An Argument For Relational Design in the Age of Climate Crisis.
The world doesn’t actually revolve around us so pretending it does and ignoring everything else seems like a bad idea. Here are some of my favourite design experiments in which relational design challenges how we participate with objects and environments.
As it stands, we tend to evaluate the impact of how we design and build stuff based on our short-term wellbeing, which essentially translates to ‘if it’s not likely to kill me personally, in an imminent way, it’s probably fine’. But in the age of climate crisis where we can clearly see that this kind of thinking has massively increased the frequency of things that could possibly kill you in an imminently, we’re in need of some new points of view. As I have previously written about, human-centered design (HCD) is just not cutting it anymore when it comes to AI, but it’s also not cutting it when it comes to the climate either. All too often, the design of human-centered products and services result in the development and perpetuation of unsustainable modes of production and consumption.
HCD is deeply tied to Anthropocentric ways of thinking, aka the idea that humans sit at the top of a natural hierarchy, and the rest of the natural world is organised in terms in terms of its value to us. This is a deeply entrenched mindset (in the Western world at least), but as the climate crisis becomes more visible, so too does that fact that we’re actually just one set of participants in delicately interconnecting biological, ecological, social and technical systems which are constantly adapting at different scales and times.
For example, you may think of yourself as an individual but you wouldn’t live long without the colonies of bacteria in your gut, or the global supply chains that got the food in there in the first place. Just like Eame’s Power of 10, you can zoom in and out to find constant linkage at every scale. The edges of the systems we are part of are porous, and frankly, finding a central spoke to design around seems a little old-fashioned.
There are plenty of great examples demonstrating how effective it can be to design system solutions alongside natural entities, not in spite of them. A prime example is the 8 clams that are responsible for measuring how toxic the water is in main water pump for Warsaw, Poland. Clams are known to be very sensitive and only open their shells slightly in order to feed, if they detect polluted water, they shut their shells. Scientists carefully select clams and link their shell movements to an alarm — if there’s pollution the clams will detect it first. Simple, elegant and helping to prevent a city of 1.8million people from getting poisoned. Way to go clams!
Using a slightly more high-tech approach than the blob of glue and a spring, Scientists at (MIT) have given spinach plants the capacity to send emails. The roots of the plant detect the presence of nitroaromatics in groundwater, a compound you usually find in explosives such as landmines. Carbon nanotubes embedded in the leaves emit a signal that’s picked up by an infrared camera and triggers the sending of an email.
But these examples are still basically rooted (pun fully intended) in an anthropocentric way of thinking- solving human problems in a way that doesn't give the clams much out of the deal.
If we actually want to design in a way that is less destructive, we need to go a bit further and move on from the idea that the world can only be understood by how they appear to humans. Instead of arbitrarily identifying a central spoke in a system to design around, maybe it’s more about picking a point to start in a system and using that to understand new ways of relating to and participating with other actors in the system in a way that is mutually beneficial. This is something that many indigenous epistemologies have been doing for millennia so it’s not exactly novel. And there’s plenty of theory and literature that back this up, whether you’re an Actor-Network Theory fan or an Object-Oriented Ontology guy (both of which, incidentally have great initials). But putting it into practice is a different thing, it tests the theories out and enables people who aren’t massive nerds like me to engage with the ideas in participatory ways.
A great design-based example is the tower that was constructed at MoMA’s PS1 Courtyard in 2015 from organic, biodegradable bricks consisting of farm waste and a culture of fungus grown to fit brick-shaped molds. It was installed and then composted, instead of demolished. The architects said:
“The building is explicitly designed to participate in the built environment around it, as well as the natural environment beyond it, and further into local manufacturing, gardens and agriculture.”
Which is very cool. More recently, Rachel Armstrong, has been pioneering the use of metabolic materials such as protocells and micro-organisms to transition from an industrial era of architectural design to an ecological one. Drawing together the fields of architectural design, natural and medical sciences, she calls the synthesis that occurs between them “living” architecture where constructions share some of the properties of organisms 🤯. I want to live in that house.
Moving away from the built environment towards product design, projects like Kelly Dobson’s Blendie which makes her literally have to sing for her supper challenge the way we relate to objects in a surreal but playful way. Blendie is a very sensitive, intelligent, voice-controlled blender with a mind of its own. To use the blender, a person has to synchronise with it by singing. People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow or at higher pitches to speed up Blendie. Now I am not saying this is necessarily practical, but it’s a great provocation for considering how we might recalibrate our relationship with the things we make and own.
From synchronising to empathising, Simone Rebaudengo has gone a bit further. VR has often been called the empathy machine, and for good reason. The scale of its impact is demonstrated by the research how the racial bias of white people diminishes in a sustained manner after a short period of embodiment in a black virtual body. Rebaudengo has made VR that makes people experience the world as a mundane object like a Roomba vacuum cleaner, a fan or a plug. He demonstrated that when people become objects they develop a different form of relationship with those objects. It’s part of a wider thread of work called ‘Everything Is Kind Of Someone’ in which he’s making the case for using these kinds of approaches to rethink the design, production and consumption patterns of everyday objects.
As part of this he has also created ‘Addicted Products’- a real fictional service that questions the model of constant ownership and proposes a scenario in which a product can be shared without the active decision of a person, but based on its own needs as a product. Or in other words, he has made a network of toasters that can’t be owned, only hosted, and can also talk to each other. If a host doesn’t treat the toaster in a way that meets the toaster’s expectations, it moves on to a new host. What I love about this is the playful invasion of the assumption that ownership is something we have a right to.
While most of these experiments may make you look a little odd, they indicate a different approach to the design of objects and the use of technology. Thinking about how to design a plug from the plug’s perspective might mean you make fundamentally different choices about material, durability and function. And harmonising with a blender to get it to work subverts the relationship between user and object, challenging how we relate to objects around us. But most importantly they’re fun.
The climate crisis is a massive bag of terrifying, and whilst the major change is going to have to come from fundamental structural political, technological and economic shifts, there is also a role for design and consumer culture to play. Minimising what we consume and how we consume it is really the bottom line when it comes to making a personal contribution to the wider need to stop fucking the planet over, but that seems to be a pretty hard sell to a lot of people. These design experiments all find ways to highlight and understand the relationship we as humans have with other parts of these wildly complex, self-adapting systems we are part of in fun, engaging and thorught provoking ways. They ask whether taking the perspective of natural and man-made objects into account in the design process might actually end-up being better for us by countering our need for consumption that is detrimental to the planet and each other. And I, for one, am here for it. So in conclusion — I think we should talk to objects more, and I don’t mind if Ilook bonkers doing so.
