talks that will be on this stage and those that will be virtual. It's great, in many respects, because it means that we are able to reach an audience that we may not otherwise have been able to do and we are also able to hear from speakers who would otherwise not have been able to travel, or at least do so conveniently as we need them to. This is the trick, is actually making sure that the technology works. I am pretty certain - I am going to call it now - at some point over the next two days, someone is going to say "Steve you're on mute, you haven't turned your microphone back on". That is bound to happen at least once. I think we have her. LARA PENIN: Yes. Can you hear me, can you see me? STEVE BATY: No, we cannot hear you - there you are. STEVE BATY: Over to you.
3. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 3 LARA PENIN: Thank you, Steve, so happy and honoured to kick off in this amazing conference in person and virtual and hybrid. Hopefully, we will have a nice hour together. Thank you for the introduction, Steve, and I will start my talk by giving my acknowledge. I know you have done it. I just wanted to call out of the names of the people in the land that I stand right now, the Lenape, and also the nations in Sao Paulo where I grew up and reminding everybody these are all unseeded Indigenous lands, the Terra Indigena is the artwork from the Indigenous artist and I appreciate, Steve, what you said in the beginning and I am right there with you. This is the most text you see on the screen, I swear, I promise. I will say this: I started to work on this project that led me to the framework that I am going to share with you as I begin to prepare a course and a series of events related to the 10 year anniversary of my research lab in New York City. The question we are posing ourselves is this: we are in 2022, we know - I don't have to repeat the many issues, the many problems, the many crises - interconnected crises we have together and also the emerging movements, including Black Lives Matter and the MeToo movement and a number of others and the ever present climate emergency for all of us, depending where we are in the world but we are going to be touched by it one way or the other, the economic crisis, the crisis of democracy happening in many places. We are more important than ever, the question is how? How might we as designers intervene and respond to all this contemporary contexts and crises? Departing from early design movements and from last century because they simply won't work with everything we are facing right now, right? What is the new version of this and how do we do things differently this time around for greater equity, care and justice for all? That is what we are trying to achieve. This is based on a course that I have been teaching for two years at Parsons School of Design, that is part of the
4. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 4 New School, it is an MFA program. I am an architect and urbanist and service designer. I have written about it, I have a new book, an interaction design pioneer and someone who has written and designed extensively in countries, especially Latin America and I have a forthcoming book on critical service design agendas with some colleagues. I have been leading this lab, as I mentioned, we work in design sustainability and social innovation, social justice and right before the pandemic started, this is March 2020, we held the last in person event and we invited a number of folks, to artists, activists, designers in a transdisciplinary effort to come together and debate possibilities for thought and action, what does it mean to design in this day and age? We came up with the idea of these assemblies, these round tables and with my students in the following two years, we developed this format, in which we invited folks to come and debate seven issues that we framed and that's what I am going to share with you, being the symbol of being together, togetherness, and this was developed in the years of the worst moments of the pandemic. So there was a sense of trying to be together when debating, even if separate. We came up with seven interconnected emerging themes. I will share them in a very specific way. I will share a general introduction. I will discuss then design implications through some examples of existing practices and I will try also to share some takeaways, in the form of either principles or questions or I will try to make a case for a particular approach, emerging from the questions we are asking. I am happy to have a debate about this. This is an ongoing work, so bear with me on this, please. My first point here is really thinking design as transdisciplinary inquiry. It is a mouthful, I know. This is my title, so I have been dealing
5. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 5 with this for 14 years now. I will try to break it down and hopefully try to make sense for you for why I think this is crucial and important for design in this century. First, let me just quickly make differences here between multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. Multidisciplinary, studying something from different disciplines at the same time, interdisciplinary, transfer methods from one to another and transdisciplinary is really concerning things that are once between and across different disciplines and beyond, right, with a goal of understanding the world around us. Crucially, what transdisciplinary, a mind set and way of thinking and doing acknowledges the different levels of reality and different levels of perception and so I think this is - in terms of imagining a constellation and kinds of knowledge, so for us to be able to face all the interconnected crisis, we really need to evoke different modes of understanding and seeing the world. We need the physical, we need - cognitive and we also need the effective and relationships. We to deal with nature, we need to acknowledge the divine and we need to deal with complexities and subjective and objective and so forth. In doing so, we really also - and that is part of the transdisciplinary principle, in the process of knowing and acknowledge knowing. We have to acknowledge ourselves in the way we relate to the world. That becomes a crucial aspect when we design, because we don't design in a vacuum and we don't design as isolated individuals but we are part of communities, we are part of context. I think this is important and crucial and here I make a case for design for this century being a transdisciplinary kind of design because it is already part of design nature to be this mode of thought as Manzini said, responding to the different challenges, it is part of our DNA to be bridges and brokers between worlds and people and organisations. As Escobar also talks about, and I will come back to that later on,
6. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 6 the idea of the need for pluriversal understandings of design in the moment of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Here, finally, I want to acknowledge the need to think about it, inter sectional ways and I am quoting Kimberley Crenshaw who talks about an intersection of feminism as a way for us to think and frame this multilayer complex inequalities, right? She talks about race and gender but we can think about all kind of interconnected inner qualities and that seems to be one important component when we think about transdisciplinary design and transdisciplinary thinking. Then related to that, my second point is re-thinking modernity, what do we understand about it now. Importantly, in imagining a modern world, who are we designing for and who is designing? Who are the public we design for as designers and who are we as designers, agents of what we put in the world, as we build the world around us? Who is modernity, right? Here I included pictures on your screen. On the top left you see Brasilia, the capital of Brazil - I am a Brazilian architect so bear with me and my choice. On the right, there is an image of this token design by Italian radical designers and architects from the 1970s. Nonstop City is the name of this project. I won't talk about them as projects but I want to say that if you look at the pictures at the bottom, they are more or less the people who design or helped design or helped to create the frame works that led to this kind of design. Both reality and Utopia from last to mid-century. What is wrong with that picture? I hope you acknowledge what is wrong with that picture. There is a complete and total lack of diversity. That seems to be unacceptable right now, because it just reflects one certain version of reality, of perceptions of the world. I also want to say that a project like Brasilia, for example, it's so well designed, it is so interesting, at the same time he left out a lot of people, one of the largest favelas in Brazil in Latin America that is
7. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 7 next-door to this beautifully designed city. A lot of people were left out, by design, it seems like and it seems like we really need to overcome that. What I see and observe is a movement in this direction that more and more people are reclaiming spaces as designers and reimagining and refuturing a design future could look like and I will show a few examples of that. This was an exhibition of modern art, two years ago, in fact. More than that, I think there is also a big problem, I was shocked when I saw this a few years ago. It is a design census done by the AIGA, the association of graphic designers in America, revealing the lack of diversity, really, of graphic designers in the United States. A bit shocking but perhaps not surprising. How do we get out of this? What do we do? I suggest a few things, some questions that I ask with my students, we frame these questions and some principles came out from that - from this conversation. Recognising patterns and languages that are othering. Specific terminology that we think as universal but really they are not. Questioning those things, imagining methods and actions to achieve change. It is our responsibility to design spaces that are inclusive for everyone, not just the people with starkly designed tools and methods related to this elite way of understanding design. Finally, who gets to design? We need to change the demographic. We need to hire and I know here many people are in a position of hiring junior designers, hiring folks, and you will be. If you are not, at some point in your career. We need to imagine and hire and take action to hire with justice in mind. It is not just an idea. My third point is connected to that, surprisingly, so who do we design for? Who do we invite to design with us? Here I am talking about one of the pillars of human century designers, we have defined at least in the last 20 years or more and the participation - participatory methods as
8. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 8 well as codesign practices and here I will be calling for the ethics of collaborating with others. Passing from - I am sure you've heard some version of this, the designing for - from designing for, to designing with, to designing by. As I mentioned, really questioning these supposedly universal lenses of design thinking and design doing. The idea of someone bringing a design expertise to somebody else's life and context and how - if you Google design workshops, what comes out is this - everybody looks the same in these workshops and the posters look the same. I am not trying to demonise or vilify any of those practices but for sure, there is not a lot of diversity in the people but mostly, not a lot of diversity in terms of how a lot of people design today. I will mention the disability movement here. Nothing about us, without us, so it is - it is a disability design, not designed for disability. The disabled people should be the designers, rather than having someone design for them, even if it includes participatory methods. So in this framing that I borrowed from my colleague, Jennifer Rittner, the idea of defining expertise and who gets to be crew den shall as an authority over what, right? I am using pictures here not to appoint fingers but to just show that becomes a problem when we have situations like a person from outside coming to save you, if you will. I want to acknowledge also the fact that many of us - the kind of codesign we do - has roots on the so-called Scandinavian participatory design movement of the 1970s and 80s. If are you not familiar with the work design and artefacts, I invite you to check it out. In this work, I have pictures from the book here. They really came up with the idea of designing together with the people, with the workers that were going to work the computer artefacts and the software. They defined through a number of actions they conducted back then, they defined the principles
9. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 9 of codesign practices that we use today in many of her practices. There is also a lot of more thorough codesign and participatory methods that I want us to begin to acknowledge. I included here some famous architect who decided that she was not going to be designing executive plans but rather just with an initial draft, she will go to the construction site and design with the technicians, with the workers and make decisions based on being together with them. There are many other such practices like this, where people design themselves, where they collaborated with architects or designers in different ways to become themselves agents of their own designs. I put here another example of housing, social - or participatory or social housing. This is a Brazilian story but you will find this in many parts of the world, for sure. In my research lab, I have been working with participatory methods and practices for quite some time and I put images here of projects over 10 years apart. Throughout this time, my practice evolved quite a lot and it became less intrusive and more observing and more inclusive in many ways. My students have been there with me throughout this process. I think there is an evolving practice and I myself see my own practice as part of that. Some key principles that have been emerging from this work, from this reflections. One is the idea of building partnerships, articulating, building coalitions, rather than coming down into a certain people and from a top down kind of approach, creating an infrastructure for participation and creating trust and taking the time, budgeting time for doing that. The other thing is before empathy, which is I know a major - an important word for many here, start with lived experience and tacit knowledge, so it is elevating peoples' own knowledge, recognising the experience as design capacity, as expertise, right and part of that calls for decolonisation of processes, methods and technology, getting rid
10. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 10 of something like discovery phase that many of us still use in defining our design process. We are not discovering anything, we are just getting to know - it is not a safari, we are getting into peoples' lives so we need to establish more trust-based - real relationships, rather than just extractive practices as many of my students will call it. Speaking of extractive practices and humanising approaches and thinking and doing, I link to point four here which is designing for care and solidarity. Here, as a service designer, I think about service a lot. I think about service as really the basic form of human care as it's written here and connecting us to the basic form of humanity. The other image that I didn't include here that comes to mind is the idea of the bone, the femur as a famous anthropologist talks about, the healed femur is the first sign of civilisation because somebody took the time to actually care for a person, to heal a bone, that takes six weeks to heal and that is really when humans became humans. Throughout history, I put many examples of imagery that, throughout cultures and ages, the idea of work and service to others, as related to care. However, as we think about the services for design, the platforms for system, the systems we design, the majority of our work, the majority of the groups and parts of society we don't really serve as designers in the market, are related to what Cheryl Buckley, a design historian, calls exterior structures, transportation systems, government, housing, planning and this kind of industry. However, she is calling us to think about how do we design services in our every day lives and caring for one another, caring for parents, caring for their children, or caring for an elderly parent or relatives, being a parent, running a home and so on. A lot to do with reproductive labour for sure. What she is saying is why have we, as service designers, looked into only those specific industries, rather than look at this kind of every day live services? Don't they deserve to be
11. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 11 designers as well? That could be one entry point for us to think about care in a much broader sense, in solidarity. I do observe a growing discourse in practice of design related to care, off defined as care. Here, not only health care but end of life care, education, personal care, elderly care, social care, in many different levels. As Maria Bellacasa talks about, it is a lot of work, she somehow thinks it is disruptive because we don't know what to do about it in a way and yet most of all, we want to feel cared for in one another. It is omnipresent, however even though we don't really sometimes name it, we don't understand it as an entity or something that can be designed. If you don't know the work of the Care Lab, based in Barcelona, I want you to check that out. They are creating a framework on which they are approaching care and care organisations and industries in different ways and defining care that is made up of compassion actions but when we deliver Care, we do so as we manufacture cars, they say. I am thinking here about American medical system as an example of that, right and failing beautifully - not beautifully, but certainly failing in addressing the issues. A lot of room here for us as designers to enter and develop a framework of design as care and for solidarity. Keep questions emerging here. Extend care beyond dominant groups and narratives. Care as practices rather than industries but are defined in a broad sense. Facilitating an environment for co-creation and trust. It is up to us as designers to create these connections, activate those networks in order to create holistic care. We can't be just passengers. It will call on a lot of our abilities to build the bridges, connect the people and the dots here and create a place where this can happen. The third point is really something that bugs me a lot, which is the challenge of scaling care. How do you scale, standardise, right? It's a paradox here. We are often called to kind
12. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 12 of bring things to scale and optimise systems and work flows and create efficiencies but, in doing so, the risk is that we lose the human touch. Think about hospitals, think about health care systems that are so pressured for serving a lot of people and how do we do that with the care and human touch that is needed, especially when resources are scarce? More of a question than an answer, for sure. Where I have arrived in this thinking here, I wanted to share that with you. My fifth point is designing for sustainable and just transitions and I am borrowing a lot of different frame works here. For a moment, pausing in this definition of design itself, right, that design is has always been the domain of world-making, making worlds, creating futures, Utopias or not. Herbert Simon talks about designers changing the course of action into future ones. Imagine different worlds and we have many examples throughout history of at least - here I am evoking western history for sure, where that has happened. Then I think again and then I look at our current forms of production and consumption and I am thinking is this the world we design? Is this really what was intended by whom and for whom? What does it mean to make worlds in the world we are living in, the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, as many have talked about. What future are we talking about here Walter Benjamin talks about time that is not a linear thing because past and future, they continue to arrive in the present. What we do now affects our future, right, and we are here living the consequences of our past. Tony Fry, an Australian thinker who talks about the future, because what he is really saying is that the unsustainable systems of today are really killing our ability to have a future. How do we create worlds? What do we do? How do we create sustainable and just transitions? One element that seems to be crucial for us to think about this is considering design for the pluriverse and Arturo Escobar, I talked about
13. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 13 him earlier, here he is again, proposes design otherwise, which is an idea, an approach to designing in a pluriversal way. For him, the transition towards a just and sustainable future might mean different things and the wealthy global north and global south, east and west. I use the global north and global south, I know that doesn't sound great in Australia. I personally don't like the geographic - the terminology, it doesn't make too much sense for me either. Just for the sake of our exercise here, let's call it that way. What Escobar is really saying is there needs to be an autonomy for designs in the south, that needs to emerge from there. You shouldn't be isolated but you should be responding to local issues in ways that make sense locally. He also calls for the intersection, the need for dialogue, a trance national dialogue between designing in the global north and global south but essentially he is just saying pay attention because it's not the same thing, people will have different needs, right. The idea of creating futures that are alternative futures for existing reality is not something new at all and I will quote here Black Panther and I am here connecting with futurism that is becoming a phenomena right now but it didn't start right now. It dates back to - my reference here is from the 70s. The Black Panther Party essentially designed and put forward a program of services to the people, black Americans were not being properly served, in terms of education, transportation, health care and so on. A number of programs were created to serve local communities, this started in Oakland, California and it became a reference for how a community begins to become self-reliant because simply market and state have failed them and I am not saying state and market should be catering but they weren't. People came together to propose this new way of thinking in the future by recreating the present. There is way more to that, for sure. I don't want to sound simplistic but I do want to quote my own work from many years ago and how it has been evolved
14. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 14 since then, where the idea in a project that we laid out years ago, we were looking at community gardens as prototypes for the future because people were coming together, cultivating urban agriculture and coming together as communities and specifically neighbours in New York City. This is mostly on the lower east side where there is a tonne of community gardens. Some are tiny, some are bigger. But all of them have a community that takes care of it and somehow something amazing happens there which is the beginning of relation yap care and a self-sustaining form of community service. The idea of things happening in the present that can be seeds of the future, can be prototypes for future thinking and we need those, because we need to change paradigms on so many levels. On bring this other project that I am involved in at the moment, related to social housing. The idea of changing paradigms in relation to the rights to the land and rights to the sea. In this project, it's an investment fund, bringing - it is a Crowdfunding fund to purchase property and make it available for low income tenants, low income families, guaranteeing social use of land and also creating precedent for new policies. This is similar to community land trust that doesn't happen in Latin America. Just to give another example of things happening in the present that can change the future. Key principles emerging here. What needs to end? That was a question my students asked a number of guests. Colleagues from Holon Design Collective based in Barcelona, they say what needs to end is the artificial separation from us to other living beings, right, the idea that we are somehow different and there is a misuse of dualisms and fixed higher access and that needs to end, otherwise we are stuck in the past, we are stuck in the last century paradigms and what needs to emerge, we asked? They said designers as every day life mediator in a social and solidarity economy. When I talk about the community gardens is very much what I
15. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 15 mean there. What is our role as designers? Here, one of our guests talked about - it is not about equality and equity, we have to go beyond those. It is really about design for justice and there is indeed that addresses the cause of inequity in the first place and trying to solve that, so design for justice or design justice in general is also a framework emerges in one of the proponents of this framework. We are talking about not just improving here and there, we really have to go to the root cause of these inequalities and try to change those, as designers. Point six is perhaps closer to many of you in the audience, given your work, design and data, control and punishment. This is a vast array - it is a lot in here but I wanted to quote a few things. First of all, evoking some modernist architecture, I suppose. The idea that design has always been in some way or another related to order and control. Creating a system or a grid, or something that is very rational, and we need that for many purposes. We need a hospital where it's very clear where the clean flows are and the contaminated flows and they need to be separated, right? If anyone has visited a hospital knows there is a list of protocols for a good reason. On the other hand, there is a lot of threats that happen in that space and here, I connect the idea of a super straight line and rational city as a new way of life, a new way of being, the new man of the 20th century, the machine and I connect that with the notion of order that is proposed by Bentham's panopticon prison where from a top central place, an observer can monitor and survey exactly what each one of the prisoners in this prison is doing and in the - the prisoner never gets to see the observer and creating a devastating, oppressive behaviour. That motto was never built but this idea means a lot in the context of our digital economies today. Interestingly, here I also want to call how Michel in the 70s and 80s in his book Discipline and Punish, he reconstructed the history of prisons
16. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 16 but crucially connects a lot of our current institutions - schools, hospitals, armies and many others to this idea of prison and control, uniformity. We have to ask ourselves, are we designing modern control to what end and who gets to make decisions here? We know these can be definitely designed in ways that are segregating and are keeping people apart and can a highway be racist or a city be racist or a building or an apartment be racist? The answer is yes to all of the above and we have examples from history. Robert Moses designed highways, he is an urbanist in 1950 in New York City designed highways connecting the city to the beach in Long Island and the legend goes that the overpasses and bridges that you see there are not very tall and this is by design to avoid buses loaded with tour people to get to the beaches, the poor people. That is by design like that and we know examples in segregated states in the south, whole architectures were designed in that way and that continues to be the case in many countries of the world, where millions are segregated in spaces inside apartments. The idea of visualising data as power, as putting people in control of their own narratives. I give you the example of a black sociologist in early 20th century America who came up with all this amazing plans that he showed in Europe and basically he was an amazing and unique picture of black America as a society right back then. I don't have to tell you the trends as technology and we talk a lot about artificial intelligence these days and the threat of reproducing biases and segregation by design within the systems. We start designing them. I give you the example of facial recognition and the whole scandal that happened with Timnit Gebru at Google. I am sure many of you have seen it. A lot there, for sure. Here, my students came up with this framework of either we have dystopian futures where we amplify the systems of control and punishment, incarceration, racial discrimination, surveillance etc. or we
17. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 17 try to create a system where we acknowledge the politics of design and really think about technology for good. How do we foster systems that are for democracy and equity and safety and so on. My last point, I will be quick, as much as I can. I have been working on this a lot. It seems really crucial for the interaction design world for me, this point of designing work and workers and how to re-centre workers in the work that we do. I wanted to quickly take you to this tour of what is our understanding of workers today. If you Google American workers - I did this not long ago - and it seems like everybody is working in heavy duty industry, right, manufacturing, power plants and so on and yet this is not true. This is related to this vision - almost this aura of the workers of the 20th century manufacturing. Many of us, including myself, have deep roots in relation to this world in our family histories. How can I say - it's been painted and we see this mural from Diego Rivera in Detroit, this strong beefy man building cars and building this new world. This is no longer the reality of us as workers. We have this kind of composition of agriculture, manufacturing, service jobs in America in 2018. Things have changed in the pandemic but not by far and large. The scary thing about this is a lot of the service jobs are really precarious jobs. We are talking about a third of the work force basically being gig workers in the United States. These are numbers from before the pandemic, but still we have the working poor, people working a full-time job, or maybe sometimes more than one job as the lady in the top three images works multiple jobs and still doesn't make a decent living. But also new forms of work, especially gig work that are made possible by the platforms many of us design, informal work and gig workers becoming really the majority, or important part of the work force. In what we do, we also contribute a lot in creating or establishing somehow the conditions of work of a lot of the back office, tech jobs and it's really far from glamourous of being a tech
18. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 18 job, it is not really working in a sci-fi environment, as a person - as this person has said but it is really having to work fast and having the bodily effect of working with a fast robot or training artificial intelligence systems and spending the whole day looking inside someone's colon for example and spotting for polyps. There is a lot to be impacted here for sure. Post COVID has really changed and somehow cast light in disability, a lot of those jobs, we have a new reference, we begin to see them and we clap at 7pm here in Brooklyn for sure two years ago and resignation and a lot of people are quitting jobs that they think is no longer worthwhile for the low paid that they are, that they make. As we think through this, my understanding is I think it's the moment for us to think about work centric design in ways that we have been thinking about user centric design for a long time now, because we can't avoid dealing with this in one way or another. We can't really be the ones designing systems, platforms and services that are really detrimental to the dignity of workers and gig workers. We can't pretend - we are designing for human beings, not only the user, it is not the only human being in the ecosystems of services we are designing for. We can be guilty of that, we can work as the designer code of ethics of Mike Monteiro says, we cannot be surprised that we are designing in this work. We can't really design to hurt someone or fulfil a mission or please a client. We are calling out a certain ethics of thinking about designing - thinking about workers as the centre of our design process. I came up with this principles for a practice based on solidarity with workers that I can share more - I don't have time to talk about it but I did also work with my colleague Antonia, we came up with this tool that we designed to try to centre service workers as something to be played as part of our process, part of our design process and try to centre design and not pretend - centre workers and not pretend they are not there,
19. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 19 they are no not invisible for sure. You can check this, you can play online. I have been doing a few workshops using evolving forms and this is a forever prototype as I call it. I am not very pretentious with this work, it is just a tool for us to think about things differently because that is what we need to do with our knowledge and in our practice, how do we think about things differently and simply don't keep doing things because they appear that way and seem unchangeable. We can't think like that any more. I hope this was not too much. Please forgive me, my tone, I guess. This is an ongoing collective research. These are the themes, as they appear to me today. They might change next year, as things evolve for sure. I really thank you all for listening. This is the product of collaborative work with many people. I am playing my teacher card here with you literally. We are trying to come up with principles that can orient practice and I want to thank you to everyone listening and for everyone working in the conference today. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: Thank you. We are at an interesting time. I am not sure you are all aware but we have this national jobs summit coming up next week, I think it is and some of the things that Lara has just been talking about redefining what we mean by work and redefining who we mean by worker, looking more closely at this idea of care and unpaid work in our society, I find really fascinating this idea that there's a role for design in working through those issues, that they are not simply economic, they are not simply political or policy choices that get made but things that, as a society, we work through and intentionally design, rather than just allow to go on as they have been. I'm really interested to see how that plays out next week. Join me again in thanking Professor Penin for that talk. Thank you, so much.