Aspen Ideas: Is Design Too Dangerous to Teach?

Prelude

I’ll be recharging my brain, exploring far-reaching ideas about education, design literacy, leadership, and civil society over the next few days at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

My focus will be on understanding how these deep and subtle topics fit together, and how we cope with the emergent consequences of our actions, in the coming age of connectivity and complexity—when trillions of computing devices are connected to each other, and to us.

Given that I’m humbled to be staying on a campus designed by Herbert Bayer of Bauhaus fame, I think it might be fitting to start my first post at the intersection of design and education.

The questions I’d like to pose are simple, “Should we just leave design to designers?” and “Is human-centered design important enough to teach people as a basic literacy?”

Let’s try a dramatic thought experiment.

Imagine we set up a research study at our labs to answer these questions. But instead of working with kids or people like me and you, we exposed the worst that our society has to offer—extremists, terrorists, zealots—to the practice of human-centered design. Couple that with the transformational power of the Internet of Everything—or the Industrial Internet or however you prefer to call the era of pervasive computing—and what do you suppose the outcomes would be?

Below are a few of our hypothetical researcher’s journal entries as he explores these questions:

08:30 AM April 1, 2018, Research Campus Number 5

Day 16

NOTE: We will be using the full capabilities of the Double-Helix simulation environment and will be running the clock at significantly faster than real time. Our goal is to simulate a year in a week, a week in a day, so that we can adequately study the emergent patterns of our experimental scenario.

Environment: Rather than choosing a scenario where human-centered design is taught during the current era of the World Wide Web we will play out the natural consequences of the coming “Internet of Everything”—an interconnected world of atoms and bits where complexity is unbounded and malignant. We believe this era will begin in less than five years and will have trillions of interconnected nodes. Our assumption is that the technological, social and cultural environment that our test subjects are placed within will play a role in the capabilities they exhibit and the behaviors that emerge.

03:08 PM April 7, 2018, Research Campus Number 5

Day 22

Our hypothesis is that people won’t have any trouble changing the world, but rather they will be able to make anything without permission and, more likely than not, be able to change the world five times before lunch. While that sounds exciting, it also means that one of those five changes could wipe out all life on Earth and create gray goo that threatens the local neighborhood of planets.

Given this framework we will be using one of our secure containment facilities.

07:44 AM April 16, 2018, Secure Research Campus Number 7

Day 31

A heartbreaking event that I witnessed on the news last night gave me a chilling idea that has provided fodder for my nightmares and for the research study recruiting protocol.

I have decided that I need to recruit participants that would be at one extreme or another. In essence I want to frame the worst case by placing the most dangerous kinds of people I can think of, within the most complex Trillions-scale environment and teach them a literacy that may be of immense power. If teaching design literacy is important and powerful, I want to know why.

05:03 AM April 23, 2018, Secure Research Campus Number 7

Day 38 (Double-Helix Simulation time: 1 year)

I haven’t slept and have decided to come back to the lab. Early results are confusing.

Last week I decided to find and recruit "would be" extremists for the scenario. We built a school to teach them Human-Centered Design and innovation techniques and began teaching in earnest. Two of my post-docs quit in protest, but young Charlie warmed to the occasion and helped me build the protocol, construct the recruitment materials, and run the sessions.

We have now been running our accelerated Double-Helix study for 7 days (365 days in the simulated environment) and the results are shocking. Before noting them, below are some of the details.

For recruitment purposes we called the school "The AMUL (pronounced: ah-mool’) Conspiracy." AMUL is an acronym for:

Advance: Know how to nurture individuals, collaborate in creative environments with interdisciplinary teams and foster ecosystems of value (even if the rewards are delivered after death in the case of more extreme malcontents) across domains.

Make: Learn to sketch and prototype, develop ideas, build storyboards that frame big ideas, help subjects dream bigger about the possibilities of their short-lived future plans. Could extremists and zealots see significantly greater returns by iterating through informed trial and error?

Understand: Learn techniques to analyze challenges and synthesize opportunities based on the mental models of people, and the underlying structures of systems, to help them uncover patterns and priorities, and frame the right problem to attack.

Look: Learn to shadow, do ethnographic research, contextual inquiry, and other looking and listening techniques to help them focus on their targets of discontent far better.

It’s worth amplifying this point. The whole idea behind human-centered innovation is to bubble up unmet and unvoiced needs to understand that, as Margaret Mead said, “What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”

10:52 PM April 30, 2018, Secure Research Campus Number 7

Day 45 (Double-Helix Simulation time: 2 year)

It has been two simulated years since we began the experiment.

Control Group Results: Our control group of malcontents and extremists, not surprisingly, has been up to a surprising amount of no good. While we didn't teach them design literacy, the underlying era of unbounded, malignant complexity played in their favor and the brittle nature of some of our infrastructure was amplified in catastrophic ways.

Design Literate Group Results: In the first simulated year we noticed a marked increase in the group’s effectiveness at uncovering their victim's mental models for ill-gotten gains. We also began noticing a much subtler increase in the emergence of communities of practice taking advantage of so-called "Dark Patterns."

I am becoming increasingly depressed and am tempted to end the experiment now.

Charlie--who has been much closer to the raw data feeds from the participants--has begged me to hold off for a week or two. He has seen some odd noise in the simulation. We have argued for two hours about throwing good money after bad, but he refuses to shut it down.

I'm going home and washing my hands of this whole enterprise. Charlie can have his AMUL Conspiracy.

09:20 PM May 14, 2018, Secure Research Campus Number 7

Day 59 (Double-Helix Simulation time: 4 year)

Reluctantly I'm back. Over the two weeks Charlie's instincts have borne fruit. Four years of elapsed time have expired and what we thought might have been just an anomaly in the data or some other noise in the system has proven out to be a new, resilient phenomena.

In the scenario which we specifically designed as a "worst case" experiment to understand the impact of a design education, the AMUL graduates seem to have turned a page.

Apparently the scale between absolute good, and absolute evil tilted a little more towards the good side of the spectrum.

The group that was taught to focus on gaining empathy through looking and listening to real people to discover unvoiced and unmet needs, found themselves moved to realize that others saw the world a different way than they did. They began to find common ground whether they wanted to or not.

The discovery and understanding of how people and systems worked together to form something greater than themselves had the complimentary impact of uncovering the petty lies and destructive influences of the charismatic shamans, charlatan zealots and tin-pot dictators that formerly held sway over the more impressionable minds. It bubbled up the foundations of science as an antidote to ignorance.

The passionate focus and craft of making real things for others, rather for than themselves, in this world rather than for some metaphysical or cosmic rewards in the next, gave the AMUL graduates a reason to live rather than die. Making anchored them and became a reward in its own right.

The slow and steady advancing of the skills and learnings of individuals, teams, and ecosystems as they simulated and failed, stumbling through trials and errors, meeting strange bedfellows along the way, showed the students new avenues of providing for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Most heartening and surprising of all was that these components of design literacy reflected and coalesced together into ripples of human-centered, rather than computer-centered thinking in that new era of the Internet of Everything.

The aggregate negative effects of the era itself, and the unbounded, malignant complexity that a world of trillions of interconnected devices portends were mitigated.

Human-Centered Design literacy, held not in the hands of a few black turtleneck wearing design shamans, but rather spread as a basic literacy, even to the most despised and downtrodden among us, focused our eyes back on people rather than the trappings and the madness of the crowd.

The bizarro funhouse mirror world of AMUL won't eliminate evil in the world. But it could give us glimmers of light that, upon reflection tilt the balance just a little bit towards good.

So, let’s get out of the labs and back to reality. The real question is not whether design literacy is important enough to teach, but is it too dangerous for us not to?

I am now beginning to think seriously about those children born in the next few years to a world where they can make literally anything and change the world five times before lunch. What impact could human-centered design, taught as a basic literacy in early childhood, have on our next generation of citizens?

I arrive at the Ideas Festival ready to be a student myself, hoping to gain fluency through conversations with fellow explorers, scientists, policymakers, designers, and dreamers that have been digging deep into the fabric of the world.

I am ready to explore the possibilities of a civil society at the dawn of a new era.

Creating this thought experiment reminded me of words that have inspired me on my own journey of design literacy:

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” - W. B. Yeats

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.” - Kofi Annan

And maybe my favorite, though I'm still finding my own way...

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” - Mahatma Gandhi