Practicing Humility: Design as Response, Not as Solution
Katta Spiel
Abstract
The very basic task put upon designers is no more and no less than to imagine alternative worlds and work towards realising those.That may be a bigger change oriented towards an explicitly transformative intent (e.g. a world without cars and alternative mobility), or a small change where an object might arrive at being or exist in a different way (e.g. a world in which there is a slightly differently shaped juice box).With this expectation and the surrounding pervasive practices, particularly around empathising with others, comes the tendency to override others' experiences through the lens of designers' own sense-making.In this commentary, I think through what it might mean to deliberately take on a different position guided by humility, loving epistemology, and radical enthusiasm.Walking through the associated tensions engrained in designing from such a positionality, I illustrate some of the considerations guiding my own practice and potential pathways guided by curiosity and awareness of the unknown.This commentary, written from the perspective of design theory, offers a provocation of how we might think of design not as something we do to find solutions, but rather as a practice oriented towards being response-able and embracing messiness and tensions.