Essay
Sandjar Kozubaev
Visiting Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Abstract
Throughout the history of design, there have long been radical design traditions that offered alternative visions of futures, both for the world and for design itself. In recent years, these methodological and epistemological trajectories have intersected with futures studies, whereby futures methods have been adopted and adapted by design research and practice. At the same time, there has been emerging design scholarship shedding light on alternative modes of material practice and cultural production, a kind of alternative design that isn’t identified as such. These emergent ways of being and knowing are commonly found in communities that deal with the most pressing socio-economic challenges of late capitalism; in the Global South, among the marginalized, the incarcerated, the otherwise oppressed, and those who directly work in those communities. Furthermore, they are often not compatible with some of the common epistemological commitments of design, including envisioning a better future, solving a problem, devising interventions, repeatability of the process, and others. In this essay, the author will argue that while the intersection between design and futures has been productive, it has also the potential to further privilege designers as arbiters and facilitators of what is to come, making them less sensitive to futures that are “already there”. Using the example of public librarianship in the U.S., and the primary research conducted by the author, the essay will illustrate how such emergent, non-disciplinary design practices can create alternative futures at a local level, and how the role of the designer should be challenged to recognize and articulate them rather than intervene into them. This, in turn, challenges design pedagogy to develop new methodologies of engagement with/in such communities. The paper will present a case study in which a new program for a seed library, developed in an urban library system in a major U.S. city. The case study will demonstrate how librarians engage in the practices of emergent design and futures and how they sometimes resist other futures that are imposed “from above.” Finally, the author will propose provocations and strategies for working in such communities and what they may mean for futures and design pedagogy.
Keywords
Futures literacy, Design pedagogy, Speculative design, Social design
Introduction
It is difficult to imagine the notion of design with the notion of the future. Design, even its most conventional forms, not to mention its radical forms, tends to be enamored with the next, the different from, the better than, the what if. These are some of the same questions and provocations that have motivated futures scholarship and practice. It is that much more impressive to observe how futures literacy, which arguably has been absent in design education until relatively recently, began penetrating curricula across the world. (Mitrović et al., 2021) But in addition to celebrating this convergence, we should also take a pause and evaluate why it is we are celebrating and whether there is something to be critical. It is generally a good practice in any interdisciplinary field or practice, but I think there is a special reason to take a pause in this case.
Both design and futures studies tend to be interventionist either conceptually or materially. For designers, an intervention is an opportunity to improve a situation in some way; by rearranging its constituent elements or by introducing new ones. (Simon, 1996) For futures practitioners, the intervention is usually a new image or narrative, and more recently a set of sensory experiences, that generate new ways of thinking about what a future might be. (Candy & Dunagan, 2017; Milojevic & Inayatullah, 2015; Polak, 1973) This sort of a doubling of interventionist logic might seem irresistible to both designers and futures alike. Indeed, collaboration of futures and design can produce provocative, novel and even useful outcomes. (Candy & Kornet, 2019; Candy & Potter, 2019; Dunne & Raby, 2013) Yet this excitement and promise is also why we, scholars and practitioners of design and futures, should be cautious. In recent years, design has been subject to substantial critique for its interventionist tendencies and devaluing local contexts and situated knowledges, especially those on the margins. (Bennett & Rosner, 2019) But there has also been emerging scholarship in design that draws attention away from the new, towards the existing, hidden, and invisible. (Lindtner et al., 2018) I believe this where the opportunity for futures in design education is most exciting and most needed: to help see, recognize, and articulate futures that are already there. To develop this argument, I will use the case of public librarianship in the U.S., based on the research I have conducted for my doctoral dissertation. In other words, I propose using civic and social design practice on the example of public U.S. librarianship to (a) demonstrate how local practice and infrastructures can give rise to alternative futures (b) outline opportunities and needs for futures education in design.
The details and methods of my field work with U.S. public libraries has been documented elsewhere. (Kozubaev & DiSalvo, 2021) However, it is useful to understand the general context for U.S. public librarianship as a profession and public libraries as sites of unique socio-technical systems. Generally, public libraries are associated with free access to information. Providing access to books, and in recent decades, access to internet, is the most visible and quintessential activity for a public library. But there are two other facets of librarianship that are less visible to the public, yet are very much a part of the everyday experience of a librarian. The first facet is historical. In the U.S. libraries, despite their social and democratic orientation, have been sites of contestation. What books should be available to the public? What constitutes propriety? Who is the public library for? These questions have been a source of friction in U.S. public librarianship from the very beginning and, in some ways still exist today. (Wiegand, 2015). In recent years, many U.S. public libraries have experienced a new incarnation of this friction in the form of book bans targeting LGBTQ+ communities and people of color. (Burnett, 2022; Land, 2022) The second facet is the growth of services in public libraries. These services include provision of access to digital infrastructure (e.g., computers, printers, web resources, etc.) as well as a whole range of socially oriented services (e.g. financial literacy, language learning, hobbies, etc.). (Ylipulli & Luusua, 2019) Economic instability and inequality both in urban and rural areas in the U.S., along with the rising homeless population, have also expanded the role of public libraries in social inclusion. (Hodgetts et al., 2008) While these emerging services have expanded the role of libraries in community life, especially for the disadvantaged populations, they have also put pressure on professional librarians to deliver an ever-growing list of services and programs. Add to that the constant budgetary pressures from local governments, exacerbated by austerity policies, and you have an environment of constant change, adaptation, and friction.
It is this dynamism of public libraries and librarianship that can be so instructive for futures education in design. U.S. public librarianship today is at the forefront of community-oriented design, where local futures are constantly coalescing from people, places, resources, and relationships. To illustrate this, I will draw from two case studies, based field research I have conducted at the Fulton County Public Library (FCLS), a large urban library system in the Atlanta metropolitan area, Georgia, USA.
Case 1: Mobile Seed Library
In recent years, public libraries across the U.S. have designed and deployed seed exchanges. (Peekhaus, 2018) Although libraries have long played a role in food justice programs the popularity of seed programs in public libraries is also indicative of a growing interest in community-oriented and urban agriculture. (Lenstra & D’Arpa, 2019) How these programs come about in each community can be instructive for design and futures education. Like many other public library systems, FCLS leadership was interested in growing and expanding its services within and outside the library walls. Part of this initiative was to form an Outreach Committee, consisting of librarians from various branches, who volunteered to work on new programs, services, and outreach activities. The Outreach Committee self-organized into different teams and one of them decided to create an outreach program focused on exchanging seeds. I took part in the development of this project as a design researcher and a volunteer. It’s worth mentioning that each of the Outreach Committee members dedicated time to this project outside of their daily responsibilities to their respective library branches. Over the course of several months, we met with this group of librarians to develop the program. We worked with different community members and stakeholders, including the Office of the Mayor of Atlanta, to get access to necessary resources and knowledge. The librarians themselves brought their own resources in the form of relationships, knowledge, and experience. We have also connected with other librarians from around the country to gather information about how to run a program like this. With these resources at hand, we conducted a series of design activities, in which we created prototypes of how the seed library would operate within and outside the library walls. Eventually, we settled on a simple design that we planned to test in one location in the spring of 2021 (see Figure 1).
Fig 1. Mobile Seed Library Stations – From Prototype to Final Design. (Image Credit: Author)
In March of 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic forced many public institutions, including FCLS, to shut down. The Mobile Seed Library program had to be put on hold indefinitely. While the program did not launch, the process of its design and development offers useful insights about how alternative futures emerge at a small scale. Throughout the project, the team of librarians did not follow any pre-determined path. Even though the library leadership generally encouraged the idea of outreach programs, the project was surrounded by uncertainty and doubt. Furthermore, each librarian brought his/her unique experiences and motivations to the project and navigated their own unique set of constraints. Some sought new skills to advance their careers, others just wanted to get out of the routine work. The important point here is that the emergence of this project is entangled with their individual experience and their everyday social and material conditions.
Case 1: Mobile Seed Library
The motivation to expand library outreach services gave rise to this next example, a program called Library in the Park. The idea is deceptively simple, to create a pop-up library service in public parks in the Atlanta metro area during the spring and summer months. Librarians offer a small selection of books as well as story time for children (see Figure 2). They can also register new patrons, thereby expanding their audience beyond people who regularly visit the local branch.
Fig 2. Library in the Park (Image Credit: Author)
While this might seem like a simple activity, for a team of librarians operating within a municipal infrastructure, delivering a service like this can be quite complex. First, the librarians had to navigate the permitting process to offer a library activity in a public park, which apparently had never been done before. To make this program work, librarians had to navigate through a network of administrative procedures, using their own resources and personal connections, to find the right person to secure the right permission. Even the librarians’ adherence to the municipal dress code had to be navigated, because they needed to be able to wear shorts and T-shirts to stay comfortable when the weather was hot. These infrastructural constraints are only one part of the equation. Librarians also needed to experiment with different park locations to find ones with the right combination of facilities, foot traffic, and presence of children. In other words, they needed to ensure maximum reach and impact each time the program was deployed.
These two case studies are just two examples of hundreds of programs that this one library system offers every year. Such programs are in constant development, some failing, others succeeding. Language courses, sewing circles, movie nights, book sales, technology clinics, financial literacy workshops all of these resources and services come to be in an environment of mutual support and civic participation, against the backdrop of constant scarcity, overwork and threat of privatization. Most of the work and material that goes into designing these programs is completely invisible to the public. More importantly, this work often involves experimentation, risk taking and personal commitment, which means it often happens outside of regular working hours and is not compensated.
Provocations for Futures and Design Pedagogy
Civic and social design practice, in this case public libraries, offer us insights about how futures can emerge in ways that do not follow neat and sweeping narratives. Importantly, they offer us insights about what role designers may play in shaping these futures. I would like to offer three provocations for futures education in design which, in turn, point to pedagogical strategies.
Provocation 1. Seeing Small-Scale Futures That Are Already There. Futures studies can be very effective in helping create alternative narratives that are yet to come. These narratives can be sweeping in their scope, building entire words and alternative value systems. But what can be equally useful and necessary is identifying futures that are already emerging at a much smaller scale, perhaps at a scale of a single individual. These futures often emerge in adversarial and uncertain conditions. Even if they never scale up to the level of a society or even the local community, they offer glimpses of alternatives that are already here. The opportunity for futures pedagogy in design is to develop awareness that futures are always emerging, and to develop tools, methods, and techniques to identify and see them.
Provocation 2. Design as Temporal Representation and Articulation. A key conceptual tool in futures literacy is creating representations of the future and temporality itself. Frameworks such as the futures cone (Voros, 2017), pace layering (Brand, 1999) and others have been effective in futures practice and education, including my own work. However, these frameworks and stories about the future that they can be overly universal and even colonizing. (Prado & Oliveira, 2014) Given the situated, contingent, and small-scale nature of some futures, as I have outlined in the case studies above, there is an advantage of creating temporal representations that are situated in a particular context or community. Encouraging design students to create alternative representations of temporality in playful, generative ways can help them understand the socially constructed nature of time and discover novel relationships between past, present, and futures.
Provocation 3. Beyond and Against Problem Solving. Perhaps the most challenging implication of the kind of design and futures work I have presented here, is that it questions the role of the designer. There is no intervention to make and no problem to solve. Futures are already emerging and design is already happening. For futures practice and research this is a familiar standpoint. Generating alternative images of the future and provoking conversation and debate about them is what (most) futures practice aspires to do. But this position can be challenging and even threatening to a designer. After all, what is a designer to do if not to solve a problem? What I am proposing is that futures research and practice can help students of design divorce their identity, if only temporarily, from that of a problem solver. Solving problems is important, but there can be many other new and exciting ways that designers can relate to human and non-human communities, and they don’t always include intervening in them; at least not with a solution. Inventing novel and confounding problems without any clear solutions is more reflective of the complexity of the world we live in today. From a pedagogical perspective, it can be challenging to both teach this set of skills and communicate the value of this skill to students, many of whom are more motivated to show that they can solve problems to their potential employers. Perhaps futures in design education can help change this, thereby expanding what it means to be a designer.
Certainly, our responsibility as educators and practitioners is to help students thrive and achieve their professional goals. But it is also our responsibility to prevent design and designers from the limitations of techno-solutionist and interventionist thinking. Our communities, ecological and economic systems are in a state of deep crisis. While it might be tempting to see futures studies as a means to increase the power and influence of design, perhaps the most exciting opportunity is to change the nature of this influence altogether. In this essay, I have tried to point out just a few of these opportunities in the context of public librarianship. But there are countless other places and spaces where design is already happening, and small-scale futures are emerging from the cracks, pressures, and contradictions of contemporary community life.
References
Bennett, C., & Rosner, D. K. (2019). The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the “Other”.Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
Brand, S. (1999). The Clock fo the Long Now: Time and responsibility. The ideas behind the world’s slowest computer. . Basic Books.
Burnett, J. (2022). Local libraries have become a major political and cultural battleground. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1119752817/local-libraries-have-become-a-major-political-and-cultural-battleground
Candy, S., & Dunagan, J. (2017). Designing an experiential scenario: The People Who Vanished. Futures, 86, 136-153. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2016.05.006.
Candy, S., & Kornet, K. (2019). Turning Foresight Inside Out: An Introduction to Ethnographic Experiential Futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 23(3), 3-22. https://doi.org/10.6531/JFS.201903_23(3).0002
Candy, S., & Potter, C. (2019). Introduction to the Special Issue: Design and Futures. Journal of Futres Studies, 23(3). https://doi.org/10.6531/JFS.201903_23(3).0001
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT Press.
Hodgetts, D., Stolte, O., Chamberlain, K., Radley, A., Nikora, L., Nabalarua, E., & Groot, S. (2008). A trip to the library: homelessness and social inclusion. Social & Cultural Geography, 9(8), 933-953. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360802441432
Kozubaev, S., DiSalvo, C., (2021) Cracking Public Space Open: Design for Public Librarians. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445730
Land, J. A. (2022). Template for attack on LGBTQ books replicated in Central Oregon. Oregon Public Broadcasting. https://www.opb.org/article/2022/12/22/central-oregon-library-lgbtq-queer-gay-books-crook-county-public-prineville-censorship/
Lenstra, N., & D’Arpa, C. (2019). Food Justice in the Public Library: Information, Resources, and Meals. The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.33137/ijidi.v3i4.33010
Lindtner, S., Bardzell, S., & Bardzell, J. (2018). Design and Intervention in the Age of “No Alternative”. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., 2(CSCW), Article 109. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274378
Milojevic, I., & Inayatullah, S. (2015). Narrative Foresight. Futures, 73, 151-162.
Mitrović, I., Auger, J., Hanna, J., & Helgason, I. (2021). Beyond Speculative Design: Past – Present – Future Arts Academy, University of Split.
Peekhaus, W. (2018). Seed Libraries: Sowing the Seeds for Community and Public Library Resilience. Library Quarterly, 88(3). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1086/697706
Polak, F. (1973). The Image of The Future. Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company.
Prado, L., & Oliveira, P. (2014). Questioning the “critical” in Speculative and Critical Design. Retrieved September 10 from https://medium.com/a-parede/questioning-the-critical-in-speculative-critical-design-5a355cac2ca4#.jb56pv4y7
Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
Voros, J. (2017). Big History and Anticipation. In R. Poli (Ed.), Handbook of Anticipation: Theoretical and Applied Aspects of the Use of Future in Decision Making (pp. 1-40). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_95-1
Wiegand, W. A. (2015). Part of our lives: A people’s history of the American public library. Oxford University Press.
Ylipulli, J., & Luusua, A. (2019). Without libraries what have we? Public libraries as nodes for technological empowerment in the era of smart cities, AI and big data Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies – Transforming Communities, Vienna, Austria. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328320.3328387