SXSW Day three – Valerie Casey Keynote
Posted in Blog, Design, Events, Geeky, News by John
Yesterday I attended my first SXSW keynote, a talk by Valeire Casey of the Designers accord.
The Designers Accord is a movement around 2.5 yrs old which was started by Valerie. Valerie is an interaction designer of 15 years. She began the talk by discussing the importance of narrative in design. By looking at design narratives she expanded upon how all stories can be told simply in this way.
The beginning of the talk opened with a series of images. Valerie illustrated a number of distressing issues that have been communicated recently online.
This image illustrates the environmental toxins man has introduced in to eco systems. The photos of baby birds who’ve died through their parents feeding them plastics which were mistaken for food were taken by Chris Jordan.
The next graphic illustrated how political corruption can be communicated with the ‘why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?’ infographic. In the US, the agricultural industry funds 70% of the total pharmaceuticals market which all go in to animals. Because of the imbalance in the federal funding shown in the graphic there arises a bizarre corruption in between health and politics which is clearly communicated in this design.
The next image was of the recently reported ‘burn pits’ in Iraq. This are pits which are setup by contractors such as Halliburton, The pits burn 24/7 and serve as garbage and disposal pits for workers. The pits burn human waste, animals, clothing and even vehicles and weapons which need to be disposed. As a consequence of the pits, its has been suggested that soldiers are now much more likely to die from the impact of being near the toxic pits, than the direct impacts of war.
Before and after shot taken from Google images
Finally, Valerie covered the disaster in Haiti and mentioned how there’s emerging evidence that natural disasters could often be man made and linked to climate change. Recent studies hypothesise that he polar ice cap ice keeps a constant pressure on the surface of the earths crust. As the ice melts the plates ease and start to move. This is providing evidence of the ‘human effect’ in both tsunamis and earthquakes.
So, all this doom and gloom may seem like the above message – ’save the planet, kill yourself’ is a reasonable response. Valerie contended that it wasn’t and that interaction design can offer solutions.
Designers accord was started with a philosophy that by uniting the creative community designers could look at sustainability and the planet in a completely different way. The Designers Accord premise is comparable to a Kyoto Protocol for design.
One of it’s aims is for members to acknowledge a personal accountability in their jobs – this involves educating clients and employees, but also sharing stories not just about successes, but about failures and compromises. The Designers Accord organises meetups at locations across the globe so that interaction designers can come together to talk and ask questions of one another.
Additionally they produce toolkits for young designers to raise awareness of sustainable issues. The ‘School by design‘ pairs designers up so sustainability can be thought about more openly. There are many schools, corporations, and 6 continents all tackling sustainability together through the scheme.
Sustainability
Valerie then focused in depth on her views on sustainability. She covered how the media talks about sustainability very much from the ‘green’ angle. Magazines often feature ‘Eco-warriors’ or produce a ‘green issue’ – this is a bizzare narrative to talk about sustainability and doesn’t ‘mean’ anything tangible. Significantly, Valerie argued that material choice or recyclability completely misses the point of what sustainability should be about.
‘Systems thinking to solve problems’
Valerie then covered 7 key points of ’systems thinking’. This is the idea that any environment has two fixed points, whenever you move or affect one end, there’s reverberation through the system. Everything we do or don’t do has sustainability implications.
7 points:
1. A system is more than the sum of it’s parts:
Looking at the Hippo roller project, we looked at how product design can change a system. The Hippo Roller allows 200lbs of water to be rolled at an effective weight of just 20lbs. This allows more water to be carried in areas where previously buckets were utilised – freeing up time for communities to work and develop other projects, decreasing the risk of travelling and reducing the strain on collection for those making the journey.
However, as a single solution, this project still had problems. For every 75 that came off the production line 125 were made – there’s was a quality problem. Shipping was also extremely expensive (because of their size). As such, a company called D2M redesigned it. They changed the product transportation in to 2 parts so they could be nested. This meant that for every one unit that was previously sent, three could now be fitted in to the same space. Additionally recycled plastic wasn’t robust enough for the product and as such was an ‘eco backlash’ from a few people who became so hung up on the products ‘green credentials’ they were in danger of missing the benefit. Valerie illustrated how within the system the point of the project was worth more than the sum of its parts.
2. Feedback Delays + Bounded rationality = design traps.
This idea is that a system takes a while to gain leverage. Bounded rationality is the idea that you can only make decisions on the information you have available to you. When these things come together they create a design trap – the results is that designers focus on the symptom, but miss the problem. Valerie illustrated how the Dell compact desktop meets all the ‘requirements’ of a sustainable project, but it misses the point that we shouldn’t be making more desktops in the first place. Sometimes when thinking about sustainability, legalism means we design by a checklist and trick ourselves in to thinking that less bad, is good. It isn’t!
3. There is no such thing as side effect:
In this fascinating example, we looked at a study called ‘global taco shed‘. In this project, the participants bought a single taco from a street vendor. Each person was then responsilbe for tracing an ingredient. It was found that 1 taco = 64,000 miles (roughly 2.5 times round the earth). At this point I was thinking ‘that’s shocking, and must be bad’.
Valerie explained that lots of people believe that ‘local’ is always better – there is a general agreement that food miles are bad. In this study however, they went a step further than just looking at the miles and analysed the embodied energy in each ingredient. This gave a measure to compare the embodied energy in tomatoes grown in a greenhouse locally, with those which were much higher but had been grown naturally farther away in other countries. The outcome gave another measure of system benefit and provided an alternative way of viewing the Taco. Another example given of mis-concenieved sustainability was the foil that had been used to package the Taco had been flown from new Zealand. On the surface this sounds bad, but the aluminum alloy used in the foil turned out to be indefinitely recyclable – a clear benefit over local products which may not have been reuseable. This example clearly illustrated that the new system took apart the theory that local was always good.
4. Creating the right measurements of success:
In this example, we looked at how we often use the wrong measure of ’success’. In the US, the most common measure is the effect on the GNP. It is assumed that if the GNP increases, the effect was good. However, this measure has nothing to do with health, well being or relationships and as such is a corporate measurement, but not necessarily a good one. An example illustrated that if there are more car crashes there are more medical bills, another car needs to be built and economic prosperity goes up. However, you’d struggle to find someone who could argue that a car crash is ever a good thing!
Designers can help challenge the way that we measure success. A project that was mentioned in India looks at ecological performance standards for the built environment – essentially, when a house is built, rather than seeking to use expensive ‘green’ products, they instead use a measurement which takes in to account the initial impact of the land they’re building on. By measuring in this way, land can be assessed in terms of filtration, soil erosion and establishing the ecological benefit of the land. When building, the measurement is to then build something which performs identically, so the land benefit is completely replaced. In this measurement rather than building something ‘less bad’, they can create a building which performs identically so there is no loss to the environment. This illustration emphasised that ‘less bad’ is a very short term approach to sustainability.
5. Selecting the correct lever for change:
This example focused on how often, designers can tend to identify the wrong thing to change when they’re trying to change something. Valerie illustrated this through an example from Romania in the 60’s. The government had realised that the birth rate was dropping significantly and wanted to remedy this. They decided to make contraception and abortions illegal for under 40s and figured this would sort things. Initially, there was a burst and increase in births, however it then leveled out. As a by-product of the new law the mortality rate of mothers had spiked – people were seeking illegal abortions behind closed doors. Similarly, loads of kids ended up in orphanages through unwanted births – another unforeseen, but significant impact. Clearly, selecting the incorrect lever for change had had an awful impact.
The example offered as having selected the correct lever for change was Naked Pizza. Naked Pizza are a small 500 sqft pizza outfit. Their mission is simple, they are attempting to make the worlds healthiest pizza. However, they also are restricting themselves to make it affordable, pitched at an identical price point to other competiors. Unlike expensive organic alternatives, their mission is framed with the correct lever for change – they have recognized that to reach the masses it must be affordable. By making it affordable, they can then invent the recipe and scale it – kind of a trojan horse in to the mass food industry. In this way they practically educate people about the benefits of nutritional health. Instead of being a whole foods activist which is prohibitively expensive, this idea is all about making people talk. It’s more sustainability rich as there is a dialogue. It’s not about recycling- in fact, adding loads of green rules would’ve put the price up so much it wouldn’t have achieved anything!
6. Enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between knowledge and behavior:
Valerie explained that for real change to occur, it’s not good enough just to have knowledge, but the behaviors in systems must change also. The analogy that was used was that with Obama, there was a huge wave of optimism upon his election, which has now disaptated. The changed he promised is unachievable in its fullest unless the governmental system itself, of which he is a part, also changes.
7. Finally we looked at the attention cycle and how the ‘degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action’:
This is the phenomenon that when the public starts to get great attention or passion around a specific issue, the degree of productive action is inversely correlated at a certain point. Essentially, so many people get excited, but nothing actually happens. If you get thousands or millions of people interested in an issue it actually has a tranqulising effect – people start thinking ’someone else is doing it, so I don’t need too’. Valerie explained how This could fatigue the sustainability movement as people opt out due to the mass of attention – designers need to avoid the idea that ’someone else is looking after it’.
Concluding Notes
Loosely defined a system is: ‘a collection of elements and interconnections that are highly organised to achieve a purpose.’
The interactive community is missing a sustainable movement – but that’s ok. The last thing we need to do is create more green movements, but instead be the voices that are the connection between all these disciplines to create a constant dialogue for all the other movements.
Designers have a powerful role to play in information flow. We are uniquely positined between many industries and responsbile for communicating issues to the masses. What would happen if our purpose was oriented towards sustainability rather than commerce? What if social media was about social impact?
Valerie encourage us to recognises systems thinking and be the connective tissue between all these different industries.
‘Every profession bears the responsibility to understand the circumstances that enable it’s existence’.
We need to lead and not sit on the sidelines. We understand the qualities of interactivity therefore we should make them work for positive change.
You can find out more on this talk and the designers accord on Twitter @designersaccord
