Designing for tomorrows

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) BRIDGETTE ENGELER: That's actually working, that's good. I wasn't sure. I never trust technology and I think it's this is going to work. I don't, I don't trust a lot of things. But we'll get to that. So it's a pretty dark world at the moment and in foresight terms of a dystopian future so I will try to leave you with a bit of hope this afternoon. I'm being frank. If I'm allowed to swear then I probably will. I am a professional futurist, I have a degree in foresight, imdoing I'm doing my PhD in strategic poer sight as well. I helped people buy things that they didn't really need. So, the reason I talk about all of this and particularly one of my favourite writers, is that we live in this world at the moment where we're told uncertainty is bad and that complexity is that the challenge that we have and it is. But uncertainty is bad, that's the mantra that's been through business for the last ten years in Australia. It's also the thing that gets talked about globally. So just to cover off a few things, I'm a professional futurist, so the stuff I don't talk about and, you know, this is what often happens with these kind of discussions. It's about prediction and the next technology well, it's not. And there's a number of reasons for that which I will cover. And one of them is that we as designers have responsibility and agency even if we don't know it. I'm going to do a modification of a foresight came called the Polak game. Please, come in, come in. And I have to do a way that modifies because this normally is a three-dimensional experience. I'm doing it in a way which means I can remain standing based on how I feel around the world. Everyone who feels like there is hope or you feel positive and optimistic about the world, please stay seated. If you don't feel so good about the world, just quickly stand up. Excellent. Have a look around. A big contrast. You can sit down again. Who feels like they have agency around making things different in the world? If you feel like you've got a lot of agency, put both hands up. If you feel like you've got a bit of agency, you can be like me. Over here. Interesting again. So there's a lot of people in the room who feel like we can create change and don't necessarily have the agency and this is why we can't have world peace. We don't agree on stuff. We're all about negotiation and we end up back where we were in the 1940s. Look at NATO at the moment. But the thing is that design has the opportunity to do stuff. I'm standing here today using technology that I'm always fearful of because the first time I ever presented way back in the '90s when I was about 23, the technology collapsed and I was presenting at a telecommunications conference in New Zealand. Everything around me collapsed and my slide deck, because it was slides then, was upside-down. So I don't necessarily always trust things and there's a healthy scepticism around that and that's what we should be using when we approach the world at large.
2. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 2 of 10 The thing is that we have things around us that we can use to make change. We're stronger at using the terminology and not necessarily doing stuff that will actually make us change. So I don't ask you to put your hands up but who used public transport to get here? I flew here and caught the train. Did you think about how you got here? Did you think about the impact of what you did in coming here? Was it a conscience decision and do you take responsibility for the agency that you have? That's not an indictment about attending conferences. I spend a shit load of time travelling. But I do it because I'm aware of my impact in doing so and there's a big argument in academia at the moment about travelling or not. I do it because I need to have a - I've got to have something to hold onto. It also helps me develop my expertise because the strategic foresight in community in Australia is about this big. The other thing is having a shared language. Now we often talk about having a shared language around design, design thinking, another day, another model in design thinking. That isn't necessarily a consistency around that language. And until we get a shared language for expressing our futures and our possible futures, we're always going to have a struggle, particularly when we think about futures. I'm going to get to the futures bit in a second. We tend not to think very long term and we can talk about government and politics and institutions having a great deal of thinking and some short term, which isn't so good for us, but we're guilty of the same. Anyone who works for financial services banking products is getting a regular brief saying we need to get people to save more, they need to have greater financial acumen, we need to plan ahead with insurance, but we don't do it and that's the thing. We just don't do it. And we can argue it's human nature, we can argue it's social theory, but we need to change. We really do. So not just challenges for design, although design can have a significant impact. It already has had a significant impact. Design is one of the reasons that we are in the state we're in. Design is one of the things that has got us to the world we live in today and I think you can tell I'm not entirely happy about that. The problem is that we all have the same challenge of designing for something that can only be imagined. This is when I get to the picture bit. We tend to work with images of futures that really don't exist. There are typically two types of futures that we work with - the used futures, images of futures that are dragged down by the past, of the weight of the past is the thing that influences. There's also the used futures which other futures that we're told. Who remembers when digital was going to cause the death of print? I do. But it hasn't died and there are new magazines being introduced on a regular basis globally. The power of print is in itself. We're told things are going to happen, this is the way it's going to be, but that's actually not what happens and these are used images that get used and used again. There's also the future that is we discard. In some ways we're guilty of that as a people globalally. If you want a hint as to something to watch I would recommend a video by a design studio in London called Super Flux. Go search them, they're great. They do amazing work and it's a particular piece they've done called Mitigation of Shock and you will need to mitigate the shock once you've watched it. If you follow me on Twitter I can make sure I follow up with a
3. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 3 of 10 couple of links afterwards. I'm an academic I'll probably recommend some books and the other thing is that I know we really don't do questions but I miss the students in lectures asking questions, so if I throw something at you just stick your hand up, yell out at me. The other concept that gets talked about is flat pack futures talking about the power of today and here's the future that we can just go and take off the shelf like a flat pack piece of furniture. Install it, get it together and our life is neat and orderly. And it tends to be around the things we've got now but more. So faster, better, cheaper, more flexible, more minimalist. But they're just two kinds of futures. We also have the futures which are set. So someone else's problem. Has anyone read a book called The limits To growth, I strongly recommend you do. The future you perceive is not the future you ordered. We are in a post-growth and post-human world. There's been a shift from user centre to design thinking and human-centred design. We now need to think beyond that. Design that is focused on both human and nonhuman life forms. Design that is focused around sentient cities, those are emerging practice areas that we need to acknowledge as we move into these post growth and post human world and I'm not even getting into the singularity today. Coffee, we don't have it for too much longer if we don't do anything about it, particularly what's happening in the Amazon about it. Chocolate, this could change my life, when I was working on... I wish I had more day spas and chocolates to work on. I got most of the financial services and healthcare stuff, which was very cool, but, yeah. Sand, you know, images of futures where we build these amazing towers and construction, it can get a bit difficult because we're running out of the sand that we need to build on. We're also water challenges. The other big one, lithium battery as a power source, five or six years ago we had 500 or 600 years of lithium left, not only has the price skyrocketed but the resources have been completed. Current rate of consumption remight run out in 40 for 50 years. Sand we need for a lot of stuff. It's actually a foundation of civilisation which is why I get so sceptical of technology. All of those devices that we tout as being a solution to various problems, we know they don't always work, we know they're not always effective as a piece of design for people but we're not going to be able to produce them. There's an awful lot of silicon that goes into producing these devices. The more we encourage stuff the more we do stuff that is not promulgating a positive future. Last bad slide, if anyone's got white wine from France, I really like chardonnay, the equivalent could be coming out of Russia by 2050. It probably doesn't have the same cache for some people. There's spots where we won't be able to grow grapes to produce wine. And 2050 is not that far away. So a big deal here is global overshoot. Have you heard of Earth overshoot day. It's the day we reach in the year where we've used the available resources what is considered a year's worth of consumption. It used to happen in October, it happens halfway through the year now because we haven't stopped depleting the resource s. We just need to be aware of this because these
4. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 4 of 10 will be the conditions that we're designing for and that's the challenge that we continue to design based on what we see as current state. We don't design for those potential future that is are down the track. So unfortunately, the things that we're going to get are not necessarily the things that we anticipated. They're not necessarily things that we're being told we're going - we should have got. And we're certainly not going to be able to empathise our way out of it. Empathy, it's there but it's not going to fix everything. If it did, we probably wouldn't have global terrorism because you can't empathise with a terrorist. So this is when we go back to we all face the challenge of something that can only be imagined and anticipated. This is why we need alternative futures. This is a thing called the futures cone, my PhD supervisor developed this based on a number of other writers before him. The idea is that we're at a point in time and as you go further out in time, more futures emerge and there are different kinds of futures. The main thing is that the further out in time we go, the more futures there are. And they are multiple, possible alternatives. So you all know pretty much what you're doing tonight, you probably know what you're doing tomorrow, you probably have a fair idea of what you've got planned over the next week or so. If you've got a holiday planned in a few months time you might have a schedule for that. We have project plans that we work to. We have a sense of where we're going out in time. But the further out in time the more possibilities there are. I I started a new role this year but I didn't have that on my radar at the beginning of the year. I didn't anticipate that but there was only six months before there was a significant change and we don't think about things happening. We think about the immediate and we need to think more in the context of things that could happen and remembering that could doesn't mean should. In foresight terms most of the words we use around future is possible, plausible and preferred. So possible meaning that it could happen and it's probably most likely to. Plausible, being oh, you know, it's seemingly possible that that can happen and preferred being the future that we want. So we want a particular type of future then we have to design for that. If we want a particular future to not happen, we have to design that stuff out and a lot of the things we do in design are about decision making, putting stuff in or taking things out. So if we stop designing in stuff that has a negative impact, then we are able to change that course of history. So the analogies are around movies like Sliding Doors or Back to the Future where things change based on the decisions that we make today. So we make the decision to get on a plane, we plan for it. We make a decision to go on a holiday and we plan for it. We we're concerned about the impact of something, we need to start designing for it not to he e ventuate. We have technology because of science fiction. So Minor Report was the first movie in which... technology was really used. It was a project of research at a university at the time but it was the first real instance of it being developed. Now we get it all the time.
5. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 5 of 10 Who had a Motorola clamshell phone way back when? Me too. I had a flip one that was a Nokia. Who is a 'Star Trek' fan? Where did we first see the clamshell? We get our images from the stuff that's around us. So if we need to look at alternative futures, we need images around us. It means that we need to have a particular disposition around design and what it can do. Moving beyond that short term of the next sales cycle, or the next iteration of something and thinking what are the longer term consequences of this. If we design that, what will happen? What could happen and what do we want to happen. If we want to really address homelessness, we're going to have to do the shorter term stuff and we're going to have to look at the systemic level issues that propagate. We're also going to have to look at the very personal choices around homelessness. If we want to address health issues, we have to look at the causes of them. We can design another app to help people with mental health, but we're not addressing some of the social issues that lead to that. There's a conundrum between, and I'm sure you see it, but designing an app to address mental health issue that is have emerged from social media and the pressure that it causes. So this is also, I don't know if there are any clients sitting in the room, but I hope there are because we as designers have agency but we have to persuade our science of that as well. A lot of us get briefs that say you have to do this, we've got this new thing coming into the market so we need to make it work. The short-termism resides with the client and their decisions as well. Sometimes we have to wait it out with the client and get them to make changes. We also have to think about the quality of the inputs we work with when we're designing. Design scenarios are generally a continuation of business as usual. They are generally the stuff we're doing now just taken out by six years. I'm not even going to talk about trends except they're trends and they're current, so remember that. Trends are happening now. So if your clients are coming saying this is the trend, remind them they need to be ahead of trend. Don't just follow the trend because all you're doing is me too stuff, so that's the brand but it's also propagate ing same/same. Trends can be identified through signals. There are tools we use in foresight work around emerging issues analysis, that start to pull this stuff together. But that design scenario you're doing for a user, and my compliment s to the presentation earlier today where this challenge to us to refer to people as people, not as users. When we're designing for people, we need to think about the future context or that future, that particular future context. And consider what inputs you have access to just because it's what the client has told you and I know we all do this, but go and have a look at what's happening elsewhere in the world around that. We can take our clues from other parts of the world. Has anyone read a book called Black Swan? OK. So we didn't have that, there was no such thing as a black swan. All swans were white. And then suddenly people get to WA, oh, bugger, there's a black swan. Not all swans are white. It changes. So we need to anticipate the un expect and we need to work with it when it happens.
6. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 6 of 10 We also need to imagine those alternative futures, and we need to be able to visualise them. This guy said this a long time ago, not everyone is into him and I can't say I'm a huge fan, but he's right about us being challenged by images of things that are different. We don't always like change. We're not comfortable with it, which is why organisations have change management strategies. We like the stuff that is comfortable and easy. The things that don't push us and don't challenge us because this stuff can be hard and confronting. And so this also goes to some of the contents made in other sessions today about the charge to us to be responsible for the things that we're creating. I think more broadly about where they sit in the world and the worlds that they shape. We can do stuff with sticky notes. This is the beginning of a scenario process. It was using a tool which allows to imagine possible futures, done in a bit of a provocative way and over a 20 to 25-year time span. I use Lego series plays as well for people to visualise because it's easy. It's a useful tool but it's also setting the context and it allows us to visualise alternatives. Someone says my car has a rocket attached to it, well, yeah, how are we going to make that happen? This was also a piece of work that I saw in Canada a few years ago. So it was giving people a chance to imagine themselves in a future. So we can visualise this in really simple ways and scenarios. This is a project in Melbourne called the Nightingale project which has been conceived based on very different design and architectural standards and values but put up in a different community. It's one of the more successful ones. There are others that have not been as successful and this isn't perfect but it's a step up. One of the challenges around this is needing to do stuff in a a short period of time. I tend to be an advocate for taking time, reflecting and doing things slowly which is antit Cal to the do it fast, break it and try again. Sometimes we need the reflection in between. We need to be able to stop stuff. Doing things fast,, sometimes we need the reflection in between. This is a photograph I took in Mongolia about a new development but it's complementary to the old style of living. I don't know if you can see the yurt up the back. So people live in yurts because that is part of their social fabric, it's part of their culture and if you have a yurt then you can maintain your nomadic lifestyle. Once you buy a house you can't be nomadic anymore. So a very significant decision made by policy that influences how the community, how the society evolves. So what do we do to avoid business as usual, because that's the big problem? I should also say the future doesn't exist. So there is no one predetermined future. There is no one place that we're going to land in time. There is no one way that it's going to play out. That slide of the futures cone suggests that. So we need to think about what might emerge. The other challenge with the future is that we have to create it. So we have to imagine it and a ridiculous idea around futures are the ones that are useful to us. I'm paraphrase ing. Some of the challenges I have for design are using a bit of foresight before we begin design.
7. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 7 of 10 Starting to think through the consequences of what we're doing into five years' time. If we design this now, what does that do to change things to the five years out? And you can extrapolate quite readily. Also using longer time horizons. I say different, longer, because most work in design is quite short term. We need to get this to market in six weeks, six months, I worked in a wine that had to go to market in six weeks and they didn't have a (inaudible). It was a tight deadline. But it worked. Doesn't necessarily mean it's good, except in this sense they had excess fruit so they wanted to get it out and do something with it. There was a commercial imperative as well. So thinking about longer time horizons in the work that we do. Asking better questions. We're good at asking questions in design, we're good at asking people what they think and feel about things and there's been a discussion with Cameron Tonkin yesterday and today about when we ask people what they do and what they say is different, are we then interrogating them further? Maybe we are and maybe sometimes we have to but maybe we should just ask a better question. Maybe we can anticipate people's needs without drilling too hard into stuff that's actually a bit - it feels like we're pulling their lives apart sometimes. Still, the other thing is that the multiple perspective, if I ask you to close your eyes for 30 seconds now, and I won't, but if I asked you to do that and imagine a future, how many of you are going to have the same image of the future? Some of you will have study ed semiotics. Who saw a black cat? Who saw a tortoise shell? Who saw a nondomestic cat? Who saw Felix the cat? Still a cat. So images of futures are down to a multiple perspective and what I want in a future and not necessarily what you want and we need to, going back to that first little hands up, stand up thing, we need to acknowledge that there are different perspectives and different preferences and we've got to work through that. We also need to foster the divergent thinking because otherwise we're going to continue with the business as usual. This is the way it's going to be. This is the way it has to be. It doesn't have to be. We've had change significantly and anyone remember Y2K? Didn't happen, did it? Why didn't it happen? We did something about it. So we've been getting the bad news about climate change since the '70s. We've been getting bad news about politics and fragmentation of society for longer than that. We did something about Y2K, we need to do something about the other stuff. Have a view and hold it lightly. The biggest part of foresight work. Yep, that's a possibility, what else is out there? Being able to move from a big macro global perspective down to the really small local perspective, that's part of what we do. There's always going to be multiple futures and things change all the time. The weather changes all the time. Those things affect what we do and the decisions that we make from what clothes we buy. I've got a serious consideration at the moment, look at my overcoat, my beautiful black, long coat that I bought ten years ago, still wearing it, buy quality, people. It's just getting to the end of its tether. I think I might have to do something with the cuffs, it's just starting to get a bit thin. Because I don't think I really need to buy another overcoat. I don't think that I'm really going to get the use out of it even if I live in the UK because at the moment the UK is threatened with its
8. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 8 of 10 hottest summer ever. Europe is melting. There's more rain in the southern parts of England than they've ever had, it's a risk of flooding. Who would have thought at the same time they're at risk of drought. There's been studies suggesting the southern part of the UK could be in drought in time. Complexity is, to use the phrase, the new normal. It always was. We just weren't aware of it. And thankfully the advent of technology and design and design practice and design theory has allowed us to explore this more. We've become more aware of it, we've had a greater understanding of it. We should be really thankful for the work we've done in design because we do have a greater understanding, than we did maybe ten years ago, but there was a bit in design where we just got it wrong. And no one person is going to be able to do this alone. The same way we have creative teams, we're going to have to work together on this. And we need to acknowledge the different perspective and our state of politics here, the US, the UK, parts of Europe is indicative of a very clear divide. Cast your mind back to 2009. Switzerland had just gone into the biggest global recession. Block chain appeared. The first real reference to block chain ten years ago. Another thing we were told was going to change everything. Changed some things. >> Hasn't changed everything and I don't know whether it will. Because the consumption block chain needs to do its job is an incredible load on the resources and the planet that we have. It will have benefits but will also have challenged. What we thought was important in 2009 may have disappeared a couple of years later. Think about your own life and what changes. >> It is hard It's hard to anticipate this but we need to open ourselves up to thinking. Being willing to shift as things emerge around you are day-to-day practice. If anyone is interested there's a U lab thing which runs around the world. Just be mindful that predictions are not really good things. I tend to think of them as depiction but we take them as a prediction of what is going to be and that's not the case at all and the future is it's not my job to prediction. It's not my responsibility to not predict and I can't tell you what's going to happen specifically tomorrow let alone 20 years out. One of my colleagues, works in really big time scales, hundreds of years, thousands of years back into the past and forward into future. Can't predict stuff. What we can do is equip ourselves but also shape it. Think about how the future, a future, might emerge and then make choices around what might be coming up and what we want to get out of the. If you go back to 2009, have a look at what we were told was going to happen 10 years ago. There's a lot of stuff that didn't happen, there's an awful lot that did but it evolved in different ways. and that's the challenge with predictions. When you read at the beginning of 2020, here are the top ten new texts for 2020, it's a trend. It's also serving someone. So think about who those messages serve. In the same way that talk about foresight, it served me. I think it served design as well but it's about being aware of what we do and say and acknowledging who that serves in the process.
9. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 9 of 10 There are lots of things that happened between 2009 and now that weren't predicted and Obama got elected, that wasn't expected. Trump got elected and that wasn't expected. I had trump as a wild card when he nominated. That will never happen. We weren't expected to get a return of the government we have. Regardless of whether you like it or no, it happened. Be mindful of "this will never happen". I've tried to avoid the quote he's not sure he's to have said. He's allege to do have said it, he doesn't remember it. There are those that quote him on it but the future is there. By the time we get there it's going to be a reflection of us and what we've shaped. If you want something different and it can be good and strong and beautiful but we have to do something about that. This is notable feeling pulled back by the threat of the future, it's thinking about how we might do it more robustly. Just a couple of things, I actually didn't take as much time as I thought, for a change. If you're looking at foresight or building in longer term thinking into your work, one easy thing to do is just add a longer time frame to a project. So when you're working through this is the launch date, this is what we're going - this is what the client wants to achieve, ask them to imagine what they think the world of that particular project might be three years out. If we think about the conditions that we're designing for. This is the quote, the chair in the house in the village, in the community, not just a chair that we're designing, it's not just a website we're designing, it's not just an app, it's not just a piece of service, it's not just a government policy, these things have bigger responsibilities and big er threats into the things we do. What do we want the world to be like in five years' time? If we do want to have achieved certain things, maybe if we want to achieve direct democracy, if that's the case get onboard with the organisation that is are promote scompg advocating for direct democracy in Australia. If we want a techno centric future go with it. Just remember there is no one silver bullet for this stuff and most of the things we need to work on are going to be joined up solutions and we need joined up thinking for that which is the dev ops presentation Wass great because we're talking about getting people working together. We need to do more of that and we do that through design. We can be some of the most collaborative and creative people in the world. Unfortunately, can be reined in. So get your clients to think about this. That's the bit that we need to be persuading. That's the piece that's missing in the discussion that you get the brief that says we're going to redesign these things, why? So you can sell more. There's also a big gap to be explored around what the policy or the latest strategy from the senior level is, versus that brand manager that you're working with. Organisations, there's the decision that's just been agreed in Europe by a CEO, they said this is what we're going to value from now on. We've signed to the FDGs, we've signed up to this, we've signed up to that but there's still someone out there making decisions based on short term because that decision hasn't made its way through. Read more broadly. All of the stuff that we're told to do to be more creative you can do that but from a future perspective. Have a look at different images or futures , particularly... futures and the work being done around Asian futures because that is where we sit. The model was more on parts of the world that is not necessarily congruent or aligned with the things that we do and
10. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 10 of 10 need in Australia. So we can look for different images to influence us and also to extract understanding of how other things might be possible. When we think about the dystopian images, Bladerunner, does anyone think that was a positive future? Probably fairly pragmatic, if you think about the time, though, it's only 30 years from now. So that's not that far away and it seems like it's a plausible future. Might not be preferred but it's plausible. So if we don't want to be showering in sand, if we don't want representations of women and gender to be the way they are in that movie, and I'm not critiquing, I think that's fair representation of gender and particularly women in 30 years from now, given it took us a couple of hundred of years since we've had the vote. We're not going to get significant change in 0 - 30 years. Think about these images and what they promulgate. Black Panther is a great image of the future. Challenge your client to say think about what those possibilities might be. I think I'm just about done for time. Am I allowed to ask if anyone has a question? Yeah, you do. Great. QUESTION FROM FLOOR: (Inaudible). BRIDGETTE ENGELER: Your question is around your agency comp and where you can do better work. Sometimes you have to make choices and this is a discussion around ethics in design. Don't think that you doing good work on a little project here a couple of times a year, compensates for the work that you do elsewhere that's actually just raping and pillaging the planet. So it's coming up with what you can - and sometimes there is - you have to just make the best work choice or the work's best choice. QUESTION FROM FLOOR: (Inaudible). BRIDGETTE ENGELER: That's an hour on its own. Because the question is ethics by whose measure, who is the question, who are the people engage ed in that pro cess and what are the longer term processes. You can't make those decisions quickly comp you can't make a choice to do something else and have a life-changing moment but you certainly can be more conscious about the things that you do and maybe plan for that change if you think that those are things you want to do in five or ten years, what do you do for that? How do you get a shift? Career? How do you move to something else? That kind of help? (Applause) SPEAKER: I just want to remind you that there is our competition going on with JMC and Askable, so go to their booths and get your names in. Our next coffee break. Thanks. We all need to leave this room again, because we're going to become one.