Speculations
Hello again,
I still struggle with deciding whether my thoughts are interesting enough to publish or not. But then I remind myself that, in a way, uncertainty is the whole point of it and it’s not for me to decide whether it’s interesting or not. Also I didn’t promise anything big, not here, not anywhere. So when I’m in the right mood, I just put things out anyway, then see what happens. Now, after 3 years since my last post, I’m in the right mood.
I spent the last few years of my professional life with various things. Last year I joined the IxDA Budapest community as a local leader. We hosted a couple of events since then about co-design and mental health, featuring mostly non-designer speakers. The topics and the act of opening these events up for non-designers are all very important to me personally.
Recently I changed job. It is an end and a beginning at the same time, but I feel that I’m more in the middle of something with this change. A middle of a transformative period that is about finding out how I can feel better, in and out of work, and how I can better leverage the skills I have, or at least I think I have. My new job helps a lot with that. Leaving a company after almost 8 years is certainly a result of many things, as you might guess, but instead of going into specifics about that, I’d like to recommend two books that influenced how I think about design and work in general. Not because I want to force any big ideology into such a career move, rather because I noticed that more and more people I talk to have concerns about what it means to be a designer today.
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber.
Whenever I find myself confused (or even hostile?) about something, it usually helps me to learn more about how and why that thing came to be, or how that thing works. Although it’s not why I started to read this book, it helped me understand how different organizations and companies (corporations) are born and why the way they work makes sense in their own reality, or under the constant pressure of progress. By understanding how these bureaucratic systems operate, I was able to better calibrate the level of organizational complexity/stupidity I can tolerate. Not to mention that this book is really fun! So, Utopia of Rules is probably the first non-fiction book that I will re-read every once in a while.
Az emberközpontú tervezés határai: Spekulatív design és poszthumán állapot by Ákos Schneider.
(Boundaries of Human-Centred Design – Speculative Design and the Post-human State – This book is only in Hungarian, which might work for some of you. For the rest of you, I recommend the talk ‘Design for the Capitalocene’ by Ákos Csertán, who did a really good job covering some of these topics in a very inspiring way in a relatively short time at Interaction 23. Also it’s not hard to find materials about post-humanism and speculative design in English these days, so you English speakers will be good, too, I’m sure.)
In recent years, like many of us, I transitioned from being a curious techno-optimist into a skeptical techno-optimist. Reading this book I realized that post-humanism is a great label (or framework) for many of my concerns about our obsession with technology and solution-focused approaches. Luckily it’s not just some academic bullshit you can annoy your friends with over a beer: many of these post-human and speculative perspectives can actually bring us to practically useful questions and concerns in our daily work, even without fully subscribing to the post-humanist agenda. Worth a try, at least. This book is a great introduction into those perspectives.
And now we’re in the middle of the preparations for the 6th MOME IxD Camp, which, in short, is an offline design camp that we started a few years ago for our UX bootcamp alumni as a kind of digital-detox / summer camp / designer retreat thingy. This time it’s a speculative camp again with a focus on sacred UX and spiritual design. OK, not necessarily that, as it always depends on the people who gather there. But still, it sounds good and very much appropriate, given the location of this year’s camp: the Benedictine Pannonhalma Archabbey. It’s definitely not a place where you can get away by interviewing a few monks and just swinging around your favorite design methods for 3 days.
I like to think about this camp as an opportunity for us, organizers and participants alike, to learn and reflect on ourselves (as designers, if you like) in different ways, doing that partly by using the immense legacy and 1000+ years of history of Pannonalma as a speculative dimension. We put a lot of effort into making it a friendly and safe space for everyone to connect and learn about not just ourselves and speculative design, but about the various favorite subjects of every participant as well. There are a few spots left, by the way. And it’s for non-designers, too, really!
See you soon.