Design as a tool
Anna Moldenhauer: You are often described as a pioneer of human-centered and strategic design. How would you define your work yourself?
Patrick Whitney: I was among the first to recognise the shift in the importance of human-centred design and strategy, and to incorporate this approach into education. Until then, there were no degree programmes with the title 'Human-Centred Design'. The term itself was also rarely used in discussions. This focus gained importance as users took control of the process, prompting companies to change their strategy regarding where they would take action and how they would succeed. To quote Roger Martin, author and former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto: While “human-centredness” and strategic design are not the definitive definitions of what we do, they remain relevant. Design responds to changes in society, the economy and technology. Design is practised in response to these changes.
From 1987 to 2016, you served as dean of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. There, you established the first doctoral program in design in the United States before moving on to become a professor in residence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a distinguished senior fellow at the Brown University School of Public Health. What is important to you in teaching?
Patrick Whitney: It's a great way to explore possible future scenarios for design, and it's a wonderful opportunity to have very interesting conversations and in-depth discussions with the students.
In your opinion, how will artificial intelligence change design education once we move beyond simply imitating familiar web interfaces?
Patrick Whitney: It will change the way we define problems and approach questions. I am increasingly convinced that AI will be useful in solving large, complex problems involving a vast amount of information that requires better analysis. AI is good at organising things that can be identified, described, counted and measured. It excels at this, whereas humans struggle to understand quantitative changes and measurements. We don’t have an intuitive sense of what exponential growth looks like. Things related to making sense of information and making judgements about characteristics will be difficult for AI in its current form. People will focus on meaning and abstract values, as well as evaluating characteristics that aren't fully supported by numbers. If we use this correctly, it will open up many new possibilities for us.
But the danger is that we’ll blindly trust the predictions generated by AI mechanisms because we find them difficult to understand and correct. I don’t know how we’ll solve this problem properly. It’s fascinating to work on a new topic, use AI tools and see how they generate a coherent set of answers. But these answers could be wrong. It's better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
AI tends to reinforce the perspective of the person it interacts with. While it tries to please us, it doesn't necessarily improve our work.
Patrick Whitney: I agree with both points, and they are both important. Firstly, different types of problems require different methods. It makes no sense to use large, complicated tools to solve simple, obvious problems. On the other hand, there are various ways to use AI tools to address different issues. For example, when I use an AI chatbot, I always ask it to provide counterarguments to what I’ve written and to highlight where my line of reasoning might be flawed. AI is like a hall of mirrors: it searches for works on similar topics and amplifies their use. Breakthroughs in AI are due to faster chips, not better algorithms. Furthermore, certain widely published voices are favoured, such as those from academia or the consulting sector. This does not result in a balanced perspective that represents everyone, particularly those whose work is highly practical, such as farmers. Additionally, AI wastes enormous resources and our time, as it’s easy to become bogged down in the details when using it.
What is essential in the effort to make technological innovations more people-centered?
Patrick Whitney: All the discussions about the value of AI focus on how it will make things more efficient. One example is that, as a result, we’ll be able to lay off many workers. That’s the wrong way to look at it. We don’t want to become more efficient at making mistakes, whether economic or environmental. We urgently need the speed and power of AI to find new ways to shape our lives.
What kind of progress would you like to see in education over the next few years?
Patrick Whitney: It needs fundamental reform. Currently, it is too focused on finding solutions to problems that were relevant in the mid- and late 20th century.
What would be an example of that?
Patrick Whitney: Current teaching assumes that there is a client who wants to make money on a regular basis. Visual representations and presentations are therefore indispensable for finding solutions. As a result, people tend to focus first on appearance rather than on function and meaning. This leads students to concentrate on the purely technical aspects of design, while AI simultaneously learns to apply these rules. This makes it possible to produce acceptable work quickly and cost-effectively. Students’ future work will thus be of lower quality than what is currently produced in the best university programs. And we will accept this because it is so much cheaper. For bachelor’s students, this will make their studies less relevant and more difficult. Master’s students will need to be better at understanding the nature of problems as well as the range of tools and methods for solving different types of problems. This work will increase if AI develops in a productive direction—one that helps identify the right questions and supports people in making judgments about value and significance. If, on the other hand, AI develops toward efficiency, many designers will become unemployed.
Is design still a discipline focused on progress, or is the industry too driven by the need to meet the demand for new products and trends?
Patrick Whitney: Design today addresses a much wider range of problems than it did 30 years ago. It has become more exploratory and is finding ways to be relevant across various industries. When I entered the industry in 1974, all conversations revolved around design briefs and helping clients draft documents intended to describe their potential future. If the specifications weren’t met, the consulting firm would lose the contract or the person responsible would be fired. Today, savvy designers and clients expect designers to explore the unknown. Would they fire them if they provided answers that were very similar to what they were already thinking anyway? The division of roles has also become much more complicated: from the creative who specializes in designing particularly cute products, to the one who rethinks complex problems, to the designers who consider how they can achieve a secondary effect through design policy.
You once said that human-centered design has not reached its full potential. Instead of addressing major societal challenges, the focus has shifted to areas such as user interfaces and digital interactions. How can we change that?
Patrick Whitney: Designers and design students should focus on identity and human cognitive factors. This is of greater importance to society, clients, and people in their everyday lives. For example, what should a personalized health form look like today? Forms in the healthcare system are opaque. It’s hard to understand what they mean or convey. They don’t provide doctors with all the information they need. The situation is similar with games: We could develop games that are less focused on quick reactions, such as shooting down a spaceship or fighting a monster. Instead, they could present players with a series of questions and activities focused on building things and creating new value. Very few people are doing this at the moment, and universities pay little attention to these meaningful aspects.
Among other things, you were a member of the White House Council on Design, which advises government agencies on the importance of design and its integration into national initiatives, policies, and government buildings. How do you convey the potential of design to this audience?
Patrick Whitney: Back then, there were 20 to 30 of us. Among us was industrial designer Sam Farber, a pioneer of inclusive design. Our task was to advise the government on how to use design more effectively and efficiently. Our main focus was on the federal courthouses. The federal courthouses designed in the 1980s and early 1990s were demonstrably better than their predecessors. In addition, design exhibitions became more prominent, such as those at the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. The government was increasingly engaging with the fields of architecture, communication, product design, and interior design, which generated great enthusiasm within the design industry. Back then, people didn’t yet talk about “experience design,” but at its core, the goal was to observe people’s everyday actions and support them.
In what ways were the courthouses of the 1980s and 1990s more advantageous?
Patrick Whitney: If you look at the tasks people have to perform when dealing with a legal dispute, they need much more than just rickety chairs and tables in a room lit by neon lights. Moreover, the old courthouses did not convey a sense of government openness. They did not express anything that would encourage people to think differently about public policy. They were merely spaces where people were housed.
How did you convey to the relevant authorities the importance of giving thought to the design of the spaces?
Patrick Whitney: They understood the importance of design. That's why they asked us to work with them. We held workshops and discussion sessions, such as meetings and competitions, including ones for architectural designs.
How is our growing inability to take a break changing design?
Patrick Whitney: That’s a good question, and one that isn’t easy to answer. In the field of information design in particular, the way we design is changing as we consider the tools for creating, gathering, and sharing information. Today, these capabilities are available to a team around the clock. In the past, there was a nationwide break at 9 p.m. when FedEx closed – that was the last time you could send something. Today, PDFs can be emailed at any time. This has led to a kind of panic when it comes to creating, sharing, and finding information. Since we no longer have downtime, we also lack the time to make judgments, sit back, and reflect on the project. We’ve lost the ability to reflect. We’ve even coined a term for a condition we call “reflection deficit disorder.” On top of that, things change so quickly on the surface, while the underlying forces often remain unchanged. If you look at the public school system, it’s not much better today than it was 30 years ago. It might even be worse. When it comes to food distribution, nonprofit organizations are certainly not an optimal solution, but we’ve come to terms with that over the past 15 years. It’s too simplistic to say that everything is moving too fast and needs to slow down. Our assessment of what we should be doing needs to be more profound, and our assessment of how we should be doing it needs to be more exploratory.
What fundamental belief about design has changed over the course of your career?
Patrick Whitney: In the past, people believed that design was a field in which individuals with varying artistic abilities and social perspectives worked. And that only star designers produced good work. Today, we have a more nuanced perspective. There are specialists and areas of expertise in design – for example, human factors and cognitive human factors, as opposed to physical human factors, in design for new technologies, retail design, and healthcare. The fields of application are evolving, as are the clusters of methods into specialized areas. The fact that there are people who spend time thinking about what design should be and writing about it is different from the past. Of course, this existed before, but not to the same extent.
What was the process behind Gary Hustwit's film “What Are People For: Design Philosophy by Patrick Whitney”?
Patrick Whitney: The idea for this film came from my colleagues André Nogueira and Ashley Lukasik who then engaged Gary Hustwit to direct the film and Rick Valicenti to design the book. The project is produced by the experience and storytelling firm Murmur Ring. It is part of an extensive body of work and a major effort to educate people about design.
What message do you want to convey with the film?
Patrick Whitney: The message we hope to convey is that design serves not only to propose solutions to complex problems, but also to analyze those problems. Design can be applied at various levels. Perhaps the distinction between complexity and uncertainty is important in this context. Sending a person to the moon and bringing them back, or sending people into orbit around the moon, is a complex problem. But it is possible. I hope people take away the idea that design adds value to our understanding of ambiguous problems and can lead to more relevant answers. Likewise, design should address questions of function and meaning just as much as it does outward appearance.
What are you currently working on?
Patrick Whitney: On a condominium complex and on “Providence.” I’m working with a venture capitalist in New York. He’s spent a lot of time exploring ways to create value in the energy sector. Together, we’re writing about the economics and thought processes involved in value creation. The more I step back from my day-to-day university life, the faster I make progress on the book. I have more time to write a book about how design is used to address problems in healthcare and education. All of this fits into the broader effort to make design methods and knowledge more formal and concrete.
