Table Of ContentDESIGNING
OUR WAY
TO A BETTER
WORLD
THOMAS FISHER
DESIGNING
OUR WAY TO
A BETTER
WORLD
Aiilso by Thomas Fisher
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
In the Scheme of Things: Alternative Thinking on the
Practice of Architecture
Salmela Architect
The Invisible Element of Place:
The Architecture of David Salmela
DESIGNING
OUR WAY
TO A BETTER
WORLD
THOMAS FISHER
REVERSE
POS/BOX NEG/BLOCK
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS • LONDON
The publication of this book was supported by the Imagine Fund for the
arts, design, and humanities, an annual award from the University of
Minnesota Provost’s Office.
Copyright 2016 by Thomas Fisher
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401–2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 17 16
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fisher, Thomas, author.
Title: Designing our way to a better world / Thomas Fisher.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049868 | ISBN 978-0-8166-9887-5 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9888-2
(pb) | ISBN 978-1-4529-5163-8 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Design—Human factors. | Quality of life. | Social systems. | BISAC:
ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban.
| ARCHITECTURE / Criticism.
Classification: LCC NK1520 .F565 2016 | DDC 745.4—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049868
CONTENTS
VII Introduction 191 PART VII Beliefs
193 19 Community Resilience
1 PART I Invisible Systems 201 20 Evolutionary Transformation
3 1 The Design of the Invisible 209 21 Spatializing Knowledge
13 2 Design Thinking
21 3 The Logic of Creativity 221 Postscript
A Past and Possible Future
33 PART II Education
35 4 Creative Education 229 Index
47 5 Schools and Communities
55 6 Reconstructing Design
Education
65 PART III Infrastructure
67 7 Fracture-Critical Failures
75 8 Overextended Infrastructure
87 9 Designed Disasters
97 PART IV Public Health
99 10 The Infrastructure of Health
107 11 Healthy Landscapes
117 12 Viral Cities
129 PART V Politics
131 13 Designer Politics
141 14 The Politics of No
149 15 Left, Right, and Wrong
159 PART VI Economics
161 16 An Opposable Economy
169 17 A Third Industrial Revolution
181 18 Metadesign
INTRODUCTION
vii
Never has one species—ours—so dominated the planet. We can traverse
and communicate around the globe at unprecedented speed, command
and control natural resources almost at will, and affect or alter ecosystems
anywhere on earth. And yet, at the very moment when we seem unstoppable
and invincible, humanity is facing new threats, with rising global tempera-
tures, a rapidly growing human population, and increasing economic
inequality, at least in the United States. Like our technology, which moves
bits and bodies around the world at an ever faster pace, humanity has started
to careen rapidly toward some sort of breaking point.
To understand what this means for us and what life might look like after
we reach that point, we could start with the idea of “panarchy,” developed
by the ecologists Lance Gunderson and C. S. Holling.1 They have shown
how ecosystems change in dynamic, adaptive ways as a series of interlocking
“figure eight” cycles happening at various scales and at different speeds.
The same pattern that occurs in nature’s ecosystems seems to occur in human
systems as well. Over time, systems tend to become highly productive,
efficient, and interconnected, with relatively few dominant actors. But in this
process, a system can lose its resilience, flexibility, and adaptability to change,
making it highly vulnerable to collapse and reorganization, which leads to an
increase in the system’s diversity, a decrease in its interconnectedness, and a
reduction in the dominance of one part of the system over others. The system
returns to a more balanced state—until the process starts all over again.
We humans may like to think that we can elude the processes of nature
because of our knowledge and technological prowess, but we cannot avoid
the fact that human systems remain an inseparable part of the natural
ecosystems that surround and support us. We know that businesses and
organizations fail and reorganize all the time, but panarchy suggests that
this happens at larger scales as well—to entire systems and possibly to the
global human ecosystem. I explore how this might happen across a range
of systems in my book Designing to Avoid Disaster, in which I try to look
ahead to what reorganized systems might be like and how we might think
about them (and ourselves) differently as a result.2 I see these possible
futures not as something to fear but instead as tremendous opportunities
to create human ecosystems more in harmony with those of nature and
with how most people would probably prefer to live, with less stress and
greater security.
viii These opportunities will, in turn, demand a considerable amount of
creative “design thinking” on our part as we envision new ways of doing
things. Enabling us to imagine what does not yet exist, design becomes
especially valuable in situations characterized by dramatic or unprecedented
change, when we need innovative ways of addressing a problem. As the
human and natural systems that we depend on face rapidly approaching
tipping points, we need novel ways of thinking and acting, now more than
ever, and design thinking has much to offer in that regard. It provides not
just a useful and rigorous process of coming up with creative ideas but
also a synthesizing, holistic way of looking at the world around us, mak-
ing connections and seeing relationships among things we often treat
as separate and distinct.
We tend to think of design in terms of the visible world around us:
the buildings we occupy and the products we use. But the “invisible”
systems that we depend on in our daily lives—the infrastructure buried
beneath our feet or in our walls, the educational and health systems that
we all experience as we age or become ill, and the economic and political
systems that affect us in myriad ways over time—remain just as much
designed as anything that we inhabit or use. Many of us may not think of
them this way. Because we cannot “see” or “touch” them, our political,
economic, health, education, and infrastructure systems may appear to
lie beyond anyone’s ability to change them, even though they all arose from
some sort of design process. Because of the scale of these systems, as
seemingly vast as the invisible “dark matter” and “dark energy” that
constitute 96 percent of the universe, they may appear too difficult to
move.3 But we can shift them if we think of them as a whole and look for
the levers that can lead to the greatest transformation.
Let me explain what I mean with a story. Several years ago, local county
authorities asked some of my colleagues to help redesign the waiting rooms
of the county’s juvenile detention facilities because fights had begun to
break out among the people waiting there. My colleagues agreed to take
on this project and started by doing what all designers do: documenting
the rooms, making observations about their use, and listening to the people
who used the waiting rooms as well as to those who worked in the detention
system. The county had hoped that my colleagues, all designers, would
come back with waiting-room plans and recommendations for moving
INTRODUCTION
ix furniture, changing the lighting, and maybe putting up a few dividers to
separate people and discourage fighting.
Instead, my colleagues recommended that the county redesign its
juvenile detention process, since no amount of reorganization and redec-
oration of the waiting rooms would end the fighting, which remained the
most visible symptom of a dysfunctional system that frustrated almost
everyone involved—those who worked in it as well as those served by it.
In making this recommendation, the design team diagrammed the cur-
rent system, showing where the communication gaps and process break-
downs were occurring. The county had not seen the system visualized in
this way, and the designers’ diagram led to conversations among people who
had not understood how they fit as part of a larger whole and how they
connected to the work of others in ways not immediately apparent.
The design team did not just analyze the situation and help the
county visualize its system; it also suggested strategies that would begin
to repair the dysfunction. My colleagues proposed, for instance, engag-
ing the youth and their families, who had experienced things not well
understood by those in charge of the system, in the system’s redesign
as well as in its ongoing operation as mentors to young people who, with
guidance, might avoid the same path. Design arises out of empathy for
the real needs of others and often reveals things about a circumstance that
those in the midst of it may not see.
This does not always please those in power or those who have a stake in
the status quo. The county did not appreciate my colleagues’ doing some-
thing other than what they had been asked to do, and as a result nothing
happened at first. After a while, though, the county’s leadership acknowl-
edged the problems with the system and began to act on aspects of the
designers’ proposal. To their credit, the county leaders overcame their initial
annoyance and engaged my colleagues in the redesign of other county
systems that were also not working as they should.
This story holds several lessons. First, it shows how much professionals
need to tell the truth as they see it about a situation and recommend what
they believe to be in a client’s best interest, rather than simply giving the
client what they think the client needs or wants to hear. As patients, we
would not go to doctors who would do whatever we told them to do,
whether medically sound or not. Nor should we want other professionals
INTRODUCTION
