I started this blog to explore the relationships between leading, designing, and coaching and how they all play a central role in our lives. I've started to explore the question of leadership with the series on the three big breakdowns every leader must face. Now, I'd like to begin weaving the question of design into this exploration.
Like the question 'what is leadership?' the question 'what is design?' is worth a lifetime of inquiry. Some design philosophers have even suggested that no agreement about the nature of design is really possible because design is configured and reconfigured again and again in so many different applications.
There is not a single thing around us - desks, cups, computers, keyboards, mice, doors, rooms, houses, schools, businesses, roads, cars, cities, airplanes, nations, etc. - that is not designed. Design is everywhere in the made world and yet it is so often concealed from our awareness because it is doing its job. When designs work, life works. And when life works, we don't really notice that designing is working.
And then we also have moments where life isn't working for us - where our designs aren't working. We call these moments breakdowns (a term we borrow from Heidegger). Breakdowns aren't necessarily a bad thing, although they can be bummer when they happen. Instead, their value is that breakdowns reveal to us where we need a design in order to get something or some part of our life to work.
Design is a practice whose purpose is to anticipate breakdowns and enable us to cope with them skillfully, effectively, and efficiently. Design is an action that happens in the present for the sake of generating a future that works.
Evey intentional act is an act of design. Every time we act with concern for our future, we are designing. The choices we make regarding decorating, dress, food, drink, homes, education, politics, business practices, and so many others reveal that we are designers. Design is fundamental to our way of life. We are all designers (but don't tell those people who think that design is a profession).
Tony Fry, one of my favorite design philosophers points to three aspects of design that must be considered.
- the designed object that results from the designed act or process
- the designer (or designing tool)
- the design process that is the on-going designing of the designed object as it functions or dysfunctions
Each of these are worth careful consideration. Personally, I am most drawn to consider the third - the design process, as Fry calls it. I don't like this naming because it is too easily confused with the process through which the design arises. Instead, I call this - somewhat awkwardly - "the designed as process." That is to say that a design acts in the midst of relationships to design the actions that are possible within those relationships.
For example, the presence of a cup with a handle designs our manner of drinking - how much we can drink before refilling, how we hold the cup, how hot the liquid can be so that we can still hold the cup, etc. That is to say that designs - a cup with a handle - also design their use. We design our world while our world designs us.
Perhaps this is what was so radical about Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup can as art. Warhol took a design and situated it in a totally different context - art - and in doing so, revealed our taken-for-granted and therefore previously invisible relationship with it. He changed its designing of us.
The major social crises we face today - global warming, economic instability, political deadlock, health care, etc. are all products of design. The major crises in our lives - work-life balance, unfulfiling relationships, feelings of victimization, and meaninglessness are also products of design.
Design is a practice that is fundamental to both leading and coaching because it is essential to living - to our very being. We'll pick up this thread in another post.
Take care,
-Steve
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