The Netherlands is one of the richest countries in the world. Still, one in five families is facing severe debt problems. It is expected that in 2030, more than 60 per cent of the Dutch population will suffer from obesity. The Dutch mental healthcare system is chronically overburdened: while demand continues to rise, the waiting lists for receiving psychological or psychiatric care have already increased to the point that we can rightfully call it a crisis. All of these problems are omnipresent to the extent that the causes – and, therefore, the solutions – lie not with any individual, but with society as a whole. But how can we identify these causes and solutions?
Walking around the streets of Delft as an Industrial Design student around 2005, it dawned on me that the things we produce drastically impact our lives. The roads and bridges we build, the houses we design, the products and services we use: all of these play a small but significant role in our everyday lives. I became acutely aware of this when the societal impact of the microwave was discussed as part of a course called ‘Reflection on Design’. Being able to heat up meals in a jiffy has unquestionably made life easier. But when we zoom out, we can see the effects of the invention of the microwave on society. Since its introduction, the frequency at which families or flatmates sit down at the dinner table and share a meal has decreased to less than once a week. Apart from its primary function of heating food, the microwave apparently holds another central role in our society because of its large implicit side-effect: it diminishes the opportunity for meaningful conversation.
This has always fascinated me a great deal. If you look at the world through this lens, you start wondering about every little thing: how does this object, this service, influence our lives? What are its beneficial and detrimental side effects? And during the design process of any given object, how can we ensure that these side effects are, indeed, positive?
Oftentimes, governments seem to assume that civilians act both rationally and with malicious intent.
Many of the things that we are surrounded by have not been designed with these side effects in mind – either positive or negative. Our economic system likes to capitalise off of our primal brain, which isn’t very capable of taking long-term effects into account while making our many daily decisions. Consuming unhealthy food, taking the car instead of walking or cycling, impulsively buying all kinds of trinkets we don’t really need or can’t even afford, being compulsively stuck to a tiny screen in search of new impulses and purposely designed to keep us there – our public space is constantly exploiting our desires, and if we want to take good care of ourselves, we have to resist its temptations. Unfortunately, more often than not this reality is not in civilians’ own interest. Companies – with the help of designers and other creatives – have become incredibly skillful at the art of seduction and facilitating consumer behavior that’s lucrative for them, not for us. Our government, however, does not seem to hold the same creative power to counter these negative effects of commercial influence in favour of the greater good. As a result, it often feels like the things that we know are good for us, have been made unnecessarily difficult or unattractive. Fruit and vegetables are still expensive, just like meat substitutes. Exercising or playing outside are made difficult in cities without much greenery, while gym memberships are costly. Spending more money than you have is very easy with ‘shop-now-pay-later’ services like Klarna and easy-to-attain yet costly loans, but finding the right help with your finances and personal debt is difficult, unattractive and bureaucratic. And ever since the explosive growth of single-person households, loneliness is lurking in a society where social structures have been economized on, with decreasing numbers of libraries, sheltered workshops and community centers since the 1960s.
Looking at it from this angle, you can only reach one conclusion: we’ve created a world, a public space and society, which doesn’t take care of us very well. How did we end up here? A dual image of humankind The commercial and political world hold two completely different images of humankind. Commerce has known for a very long time that consumers are, well, people, with those primal brains that are easily distracted, manipulated and influenced. Oftentimes, however, governments somehow seem to assume that civilians act both rationally and with malicious intent. A poignant example is the toeslagenaffaire: the ongoing Dutch childcare benefits scandal which saw the tax authorities wrongly accuse thousands of parents of making fraudulent benefit claims, pushing many of them into financial hardship and family tragedy through unjust repayment schemes. While supermarkets have introduced self-scanning registers because they know the vast majority of people will honestly pay for their groceries, it appears as though the government systematically considers those same people frauds, judging by some of its policies and mechanisms of surveillance. In many Dutch municipalities, for example, tenaciously tracking down fraudsters seems to have become a goal in itself, rather than a necessary evil.
It will come as no surprise that this dualistic thinking about the way people function has disproportionately bad outcomes for people lacking privilege. If you are healthy and wealthy and without worries or stress, chances are you have plenty of bandwidth to take care of yourself and are not reliant on the government. Also, your money can fill up the holes left open by the flaws of society. You can go to literal greener pastures, hire a personal trainer to keep you moving, get a coach to tackle mental health challenges, pay financial experts to secure your assets and pension and get a good lawyer in case you’re ever in trouble. But the less money you have, the more dependent you are on often poorly designed municipal and governmental products and services, and the higher the likelihood you won’t make it out. Still, I’m optimistic. Since the toeslagenaffaire, something has tilted in the Netherlands. It feels like the whole political system, from left to right, has realized that civilians are people. And that most people are good people – they’re just not always able to make sensible decisions. This realisation is crucial, because now we can ask ourselves the question: how do we design a society which really does take good care of us – long and short term?
We are going through many significant changes: the energy transition, the protein transition, large scale urbanization and the housing crisis. This is why we will have to take a fresh and critical look at our society and public spaces. For everything we develop, we will have to ask ourselves what will be the (direct and indirect) consequences on a societal scale, in order to make sure these consequences result in positive change overall. Because if we can influence century-old family traditions by inventing something as banale as the microwave, what can’t we do?
Luckily, nowadays we know so much more about ourselves than we used to, about how we function (and how we don’t). Through all of our psychological and behavioral scientific knowledge, we are getting a better grasp on what we need to retrieve and maintain a happy and meaningful life, and can learn how to steer people towards it by making certain choices easy and others harder to make.
Do you know who mastered the art of steering people’s choices? Designers. Designers know how to make things easier, more attractive and fun. And how powerful design can be. My plea is that in our collective aim for a better future, those two worlds – the world of design and the public sector – should collaborate a lot more and much closer. Designers could and should make a much more significant contribution to society and public space by designing products and services that take better care of us.
Designers know how to make things easier, more attractive and fun. And how powerful design can be.
Steering people’s choices – and therefore, influencing their behaviours and lives – may sound scary. Some argue that these practices aren’t fit for governments, in fear of repressive systems with too much control. However, right this moment, the government is already steering people’s behaviour in many different ways through laws, financial incentives and campaigns. From an ethical perspective, I think we should ask ourselves whether it’s fair to expose people to the ever intensifying influence of commercial parties, seducing potential customers to spend their limited time, money and mental space on their products and offer nothing in return but trust in people’s individual and unlimited capacity to ‘make the right decisions’.
Ever since I left Delft, I have returned yearly to give lectures and teach design methodology, and every year, more students get passionate about how to use design as a tool to change behaviour and improve both individual lives and society as a whole. Over the past decade, we’ve seen the emergence of social design. Researchers and start-ups in this field are trying to figure out in practice how best to predict indirect side effects, how best to incorporate theminto the design process, and how to design specifically for these desired side effects. By understanding behavioural research, incorporating it into our solutions and testing and measuring both the direct and the indirect effects, we can change the way we shape the world around us. But designers cannot change the world all on their own. We need policy makers and public institutions to work together with. People who own the problems that need new solutions. We need them to experiment, to take the chance to do things differently – to believe that this change is possible.
What does a neighbourhood look like that has been designed to reduce loneliness and improve health? What if the tax authorities were tasked to operate on the basis of trust and gratitude? Could we have banks that help people stay financially stable? In my opinion, the opportunities and possibilities for a better, more inclusive society are endless.
