The Layman's Almanac

Brenda Laurel

Currently, Chair of the graduate Design Program at CCA, Brenda Laurel is a designer, researcher and writer. Her work focuses on interactive narrative, human-computer interaction, and cultural aspects of technology. She has worked as a software designer, producer, and researcher for companies including Atari, Activision, Sun Microsystems Labs, Apple, and served as Chair and graduate faculty member of the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She has published extensively on topics including interactive fiction, computer games, autonomous agents, virtual reality, and political and artistic issues in interactive media. She is editor of the book, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, author of Computers as Theatre, Severed Heads, Utopian Entrepreneur, and her newest book is Design Research.

At the CCA offices in San Francisco, California.

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LA: From your perception, how has the field of design changed?

BL: I think we're learning that we have to lead public consciousness in new ways. It's weird to have to wait for, not just business, but more importantly, voters and policy to catch up to the triple bottom line idea. I like to think that in this program, we're building the army of the night. The news outlets in this country have failed us in educating the public on issues like climate change and sustainability. And it's only getting worse. Where else can we turn? We can make a difference through what we design, how we frame design and making, and how we speak and think about those who are touched by what we design. For example, I question my students when they use words like "consumer", "users", "targeting", "eyeballs" – words used in marketing that dehumanize or even dismember people. The "consumer" is this sort of mindless slug through which things pass from retail to landfill in order to generate profit. We don't do that. We speak and think about customers, audiences, players, etc. with dignity and respect. We instantiate the values that we want to see in the world by how we think about people, what we design, and the way we design it. It goes to sustainability, it goes to citizenship - world citizenship. Design is a big responsibility.

LA: How did you enter into design?

BL: I was educated first as a psychologist, then I became an actor, eventually got a masters degree in acting, directing, and a PhD in drama theory and crit, and instantly found myself in the game design business. So there you go. I tell the students, don't count on what you think is going to happen - it's going to be what HAPPENS, and it will surprise you! Get an education that tunes up your ethics and passions, your strategic thinking and your craft. I've worked in drama, game design, interaction design, virtual reality, research in gender and technology, entrepreneurship, media history.

I'm currently working with what I call Gaian IxD in an article for Interactions magazines, to look at how we think about creating interactions that are planetary in scope. Conversations about geo-engineering and "Gaian gardening" are extensions of the sustainability conversation - how do we turn our attention as interaction designers to getting people involved collectively in creating better ways to direct positive change at a global scale?

LA: You, along with others like Theresa Duncan, had paved the way for games for girls in the 90s, can you discuss some of that history?

BL: What happened was there were 6 or 7 companies in the "girl game business", and basically Mattel acquired all of them, and murdered all of them but one, which was American Girl. A few, like Girl Games, slipped by but they never made as great an impact as they might have. Eventually, Mattel choked on their scheme because they invested too much in acquiring properties in order to defend Barbie, but they killed a movement that had some promise. Nevertheless, the political and social reasons for that intervention in popular culture is now past and if I had to do it over again I certainly wouldn't do it the same way. That was a tragedy but it was certainly a lesson in corporate America. And as it turns out, girls have gotten over the hump in terms of computer literacy through other means. Getting them involved in computer science has its own set of challenges, but that's a different conversation.

To me, the place where the alarm is going off today is the degradation of citizenship and civil society. Generally, we are in danger of losing critical intelligence; we have a significant portion of the population in this country, sadly, who accept the stuff they're fed by Fox News, and we're watching it play out in Congress with hideous behavior. That may not only destroy many lives in this country, it gives the lie to everything this country stands for. I think this is happening because consumerism has gotten people out of the habit of thinking critically. Our educational system has been consistently degraded and hobbled by the undervaluing of teachers. It's getting acute. Given the state of citizenship and democracy (in America), there's no way we can address ourselves coherently or meaningfully to the global situation. We can't show solidarity with people in Egypt or anyplace else if we don't have our own house in order. For me, that alarm is turning bright red.

Generations of people have been entrained to accept business as usual, the upside fairy tales that media puts out about our condition, and it's putting our country at risk. In a way, it's putting our planet at risk because America is not taking a leadership role in critical areas like sustainability and climate change. Citizens typically don't understand the notion of triple bottom line. Most people couldn't tell you what a carbon footprint is. If we can't explain triple bottom line, if we don't understand that the environmental and human impacts of business as usual aren't on anybody's bottom line, then we don't get alarmed when clowns in Washington try to eliminate the EPA. Huge swaths of human and planetary well-being don't show up on anybody's spreadsheet, and policies that might correct that aren't considered because the problem itself is invisible to most people.

One of my students just did a presentation on disruption of habits, which is a great, wonderful topic. He's not just talking about disrupting cigarette smoking, or people's laziness around tooth-brushing, he's talking about self-disruption as a way of awakening ourselves to the reality of what we're doing and what's going on around us. This program is part of the Designer's Accord, and our core values around sustainability and human dignity are as fundamental as the notion of quality itself. This has dramatically influenced the kind of work the students are doing and the ethos they are taking into the world along with their craft. A lot of our students are doing things that lift up the specifics of place, perception and mindfulness. They're designing products and systems that embody sustainability. One of our graduates from the Dominican Republic did a thesis project on recycling systems, and she has already begun work back there and to help her whole country figure it out. These people aren't screwing around. We have 2 women from Iran graduating this term who just kicked ass in this program and are determined to take back with them what they're learning – not only the skills but also the values. That's great. It's about intention. Very few thesis projects have the intention of producing products as usual. The work shows mindfulness of sustainability and balance, and much greater awareness of the lives and conditions of the people at the other end of our work than the marketplace normally reflects.

The students in this program are multigenerational. Most are millennials, but some are gen-X-ers - we've even got a trailing boomer or two, so their perspectives are different. I think what the millennials bring to the party from their generation is a radically different understanding of notions of privacy and a desire to rethink ownership in relation to intellectual property and cultural production. I think there's some echo-boomer ethos going on here too - respect for good old northern California hippie values - which is nice because that makes our job easier. They already get it with things like organic or biodynamic food production, labeling things properly, thinking about things like pesticides and BPA in plastics - basics that you might have to lean on more heavily in middle America or the South.

There's also a lot of generosity in the millennials. Generally speaking, they're generous with each other, they're generous with personal information, they are comfortable with utopian thinking. But it's paradoxical: at the same time they act like little customers. They can get kind of fussy when they don't like something about a class - "well I'm the customer, right?" To a certain extent that's true, but it's not the whole story. It takes some work to break through that consumerist veneer they've developed growing up in this society, and get them to understand that they actually came here to work hard and sometimes have a tough time and have people ask them hard questions. When they get to that point - and almost all of them do, their work turns around and becomes exceptional.

LA: Do most of international students at CCA stay here or end up returning to their countries of origin?

BL: Many of them that say they're going back end up staying because the grass is just greener. It makes me a little sad. The students that are most likely to go back are from China. Both PRC and Taiwan. And that's good! I think the energy and perspectives that they're going to take back are probably going to be useful there. What they often end up doing is designing things that create affordances for social change in a positive, non-confrontational way. Their projects often elevate understanding of how systems actually work and make the invisible, visible in various systems and media. They're doing pretty sophisticated design work that can make people more confident and creative as individuals. That's good news.

One of our graduating students was talking today about how we've moved from broadcast media to audience-based media, looking at the multiplicity of media channels available to us in terms of how they are customized to particular audiences, and thinking about how audiences can do that for themselves. One of our graduating students has been work with ways for people to design their own digital tools that bring more of the hand and body into the digital world. Maybe as a reaction to digital age these guys grew up in, their work often brings the senses or notions of place back to life through design. For example, they're re-enlivening digital systems through kinesthetic components. It seems to me that there's a sort of re-embodiment of the digital going on in design.

LA: What role does humor play in your design process?

BL: If it doesn't, I think you're in deep trouble. The definition of humor is pretty broad. Henri Bergson said that mechanical or automatic behavior in people was a source of comedy. That kind of humor you have to get used to as a designer and embrace because it's sending you a message about putting things on autopilot. In a broader view I think that we need a sense of irony, but if it's dark to the extent it's not funny, you've sort of blown it as a critical tool. A spirit of lightness is more to the point than humor, and not attaching to the artifact or even the process in such a way that you quit growing. If you're attached, and you have a failure, it can crater your ability to change your process. If you're not attached, and you have a spirit of lightness in your failure, when someone asks "what was that?", you may respond "oh, that was funny, I see how that didn't work, I'll try it this way". There's a real value in disconnecting your egotistical attachment to the things you design.

Going back to that question of how design is changing, I think the age of a great man is over. The great man may have been funny, but lacked a spirit of lightness – or humility. There are some walking fossils among us, like Phillipe Starck –he gets his stuff put in Target, good for him, elevating the taste of the common folk without their even knowing it! But at the end of the day, design isn't about superstars, it's not a rockstar business. The designer who's going to succeed is going to listen, collaborate, find space for creativity, conduct research, and then bring their values, their imagination, to bear what they learned from the world and from people.
You need to understand design research well enough to know that a potential customer is never going to tell you what to design, so don't be afraid of it limiting your creativity. Use it as inspiration and form your intuition with it. You have to join hands with people you didn't think you needed to, to do a good job in the design world today, including the customer. And that's all good as far as I'm concerned. That's a big thing that's changing. I don't think you can get away with being Phillipe Starck anymore, you might get away with being Charles and Ray Eames, but they had a lot of good R&D and collaboration going on.

BL: What are your thoughts on Apple?

BL: I had a particularly funny run-in with "The Steve", which I will not report here.

Yeah he may be autocratic, but he also has it in the wrist about hiring good people, spreading good process, and he has the marketing piece of it down. He had the audacity to charge more money for his products simply cause it was cool. About 10 or 12 years ago, Apple Computer had about 6% market share – almost a cult item. I walked into an Apple store a couple of years ago and was amazed that the big campaign du jour was 'Macbook, brought to you by the people who invented the iPod' – for those of you who were born yesterday – "we brought you the iPod, not look at this". Boy, did I feel old. But I think he's brilliant.


He's put together a brilliant team, I think he's got perfect intuition, a one-of-a-kind guy, he's an Eames, I'd put him in that class. I don't think he's an evil genius or a Great Man who ignored everybody and just got away with it, I think he's got some real chops at building great teams and working with them to make great designs, and I generally love the products I've been seeing. Recently the planned obsolescence has gotten a little worse, things like crippling mail on the iPad or having a mess with multiple syncing unless you use Mobile Me, but then I remember what it's like to use Windows.

LA: In the last issue of The Whole Earth Catalogue were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Stupid." This really resonated with a young Steve Jobs and informed who he eventually became. Do you see a lineage like this being passed down to our generation?

BL: To an extent we can see it in the echo-boomers. These guys know the lyrics to Neil Young songs, they listen to Paul Simon, they know who the Grateful Dead are, they listen to the Beatles, they've got the utopian piece of my generation's heyday, they're got it in their nervous systems to question intellectual property. Which is a good thing. But in terms of big influencers? I have no idea. All can think of is independent film and independent music as big influencers on how these guys frame cultural direction. That would be my first thought. In their lifetime, they've watched labels go away, they're not confined to what's playing on a particular radio station. Their whole habit of finding cool media and lifting it up quickly is in their life experience, in their formative years. I rely on these guys to feed me terrific music, film, and art that I could never have found on my own. They have a secret jungle drum system of pointing each other to stuff. They're totally invested in this scene.

LA: Where do you see a shift in hard skills versus soft skills in education?

BL: I get advice from leaders in the industry and people who observe design business, I credit Howard Rheingold here. I've put together a board of such people to help us understand how the design world is changing and what's going on out there. What we've heard consistently for the last 4 or 5 years is that high-skill labor can be found off-shore, and a BFA or even an MFA design degree just doesn't get you much, if it's based primarily on high skill. The people on our Pro Council are asking for designers capable of envisioning and directing complex, transdisciplinary projects, who know and use research and strategic tools, who can also "speak business." That advice was the genesis of the trans-disciplinary approach in the program - granted I was pushing for anyway - so what comes after high touch, high skill is partly strategic, partly political, partly collaborative, and partly visionary - not just to observe change, but to own change as we change, and to be really comfortable with that. To me this is all kind of convergence, but not the kind that used to be predicted where all media come out of one box – convergence in that the disciplinary boundaries in design are fading away.

There's an acute need for new, more sophisticated and strategic thinking in design. Material culture is headed for a train wreck, not just locally, but globally. This notion that persistent growth is necessary for an economy to survive and the way that growth is measured is going to kill us if we don't change our views and our actions. Part of what we're doing, not only in this program but also in the dMBA, is looking for better ways to frame cultural and economic health. We need to get out of the box of definitions we're currently immersed in - they are really the heritage of consumerism, consumerist capitalism.

We're all trying to get out of that box. Design research is a biggie for us. Understanding people deeply as who they are rather than who we want them to be is not an old-fashioned part of the design process. Understanding even people who are flat-lined, watching reality TV - they're still people and if you're going to get to them, design something that's going to change their lives in a positive way. Show them some respect and maybe that'll be contagious. Self respect is empowering, a lot of people don't have it.

Take cosmetic companies, and look at the gender issues going on. I often tell my students "with what I learned about pre-adolescent girls, I could have made a really evil, "monetarily successful" cosmetic company. I learned so much about how girls can be insecure and which buttons to push. But I did something else. I worked on games that gave girls emotional rehearsal space and helped them step into their power. At the end of the day we have to decide what we're going to do with what we know. There's this old whine, "it's HARDER to make a video game with a positive effect on people, it's easier to make a game where people kill each other", and my answer is "Yeah it's harder, suck it up!" Are you a designer? Stand up, do the hard thing. We're responsible, buck stops here. Popular culture comes from someplace. Guess what? We make it, it's up to us to change it.