Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you won’t have failed to clock the core mission of the UK Government. It has been shouted from the rooftops: growth, growth, growth all the way. Without growth, argue our political leaders, the country won’t have the money to rebuild public services, including social and older adult care.
To generate growth, key environmental targets are to be set aside, with airports expanded, planning regulations relaxed and new oil fields given the green light. These are hard political choices, but at a time when many economists challenge such orthodoxy, how much does the growth model really enhance the lives of older and disabled people?
This is a question that has been asked with growing frequency within the design research community in recent years. To achieve growth depends on a process known as ‘scaling up’ –be that air travel, house building or energy production. Scaling up has enabled mass production, mass distribution and mass marketing. It can confer both commercial and social benefits. Along with visual abstraction, it is one of the most important skill-based contributions that professional designers can make.
However, it can also be one of the most dangerous. Think of pollution or habitat destruction, or the reduction of real people with real needs to anonymous customer segments. Or the simple fact that much of the wealth created can end up in very few hands, deepening social inequalities. No part of this is helpful to an ageing society.
This danger is recognised in design circles. Over the past 20 years, there have been various movements with labels such inclusive design, universal design, transition design, and design for all that have, in various ways, attempted to slow or reverse the growth model. I have termed this process ‘scaling down’.
What might designers and their public and private sector clients do to ‘scale down’ rather than scale up? Fundamentally, instead of learning just a little (or just enough) about very large groups of people to service mass markets, they should focus on learning a great deal about relatively small numbers of people, concentrating not on what makes them similar but on what makes them different. This is vitally important for the interests of older and disabled people.
There are some specific things that should inform design projects seeking to scale down. The first is adopt a participatory mindset rather than an expert one. Intrinsic to scaling up is the expert mindset that enables designers to make essential decisions about form and function on behalf of large numbers of anonymised people. Scaling down requires designers to design with people, not for them.
This leads to a second point about working with real people and not personas. Personas are imaginary characters that substitute for real people in developing new products and services – they are fictional amalgams of user traits offering a shortcut in R&D, but they are rarely a substitute for the real thing. Scaling down requires that design decisions are not based on the abstract ideal of the persona but on the messy, contradictory evidence of real-life encounters.
Scaling up depends on abstraction which enables the adoption of a few broadbrush, generic ideas about people for designers to act upon but does not allow for contradiction, complexity and iteration. Direct engagement with groups and individuals, whether through workshops, consultations or co-creation activities, resists abstraction because it is based on real opinions and experiences.
It is interesting to note how many of the UK Government’s ‘expert’ pronouncements on growth are at a large-scale, abstract level that does not factor in the likely impacts on local communities and individuals. As we engage in a national debate about scaling up for growth, it is worth recognising that it has been and continues to be a live topic within the design and innovation communities on which national economies depend to grow.
About the Author
Jeremy Myerson is Professor Emeritus in the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing.
Opinions of the blogger is their own and not endorsed by the Institute
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