Design Emergency: Building A Better Future

Alice Rawsthorn & Paola Antonelli

In an emergency, design is essential for creating clear and actionable communication. It helps people find their way: mentally, emotionally, and sometimes literally in an actual space in the world. In short, as the authors write near the start of their chapter on Covid-19: “Any emergency is also a design emergency.”

(As a quick aside, the pandemic also revealed flaws in the design of hospital gowns and masks, which, as noted in another book, Extra Bold, “are designed to fit a so-called average male body, making them dangerous for caregivers of smaller stature, including many women.”)

There is a frightful realism—something that brushes against the reaction one can have when thinking about the banality of evil (except here there is no evil, only a pseudo-alive thing called a virus)—when Design Emergency tells us how the iconic image of Covid, the “spiky blob” with red and magenta tubercles, is just the result of an ordinary weekend work assignment given to two artists who worked at the CDC.

Their names are Alissa and Dan.

Also arresting is the design approach New Zealand took at the start of the crisis, when people were at their most uncertain and most afraid. Its government gave citizens (a) clear and positive instructions (b) with easy-to-understand visuals (c) that leaned on the colors black and yellow. (Yellow, interestingly, can symbolize both optimism and caution.) New Zealand went on to have the lowest death rate per capita.

There are many more use cases explored: from one designer’s hope to use “architectural acupuncture” to revive villages in rural China, to an Italian astrophysicist’s claim that “gravity is the best designer,” visible in the “spherical perfection of celestial bodies.”

But this Covid example hits close to home because we all lived it; and it shows how good design can help mitigate panic and elevate a sense of community, especially when we need it most.

The Art Of Noticing

Rob Walker

Paying more attention to the world around us can improve our well-being and our relationships. It can help us grow to appreciate the wonder in our surroundings, noticing the kind of details that can lead us to be better thinkers, learners and communicators.

But in becoming deeper observers, in breaking from routine thinking, it’s almost inevitable for us to grapple with uncomfortable questions and harsh truths.

For example: What does it mean to explore an abandoned place or a crumbling environment, like a closed hospital or a shuttered business? Almost every other kind of architecture we encounter is actively maintained and preserved.

Or what are you asking people to think about or do when, in a prestigious or sanctified space, like a college campus, you place a bright pink plaque—meant to be noticed—against a gray stone statue of a lionized figure who we know engaged in acts that today we’d classify as morally wrong?

Honing our perception can help us reevaluate the hegemonic forces we swim in. But to see the vibrance in our ecosystems, we must also see their dereliction, sometimes in ways that challenge our sense of self and security.

On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity

Derek Thompson

There are many interesting ideas here, but one section that sticks with me, “The Millennial Workist,” describes a dilemma I know all too well, not only as a member of the generation in question but also as a media consumer who has been subjected to endless think-pieces about millennials and their (our) state of being.

The dilemma, broadly, is this: Millennials are overeducated yet financially insecure; overworked by a society that encourages them to do what they love but obscures the fact that passion can lead to burnout.

On Work is good to meditate on with Extra Bold, which speaks of the “mythical norm,” nearby. I wonder if the existential crisis felt by so many millennials is not only caused by the disparity between the world promised and the one delivered, but also by the fact that even those in the “mythical norm”—college-educated citizens of a developed nation—feel themselves pushed to the margins.

Quietly, the visibility of work has changed too, as well as the connection between value and visibility. As children, millennials were often praised for intellectual labor. Now, however, “the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product,” to quote Thompson. And invisible work may be harder to quantify and explain, to others and to ourselves, which can make it harder to appreciate.