Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

UXA2022_Day 1_ Lara Penin - Thinking Design for this Century

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.

uxaustralia
PRO

August 25, 2022
Tweet

More Decks by uxaustralia

Other Decks in Business

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 | [email protected] | 0447 904 255
    UX Australia
    UX Australia 2022 – Hybrid Conference
    Thursday, 25 August 2022
    Captioned by: Kasey Allen & Carmel Downes

    View Slide

  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.

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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,

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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

    View Slide

  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,

    View Slide

  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.

    View Slide