What do I design when I don’t design?
By: Dilina Janadith
Tags: Design Thinking, Design, Speculative Design, Philosophy, Designer

What do I design when I don’t design?

“Do not get caught into this pseudo activist pressure of ‘Do something’. In the 20th century, we may have tried to change the world too quickly. It is time to think and reinterpret it. I do not say just sit, think and ignore the suffering of people, but we should be very careful what we do. Because in all the ‘call of actions’ of blunt activism, I always discern in this an ominous injunction — Do it and don’t think too much” — Slavoj Žižek

In contrast to Marx’s suggestion — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” — current thinkers continuously emphasise the need of revising our pool of ideologies instead of changing the world or acting. If one thing is commonly shared by anti-capitalistic Zizek and pro-neoliberal Yuval Noha Harari, that is this need of revising our ideologies and to create a discourse about it to match current needs.

Watch this for his complete argument

However, borrowing the advice of ‘Don’t act, just think’ is not easy for us designers due to two major reasons.

If we take the first part ‘Don’t Act’; at the core of the role, designers are expected to act (to be specific we are supposed to ‘design’) and we are paid for this action. However, most of the time this action is a demand from a higher agency — client, cooperation, money, or anything you would like to call it, and therefore a crucial part of thinking is done at higher stages, and action is what the agency is expecting from us. So, first, it is difficult for us not to act or run away from that fundamental role of taking actions.

Next, when it comes to the word ‘thinking’, designers do not have much in the library. Unlike art, economy, sociology or political science, we have very limited schools of thinking.

The inherited capitalist nature of the profession could have been a major reason for this. Since we are demanded to act/design (according to a need of a higher agency), our thinking is shaped to increase the result/action of that demand. If we take current UX research dialogue, this is purely oriented on increasing the result of the design and not to forget ‘Design Thinking’ — a pure action-oriented process. On top of this, there is no ample space for a designer to think critically in a given task, what we think is how to creatively fulfil what ‘agency’ have thought of beforehand (the need of the Client). Therefore second, even if we want to just sit and think, available resources and environment are not supporting it.

This is where my first interviewee of this series — a series revising and recycling design ideologies and philosophies — fits into the puzzle, because he has his way to achieve ‘Do Not act, just think’ in a designer way.

He is Damien Lutz, and according to his web, he is an Australian Digital Experience Designer, sci-fi author and a tech writer. By occupation, he is a Senior UX Designer for Vodafone, Australia. I was honoured to talk with him recently.

Damien as a designer outside his job

Damien Lutz

As a result of the COVID lockdown at the beginning of 2020, Damien was left with spare time to explore how to bring his design and sci-fi writing together by detailing the process he went through to design the future technology and future worlds of his sci-fi novels.

“For my second sci-fi novel, I was writing about this augmented reality contact lens. While I was writing I started to get into the details of this product such as its interaction methods, UI, onboarding system and even the ecosystem and supporting services of the design. I developed a separate case study for my portfolio with this ‘contact lens design’. Then I realised that I am actually applying design to writing in my own way.”

This is where Damien realised that he discovered something he was looking for a long time.

“At that time, I did not think that anyone was mixing science fiction and design techniques. As I was getting deeper into this area, I realised that it is a practice. To be honest, at first, I was disappointed because at that time I thought I discovered something original. But then I got excited because this is a real thing, and this is what I was looking for.”

He converted this excitement about ‘Speculative Design’ into researching the practice’s origins, tools, and methods.

“This made me realise how important it is for designers to play with ‘design’ outside of their job, speculative design is just one way to do it. For me, it reignites my passion for value-driven design. Even talking with you is a result of that passion.”

His personal website is full of interesting experiments, tools, and case studies of speculative design. He is actively sharing his knowledge and also experimenting with speculative design. One of my personal favourites in his web is the ‘Future Scouting Game’, which is also related to the topic of this article — Don’t act, just think.