bruno latour on design

it’s been a bit quiet on sparkthinking recently thanks to a holiday I’m nearly at the end of in Los Angeles. What a place! I’m not sure I like it very much – very taken aback (naively so, I suspect) at the reliance on cars, the extent of huge shopping malls – all lit up and air conditioned, the sheer weight of expectations to consume of the place – so despite marvellous company and a fun week, I haven’t been converted to LA life. in fact if anything it has given even more solidity to a sense I’ve had for a while that I want to simplify life and pare things right down to what’s actually important when I get home. watch this space on that front…

anyway, I’ve spent a bit of time here thinking through what’s going to go into the pamphlet I’m doing with the RSA on social design, service design and the future of design education, and as part of that I’ve been reading a fairly impenetrable piece by sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour. It’s a paper he gave to a design research conference last year, and for me it brings out two key themes that will feature in my own pamphlet.

First, the need for design ethics these days. As Latour says

By expanding design so that it is relevant everywhere, designers take up the mantle of morality as well

This is certainly a theme that has come up in my interviews with design tutors and some of the students: if designers are serious about applying their skills to social challenges then they have to accept that there are ethical and moral dimensions to this work, and that their own activity has impacts that they should think through carefully in advance. Yet design courses have little to say about ethics currently – all the more striking when you compare design to other disciplines interested in achieving social change – in subjects such as psychology, or anthropology, or even political sciences, ethics features heavily and is taken very seriously.

The second theme that I thought Latour’s piece brought out well was about representations and communication of design work. Latour is interested in how design can do more to represent the complexity of real life, rather than objects in a vacuum:

Design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing practical skills for drawing objects… but what has always been missing from these marvellous drawings… are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stakeholders that are born within these.

Many of the students I’ve interviewed raise this question of how to represent complex social or service-based design work. We don’t yet have a language that’s developed enough in this sphere and it seems to me that it’s a prime area for further development in design research.