I presented the closing keynote at the Design for America (DFA) Summit 2019 just outside Chicago. I celebrated the great work done by the DFA over their now 10 year history. I then talked about the need for interconnectedness between business, design, and society and the fostering of interconnected communities. After sharing the experience of our team’s design transformation of IBM, the hiring of a huge design team, the building of studios all around the world, the ways we’ve fostered connectedness within and between studios and with clients, and now connecting externally to various educational institutions, I talked about the challenges we all should address focussed on being bold, global, and personal.
There’s been a trend for universities to focus on “designing for the social good” and the DFA does an excellent job of that at more than 40 campuses across the US. The capstone classes I teach and the college campus workshops I facilitate have included “designing for the social good” as well. I think we should continue to do projects like that but I’d like to challenge us all to be more bold in the topics we take on.
There are three areas of focus that require particular bold attention in my view: 1) climate change, 2) social media and 3) divisive societies.
Climate Change
The image above is of the Athabasca Glacier that I visited some ten years ago. It had such a profound impact on me. The site has markers indicating where the glacier was every few years and the accelerating receding of the glacier is shockingly evident. Climate change for many people is quite theoretical but it’s disturbingly real for anyone visiting this site. The projects we’ve applied design and design thinking to on the topic of climate change have been important but, I believe, not bold enough. And why are they not bold enough? Because we don’t have time as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out. We need to be more bold at the global level of organizations and governments but also at the personal level.
Tesla
We need to workshop and champion crazy bold ideas like Elon Musk’s of building an all electric car. It isn’t bold to do that in itself. He could have built an entry-level super ugly car that only environmentalists would buy. Instead, he first built a desirable electric sports car and a luxury car which were highly desirable for their looks and performance. And, they were also environmental. Tesla was bold in its design and its engineering but also in its attention to the need to build out an entire system of Superchargers, mobile service technicians, and over-the-air software updates. After creating an incredible demand for these highly desirable well-designed and amazingly well-engineered cars, Tesla delivered a reasonably affordable sedan that it’s having to build new massive giga-factories for in order to keep up with demand. Tesla’s also developing solar technology for homes but in the future also for cars so that they possibly will be able to be run entirely on solar energy. And of course, while making a huge dent in climate change, Tesla is also developing autonomous self-driving technology to eliminate the need for human drivers and, in turn, to drastically reduce the death toll from human drivers.
What’s the lesson in what Musk and Tesla have done and are doing? Their startup wasn’t simply trying to develop another Instagram in order to be bought by the major players or a tiny solution to climate change, Elon Musk and Tesla addressed the hugely bold challenge of how might we accelerate sustainable energy and autonomy. They’ve been addressing that challenge and inspiring others to do the same. And, importantly, they didn’t just address the global problem boldly, they also empathized with people and designed their vehicles and the surrounding technical ecosystem in such a way that people desired the cars for their looks and drivability and, oh, in turn are making a huge positive impact on reducing climate change. Bold, global, and personal.
Beyond Meat
While transportation is a major contributor to climate change, so is animal agriculture. And what did startup Beyond Meat do to address the challenge? Did they produce an ugly meat alternative that tasted strange but that some people might buy simply because they wanted to reduce their impact on the environment? No. They used the best science available to understand what made meat taste and look like meat and they then found plant-based ingredients to create a product that tasted and looked like meat but didn’t require environmentally damaging animal agriculture. And they placed their products in the meat section of grocery stores to make it easy for consumers to switch and they created huge demand every time their product was introduced to yet another fast food chain. They’ve also broadened their products so that they have alternatives for most animal-based meats and they’ve made it easy for all places that serve animal-based meat today to also sell their plant-based meat. Much like Elon’s objective for autonomy in additional to sustainable energy, Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown had the additional objective of eliminating animal suffering and death. The formula of addressing a bold challenge globally but also with a focus on the personal made the difference.
These are but two examples both of which are salient to me with regard to taking effective action. We need many, many more.
Social Media
Another area requiring bold ideas and action involves social media. Things started off innocently enough with social networks connecting people and enabling them to share posts and pictures with each other. Early on there was even an explicit intention to not monetize with advertising. But that all changed.
The Problem
And when it did all change, the largely positive impact became much less so and we started seeing worrying implications of designing these services to increase engagement and time spent on the site in order to increase advertising revenue, the optimization of newsfeed algorithms for showing similar content, and the ability for advertisers to micro-target messages. While these developments were good for business, they weren’t necessarily for users or society as a whole. Users became addicted to their newsfeeds, constantly checking them every few minutes. Advertisers loved the platforms to influence people to buy their products but so did anyone wanting to influence the perceptions, beliefs, and actions of people. The very same micro-targeting that advertisers loved was now being used to purposely spread misinformation and that misinformation was shared disproportionately compared with veridical information. Could this have been avoided? Well, yes, had these companies used strategic foresight methods and/or an exercise that we often use called a pre-mortem. After a team has done their user research, ideated solutions, and chosen a particular solution as the preferred, the team is asked to imagine that they’ve now implemented that solution and it’s a year in the future and the project completed failed. The team is then asked to consider what may have gone wrong and then to come up with mitigations to prevent those negative outcomes. These companies and all of silicon valley seemed to be consumed by youthful optimism without critically evaluating what could go wrong and when things did go wrong, as they still are regularly, blind optimism still appears to be their single-minded strategy.
The use of social media platforms to spread disunity, to tailor different messages to specific groups, and to provide direct access to subgroups with no filtering, vetting, or review has had disastrous effects on the social fabric of societies around the globe.
Some Positive Examples
Tristan Harris recognized some of these dangers of social media early and has been a champion for raising awareness of them. He argues that social media is essentially an attention economy which can be best characterized as “the race to the bottom of the brainstem”. He is credited with starting the Time Well Spent movement and the Center for Humane Technology focusing on the problem of “human downgrading”. Tristan, together with Aza Raskin, developed terminology for people to relate to including phrases like the downgrading of humans, downgrading of humanity, downgrading of our relationships, downgrading of our attention, downgrading of democracy, and downgrading of our sense of decency.
Tristan’s work mostly focusses on characterizing the problem but he has also inspired some changes like Apple’s attempt to reduce social media addiction by introducing Screen Time for all its platforms which provides information to users about their social media use and allows users to set limits on their use. They also introduced Do Not Disturb While Driving which prevents the use of the phone while driving.
To start to address the influence of social media on elections, several companies have admirably banned political advertising including Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitch, and TikTok. Twitter’s CEO argues that “political message reach should be earned, not bought”.
Big Challenges Remain
Notably absent are the advertising powerhouses Facebook and Google. They haven’t addressed the problem of human downgrading or specifically their negative impact on elections and democracy. And remember, these are the companies who have all our data, who know us best, and who have advertising platforms capable of micro-targeting based on those data. Facebook in particular argues that this is a free speech issue and argues against fact checking ads saying that cable networks and national broadcasters play them. However, what’s worse in my view is that Facebook allows any information correct or incorrect to be targeted to specific groups with micro-targeting which nobody else can see. They’re hugely different in that regard.
While there are some companies dealing with these issue in a bold progressive way, others seem to be guided more by revenue than what would be best for their users, democracy, and society in general. The backlash has led to a healthy crop of alternatives to Facebook and Google services. Some will argue that these startups couldn’t possibly succeed but look back at what Tesla and Beyond Meat have done in the climate change space and the changes now being made in the incumbent competitors. Most of the big automakers are now developing electric cars and the biggest animal-based meat companies are now buying up plant-based meat companies and offering an increasing supply of plant-based products. I believe that the social media space is ripe for disruption too.
Divisive Societies
Societies in the past were never completely homogeneous but societies today appear to be more heterogeneous than ever before largely due in my view to the topics discussed above. Interestingly, societies aren’t so much heterogeneous but bifurcated along several lines, conservative vs. liberal, young vs. old, white vs. black, one religion vs. another religion, immigrant vs. non-immigrant, rural vs. city, rich vs. poor, women vs. men, educated vs. uneducated, etc. And topics like climate change cut across these divisions and social media both fans the flames of these heated divisions and also ensures that no real debate happens across them. Entrenched views become even more entrenched. The lines between in-groups and out-groups are even more solidly drawn. As a result, we don’t see collaboration, compromise, or quite frankly working for the common good. This is the case in many countries around the world.
A Call for Action
I’d like to issue a call to designers and multidisciplinary design thinking teams to take on one or more of these bold challenges. You have the knowledge and skills necessary for deeply understanding the issues, the various players involved and their stakeholders, to ideate solutions focusing on the global and personal levels, and to prototype and evaluate the various solutions. There is significant interest in each of these topics, so much so that there are regular protests about them. While its good to draw attention to the topics, these protests don’t typically come up with well thought out, researched, and designed solutions. We need to do that.
I think it would be great if some top teams in university capstone courses took on one or more of these challenges and that DFA studios on various campuses did too and that startups also consider these bold challenges. I’m also thinking of organizing a Design Olympics type event of sorts with the best designers and thinkers in the world getting together to tackle some of these biggest challenges in the world in a bold, global, and personal way. Let’s join together to use the power of design and design thinking to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems.