What We Mean by Transformative Situations

A core tenet of Dienk’s work is that we help organisations make sense of and take accountability for transformative situations through human-founded insights and design-led interventions. Here, we discuss what we mean by transformative situations and the role of design as a general social process for transforming perceived situational deficiencies into preferred situational outcomes.

By fostering an environment where design is leveraged as a transformative process, design enables organisations to navigate complex situations effectively. By focusing on human-centred insights and collaborative design processes, we can drive meaningful change and achieve preferred outcomes that address both tangible and intangible aspects of human experience.

How are situations understood as being meaningful in design contexts, however?

Situations

In a 2019 article titled ‘Embodied Design Thinking’, Jerry Diethelm—drawing on philosopher John Dewey—draws a picture of human experience as being founded not in atomistic sense impressions, but more fundamentally in the particular context or set of circumstances that one is considering or dealing with. The “complex of physical, biological, social, and cultural conditions that constitute any given experience” is what Dewey called a “situation,” the primary locus of human experience “taken in its fullest, deepest, richest, broadest sense.”

Situations are significant and meaningful insofar as that they are centred in beliefs, perceptions, perspectives, needs and desired outcomes. Given their socio-cultural dimensions, situations therefore become what Diethelm describes as “problematic social circumstances of a time and place thrown forward into human attention,” where competing interest and concerns come into conflict. Such conflict can be understood productively, if—as in the case of design initiatives—a collaborative effort is directed at transforming the conflicted situation to a state of accord. As Diethelm elaborates:

“It is from working through these occasions of difference and impasse that we make situations manifest, pressing them forward for resolution, transformation, and action. Qualitative differences arise out of a situated history that has come to a pressing need for change. Once the situation ripens in its social setting, the transformative situation sends imagination energetically forward into the world of something meaningfully better.”

Design: a transformative situation

Diethelm connects the transformative situation he describes above to the “signature end” or target of design thinking, namely, cultural betterment and transformation. The goal is “the purposeful change of unsatisfactory conditions into something better.” Notably, such unsatisfactory conditions involve more than objective conditions, but include the unfulfilled—and often unarticulated—yearnings, hopes, and desires of people in their given time and place. Through considering the “full-life measure of experiences that matter to people and all that they bring to transformational situations,” these dimensions of unsatisfactory conditions are the scope for negotiation in which the parties in transformative situations enter into the process of designing. Design represents the commitment to uncovering, evaluating, preferring and choosing what these parties—design stakeholders understood broadly as those impacted by design interventions—believe to be satisfactory solutions (one might recall Krippendorff’s assertion that reaching consensus on what a particular wicked problem is, is the problem).

In an earlier article, Diethelm tells us that the parties involved in the “social situations of significance” of design initiatives enter the process of designing with a conviction in the possibility of improvement and change. Both on an individual and collective basis, these parties commit to and engage in the pursual, evaluation, preference, and selection of what is understood or believed to be satisfactory outcomes. This kind of engagement is “a portrayal of full-blooded human beings immersed in their worlds of meaning.” People and the things in their worlds are put into direct contact through the phenomenon of attention, and it is through this “attentional connection” that humans “come into presence” not in the physical sense of the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of how human beings are engaged as living, experiencing human beings.

Designing is thus understood as a general social process for transforming perceived situational deficiencies and qualitative differences into preferred situational outcomes. Insofar as situations are significant and meaningful when they are centred in the beliefs, perceptions, perspectives, needs and outcomes that satisfy the people involved, an improved understanding of design, designing and design thinking can be gained by looking closely at what each of the parties “brings to the table” and acknowledging that these parties commit to and engage freely in searching for, evaluating, preferring and choosing what they believe to be satisfactory solutions.

References

Diethelm, J. 2015. Situations of Significance: Late Modern Design Thinking. [O]. Available: https://www.academia.edu/12012142/Situations_of_Significance_Late_Modern_Design_Thinking

Diethelm, J., 2019. Embodied Design Thinking. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 5(1), pp.44-54. [O]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872619300127

Krippendorff, K. 2006. The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. Boca Raton: Taylor and Francis.