Transcript
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Last year alone, the billionaire class in the world increased their wealth by 2.3 trillion dollars.
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That was just last year alone.
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The bottom 50% lost about that much.
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Today I am in UTS podcasts studio in Sydney, Australia.
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So I'm here for a holiday, but I thought I would take that opportunity to speak to two of my good friends.
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Martin Tomic and Steve Beatty who are also co authors of this book Designing Tomorrow.
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We're also still designing things in a way that begins with raw materials and ends with a finished product rather than ends with raw materials.
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And I had the honor of reading a preview of this book and provide my testimonial And I thought this was such a much needed voice in the design industry and not just the design industry, but the world in general in terms of what we should be doing, thinking, and feeling about designing a better tomorrow for ourselves and for our children.
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Yes, it's important that we are responsible, and what products we buy, and how we use them, and how we dispose of them.
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But the bigger change we can achieve, um, The bigger impact we can achieve is through changing the organisations.
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This conversation is going to be about.
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What are some of the mindsets, the tools, the techniques that we can use in our practices as designers, change makers, entrepreneurs, teachers, whoever you might be, to bring more life centered techniques, to bring more systems thinking and how might we also collaborate better with, uh, business leaders, executives, and decision makers to align on producing products and services that are actually not just good for humans, not just good for the business, but also good for planet and all its life forms.
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Designing tomorrow as an evolution rather than a revolution.
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welcome to Design Feeling, Martin.
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Thanks for having us.
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Yeah,
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thanks.
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It's great
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to
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be turning to you today.
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Yeah, we've been planning this conversation for quite a long time.
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Um, I know we're, when I was in London, we were trying to kind of do this virtually, but I'm glad we didn't do it because, there's nothing better than being here in the flesh, in 3D, and talking about this.
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So, Designing Tomorrow, well this book is not out in its country of origin yet, in Australia yet, right?
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When is it coming out again?
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Probably.
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Uh, as of late April, early May, it's going to become available, um, in Australia and the rest of the, of the world.
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It's, uh, It's out in Europe already, it's in the UK and other parts of Europe.
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You can already get it online and in your local bookstores.
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Nice.
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Since last year.
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I did buy a copy of this in the UK.
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Um, and, um, and Martin and Steve kindly gave me another copy here, which is signed.
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Um, so, um, well, my first question to both of you is, um, where did the idea for this book, where did it kind of germinate for you guys?
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I think both of us were coming at this problem of the role of design in, um, contributing to the problems that we see in the environment and around the world.
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We were both sort of thinking about that and grappling with it from the perspective of what our practice is.
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was contributing to the problem and thinking about how do we actually start contributing to the solutions?
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How do we start contributing in positive ways and in ways that shift what we're putting out into the world and the way in which we're putting things out into the world into a more positive frame, um, and to be having a more positive impact.
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We spoke at UX Australia, I think it was 2021.
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Um, and afterwards Martin sort of pulled me aside and said, I think we're coming at the same thing from different directions, um, but well aligned perspectives.
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Um, should we turn this into something beyond just our talks?
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Mm.
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Mm.
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I think it was kind of like we both had, we both had this idea in our head for a while and been thinking about these topics.
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Um, and what we could do about it, and then at the point of when we, when we both spoke at UX Australia 2021, which was online because of COVID, Um, that's sort of where, where those, those ways of thinking, our ways of thinking about it connected, and we started, um, collaborating on the book and, and thinking about what this book could look like.
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Um, so for me, um, so the way I'd been thinking about it before UX Australia, It was, again, it was kind of like an idea that was probably taking shape over some years for me and, um, in particular based on my research about life centered design.
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And also, I guess, looking at the, well, I guess, Steve, what you were talking about was more from your practice experience.
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For me, it was more as an educator, um, and researcher, academic at the university, teaching design students.
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I guess I was starting to think about how can we teach design students about this and educate them in different ways and give them the right tools and strategies to drive change in organizations as they leave universities and start working as designers and decision makers.
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I can definitely see we have some heavy resumes in this room right now.
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Um, so Martin, you are the head of the Transdisciplinary School at UTS.
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You're also the founding member of the Media Architecture Institute and also the Life Center to the Design Collective.
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You've written, well now, three books.
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Besides Designing Tomorrow, you've written, Make Cities Smarter and Design, Think, Make, Break, Repeat.
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right?
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Yes.
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And Steve, you are the founder of Mel Studios, which is one of the premium boutique design studios in Australia and possibly the world.
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You are also.
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One of the organizers of UX Australia, which is, I have to say, hands down, one of my most favorite conferences, UX conferences I've been to.
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Um, you know, it was definitely my first UX conference or UX event, um, as a UX designer back in 2010, I think.
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Um, met in Melbourne, I remember.
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I still remember the keynote speech by, um, Gerald Spool.
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Um, and, uh, you have been, uh, past president at IXDA.
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Yes.
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That's correct.
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And you've been, um, the judge at various interaction design awards as well.
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So, uh, many years of experience that you bring together, but I wanted to kind of cast your mind back to some of your early days in design.
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Do you remember your first day when you thought, yeah, I'm a designer or, you know, I am a design educator?
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It's probably a clearer one for you to answer than it is for me.
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I still wake up some mornings wondering whether that's true or not.
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So I'll let Martin go first.
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So your question is like, when, when I first.
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Yeah.
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When did you start in your career or what you call it?
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Call it, call it career.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean it's sort of, it, it really, for me it happened, it's not like I had this plan to one day be sitting in this podcasting studio and talking to you and, and, and with Steve about this book, um, it, it really for me was, I think it was quite opportunistic, it's, uh, I, I was always interested in both technology and creativity, and I guess I found my pathway through university through studying technology design and picking up other subjects from other areas.
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Um, so in many ways, um, it's interesting for me now to find myself in a transdisciplinary school because I guess I've always been interested in different disciplines and different ways of thinking.
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Um, I mean, for me, maybe, maybe it The pivotal moment for me was when I was a student, uh, doing exchange in Stockholm at the technical university in Stockholm, the KTH, and, and learning about human centered design there.
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Um, there was, and, and so for me, it was really, uh, I think a pivotal moment to realize that, oh, actually, these interests of mine collide and connect through this idea of human centered design, which is both about understanding technology, but also understanding people and using creative ways to make technology work better for people.
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Um, and again, over the last few years for me, that has changed to, uh, connect actually with an, with another interest of mine.
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I've always been very interested in the environment and thinking about how we can have a more positive impact.
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Um, through the work we do and, and as we change organizations and how we live and work.
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And, and so hence the shift for me from human centered to life centered design, which, um, for me is, um, a framework that brings all of these things together.
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Steve?
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As I say, like I, I still have days where I, I, I wake up and I'm, I'm not convinced that that's really what I should be calling myself or thinking of myself.
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What did you, what did you, how did you mean?
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Yeah.
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Well, I, my, um, my intellectual background, my, uh, sort of academic background started in applied mathematics and applied statistics.
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Like I, I wasn't trained in design.
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I've read a lot of design.
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I've practiced design and design methods and design theory.
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philosophies and ways of thinking, but on any given day I might wake up and be thinking much more of myself in terms of systems and how systems work and, and how we think about the world and describe the world.
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And for me, that's always very much in sort of mathematical terms, almost in terms of models and the interactions between different sort of parts of systems.
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Um, And that's really useful as we sort of cover in the book and, and, um, as we sort of use in our design work all the time, understanding systems and system dynamics and the way in which different components interact and reinforce or not each other is a really, really critical skill.
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But for me that skill comes from applied mathematics rather than from design.
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Um, So depending on what I'm doing on any given day, I might wake up and think, wow, like I'm, I'm using my mathematics.
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Um, told you it'd be good for something, or I might be sitting there sort of going on that, like really what I'm doing today is, is understanding people, understanding their place in the world, understanding their sense of meaning and significance and their needs and And working through a problem using the tools of design, you know, like, um, and it's, I, I feel much more like a genuine designer on those days than others.
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Yeah.
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But I mean, the, in a way that, um.
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That ability to think analytically and then use using your mathematical skills, that's becoming even more important for designers now.
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And I guess that's also what we talk about in the book.
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Absolutely.
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But not, not to scare off designers.
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Like it's not, we're not saying we need to like, designers need to study mathematics.
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But the way, luckily, there's, there's, there are tools that I feel designers can connect quite well with because as designers, We are, we are, we are used to using tools.
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Um, that's what we do all the time.
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And so things like, um, we use mapping tools.
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Um, there are lots of mapping tools, um, in design.
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And so one of the methods we talk about in the book, Systems Mapping, is actually a great way, I feel, for designers to start thinking about how, as you say, Steve, how the components fit together, how to influence each other, and the more analytical side of looking at the design problem, and also being a more holistic way of looking at, The world and the context and the problems we're working on within that context.
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And that's something that, um, as an educator, I feel that's missing a little bit in design education at the moment.
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And that's definitely a shift that needs to happen.
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So, from your point of view, what is a designer and how does that definition need to change, do you think?
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You can answer that.
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Well, um, so I was taught in different design programs and also different design subjects.
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Um, uh, I mean, in a way now I maybe see myself a little bit as a transdisciplinary designer because I'm in the transdisciplinary school.
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So it means I'm drawing on different, um, disciplines in my work and through my work and trying also to bring different approaches together.
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Bye Um, and again, that's what we're also doing in the book as well.
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So trying to.
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Like, we draw a little bit on economics, for example, um, again, the systems, um, thinking movement that we also bring into the book, weave into the book.
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Um, I should also say we've worked very closely with two editors, uh, on this book, so, uh, Jacqueline Hall and Verity Borthwick.
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And, um, Jacqueline, by background, is a journalist, um, and, uh, has also studied, uh, economics.
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And so she brought that experience and, and, and knowledge to the, to the editing process.
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And Verity actually has a PhD in, in Geosciences.
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Um, so she's a, she's a scientist, a trained scientist and then became an editor.
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So she also brought that knowledge to the editing process.
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So we, we, for me, this debate, I guess, it's, it's, it's, it's more and more difficult to, to box a designer into one particular area.
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Um, and it's, But at the end of the day, a designer is someone that, um, It's able to understand, um, different elements of a problem area and then figure out how things connect.
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That's the creativity part, so connecting, connecting elements and then also being able to imagine futures that don't exist yet.
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And then I guess the last part is to communicate that change in a way so that, um, that they're able to bring others along on the journey and then that's actually how we affect change.
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Yeah.
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The thing, that, that idea of not, not boxing designers in, I think it's a, it's a critical one as we move into spaces where we're dealing in more complex, more interconnected, um, more non linear type problems where the boundaries are very, very blurry and they necessarily Transdisciplinary approaches.
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So there's a set of design capabilities, mindsets, sensibilities, philosophies, that I think At the core of design practice, you can say, well, those are design ly ways of thinking, being and working, right?
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Like, and engaging with the world and making sense of the world and that kind of thing.
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Um, and there, you know, like the ability to prototype, the ability to iterate, the ability to sort of hold multiple competing ideas at the same time while you test them.
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Um, you know, like that you test things in.
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rough and ready ways and you invest more time as you build more confidence in an idea.
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So the idea of going from a sketch to a prototype to a pilot to a, you know, like those sorts of sensibilities.
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The idea that, um, thinking outside yourself, so externalizing your thinking through sketches, through the use of, you know, like war rooms and design walls and these sorts of things, is an important part of shared sensemaking and shared exploration of the space.
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Like, those are all things that you can sort of look at and go, well those are designly things.
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If I walked into a room and I saw people working that way, I'd feel like there were designers in the room.
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Um, but as you get into these areas where.
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You're trying to tackle or impact poverty in a country like Australia or the availability of healthcare in remote communities or the prevalence of domestic violence or sexual assault sort of thing, which are areas that designers are absolutely working in today.
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They're working in those areas alongside a whole raft of people with different backgrounds.
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And I think that's where you sort of go, we want those people.
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The social scientists, the economists, the policy people, whoever to have the availability of those design tools because there's power in them, especially when we're navigating these ambiguous spaces.
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But we're not trying to make them designers, we're trying to give them access to those design elite tools.
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So the, the, the, the core might be well defined, but the edges are becoming increasingly blurry.
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Mm hmm.
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So, what I took away from that was, although the title of the book is Designing Tomorrow, this is not just for people with the title Designers.
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That's right, yeah.
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We specifically wanted to write it for not just designers, but any decision makers.
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Yes.
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Um, I think that's a good way to capture it.
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So anyone who is in a, in a, in a, in a, in a position, in a role where what to do influ involves making decisions, which is almost all of us, um, can benefit from the tools and use those tools.
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Um, and as Steve says, we, we also try to describe those tools and strategies, um, uh, in a way so that, um, anyone, even without a design background, can apply those tools.
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Hmm.
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So, What's wrong with how we are designing today or how we've designed yesterday?
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Uh, where to start?
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So for me, uh, Again, bringing it back to this idea of life centered design.
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One of the things, one of the problematic ways of how we have designed in the past is that we center all the decisions around humans and their needs and desires.
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And, um, that was great for a little while and it also helped in a way to cement the role of design and designers in business because Businesses loved it because if, if designers helped them to better understand what the needs of the customers are, it means they can sell more stuff to more people.
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And so it was great for businesses, was great for designers, um, great for the shareholders, but, um, unfortunately not quite for the planet because it, um, and that's where we get into economic, um, thinking and, and, um, uh, economic models.
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One of the problems is that organizations today still operate on.
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Uh, outdated economic models that, that, that assume that there's an infinite, infinite amount of resources available to organizations.
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And also that there's an infinite, uh, uh, capacity of the planet to regenerate itself and to produce resource, new resources and to deal with waste as well.
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Um, and so it's what economist Herman Daly describes the empty full world problem.
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So we, we no longer live in a, in, in an empty world.
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We live in a world where the, the use of our resources actually exceeds the regenerative capacity of the planet.
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Um, and, and so hence why we need to add, so what we talk about in the book is that we need to add the responsibility perspective.
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So it's no longer just about viability.
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I got it.
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Can we actually make it affordable?
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Um, The feasibility, is it possible to build it?
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And the desirability, like, do people want it?
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But we also need to think about the responsibility.
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So what are the ethical and environmental values?
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And we make an argue, we make the case that designers and decision makers are in the right place to be the custodians of that responsibility perspective.
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I
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think the, the, the, The piece that I would add to what Martin has just said is that we're also still designing things in a way that begins with raw materials and ends with a finished product rather than ends with raw materials.
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So ultimately instead what happens is we begin with raw materials, we make something which gets distributed, stored, sold, used and then discarded.
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for listening.
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And because we've drawn our box around our responsibilities as ending with a finished product, the disposal of that product isn't really being designed as intentionally as the rest of it.
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So you might have a really well designed, for a definition of well, and we tackle this sort of early in the book, but our notion of what that looks like ends with the finished product, not subsequently how it's disposed of.
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So you end up with a situation where the end product is full of toxic chemicals, materials that don't, um, degrade or can't be recycled, can't be repurposed, is difficult to repair, um, All of which contributes to waste.
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And this is right across our economy.
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So whether we're talking about fashion, or consumer electronics, or white goods, or the automotive industry, you name it, we've got this situation where increasingly, over the last seven decades, since 1950s, 1940s, we've increasingly been creating products, probably since the introduction of plastics, mostly, mostly.
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But consumer electronics as well, since the 80s, have been contributing to this environment where our batteries, our transistors, our microchips, the casings of products, how we package things, how we ship things, um, are all contributing, um, not just waste but pollution on a scale that we just can't sustain.
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So when we look at what was the problem with design that got us to this point.
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Both our thinking around the impact that we might have and the resources that were available to us were infinite, even though we're in a closed system.
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Um, and the way in which we were drawing our boundaries created these problems whereby we're not really thinking about what happens afterwards.
00:22:21.414 --> 00:22:23.394
And we really need to start thinking differently.
00:22:23.404 --> 00:22:42.634
So, somewhere in UTS is the Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence, as an example of a group that's thinking about, well, how do you look right across the life cycle of a product, and include its, you know, how it's actually disposed of at the end of life, and what does it mean to be end of life for a product.
00:22:43.085 --> 00:22:49.515
Where are the raw materials being sourced from and are they reused materials or are they fresh extractions?
00:22:49.954 --> 00:22:51.644
How do you minimize all of that?
00:22:51.704 --> 00:23:00.335
Um, and that's a real change in mindset over the last Two three decades when we're seeing it really emerges a strong area of practice Yeah,
00:23:00.805 --> 00:23:07.125
and and it's really something that as designers we can think about those things at the product genesis stage, right?
00:23:07.125 --> 00:23:07.464
That's right.
00:23:07.464 --> 00:23:12.660
You can But it currently ends with, as you say, we're thinking about the product and how it's used, but that's it.
00:23:12.849 --> 00:23:13.210
Yes.
00:23:13.519 --> 00:23:21.309
Uh, and we, but we could also think about what happens after that, like how, how can it be repaired, how can it be reused, how can it be recycled, you know.
00:23:21.309 --> 00:23:22.430
We have to start thinking that
00:23:22.430 --> 00:23:22.500
way.
00:23:23.480 --> 00:23:30.640
So, obviously, you know, design has evolved from being more kind of, you know, object centered to, towards like human centricity.
00:23:31.319 --> 00:23:36.079
Uh, and now we're, you know, having these conversations around life or planet, you know, centricity.
00:23:36.099 --> 00:23:41.029
Um, but obviously as humans, you know, we first care about our needs, right?
00:23:41.029 --> 00:23:44.960
Like according to the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and we have all these like needs and whatnot.
00:23:45.470 --> 00:23:52.430
And, you know, the whole notion of human centricity came from like, how do we meet those human user needs first?
00:23:52.460 --> 00:23:56.309
And a lot of it came from like, OK, how do we make our lives easier and more convenient?
00:23:56.920 --> 00:24:08.414
Now, how might we convince humans to let go of some of that convenience for the sake of, you know, I guess, things that we cannot really see or notice within our immediate environment.
00:24:08.464 --> 00:24:15.805
Like, you know, a lot of things that we talked about, the, the materials that get used, that gets, you know, dumped in landfills, or in the rivers, in the ocean.
00:24:15.805 --> 00:24:17.704
We don't see that in our immediate environment.
00:24:17.734 --> 00:24:20.150
Like, it doesn't really impact us right in this moment.
00:24:20.150 --> 00:24:22.904
How do we care about this as designers?
00:24:23.875 --> 00:24:28.045
I mean, for me, for me, that's why it's so important that we change organizations.
00:24:28.045 --> 00:24:43.845
Because, um, A large part of our carbon footprint, our individual carbon footprint, is actually defined through the, through the environment in which we live, through the society in which we live.
00:24:44.345 --> 00:24:51.315
And, So we need to, it's not just about changing individual behavior, and we make that point also early on in the book.
00:24:51.325 --> 00:24:59.654
Um, yes, it's important that we are, um, responsible, and how, and how, what products we buy, and how we use them, and how we dispose of them.
00:24:59.964 --> 00:25:07.954
But the bigger change we can achieve, and again, that's why, um, Designers and decision makers have actually such an important role to play.
00:25:08.224 --> 00:25:32.984
The bigger change we can achieve is through, um, the bigger impact we can achieve is through changing the organisations And so if organizations change the way to produce products, um, and using materials that are more environmental, um, that don't use plastics or, um, ensuring that products don't end up in landfill at the end of the life cycle, that it can feed, be fed back into the into it, into, into, um, the product cycle.
00:25:34.325 --> 00:25:39.785
then actually consumers don't need to give up any, any of the things that they enjoy right now.
00:25:40.055 --> 00:25:41.694
And ideally, if we can So you think
00:25:41.694 --> 00:25:43.005
that there are no trade offs at all?
00:25:43.204 --> 00:25:44.974
Ideally, there shouldn't be any trade offs.
00:25:44.984 --> 00:25:59.325
So ideally, we can design, uh, we can change organizations and change the way we live and work so that we can continue, um, enjoying all the benefits that technology has provided us with, but in a way that doesn't affect negatively the environment.
00:25:59.724 --> 00:26:00.795
But that's a big challenge.
00:26:00.815 --> 00:26:15.380
But also, that's important because People are not, as you say, it's very hard for people to change their behaviours and give up those luxuries, if you want to call them, or things that we are used to.
00:26:15.650 --> 00:26:20.680
And at the same time, organisations are not going to invest in things that are bad for the business.
00:26:21.045 --> 00:26:28.974
Like, they're still operating on a neo liberal, um, economic system, so they, they will always do things that are good for their business at the end of the day.
00:26:28.974 --> 00:26:37.634
So it's about, and that's what builds with the case we make in the book, is about how they bring all this together in a way so that everyone benefits essentially from the change.
00:26:37.634 --> 00:26:59.839
I think, um, although there is, there are absolutely ways in which we can, um, change organisations, and, you know, we can bring this together so that the things that they're producing have less impact, so that they are circular, so that they are, you know, like better able to be repaired and that kind of thing.
00:27:00.579 --> 00:27:14.964
There is, there are so many parts of the lifestyle in a country like Australia that just contribute enormously to the resource intensity of life in this country, right?
00:27:14.964 --> 00:27:22.085
So we waste something like 30 percent of the food that we produce and a lot of it never even makes it off the farm.
00:27:22.664 --> 00:27:40.204
Um, so recently, if you sort of were paying attention to the news, you would have seen reports of, you know, farmers basically, um, throwing away tons and tons and tons of fresh produce because the supermarket said, well, we don't, we don't want it.
00:27:40.825 --> 00:27:55.664
Um, and there was a big thing as part of the Senate inquiry into competition in the supermarket and grocery industry or fresh food industry, that supermarkets are indicating to farmers that we'll buy X tonnes of your crop.
00:27:56.075 --> 00:28:01.335
And then at the time of harvest, turning around and saying, we'll take half of it.
00:28:02.424 --> 00:28:05.244
Um, so it's a system.
00:28:06.430 --> 00:28:10.349
In part, that's to generate buying power, purchasing power on their part.
00:28:10.349 --> 00:28:16.250
If I'm only going to give you half, like buy half of it, then you're on the defensive.
