What could we add to or take away from the discipline of design to make it more human? That was the question considered in our Aug. 26 session in partnership with Cannon Design. Given that the room included representatives from more than a dozen different design disciplines, each participant ended up with a slightly different answer.

Many of the participants gave those answers material form in a recent exhibit of artifacts that were displayed at the Cannon offices. Meanwhile, Labs Dean Jeff Leitner gives his take here. The key idea: while design makes things that are good for humanity, the continual practice of it is also a way of deepening our understanding of being human. Read more in his conversation with Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson below.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: So it seems to me that this Lab tackled a very complex problem that we and people we know have been struggling with for a long time: the meaning of design. To get us started, could you explain it to me as if I’d never heard of it before?

Jeff Leitner: The Lab began as an exercise to solve this problem: design, as it is practiced generally, is not quite sufficient as an expression of humanity. There is something about it that still feels inaccessible – it feels less “of” us and more “at” us. We set out to discover if there were conventions or practices that we could remove from design that we could redact so that we could make what we create even more “of” us.

ABN: How did that problem come to exist in your mind? It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing one encounters just walking down the street.

JL: It came up in a conversation with the group that we eventually partnered with, Cannon Design. Cannon is a global architecture and engineering firm that is seeing that its greatest contribution may not be buildings, but the ideas behind the buildings – the thinking, the context, the paradigm in which those buildings are created. I don’t know if there was a eureka moment, though I think there was a eureka meeting.

ABN: Why did you focus on what you could remove from design, as opposed to adding or emphasizing something?

JL: We wanted to distinguish this from all the conversations we were observing where people took a white piece of paper and said, “What can we build?” Design has been around for millennia – it seemed silly to start with that white piece of paper. The paper has thousands of years of content on it. And we don’t have the luxury of inventing design on a desert island. Even if you were on a desert island there would be constraints. So we decided to start with what exists and work from there.

ABN: So how did you move from the idea of this topic to the particular moving parts that made up this Lab?

JL: There were two design principles, if you will, in assembling this Lab. First, it seemed central to a question like this that we had to take the particulars of any one design practice off the table. So it couldn’t just be about architecture, for example, because we wouldn’t get to the grander thoughts and broader foundations that underlie architecture. We wouldn’t be able to talk in the same way about the confines in which we create what we create. So we had to make it intensely interdisciplinary. There were 20 of us in the room, 17 of whom were designers from various disciplines. What we had the most of were architects, but those architects worked in a number of different disciplines.

The other principle in a conversation like this – and it became really clear as we went on that this was the right approach – was that you have to assume a degree of seniority and experience in the room. We do this with almost all Labs. Something happens when you spend enough time with anything. There is an exponential increase in understanding in what you’re doing, not just a linear one. We had to have a room full of people who had been there, who had experienced that kind of growth in understanding about what they did.

ABN: What other criteria did you use to choose these particular design disciplines and these particular designers?

JL: I wanted people who would immediately communicate by virtue of their experience to others in the room that they were worth listening to. They would say to themselves, “Well, I’m clearly the person in the room with the most experience in X, so that’s who I am in this room.” The other thing is that they would say, “Holy cow – I don’t know anything about what that person does for a living, their credential are such that I have to learn something from them.”

That isn’t always the case. In most Labs, we are attempting to build a group that all melds into one brain. It isn’t terribly important what got the person in the room. But in this room, we knew we needed people to draw lessons from hearing people talk about their own disciplines. That almost never happens in other Labs.

Designers, almost as a job requirement, are patchwork quilts of everything they come across. So when you put a theater experience designer in the same room as a medical technologist, they’ll just do what they do – they’ll absorb from each other. I knew that going into this.

ABN: You and Howell often go into a Lab with a particular hypothesis or premise about the problem at hand. What was it in this case?

JL: We had an idea we led off with it, though that’s not to say we actually believed it. Sometimes you just have to throw a grenade into the middle of the room. Sometimes you believe the grenade and sometimes you don’t.

The initial idea was that the values associated with business are not necessarily aligned with humanity – they are aligned with profitability and efficiency and margins. But those values aren’t necessarily the values of design. Howell in particular laid out the premise that those values are in conflict, and design is rolling over. If you think about it as a court room where design is supposed to be the advocate for humanity and business is the prosecutor, design wasn’t doing a very good job of representing humanity’s interests. That was the premise we laid out at the beginning.

For the most part, the room rejected the premise. It’s not that business and design are not often at cross-purposes – everybody in the room wanted to create great work and everybody in the room was also beholden to “the Man.” What was interesting, though, was that the room said that “business” is not other people. They said that they both embody the “B” of business and the “D” of design. And what the business side does is establish the parameters in which we must create. So they did not accept this idea that design was some sort of Vichy government.

That moved us into the question of whether there is a moral dimension to the decisions designers make – whether they have an obligation to consider the consequences of their work or whether doing great work is a sufficient good. George Aye triggered a really interesting conversation about whether you can not only choose to serve humanity through the type of projects you take on, but in the way you take them on. So it’s easy to decide that you don’t want to design the logo for a nuclear bomb. But do what extent do we have an obligation to consider how what we design will be used, even if we are doing it for a cause we consider noble?

ABN: It seems to me that there are two ways of looking at that problem. One is to say that there is a set of morals that apply to human beings, and we are trying to figure out the particular ways in which they apply to designers. So “don’t tell lies” becomes “don’t lie through your design.” The second way would be to say that there are special ethical obligations that exist only within design and don’t translate to people outside of it. So there are obligations that apply to George Aye and Trung Le that don’t apply to other people. Do you feel like the conversation followed one of those two paths?

JL: Frank Magueri wanted to take the conversation the first way, to say that designers have no obligations separate from the obligations of all human beings. I wouldn’t say anyone took him on in that point directly – it’s an almost unassailable point that there is significant overlap in those obligations. I would say that in practice the room followed something more like the second path. It seemed clear that they felt that creators have special obligations. Creators have different duties from everybody else.

ABN: That’s interesting. I’m going back to your nuclear bomb example. I’m mentally comparing it to the obligations on physicians. When you’re a physician, you’re obligated to treat anybody. If a gang-banger and the victim of a drive-by both stumble into the emergency room, you’re obligate to treat them both. It’s a special ethical obligation to the profession. Now if designers have the same obligations as everybody else, it makes sense to say that in order to behave ethically, they ought to avoid the nasty clients. But if designers are more like physicians, and clients are more like patients, it may be that they are obligated to do the best work they can wherever they find it, and try to improve the world in the process.

JL: That’s like a color commentary for what happened in the room. It went from “I shouldn’t design for beer companies” to “is there a way to design for beer companies that serves humanity?” If the Lab were a novel, that might be the underlying theme. It began with the idea that we have to do moral things, then went to the idea that every thing we do, we should attempt to do morally. And it ended up with the idea that before we can decide whether to design for something we believe in or not, we have to take on about 1,500 projects to even know what we are doing. Those projects are things we have to do along the way in order to save the world – there is a degree of mastery required, and you just have to do your time.

But that was the superstructure. What actually happened was that after the conversation about obligation, John Syvertsen decided to read the Hippocratic Oath. That really made the room buzz. Everybody in the room began to feel that design was not just what they did for a living, but the gift that they were given. That’s the thoughts I took from the room: “Not only is this the way I pay my mortgage, but this is the special path I have been given, and I have special obligations within it.” That’s my interpretation of what was going on.

ABN: Wait, why did he have a copy of the Hippocratic Oath?

JL: Somebody went and printed it off for him. Three different versions of it, actually. But the sense we got from all of them was one of obligation and privilege. Several of us were visibly moved as he read it.

There was another point like that. Trung Le said, “I know what should be removed from design to make it more human… humans.”

ABN: What did he mean by that?

JL: He meant that humans have the audacity to design with themselves in mind, when we are really just part of a complex ecosystem. That can’t work. Any designer would know that that’s irresponsible design. So we should flatten out the hierarchy that has us on top and design for the entire system.

ABN: That reminds me of something else from the history of medicine: the emergence of epidemiology. An important moment occurred when public health specialists figured out that they didn’t need to completely control a disease or dominate an environment or eradicate a species to get the result they wanted – they just needed to alter the balance of the system. And even in individual care, the best physicians realize that they are not doing the work of curing the patient alone. It’s like the French battlefield surgeon Ambroise Paré said: “I bandaged him, but God healed him.” It’s totally different from the popular image of the designer, which is more like Wile E. Coyote sketching out his complex scheme on a drawing board, then implementing it.

What did the room make of what Le said?

JL: The room went crazy for it. Loved it. You can see how in a room inclined to believe in obligations, that went over really well.

Frankly, I didn’t like it as much. It seemed too intuitive to me. It seemed too much like what we’ve already got in sustainable design. I didn’t think we needed to put an esteemed group together to find out that we needed to be more sensitive to the environment. I didn’t want to land there.

ABN: It seems to me that the error would not be the point Le made, but assuming that we already have an answer to it. It’s tempting to say “hence, sustainable design” or “hence, user-centered design” or even “hence, here’s a list of factors we are going to consider every time we design.” Those are just baby steps compared to a total implementation of the kind of ethos Le described.

JL: You’re picking up what I was picking up on. It’s not that any of those things are wrong – it’s just that we can go much further than that.

You mentioned user-centered design, or UX. Let’s talk about that for a moment. UX is really interesting in this context. You have to keep in mind that we’re holding the Lab in the middle of Manifest, the largest concentration of UX designers of its kind. And we’re the ones who started UX for Good. So what was interesting was that no one in the room needed to make the point, “You know who ought to be at the center of what we do? The people who use it.”

To me, it was like the way it felt to go to Israel the first time. When I was there, being Jewish wasn’t remarkable anymore. It was not worth remarking on. It was really interesting to be in a room with that many designers and not have to talk about how design should be user-centered. It was just assumed.

ABN: I could see that from the interviews I did beforehand. I am sure that many of these designers are used to going into rooms full of clients, explaining how design could be more user-centered, and blowing their minds.

JL: Right – Trung Le does things like getting kids designed in the process of designing schools. In the context of the world, that’s incredibly innovative. But in this room, that didn’t come up, just like inhaling and exhaling oxygen didn’t come up.

I had not been around design and designers long enough to appreciate that this was a relatively new idea in the world of design. But that meme seems to have fully taken hold. You look around the room and there is a choreographer and there is a video artist and there are architects – people who the movies would have you believe reach deep into their gut and pull out a story they want to tell. And to some extent that’s true. But it is also true that in the world of design now they are intensely focused on the people who will watch or experience what they create.

Now it might also be that Greek playwrights turned to each other and said, “You know, we really ought to consider the needs of our audience.” I have no idea. Maybe it has always been this way and it is only laymen who create the myth of the artist or designer who says, “I will create what I want, let the public be damned.”

ABN: So where would you say this Lab landed?

JL: It was a conversation that George Aye started and Christian Long really took home. The key idea was craft. Actually, it began with Randy Guillot pointing out that most of the people in the room did not create the actual things they design – they just create the idea of them. But design is still a craft. As you spent more time in it and move closer to mastery, it gets bigger and you feel dumber.  We have tapped into a craft of how we represent human ideals to each other, and the more you practice it, the more you realize how little you actually know. What began to emerge, then, was the concept of humility. I cannot speak for the room, but that, for me, was the connective tissue between design and humanity that I was looking for.

Christian laid it out using a metaphor from martial arts. As you master a martial art, you get better and better at defending yourself. You’re better and better at fighting. But when you get great at it, your obligation is to not fight. So I began to also see design not as a valuable thing in itself, but one of many paths to humanity. It is one of the paths in which we get better and better and better but never master it.

On paper, designers seem to be about peanut butter and carburetors. But it is really a sort of religious order. We’ve all been around people who genuinely believe in a religious order and notice how much more humble they are than the rest of us. Being that good at whatever they do makes them humble. That humility is an approach to greater humanity.

ABN: Medicine and healing continue to be my go-to example. I think there is an idea that sustained exposure to vulnerability and mortality give one a new appreciation of life. This is why there were religious orders of nurses. There’s this concept that while one way to come to know God is to go stand on top of a pillar and pray all day, another way is to intimately know suffering by tending to the human body all the time. So what about humanity, exactly, does one learn through a lifetime cultivating the craft of design?

JL: I think your construct is faulty. I don’t think it is that thing which they focus on. I think it is the religious dedication to the focusing on something that cannot be mastered. I think the reason it works for tending to the sick is that you can’t win. It isn’t human suffering as such. Tom Skilling, the Channel 9 meteorologist, might also be able to get there, simply because he has dedicated his career to mastering something that cannot be controlled. I think it is the humility that comes from getting better and better at something that you cannot control. And something that moves all the time – design is a reflection of the zeitgeist. The constrains of design, the tools of design, the meaning of design, the purpose of design – all of that is changing all the time. It isn’t mastering ancient Chinese wisdom. It’s trying to master a drop of mercury. It is dedicating your career to trying to do that that brings humility.

So in the end, the group came full circle, back to business. Business is an effort to dominate. I don’t mean that as a pejorative, but it is an effort  to win – to win profits, to win friends, to win shareholders, to win clients, etc. It is not an act of surrender. We keep track of how we are doing in business through metrics one associates with competition. That’s okay – and it may be that the idea of trying to apply more human measures to business is just antithetical. Being nice and being humble may be a nice story, but I’m not sure it’s relevant to the business equation. Maybe there is a yang to that yin in the world. Design may be an accessible “other,” a balance to business, that has a very different kind of measure.

ABN: How is that different from your original premise?

JL: Howell laid out a premise that said, “‘You are allowing yourself to be corrupted by ‘them.’” The room said “we are ‘them.’” And the answer is, “I think that’s right.” But as designers, we get to access a very different part of us that most people don’t regularly access. Everybody gets humility in a different way, but design is one of those paths to humility and humanity.

We talked a few minutes ago about how there wasn’t a lot of discussion in the room about user-centered design. But users are inherently served if we pursue this path.

ABN: Sure, I think it gives greater meaning to that approach. It’s possible to reduce user-centered design to a slightly more sophisticated version of “the customer is always right,” and that can be really stifling. And not even true – Apple designs in ways completely unlike what a focus group would tell them and reaches brilliant solutions. But when you add this spiritual element of humility, divesting yourself of ego and decision-making and seeking what other people genuinely want, it can become much more profound.

JL: You may be right, but that’s not where I was going. Where I was going was to say that the act of practicing design makes you humble, and if you are humble you will create better design. I am not saying “put the user at the center of your design,” thought right now that is the thing to do. I am saying that a career of design makes a person more humble and thus more able to serve others. That was for me the big insight.

We also talked for a little while about young designers. I brought it up because young designers make me crazy. I get the appeal of youth and enthusiasm and access to things I don’t know about. But this humility only comes through practice, and no matter how supremely talented you are, you can’t be practiced when you are young. That isn’t to say you aren’t more talented than me – most people probably are. But I’ve put in more time. I think we’ve gotten away from that idea.

Maybe this is just what I say now that I have gray hair, but I don’t think so. I don’t think the raw number of hours you have put in is a predictor of success. But it is a pre-condition of mastery, and mastery leads to humility. And that which we create when we are humble is much more human. Or, to Le’s point, even greater than human.

ABN: This makes me think about Apple again. I don’t know that Steve Jobs is a humble man, but I think what his career shows is that there are qualities one can access that make one’s products very human even though one does not employ a highly outward-looking, user-centered design process. His might be humility or it might be something else, i don’t know. But humility has got to be one of those qualities.

JL: Tanarra Schneider was the representative of user experience design in the room. She and all of the other good UX designers I know call it “empathy.” The reason I am using “humility” instead is that “empathy” is temporal. I can have empathy for you in this conversation and no empathy in the next. Humility, however, is a desired state that then informs everything, including empathy.

ABN: I think this also speaks to the problem George Aye raised. We can ask people what they want through mechanisms like the market, and then design for their most superficial desires. We can design more sports cars. Or we can respect that the users we are in conversation with are themselves not yet fully realized human beings. That’s not a haughty things to say – it’s just a fact of life. Someone may say they want a sports car when they really want dignity.

JL: Or for their girlfriend to be more impressed with them.

ABN: Right. But I’d say that one of the things people gain through humility and empathy is an improved ability to discern what other people are actually asking for. That would make them better designers.

JL: I don’t know. It would be inarguable that we want all the nuns on the streets of Calcutta to be humble. One could argue that we want them to be humble so they will be better servants of the people they are helping. But that sort of humility may also allow them to access ideas and emotions that you and I cannot even imagine at this moment. We have all had the experience of being around someone who seems to have transcended all of the nonsense and be existing someone else, whether it’s a priest or a physician or an artist or a friend. I think we would all be served to find a space where we can work diligently at something we cannot master so that we can achieve that transcendence. With those kinds of eyes, who knows what we could see?

ABN: You’ve mentioned that this was a very emotional Lab. Why is that?

JL: I think there are two reasons. The first is that the Lab is my discipline of design. This is what the three of us are trying to do and master in order to get what these designers can get. So we were also humbled by trying to catch this drop of mercury and realizing how much we still have to learn. This is our potter’s wheel, and I think we became acutely aware at how early we are in the process of learning to make pottery.

The other thing that is interesting is that since we’ve done this 20-something times, we can sometimes predict what is going to happen in the room and what could happen after the room. We can, in this sort of Doctor Who way, see the past and the future simultaneously. So I am moved when I see someone lean back in their chair, put their hands behind their heads, and say, “Woah…” Something just clicked into place that will allow them to do what they were doing much better than before. I can only imagine how this factors into the next conversation they have about design, and the next. Then it might show up in a dance or a building or a video installation. I’m not presumptuous enough to believe that we changed anybody’s world. But I am confident that we shook them up enough that it will influence things that will change the world.

ABN: We’ve talked before about how one measures the impact of Labs, and one way to do it would be to look at the organization we’re working with. But in this case, since we were considering design in its entirety, everyone at the table was both physician and patient. I imagine each person has his or her own measure of the impact as well.

It’s like you’re a widget manufacturer who goes to see an opera. The impact on you could be that you stop making widgets. Or it could be that you start making a brilliant, new kind of widget and you’re not sure why.

JL: Or you’re nicer to your wife. So we’re not willfully avoiding measurement. I just can’t imagine what we would measure. It would be presumptuous to decide what to measure coming out of this.

ABN: So tell me about the end of the Lab.

JL: It actually ended with Sarah Malin from Cannon, who is an anthropologist. She said that in the US, people tend to have conversations like this through dialogue. But that’s not the only way to have the conversation. So step two is to go and see how it manifests in one’s own work. That makes sense for this room, since these are people who deliver messages not just the way I do, by speaking and gesticulating wildly, but through art and dance and theater and logos and buildings. She said, “We’ve done it the Labs way. Now go do it your way.”

They’ll do that at the exhibit at Cannon. To say I’m looking forward to it would be a massive understatement. I’m looking forward to being satisfied by it as well as confused and overwhelmed. I suspect that wandering into their brains will be like wandering into a space where I don’t understand the rules. I am so accustomed, as a user, to designers designing for me, that I am awed when designers let me in to see what they design for themselves. It’s similar to the experience I have had soliciting art for our website.

ABN: So what do you think you learned from this Lab that you would apply to future Labs?

JL: I think that by adding the dimension of pre-interviews, we increased the value of the session. It deepens commitment to the process. It sets a tone for how serious we are about what we’re doing. And I think it clearly communicates that what we are doing is for the benefit of others, because it goes immediately online. It also introduces the participants to the caliber of thinkers they are about to have this experience with.

This was also a different kind of Lab. Instead of saving XYZ non-profit, it was more like saving 17 people. Now we have to figure out how to get that into the collective bloodstream. When you help an organization, you help an agent that then goes out and does good in the world. In this Lab, it was like we just skipped that and went straight to the world.

ABN: I am curious about how this Lab might have affected your perspective on “design thinking” or the various movements out there to use design for the public good.

JL: I think that as a rule it is a bad idea to work on projects that violate your personal ethos, just like it’s a bad idea to work for a boss you hate. Having said that, I think the lesson the Lab taught me is that striving to do the best design over and over again is a path to good. It is a good itself, independent of the thing that you create. The system in which we define “good” is ever-changing. What what never changes is that trying to do something better and better over and over again brings one closer to human truth.

ABN: What significance do you think this Lab has for people who are not designers, or who are not particularly interested in the design disciplines?

JL: I think it was another expression of a universal truth that we all struggle with. Most of us do work most of the day that is not particularly humanizing. We all need a vehicle or a path to balance that out. Some people do it beautifully through religion. Some do it through service. Some do it through parenting. Some do it through bikram yoga. What was instructing to me, and so humbling, was the recognition that design is one of those paths.

So the applicability for what the rest of the world does isn’t that design is a path, but that the studied practice of something bigger than ourselves that we can never truly master is the path to the human. Does accounting allow us to do that? Not being an accountant, and not spending enough time with them, I don’t know that I could get there. But I am confident that being a carpenter can get you there. I am confident that being an HR executive can get you there.

We are, in the course of our lives, torn between having a face that says, “I’m at large and in charge and you can trust me with your problems and your money,” and with another part of ourselves that says, “We are ignorant. No matter how long we have been on this Earth, we know no more than when we got here.” That push and pull is true at all moments, but people who only embrace the “Master of the Universe” side are the people who we celebrate in too many cases. This Lab helped me to see or to remember that the other side needs to be celebrated, and you don’t have to move to Calcutta and work with the poor to do it.

That’s why I got so moved. I realized during the session that these people had wandered into my workshop, where I am both at my most masterful and my most ignorant. I am scared before each session that this is the time that I throw the clay on the potter’s wheel and the clay kicks my ass. This is the time when I can’t even make an ashtray. I realized I was in a roomful of people who face that every day – and, ironically, they were my clay. That was what was so knee-bucklingly humbling about this room.