Joining designerly dots

This is a post by Stephen Potter, Professor Emeritus at Design and Innovation

This Thursday a one-off return of the BBC programme Tomorrow’s World is appearing on BBC4. As a kid, in the 1960s this programme really stimulated my interest in design and technology. Each week a set of potentially life-changing gizmos and gadgets were demonstrated by Raymond Baxter and James Burke. There were electric cars, high-tech tin openers, hover-trains, paper underwear, CDs, collapsible knives and forks, mobile phones (with dials!) and endless developments in computers – and even autonomous cars.

To accompany this brief return of the programme, James Burke has provided some perceptive thoughts in a Radio Times article (17th November edition, pp 18-21). In this he picks out a crucial shortcoming of the Tomorrow’s World approach:

“We never really joined up the dots. Not just to show the potential social effects of a high-tech tin opener, but also that of personal computers, mobile phones or (above all) the internet. We didn’t suggest, for instance, that mobile phones would become mini-PCs that might allow us to monitor what we have in our fridge so that we could automatically keep it stocked with fresh food and never actually need a hi-tech tin opener. We just didn’t think like that.”

What was missed was the way new designs and technologies trigger a socio-economic change in behaviours, practices and systems. There is always a tendency to only see a new design as relating to how things are done now – not transforming the way things are done in the first place. The word processor was envisaged as enhancing the work of typists in the typing pool – not to eliminate that way of working altogether and going on to entirely transform the workplace (and home).

But James Burke rather conflating a series of factors in how a new design or technology becomes established and its consequent effects on society. A 1960s design for a high-tech tin opener was not rendered irrelevant by a 2018 system of mobile phone apps. It was sidelined by a superior and simpler can opening design – the ring pull. The product design ‘dot’ of opening cans was addressed simply and efficiently. In the same way, hover trains were simply out-competed by a more efficient design – the high-speed conventional train. But then there is the issue of how product level ‘dots’ interact with other dots. These include other designs and technologies to which the product dot had not previously been linked. The decline in canned foods has been linked to wider societal changes, including great availability of domestic refrigeration and freezers. The dots are both technological and socio-economic. The behaviours, practices and systems of people and organisations respond to new designs. New designs and technologies trigger responses within the system of ‘dots’ and outcomes can be very unpredictable. Hence why many Tomorrow’s World designs failed while others proved revolutionary.

In recent years, smart city technologies and designs have been a real interest in our research. I have recently drafted a book chapter on autonomous cars. I do not provide any detailed review of product-level design but look at the ways the links to other ‘dots’ might work out. Autonomous vehicle technologies could lead to significant changes in our travel behaviour. Some commentators see the end of the private car; why own a car when an autonomous mobility service can be at your door with a vehicle tailored to your specific trip needs to take you door-to-door? Others see the autonomous vehicle as reinforcing private car ownership as we get additional features to add to the hedonistic value we already get from our cars. For public transport, big buses running on fixed routes to scheduled times could be rendered obsolete by such autonomous door-to-door services; but powerful vested interests may prefer to see the technology applied in marginally improving the services and systems in which they have invested so much.

So many permutations of dot linkages could arise – some of which lead to a more sustainable and less congested future, and some to one where emissions from traffic rise and traffic congestion worsen.

Designing good dots will always be important. But today, with technologies permitting a whole range of outcomes to be achieved – from the benign and sustainable to the coercive and degenerate –exploring permutations and implications of dot-joining is more important than ever. Yes, James, joining the dots was neglected. That cannot continue.


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