A Conversation on Failure in Design

Ashwin Rajan interviewed by Marcia Caines for Cluster

“Eighty percent of the environmental impact of the products, services, and infrastructures around us is determined at the design stage. Design decisions shape the processes behind the products we use, the materials and energy required to make them, the ways we operate them on a daily basis, and what happens to them when we no longer need them. We may not have meant to do so, and we may regret the way things have turned out, but we designed our way into the situations that face us today.” John Thackara – In the Bubble.

AR: A comment before you fire away. I dig John Thackara, but I see what he’s addressing here very differently. The situation on the ground being what it is: financial, market, and political decisions drive our collective use of processes and products, and their use and disposal. Products and services come to market, are adopted, used and tossed away in waves of spontaneous consumer indulgence pursued by an orchestrated effort to sustain market share. It’s not as elegant and thought out as Thackara describes, because to ‘design’ anything would be to think it through to its logical extremes. In fact, what Thackara supposes here is exactly what is not happening in my view: practices that offer ways to design for systemic consequences are not very influential in our global society at all. And the position that designers and design thinkers are seeking today is one that situates them much more centrally in processes that have ignored design for way too long, at everyone’s peril.

Read the full interview here: http://www.cluster.eu