The Designer, the Designed, Limits, and Emergency Management

A Look at Design, the End of Artifacts, the Limits of Knowledge, and Leaving Plans Unfinished. A NoiseBox Publication.

Note: I first referenced design within an emergency management context in 2016. I resumed the discussion three years later, in 2019, when I started this blog. Design for emergency management was the centerpiece of the first five-post series. As someone actively propagating design for emergency management, I realized I had not yet said a critical word about it and thought I would benefit from doing so. This post is, in general, morbid. There is no graphic violence, horror themes, or imagery. However, there is a reference to the death of designed things and designers and a vague reference to the loss of human life.

The Death of Designed Things

Designed things, also known as artifacts, have a strong sense of death. Designers inscribed it upon them in the designed thing’s form, function, pattern of usage, materials, durability, and style before they end up in a landfill. Designers have less of a sense of death. Their mortality is obscured by their relations, imaginaries, futures, goals, visions, and earthly roots. Compared to working with designed things, should they be briefly animated, designers spend much less time looking toward death as the movements, discussions, and planning of their everyday life occludes it. The issue then arises: how can designers place into artifacts the date when they will no longer be useful if they are entirely unaware of their own impending, yet random, demise? How can a designer’s unawareness of death be instrumentalized successfully to determine and place into a designed thing the month, week, day, or moment when it will die? In combination with other factors, to decide when a thing will die, designers must first realize their lives are far from infinite; they must become aware of their mortality and its horizon and see the presence of their looming death in the design environment. They do not have forever. This is a first step toward situating the demise of the designed artifact in time. The directive is to be aware of the hazy presence of death surrounding the designed artifact that will expose its tendencies and intention toward death without specifying when it might happen, as this requires design expertise. Concurrently, designers must also sense the presence of their death within the design environment, as this provides a measuring scale for the artifact. While incredibly uncertain, the very notion of mortality and the limitation on time establishes a trajectory, the knowledge of which can be applied to determining the death of a designed thing.

Designed things die. Designers die. People who use designed things die. In abhorrent, regretful cases, people use designed things in unintentional and intentional ways to make others die. Meanwhile, design is focused on deciding upon the future and its materialization and continuing to investigate which future should be brought into being next. Design is also concerned on a larger scale with questions about creating the next stage of being throughout society, or at least a facet of it. These are honorable, important goals critical to ensuring that we as a species have a future somewhere and some time (Fry, 2009). However pure-hearted and interested in humanity, this design practice also incurs the death of things through outdated strategies, failed frameworks for creating change, and lectures at conferences that fell flat were never heard again. The material, content, and travel to the conference consumed resources that died. (Papanek, 2000).

The above focused primarily on industrial design, which is far more established than design for emergency management. However, design for emergency management (both as a book title and a practice) can still learn from death within the industrial design context. In the sense of “everybody designs,” emergency managers have been designing unknowingly, that is to say, bringing preferred futures into being, without a particular design process or expertise for decades. This is particularly unnerving when it is considered that the majority who do not recognize their designing are regularly developing artifacts that will coordinate and intervene in situations to save lives, property, and resources. This is not to say that there have been deficiencies or that the unrecognized use of design is wildly off track. Instead, it points to the possibility that formalizing design in emergency management may make it something to be developed and mastered and the interaction between designed things, designers, and death visible.

Process

In its most basic formulation, design has two primary components: crafting and deciding upon an image of a desirable and foreseeable end—something that will be brought into being in the future. The second component is the intentional ordering and patterning of the designer’s activity to bring the desirable end into being through craft (Papanek, 2000). During this process, the designer determines when the designed artifact will die with some degree of approximation and against the designer’s mortality, though this process can be prone to mistakes.

As noted above, in their design environment, whether a conference room, a cubicle, or a table in a hallway, emergency management designers must first come to terms with the unavoidable fact that their lives will eventually end. The only uncertainty is around when. Staring one’s mortality in the face provides plenty of motivation to take action in the present, to design, to help others with design, to define and refine one’s design craft, and to use this sense of limitedness to express an idea motivated by how long the designer might live, and how long the things they design will be alive (Inwood, 2000). Even recognizing there is a trajectory the designer is traveling down provides a plane they can situate what they are designing to assist with inscribing into the artifact when it will die. Both the design and the designer have trajectories, one, much more likely, longer than the other.

Designers working on frameworks, initiatives, and projects may extend the life of their artifacts by grounding them squarely in evidence or theory. Designers may ensure the longevity of their artifacts by extending their use beyond the conditions, styles, and patterns of the present day, making them adaptable to meet the needs of varying stakeholders and function in different futures. They may also use multiple definitions to widen the applicability of a driving concept such as resilience. Although the artifact's life can be extended, everything will still die. But by designing with the above in mind, the lifetime of an artifact may be extended. Designers may become aware of the short lifetime of a designed thing based on its current design and use some of the above strategies to postpone its death.

Death

In designing for emergency management, the most vile, repulsive, and regretful outcome is if what has been designed is even remotely implicated in the loss of life. So far, in an earlier blog post and a key principle of a lecture delivered this year at the Colorado Emergency Management Conference, my perspective on death was kept at a distance from human life and focused on artifacts and complex systems. It seems there are few contexts where death can be discussed with ease. However, it is essential to talk about death, especially regarding design. Purely unintentional, it is possible, but maybe not all that probable, that an Emergency Management Operations Plan, a design outcome, does not address every relevant hazard, especially those beyond historical norms, in a deep or broad enough manner to always do the most good. Designers may have been unable to imagine what might happen, what may become possible, and at what level of complexity and velocity. There may have been a plan for a wildfire, but not for one that immediately spotted over the vast, thinned fuel break created by local fire resources. The late-season fire then burned with extreme behavior into several subdivisions filled with community members who had been warned but had not yet had time to gather their possessions and evacuate as the fire approached. Although a plan existed, what happened was beyond what had been imagined and placed into the plan when it was being designed. A rapidly growing and explosive fire quickly became a sizeable problem in the wildland-urban interface. It was entirely beyond the designer’s foresight, the available data, interpretations of this data, and local knowledge. No plan was designed for this reality.

A perfectly reasonable plan may have been designed for a general pandemic. Still, plan designers may not have been able to conceive of an event like COVID-19 and the total extent of its health and social ramifications, duration, and scope during the design process. Design may have been implicated in both wildfire and early pandemic deaths. Joining design is an unmitigable lack of knowledge on which design is reliant. And yet, it is design that remains unfinished. In these two instances, design was not involved in death because of what the design artifact knew, how it was made, and how it was intended to function. It was implicated in death because there is no complete, finished design process. There is no way to account for everything because only some things can be known. Design is death not because of what was made but what could not be made because there was no way of imagining it into existence, and the unfolding events could not be responded to by a plan that had not been designed.

No blame is assigned here, nor is there any suggestion that planning is folly and that any harm was intentional or even avoidable. Instead, design was death (and destruction) because of everything designers could not reasonably be expected to know, envisage, conceive of, or in some other way that could be codified in the design process. There will always be unknowables, the unimaginable, and the barely visible but considered impossible that designers will be unable to identify, grasp, and design for. It is like designers are extending their arms before them in the dark and constantly feeling around without knowing where anything is but suspecting they may someday run into something and fearing it will be the one thing they least expected, or worse, could in no way expect. This leaves the design process open, a frayed end blowing in the wind, and designers concerned about what they are missing. While plenty has already been accounted for and set in the plan, the feeling of “what’s missing?” nags at designers. The design process is unfinished, even if the planning process is determined to be done. Design awaits expectantly to be finished, which it never will be.

Design in emergency management is dangerous because it is always unfinished. Because design is always unfinished, it is dangerous, and because it is always dangerous, it can always be death. Some unknown hazard, frequency, or severity of hazard will interact with the emergency management office and the community they serve and occupy the space just out of reach of the unfinished, tattered end of the planning design process. Even in the flow of the response to the unanticipated event, design for emergency management can begin at the unfinished end, building artifacts to guide the emergency, working to eliminate “flying blind,” and putting structures in place as the need arises. Design is not just death. Design is also a solution.

To be clear, in the case of this post, design is implicated in death (is death) when designers cannot (not for lack of trying) anticipate a future hazard event, which puts pressure on all facets of the emergency and the community. An inability to imagine a hazard and its behavior is not a personal downfall or the absence of some attribute. There are limitations to knowledge.

Forecasting may be applied to what can be seen or conceived as a valid possibility. However, forecasting has many limitations. The largest is that to forecast a particular hazard within particular parameters, someone must first decide to do so. Without the decision, there is no forecast, and the risk, or the hazard with specific dynamics, remains unimagined and designed for.

If the present is highly complex as it often is, key variables are interacting richly, dynamically, and unpredictably. In that case, any long-term forecast will be a guess, not one worth depending on or building a plan off of. In this instance, although the hazard can be defined and understood moment-to-moment, designers do not have the luxury of long-distance forecasting (Cilliers, 2008). As a result, the design remains unfinished and dangerous. Hazard frequency and severity may also leave a design process unfinished, as determining either with certainty is difficult in the face of a changing climate. Proactive steps to be taken include designing and training for organizational adaptation to include self-organization, resilience, and supporting creativity, so when the previously unimaginable arrives, there are capacities to address it. Furthermore, design capabilities must be continuously developed so that defined design processes can be moved through quickly when the unexpected does arrive, and coherence must be established.

Before Death

It is important to recognize the unfinishedness of any given plan. While the planning process may be complete, the design process it takes place within is likely not and will probably never be because of the limits of knowledge. The emergency manager’s planning environment may have more unfinished, ragged ends than comfortably concluded plans. Design was referenced earlier in the context of events that took place beyond what was known or imaginable when the plan was developed. The emergency management community’s long-withstanding yet unrecognized use of design needs to transition to a recognized and intentional act shaped by studying, observation, reflection, and engagement with the design community. Becoming designers who can act purposefully and expediently, informed by learning about design and designing in controlled environments, can create plans for previously unimaginable hazards at the pace of the emergency’s evolution, or ideally faster. While the above discussion on adaptation is still important, creating emergency management designers is also important. Design is how we understand and act in the world and bring about new ones. The text Design for Emergency Management contains current and innovative approaches to designing in emergency management.

Design is good. Design enables. Design materializes futures. Design makes things possible. Design fixes. Design encourages. Design Discourages. Design creates experiences. Design creates products. Design creates services. Design changes. Design gives life. Design is in time. Design is unfinished. Design is dangerous. Design is death.

References

Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity & postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. London: Routledge.

Fry, T. (2009). Design futuring: Sustainability, ethics and new practice. London: Bloomsbury.

Inwood, M. (2000). Heidegger: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford.

Papanek, V. (2000). Design for the real world: Human ecology and social change (2nd ed.). Chicago, Illinois: Academy Chicago Publishers.