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Amrita Kulkarni: How do you understand heritage or define it for yourself?

Sarah Teasley: Let’s say we think about heritage as collective value attached by a group of people to something culturally relevant to their history. In that sense, heritage is about assigning value to something we’ve built in the past. But then there are all sorts of questions and problems that come up around that definition, because: whose history are we talking about? Are we also thinking of those who have been traditionally marginalised or excluded from having a say in these value assignments? If someone important in history has decided that a particular thing is culturally valuable and relevant for broader society, then that message may have been transmitted down and across decades without question so far.

Such questions are very live in contexts like Australia, which as a country, is a settler colonial nation. There is an easy-enough understanding of, say, heritage buildings in Melbourne, but there are ancient, 60,000-year-old areas of cultural heritage, which are sometimes not fully recognised or protected in the same way.

Another point here is that heritage can be contested, and heritage isn’t always shared. It’s an incredibly problematic term from that perspective. Here in Australia, something might be heritage designated, which means it was relevant for some communities, but perhaps not relevant for others. Something that might be particularly relevant for settler colonial Australians may be less relevant for recent migrant communities and certainly less relevant for indigenous communities. Heritage itself as a concept or category is contested and complex.


 

If we’re talking about attaching value to something, in the context of products and services, does that come down to popularity or sales?

Yes, that’s how markets work, and that’s how capitalism works. Very simply put, it is the basis of so much design employment. Someone looking to get a competitive edge in the market is going to hire a designer or researcher to uncover user tastes, user demands and user needs. In the last 
150 years at least, design has been very much about understanding user needs. This has proven to be an effective way to anticipate interest and value in the outcome, whether it is a product, service or experience.

So yes, collective value for today’s designs — which will become heritage of tomorrow — is signaled by its popularity in the market right now. And this is connected to designers’ viewpoints and priorities in their jobs. Designers are expected to work to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and serve a business mandate: increase traffic on this website, get to a certain number of downloads or increase product sales. There is so much research out there that supports incorporating diverse users and viewpoints — essentially shifting viewing them as edge cases to understanding them as primary user experiences. Such practices and processes actually increase the integrity and strength of the final product. Knowing that today’s design decisions are linked to tomorrow’s cultural heritage, someone like me pushing to include more voices can be seen as disruptive. I’m asking designers to rethink the model a little bit and redefine their own job descriptions.

 

 

Heritage can be contested and heritage isn’t always shared

 

 

What does heritage mean across the various design domains? How are they different?

Depending on the discipline you’re coming from, it can have very, very different meanings. The connection between design and heritage really differs by discipline. In architecture, heritage is visible and quantified — defined through cultural preservation, heritage sites, building conservation, and techniques or materials. But this fairly defined discourse around architectural heritage is distinct from that in the design practice and industry — spanning User Experience (UX) design, service design, product design, and so on — because these disciplines are still very young. UX design and service design have been formally around for just 20-30 years now, and maybe a bit longer if you change the name, especially in product design.

But to comment on the heritage of recent design? I think it’s too early to tell. In such instances historians talk about being in a valley where we don’t yet have the distance to see well enough or far enough. In a history that’s 10, 20, or even 30 years deep, it can be really hard to discern actual historical patterns, to be able to identify the actual values at play and recognise historical shifts — because we are still in it. Design decisions from 10 years ago are still playing out in our lives right now.

At the same time, if we don’t deliberately collect and preserve design products like recent games or apps right now — before they’re naturally understood as ‘heritage’ — it’s all too likely that many meaningful products will disappear from collective memory. This is the same as debates about Brutalist or postmodern buildings as architectural heritage. Designs from the 1990s may not seem like heritage yet, but it is important that we preserve work now so that when we do see work from that period as culturally or historically significant, we still have it with us.


 

Tell us more about historical decisions playing out in our lives now.

Let’s take an example. Technical specifications set out in Mac OS, Windows OS and Android really govern our lives to a certain extent and we don’t notice because we’re so busy using our mobile phones or laptops.

I take the question away from heritage and more into history, to look at it critically, like a historian would — into not just what has been happening but how it has come to be and what stories are being told about its value. To explore the historical decisions and the values that led to these things being in place as they are today.

For me, it’s less about heritage and more about the legacy of design industries. It’s more to do with how we work to have awareness of different cultural heritages across the products we’re designing and the people we’re designing them for, so as to be more relevant for and reflective of the communities that might be using them. This is where Design Research comes into play — taking into account different users, their contexts and behaviours.

 

 

Designs from the 1990s may not seem like heritage yet, but it is important that we preserve work now

 

 

Reflecting on the past 150 years of formal and informal design, what do you see as the high and low points of the history we’ve been building?

I don’t think what I’m going to say will be controversial at all, because the facts are well established now: the heritage that the design industry has left for us means we are looking at a climate crisis compounded by business strategies like planned product obsolescence, as practiced especially after the Second World War in developed or high consumption countries like the US.

It is very clear that the discipline of product design has been complicit in the economic system of making profit through the selling of more goods and services. And while this increases company profit, it also boosts GDP, enabling better jobs and higher wages so people can buy more stuff. But eventually, people have enough stuff. This is when companies are incentivised to ask people to buy new stuff anyway. And that’s when companies strategise for planned obsolescence. You get into styling design, designing for desire rather than need. Design’s complicity in this system is a really unfortunate legacy.


 

So you see design, specifically product/industrial design, as having played a central role in this system.

It’s easy to feel guilt for the impact that designers have had on the environment, to feel that designers are responsible. But I think that’s not the case, because designers are employed by managers, who are employed by company owners, who themselves are part of an industry which makes these decisions.

I write about this in my book, Designing Modern Japan, that industry or economic systems, inclusive of planned obsolescence strategies, also give designers a way to be creative. It offers designers a way to live, pay rent, mortgage, or bills, afford to eat, have a family, and gives them a reason to be creative on a daily basis. And we can’t discount that fact. This global growth of design jobs and employment is a legacy worth taking pride in, but these everyday joys of a design job come with all the downsides we’ve just talked about.

It’s easy for me — sitting in a university setting — to push design students to be critical thinkers and strengthen their design, technical, and analytical capacities as they contribute to society. Designers are and will be important in crafting new methods, processes and ideas that shape the world, like for example, adopting regenerative practices. But then again, it’s bigger than just design and designers. Changing the direction of economies and holding governments accountable to climate targets are wicked problems at hand, and yes, designers can have a role in that, but that is not just the designers’ job. All of this points to the fact that designers have a lot of creativity and an incredible skill set, which as a group we need to be using well beyond design as well and right away.

 

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