July bears down heavily in Southern Louisiana. The twin oppressors of heat and humidity render a dullness to the air that 2 o’clock thunderstorms do little to abate. In his 1851 memoir “The Manhattaner in New Orleans”, A. Oakey Hall described the plight of the “can’t get away club” – those unfortunate families whose work required a summer stay in what was for the lucky a six-months-a-year city (Hall, 1976, p. 111).
This is not to say, though, that they didn’t find a way to make it work. Architectural features like high ceilings and transom windows found in older homes like my own are persistent artifacts of earlier inhabitants’ efforts to beat the heat. After all, as Nelson and Stolterman argue, we “have to design because we want to survive” (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012, p. 13). The snoball, the breezy seersucker suit, the levee – all artifacts of design will aimed at improving the quality of life for the New Orleanian.
The last of these, though, is a design more substantial and problematic than the rest. The history of the levee as a man-made creation gives evidence of the tension implicit in design; evil and magnificence in simultaneous, paradoxical coexistence.
A stretch of swamp nestled between lake and river, New Orleans is bound by water. The city’s history reveals the strength of those bonds against which its inhabitants have struggled. The Flood of 1927 and its aftermath serve as one example among many of this point.
Heavy rains earlier in the year had swollen the Mississippi to the point of overflowing. Having heard news of flooding upriver, a group of New Orleans bankers convened in hopes of finding a way to protect the city (and their assets therein). With the mayor’s consent, the group designed a strategy to break a levee in Caernarvon, a rural community downriver. A few weeks and 39 tons of dynamite later, a release of flood waters surged over St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, forcing mass evacuations of a largely poor, black, and rural population. Displaced residents took shelter for a while in a warehouse repurposed as a refugee center, but many soon joined the “Great Migration”, leaving their ruined homes for the Midwest and the North. Treated poorly in the refugee camps and largely uncompensated for their loss, many African Americans turned from then-president Coolidge’s Republican party to the Democrats – a trend that persists to this day (Barry, 1997).
The enormity of the social, political, and environmental consequences of the choice to break and then rebuild the levees is beyond the scope of this post. The point here is to show that every choice is an act of creation, an act which in turn upsets the balance of a system. The disruptive power of design can lead to systemic effects beyond the imagination and intention of the designer. If we extend The Design Way‘s analogy of designers as “lame gods in the service of prosthetic gods”, designing becomes an act of omnipotence without omniscience (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012, p. 13). What responsibility, then, can and does the designer hold for her creations? What responsibility does the designer of the AK-50 have for its victims? What responsibility does the teacher have for the power structures his pedagogy supports? How confidently can we create with little guarantee of the ultimate good of our actions?
These days, air conditioning mounts a valiant front against the Crescent City climate, but an ambient feeling of oppressive weight persists. This summer, bad news seems to build on the horizon as dark and dense as the storm clouds that roll in every afternoon. The swaying scales of good and evil, power and responsibility, control and action rattle my certainty in “human-kind’s ability to deal intentionally, and successfully, with the deeper issues of life” (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012, p. 203). When designing within such a complex system, knowingly limited in our knowledge, the prospect of a guarantor-of-design is an appealing one indeed.
The more I learn about the powerful and complex constraints at play in the systems that operate around me, the more tempting it becomes to lose faith in my ability to contribute to midwifing a brighter future. As appealing as it can feel, though, to pass off my responsibility to administrative or other external forces, this is of course the wrong approach. I am coming to learn that becoming a designer demands an intense personal energy – there is no way around it. Truly embodying the Design Way means to sharpen my understanding of and faith in my core values, character, and beliefs (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012, p. 209). It is only through a lifelong practice of “reflection-in-action” and “reflection-on-action”, a rigorous and critical self-assessment, that I can have accountability for, confidence in, and ownership of my design judgements.
Near the outset of my journey as a learning designer, my responsibility now is to work on bringing into focus the kinds of contributions I would like to make – modest though they may be at this point – to the “mind-numbing complexity and uncertainty” of this heavy, light, good, evil, paradoxical designed world in which we all together live (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012, p. 205).
Sources:
Barry, J. M. (1997). Rising tide: The great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hall, A. O. (1976). The Manhattaner in New Orleans: Or, Phases of “Crescent City” life. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Nelson, H. G., & Stolterman, E. (2012). The design way: Intentional change in an unpredictable world. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.