MY EXPERIMENTS WITH THE FUTURE:
Designing for a Sustainable Southwark, 2030
INTRODUCTION: If Not Now…
When I was applying to UAL, I had two choices in front of me — A Masters in Designing for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures and a Masters in Service Design. Both courses were empowering and visionary, but the fundamental difference (as I understood it then) which drew me to Service Design was the fact that it dealt with the wicked problems of the now. I saw that as a way to address the challenges facing us today, that could impact our tomorrow.
As part of the MA Service Design program at LCC I, along with my cohort, have had the opportunity to learn and apply Service Design in practice through some truly impactful projects with different borough councils, researchers, society organizations and development groups across London.
So you can imagine my pleasant surprise when we received a brief from the Southwark Council to design Sustainable future solutions for the borough. In an emergency declaration, the Council had shifted their deadline for making Southwark Carbon Neutral from 2050 to 2030. The brief was to design solutions that can help Southwark achieve this goal.
Keep in mind that this wasn’t a speculative brief, in the traditional sense of the word; It was about speculating about the future to design solutions that could actually shape the way Southwark battles the impending climate emergency before it spirals out of control.
It was a welcome jolt that made me wonder, whether it was naïve of me to believe that the problems of the now (and the corresponding solutions), were to be simply restricted to the present. The need to design for the future now, especially with regard to a gigantic and complex problem like climate change, can be driven by a current, urgent need.
So when it comes to thinking about solutions that would affect Southwark’s future impact on the climate, the question to ask as a designer, and in my case, particularly as a service designer who thrives in the now, is ‘if not now, then when?’
It was clear that if Climate action isn’t Southwark’s collective priority now, then it might be too late when we finally wake up to its effects in the future, as foreshadowed in a 2018 IPCC report on climate change.
CHAPTER 1: The Future Is A Wicked Problem — A Discovery Of What Design Can Do
The brief for Climate action in Southwark was a journey of a 1000 miles, or to put it more aptly, a decade. Before we took our first step, we had to ask ourselves — in which direction do we go? The act of designing, as we are repeatedly reminded, isn’t a linear journey about reducing a problem and then offering a compelling solution. The book, Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design define the 4 characteristics of contemporary problems as Open, Complex, Dynamic and Networked (Dorst, 2015). In Service Design parlance the term ‘Wicked’ sums up such problems.
The brief gave us several areas that could see positive climate Change action to pick up and focus on. These were namely Transport, Energy and Construction, Biodiversity and Consumption and Circularity.
The focus area that my team and I chose was Consumption and Circularity. During the initial interactions with the Southwark Council, we realised that the Council’s view on solutions was very goal-oriented. To an organization, that’s the most efficient way of getting things done. However, we as designers were duty-bound to ask, how effective would this approach be in a world where the complexity of the problem dictates the narrative?
Service Design often encourages us to look at the world through what I like to call a Prism & Kaleidoscope approach. We break down systems into key components and then visualize new arrangements. We took this approach with the brief, to speculate while using Design- through-Research as our core methodology.
As part of our research, we started scanning the horizon only to find that the very ambit of consumption had evolved around us — with fast internet, IoT and mobile technology, the lines had blurred between traditional consumption (Food, Clothes, Supplies) and new age consumption (Online deliveries, OTT and Social Content, Meal Subscriptions) — this helped identify the dominant behaviour model among consumers.
From our briefings with the Southwark Council, we hypothesized that their definition of Consumption didn’t take new realities and this mental model completely into consideration.
Could changing the way that the Council looks and approaches consumption-triggered climate change be a step in the right direction?
But wait…Wouldn’t that mean changing the way the Council operates?
For perspective, we are talking about transforming the very way of working of a 56-year old organization. Dominant opinion about the government’s way of working makes one want to believe that this is far from achievable.
But as designers, if we were to shift the lens to a future-oriented one, we would see this as a preferable future worth exploring, rather than an insurmountable obstacle as per the now (Simon, DtR). With this reframing could this become a design possibility worth speculating and testing?
To validate the belief that large-scale organizational transformations are possible, we studied the Civil Services Reforms that have taken place in the UK over the last 30 years (Thomas & Davidson, 2014). The reforms have arguably seen success with increased involvement of domain experts and specialists from several relevant fields in government operations, creating new avenues of changing the system from within.
We also critically examined visions of new systems in society, government and policy within speculative fiction– notably Judge Dredd, a law enforcement officer empowered to summarily arrest, convict, sentence, and execute criminals (Wagner,1977) and the contrasting worlds of the poor but egalitarian Anarres and the rich but unequal Urras in The Disposessed (Le Guin, 1974)
As a team we realised that through our scanning and research we’d stumbled upon a ‘wicked’ problem that leads to the wicked climate issues we were trying to address.
As a service designer trying to foresee and address problems in a speculative world, I hesitated; I wondered whether as designers, we are even capable of what fiction, politics and revolution have achieved over the course of time — rebuilding and creating new worlds.
We grappled with the thought of scaling down our ambition for the 10 weeks unit and then decided against it. As designers and students, armed with the spirit of inquiry, it would be a loss to not have explored how far this possibility of a new Council model, is viable and in what form.
And with that, we took a step towards reframed the brief we received from the Southwark Council, to address how the Council could become the fulcrum of climate-positive action by changing itself and merging itself completely with the community it aims to represent.
CHAPTER 2: The Future is Malleable: Defining the Could, Would, Should
As a team, we were a diverse group of people who saw design as a means for far-reaching change. This change manifested in not one vision but several visions, defined by each of our different experiences, backgrounds and personalities. Our expertise ranged from textile designing and urban planning to software engineering, graphic design and advertising.
Our process, primarily involving discussion and debate, became a design research method to extract learning from our personal experiences as well as critically examine and contribute to our collective vision of Southwark’s future concept. Our online calls and meetings became our ‘lab’.
It is important to acknowledge that this process also had severe downsides and limitations which we would only encounter later.
Our efforts to define the future of a new climate-centred Southwark Council began with trying to define how the council would be structured.
Could it be a special task force within the Council?
What kind of powers would it have?
What would be the kind of injustices that it would tackle?
What actions would fall under its jurisdiction?
What kind of skills will it have?
What kind of people would be in this organization?
What would its values be like?
How will Community have greater representation in this?
Within our proverbial lab of Microsoft Teams calls, we shared and debated several aspects of this new council, taking key inspiration from the ideal teal organization structure (Laloux, 2014) to define its values and principles
Note, that I use the word ‘lab’ to describe our work environment. This is because we, as a team, were building this vision of the council, in a controlled environment that existed in our minds and collaboration boards. In theory, it was what Southwark needed. But the question we also needed to ask was, ‘what shape and form it’d take in relation to the world?’.
To fully grasp the relevance of this new council in the world of Southwark in 2030, we built a narrative through a future newspaper, that imagined this new Consumption Council taking on an extended role to crackdown on wanton consumption and crimes brought on by food insecurity. The world we created saw climate action becoming part of consumer behaviour through regulation and even religion — a world where community and council, despite their differences, come together to tackle climate change, by tackling complex consumption-related issues.
The newspaper was the first of the several diegetic prototypes we’d make as part of our research to test and influence our design process. With each of these prototypes, our understanding of the concept evolved. With each prototype, we were challenged to think of something that our ‘Lab’ environment didn’t allow us to foresee in the same way, that the ‘learning by doing’ approach was allowing for.
Through making, we learned how far, in practice, were we from our vision of the future. We proceeded to chip away at it with a constant critical analysis at each step, of prototyping objects.
Ironically, one thing that was sorely missing from our discussion-led ‘lab’ environment was discussions with the council itself. While we did identify and speak with stakeholders and test our future objects, our efforts to shadow and speak to the Council about their way of working were restricted to secondary research on Council structure and commissioning.
Perhaps this is why our team’s focus gradually shifted. The reactions from the prototyping and the conversations with community stakeholders gave us a clear view of the assets that the community had to offer. Our hypothesis was that our theoretical Council model could benefit by being more community-centric. As a result, we moved to an asset-based approach, that sought to use the variety of efforts of Southwark resident communities and groups as the bedrock for climate action.
This evolved our recommendation to the Council. Instead of recommending changing themselves, as we had earlier hoped to propose, we suggested for them to be involved in and support community climate action by empowering those who were championing initiatives within Southwark — be it Individuals, Community groups, Businesses or HEIs. So in theory we were talking about a future Council that embraces devolution — a willing and systematic transfer of power to the people enabling them to take positive climate action with the council’s support.
In Greater Manchester there exists a great example of devolution being used to support system-wide approaches to commissioning. Within healthcare, ‘Clinical Commissioning Groups, local authorities and other local bodies have come together to take responsibility for the entire local health and care budget’. (Wenzel, Robertson, 2019)
As a result, after several iterations, our ‘What If’ question — the core of speculative future thinking — evolved to read:
What If the Local Government supported local organisations, businesses and universities to work in collaboration to promote, prototype and pilot sustainable practices?
But as our Unit Leader, Dr Lara Salinas often reminded us ‘Show, don’t Tell.’
It was important that our vision for this future stayed true to our asset-based approach in practice. This meant that our Design through Research methodology would go on to play a crucial role.
This also meant that it was now high time we get out of the lab that we’d been spending so much time in, and supplement our long discussions and on-paper concepts with physical hypotheses (Jan Stappers, Koskinen 2013).
But I couldn’t help but feel concerned. Would our actions at this stage prove too little, too late?
CHAPTER 3: A Minimum Viable Future
Out of the various pathways that we charted and prototyped to represent the output of this new model of Council plus Community, one solution emerged as fresh and scalable.
We called it the Incubation Garden –a shared space that brings Council, Community together to collaborate and address the challenges of consumption that affect Southwark adversely.
It aims to transform community gardens into local hubs for local businesses and organisations, to prototype collective climate action.
The Garden facilitates the ‘growing’ of climate action by enabling the growth of the following:
-Climate discourse
-New climate-friendly habits in lifestyle
-Climate-friendly and circular skills
-Circular Business innovations
- New Policies around Circularity and Consumption
Staying true to the asset-based approach, the Incubation Garden doesn’t necessarily add anything new. Instead, it takes all the initiatives that are already being cultivated across Southwark by its residents and community groups — and aggregates them to one common space centrally accessible by the residents of the area as well as the Council.
The Incubation Garden, which mimics the concept of ‘Sandbox Culture’ made popular by MIT’s Media Lab (Koskinen et al., 2013) lays emphasis on demonstrating ideas, skills and opportunities in practice within this safe and inspiring space of the gardens.
The concept might read clearly, now that it is written in hindsight; but when we developed it, it was set with a lot of deliberation as we struggled to scale our Maximum Viable Vision to a Minimum Viable Prototype. As a result, the concept went from being a primarily council-funded initiative to being a community-led and council supported pilot.
Our research and testing with community organizations like the Tabard Growers Association and John Evelyn Community Gardens helped shape our actions to a great deal. These spaces and their expertise in cultivating not only urban green spaces but also a culture of nurturance and care for the climate through steady behaviour change to a care-based mental model seemed to be the right shift from Society’s hyper-consumerist model.
Even as we prepared to present to the Southwark Council, our initial hesitations would remain — in reframing the brief to build a brave new model of climate action, were we as designers, pushing the idea of a utopia that simply wasn’t in line with the council’s immediate goals and worldview?
CHAPTER 4: The Future has Gatekeepers
Our presentation to the Southwark Council went by in a blink. There was little discussion on the Incubation Garden. The concept didn’t make the impact we hoped for.
As designers when we embark on the path to reframe the brief, we have to be prepared for the eventuality that a concept, built with conviction, may not evoke the same emotion amongst key stakeholders. This was part of the design-through-research process.
We spent time reflecting on our approach and concept presentation. The council’s reaction wasn’t interpreted by us as a shortcoming of the idea. Instead, it made it apparent that if we were to bring the Council on board with a long-term behaviour change concept, we needed to see them as gatekeepers who held access to opportunities and resources to change the future. This meant addressing their immediate concerns that were outlined in their brief before we step outside its boundaries to reframe the brief.
Having worked in the creative industry, I comprehend the sense of intellectual adventure that comes with dissecting a brief and reframing it. But in retrospect, the Prism and Kaleidoscope approach needs to be anchored in what is first needed in the design brief, before we move to explore beyond the boundaries.
As we detailed our concept for a report, we realised that for the idea of the incubation gardens to grow in the minds of stakeholders, it also needed an environment of patience and nurturing, much like a plant in a garden itself.
Perhaps if given to evolve and mature over time, the value of the Incubation Garden will be seen ‘in retrospect and years after the fact’. (Overbeeke, 2007)
CONCLUSION: Every Future has a Future
Doctor Strange: I went forward in time to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict.
Star-Lord: How many did you see?
Doctor Strange: Fourteen million, six hundred and five.
Iron Man: How many did we win?
Doctor Strange: One.
While creatively representing the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, this conversation helps to believe that the future at any given point is not one, but multiple futures, depending on the sequence of events and choices that occur at that point.
As both service designers as well as researchers, looking to address wicked problems of the future, it is our duty to explore what these futures could look like, and use methodologies and tools to engage conversations around them. Not all these futures might be preferable or even plausible (Hancock and Bezold, 1994), but it is for us as designers to be able to discover that.
Because In doing so, if even by the process of elimination, we come ever closer to a solution to the climate crisis that might truly lead to that one in a fourteen million scenario where we, as Southwark, win.
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REFERENCES
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Thomas P., & Davidson N. (2014) Civil Service Reform in the Real World. Available at: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publications/civil-service-reform-real-world (Accessed 18 May, 2021)
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Laloux, F. (2014) Reinventing Organizations, Belgium, Nelson Parker
Wenzel L. & Robertson R. (2019) What is commissioning and how is it changing? Available at: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/what-commissioning-and-how-it-changing (Accessed: 17 May 2021)
Koskinsen, I. et al (2013) Design Research through Practice: From the Lab, Field and Showroom, pp 44,63, U.S.A, Morgan Kaufmann
Overbeeke, K. (2007). The aesthetics of the impossible. Inaugural lecture, Eindhoven, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, 26 October 2007. (Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGbqgzewCU). Retrieved 18.05.2021
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Vaidman L (2018) “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/qm-manyworlds (Accessed on: 18 May 2021)
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