Carrying on with a Design Philosophy for Emergency Management
Locating Design in Existing Emergency Management Practice and Moving from "Doing Work" to "Creating Futures."
Note: This was initially prepared to be posted in the Operational Coherence collection in late Fall 2023. It is a small continuation of my chapter “A Design Philosophy for Emergency Management” in the Design for Emergency Management textbook. This is version 1.5, a short addition to what has already been written. This could be expanded upon extensively and may well be in the future.
Introduction
With the exception of reading from Edgar Morin's new book, I have been taking a bit of a hiatus from reading in a marked departure from my norm. I wanted to take a pause and think independently from what others had already written and see what I could come up with. Of course, everything I have read influences me in some inescapable way, and I think it is important to acknowledge that from the outset. At the same time, the chapter I recently finished for the text Design for Emergency Management was surely a strong influence here. Like many before (dating back to 2019), this post will encourage emergency managers to become aware of the multitude of moments when they are designing and think about the implications of doing so.
Locating Design in Emergency Management
There are many barriers to popularizing the idea and practice of design within emergency management. From past experience, design thinking in the traditional sense in emergency management had just barely begun to be recognized within the past five years. It seems design is still regarded as "new" and perceived as being distant from the needs of emergency managers.
Those interested in propagating design in emergency management should begin by helping emergency management practitioners see the ubiquity of design within their own practices. If design is understood broadly as the intentional act of bringing into being an envisioned and desired end, it is not hard to find design already being unknowingly practiced in emergency management.
The first step in locating design in emergency management in the interest of popularizing it as a valuable way of thinking about and approaching emergency management is to uncover it. Designers can assist emergency managers in finding the instances within their work where they are already developing images of what future state they want to create and acting intentionally to bring it into being. These two designerly components are considered here to be the essence of design, presented coarsely without breaking them down into their component actions and reflections that drive the process forward. Helping emergency managers find this essence already embedded within the flow of their professional life presents design not as something alien to the field but as a practice that has been everpresent, but not yet recogized. Presenting design as an already existing way of thinking and working emergency management aims to make design recognized, deliberate, and strongly oriented toward the future.
Emergency Management and Design
Locating design in the work of emergency managers is the first step in making it an intentional practice. Uncovering the presence of design in just one emergency management organization is important to the larger effort to spread design throughout emergency management.
Finding design's essence in an emergency management office or department adds a new strand of value to existing practices. Design intertwines with the emergency manager's existing methods for completing work. Design becomes not a detached activity but a part of existing working methods. Adding design to an existing entanglement of meaning, methods, tools, and theories brings unique value. At the most fundamental level, design can transform work from being a collection of potentially seemingly purposeless or mundane tasks into an interrelated arrangement of work devised to bring into existence an envisioned and desirable future. Working then appears to be an intentional activity guided by a foreseeable end and concerned with producing a desirable future state of affairs. Through this transformation, emergency managers are encouraged to change their disposition toward work from simply outcome- or conclusion-producing to future- and possibility-producing as well. Shortsighted views of design that seek to instrumentalize it only as a product management tool neglect to find this deeper meaning essential to design practice.
Further value stems from discovering the essence of design in emergency management. To situate themselves in the process of bringing something into being, emergency managers can use the two spaces that make up the essence of design: A desirable end and an intentional movement to materialize it. Greater granularity can be gained by breaking the two primary spaces into smaller ones to account for specific phases as designers craft desirable images of the future and then conceive of ways to make them a reality. Discovering where one is in the design process may assist with general sense-making, coordinating efforts, and preparing to shift from one space to another as outer boundaries are reached. Design then has the value of transforming work and emergency managers' disposition toward it and providing structure to help outline the design process.
Design, Worlds, and Transformation
By helping an organization find the unnoticed presence of design within their daily work life and making it known, design can give a new direction to practices, add value, and transform an organization. Designing for emergency management organizations may understand themselves further than future-producing and recognize the future emergency managers seek to materialize creates a new way of being. If even in some small way, as the designed outcome is released into the world, it touches a corner of humanity and introduces new possibilities of being human by changing interaction patterns, new visuals, and new interfaces and tools for dealing with the world. Pursuing the creation of a new world is not a new stage in the essence of design but rather folded into the desirable and envisioned future state. What manner of existence should the prefigured future bring into being? Designers will act toward the ultimate goal of producing a new way of being throughout their community. This new way of being may be characterized as more resilient, prepared, willing to engage in mitigation actions, or even in some small way aligned with the objectives of the emergency management organization.
Making design and its interest in creating worlds a part of everyday emergency management practice is not trivial. Over time, as design spreads from its early champions and permeates the organization, a larger concern for creating a community's next stage of being may emerge. Recognizing an emergency manager's influence on the future and integrating that awareness into their design practice is significant. This can transform how the organization understands itself, its agency in creating new stages of being, how it should carry out its tasks, how it should structure work, and the temporal horizons it considers. Design changes how an organization exists so that it may change how others do (Vigneaux, 2023).
Conclusion
This post focused on defining design in general terms, exploring how it might be presented to an emergency management audience as something preexisting, how it can add value to emergency management, design and ways of being, and lastly, how the integration of design into practice can transform an emergency management organization. This post could have easily spanned the length of a small book if all the concepts were fully unpacked and placed in an emergency management context. In the author's experience, discussing design meaningfully with brevity is difficult. Adequately discussing how design can be understood and its capacities takes far more space than a blog post such as the original chapter. However brief, it is hoped this post has provided a valuable introduction to design and what it offers to emergency management.
References
Vigneaux, G. J. (2023). A design philosophy for emergency management. In S. M. van Manen, C. Jaenichen, T. S. Lin, K. Kremer, & R. Ramírez (Eds.), Design for emergency management (pp. 13-30). New York: Routledge