Assembling Tomorrow: Designing Futures
Tips from the experts at Stanford's d.school
Last month I saw an ad1 for a book, about how to build toward a preferred future, and I bought it on a whim. Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future is written by Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter of Stanford’s d.school, and is broken up into two main sections: how to observe the (often problematic) design in the world around you, and what you can do to design things more intentionally2. Design Futures is one of the standard electives in the Houston program, so I thought it would be good to get into the right frame of mind.
The thesis of the book is that throughout human history, everyone has been engaged in the work of design: intentionally shaping the world around us toward specific goals and purposes. However, the present moment is marked by an odd convergence of and blurring of boundaries between humans, our technology, and nature. There have always been intersections between these categories — for example, eyeglasses are a piece of technology that easily just become part of our extended concept (and image) of self, and controlled burning to create farmland is a technology that has radically reshaped landscapes — but things like genetically engineering mosquitos to rid humanity of malaria, or geoengineering to reverse global warming, increase the magnitude and complexity of these interconnections. The authors describe this as an era of runaway design, where the stuff we make has unexpected and escalating consequences.
Noticing Design Around Us
There are four big skills taught in the first half of the book:
Noticing the connections between things in the world: reality is in many ways one long chain of causation3, where something happens and then leads to other things happening. This actively creates the future: for example, designing a predictive policing program based on a model of future crimes will add more police to certain areas, leading to more arrests there and creating the world that was imagined. This is the world of systems thinking: luckily, I have an entire series of articles on the topic for your perusal.
Flow: anyplace in the world where something moves from one place to another. As one example, in recent decades huge parts of our economy have been reconfigured around the capture and flow of various pieces of data. Higher pace of all these flows can increase the efficiency/output of particular subsystems but also introduce danger and defects4. For some reason I’ve never talked about Stewart Brand’s pace of change in this newsletter, but I love it because it is an idea that’s both important and instantly understandable:
Feelings: human emotion is a critical part of the cause and effect of design. Often, people’s ideas and innovations come from some frustration they experience, and the emotional state during the design process can change the outcome. Also, all design will affect emotions, and we ignore that at our peril — the example in the book is that the internet was designed to transmit data but many of the challenges of social media come because it so effectively transmits our emotions.
Imagination, empathy, and storytelling. Each of us can only directly experience a tiny slice of reality, so we need to actively seek other perspectives and work hard to correct for our blind spots and cognitive biases5. The stories we tell are all essentially fictional simplifying frames on reality, so remember that they are tools, not truth.
Designing Differently
The second half of the book is dedicated to the skills needed to generate more thoughtful design better suited to modernity6:
Because it’s so easy to be part of the flow of designed systems, the authors recommend taking an intentional step back in everyday life and become an observer. As an example of the level of awkwardness they are seeking, they describe being in a new cafeteria, surrounded by people who are all engaged in flow according to invisible norms and rules that you don’t know7. We can lean into this awkwardness and pay attention to things that seem mundane and obvious under new ideas and insights unfold. The authors suggest bringing a relaxed but curious attitude (the same energy children bring to play), and engage your emotion and empathy rather than trying to be scientific and detached. One particular thing to try noticing during these times is the affordances in the things around us — the uses built into things that designers didn’t anticipate but the users find convenient, like the way Kleenex was designed to remove cold cream from faces, but people found them useful for blowing noses.
The ability to adopt and shift our frame of reference and thought pattern to help us notice more and stay flexible. This requires enough diversity of thought/experience/etc to generate lots of ideas. One trick can be to look hard at the interfaces between things and notice the different ways things have found to interact, from handles for doors to toepads for geckos. Three specific exercises are offered to help readers broaden an idea and see it from different perspectives: intentionally trying on different metaphors (how is X like a river, or a relationship, etc?), using analogies to mix ideas from one area onto another, and mapping the issue to unlock the substantial human ability for spatial reasoning and logic.
Honestly this chapter feels like kind of a grab bag. This includes an observation that trying to control a natural flow tends to result in turbulence; second, a discussion of the conflation of measurements/goals for the actual purpose of what you’re designing8; subtraction is also design and frequently better, though unintuitive; switching up the medium that you’re working in to see things differently; and thinking about the value of the things you’ll design over time by considering the things that will be different in plausible futures.
Realize that everything will break and be imperfect, including the things you design. Start with inclusive dreams to design from, but imagine, if everything you intend goes right, what will go wrong and for whom? Embrace the constraints put on you by budget, societal needs, and the limitations of various mediums you might use. Prepare to respond to ameliorate the harms you cause and slow down the pace of your products’ flows to reduce the amount of reactivity built into them.
The book ends with an explicit call to engage in design for healing. This entails thinking hard about both plausible and problematic futures and designing for a wide range. Since everything is designed, but also designs, orient yourself so that the things you bring into the world make it better.
The Design
As a book on design, there’s a high implicit standard for the book’s design. Assembling Tomorrow has several design features that set it apart: marginal notes in blue, illustrations with a coherent style, stories interspersed throughout the chapters using speculative fiction vignettes to illustrate the points being made, and different-colored paper for the different kinds of material. It mostly works pretty well, though the stories are sometimes so long (occasionally 6+ pages) that they break up the flow of the argument in the chapters. I feel like there’s a big gap in the book because it doesn’t really consider the role of incentives in design and use9, and I was hoping that it would get a little more concrete with design case studies rather than stay at a high level. That said, this seems like a great introduction to design for futures-oriented folks, and a good companion to developing strategic options.
In an act of laser-targeted precision marketing, it was in between pages of the Phoenix-as-a-preview-of-US-futures article in the Atlantic I discussed earlier this summer.
Or, to take it back to my two core principles of futures, to increase our imagination and agency regarding design and the future.
I don’t mean that things are deterministic or have a simple, single cause, just that we can see the ripples of impacts of past events. Maybe less a chain and more a directed acyclic web?
Think about a faster assembly line, or a faster river current, or an internet platform that allows people to post their reactions in real time.
As a specific example, climate change is an issue that is very poorly-suited to the human brain — impersonal, global, gradual, stochastic, chaotic, etc.
Reading through these, you may be thinking to yourself that there really isn’t a clear-cut distinction between the skills to notice design and the skills to design something better. I think this is 100% correct, and that the structure of the book is somewhat artificial.
By some strange coincidence, new cafeterias are precisely my #1 anxiety-inducing situation.
One strategy the authors propose for this is to make so many goals that all the possible aims of the system can be accounted for, interrogated, and wisely chosen from - going a bit beyond the balanced scorecard idea.
This could just be my Econ degree talking.