My review of The Browne Review: what a f***ing disgrace

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The Least We Can Do

This talk was given at Savannah College of Art and Design, USA, on 9 October 2010 as part of the first Design Ethos Conference. The intention of the talk was to provoke a debate about what graphic design is, whether the way it is seen is limiting, and whether the graphic design "community's" response to the Deepwater Horizon oil leak was as meaningful as it could have been.

(Note, picture credits are currently missing and will be added soon)

Earlier this year the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven people.

The pipeline supplying the rig ruptured and led to a massive leak which reached the surface and began to spread towards the Gulf of Mexico.

The spill resulted in a massive environmental disaster both at sea and on land. All this is well known. It's not my intention to go into great detail about something I imagine is better understood here in Georgia than it is in most places.

But I do want to look at what caused the spill, and put a specific design-oriented spin on it.

There have been, and will be many more, enquiries in to the disaster - what led to it, how it was dealt with, how a repeat can be avoided in the future. BP's own enquiry was characterized in the press as an attempt to shift blame, but the reality is the whole process was one massive game of blame shifting, with little real analysis of the causes. These causes were in themselves not that significant, but like the O-rings that led to the Challenger explosion, they turned out to be important.

These aren't the only four causes, and not even the most important, but they're the ones that stand out for me. Alarms being switched off, failure to assemble key equipment properly, a breakdown in communications, and something else which I will come to.

Alarms are annoying. They're sort of meant to be. Or rather, they're supposed to be persistent and insistent. In fact when they're annoying they often have the reverse effect of the one that's intended because people tend to turn them off, or nobble them so they won't work. And that's what happened here.
Key warning systems were switched off to enable workers to sleep (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/23/deepwater-horizon-oil-rig-alarms). The decision was made by Transocean staff to prevent workers "being woken up at 3 o'clock in the morning due to false alarms".

The second cause was that contractors failed to supply the right amount of key parts to the contractor building the rig. This encapsulates the third cause - poor communications. Let's deal with the parts problem first. If an extensible hose has a section missing, it is always the end section, never the middle one, because there's no such thing as a middle section. The hose will still work, it will just be shorter. That might make it difficult to wash out of reach windows but it won't be catastrophic. In an oil rig, if the design calls for six grommets then it needs six. Assuming that two of them are redundant for safety reasons doesn't mean you can get away with four - it means that the safety margin has gone. A rare event has now become slightly less rare and if it happens the chances of catastrophe have increased.
If being drenched in water were dangerous, we'd design a hose that could only work if it were a certain length, so that if a part were missing it wound't operate.

As a kid I noticed that on the train line from my home city of York to nearby Harrogate, part of the line was single track. For a train to be allowed on the single track the driver had to collect a big rubber brick on a large metal loop from the station master. This "token" meant that was the only train on the track. At the end of the track the driver would give the token to the station master there, so the next train along could proceed. Only one token meant only one train, and no crashes. A signal would have worked just as well, but if the signal broke then disaster might occur. A token works because it is simple and unlikely to fail due to mechanical error.
It also means that communications between the different parties - station masters and train drivers - were kept simple. Either you had the token or you didn't, and if you didn't you couldn't go anywhere.
In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, not only were key pieces of the rig missing, the communication system was set up in such a way that one person could proceed with their part of the job assuming either that the other person had done theirs, or knowing they hadn't but assuming it didn't matter. Complex systems need simple solutions even if it's as basic as passing a token to the next part of the process before it can proceed.

So that's three causes, each with a design problem attached to them. What's the fourth? Well to explain this we need to look at the reaction to the disaster.

America responded the way it always does: it set up some hearings. The problem with doing this is it makes it far less likely that anything approaching the truth will ever be heard as people understandably try to avoid saying something they might later regret, either because it shows them to be incompetent or criminal, or because the full facts aren't known.
This process was made much easier by the fact that not only was the villain of the piece a company called BP, but it had an Englishman as its head.

BP wasn't the only company involved - in fact only a handful of the people working on the rig were BP employees. But every story needs a villain.

And just as Hollywood always casts Brits as its villains, so the media seemed to latch on to the British element here. This was a disaster brought upon hard working American people by a foreign company, the "British oil giant", British Petroleum.

Except BP hasn't been called British Petroleum for the best part of a decade since it merged with Amoco and then acquired Arco.

The sentiments behind the logo have long been a point of highly appropriate criticism. But that aside the fact remains...

BP is as much an American company as it is British.

It employs more Americans, it serves more Americans, it has more production facilities in the US than the whole of the North Sea oil field put together, and when its shares tanked it hurt more US pension funds than it did British.

All of which is not to make a political or even nationalist point, but simply to make a point. Why did not only the US media but US politicians - the President included - insist on calling BP British Petroleum? The answer tells you where I think the fourth cause comes from.

The oil spill soon became highly political with right wing commentators (and left wing too - Jon Stewart was notable in his criticism) quick to suggest Obama wasn't doing enough. Comparisons - arguably rather distasteful ones - with Katrina were made.

And some people even suggested the whole thing, or at least the apparently slow reaction to the explosion, was a plot to stop offshore drilling. It's funny how government in the US is made out to be incompetent in everything except convoluted conspiracies and keeping them quiet...

All this of course ignores the painful truth that up until the oil spill, the dominant refrain in discussions of the USA's energy needs was "drill baby drill", onshore, offshore, and in Arctic national wildlife reserves.

Except, of course, the whole offshore thing became too much of a hot potato for a while and some politicians, Sarah Palin included, conveniently forgot that they were advocates of drilling anywhere, and of loose regulation of drilling. Her attempt to blame "extreme greenies" for the spill marked a new low, even for her.

The attempts to paint this as a foreign-made disaster, to make it political, to find someone to blame rather than understand the problem, to use it as an excuse to open up arctic oil reserves... all these point to the fourth cause for the disaster: us.
Anyone who drives a car,

anyone who flies - including those of us who flew here. Anyone who uses oil in a way that imagines it is unlimited in its supply and has no effect on the world we live in...

We are the real cause of the oil spill.

Which is all very depressing. So let's cheer ourselves up a bit and ask "can we fix it?"

Well, yes we can. But how we can fix it is another matter entirely. In the long term the solution isn't clear other than wait till the oil runs out and then pray that whatever civilization arises from the ashes will be a little more enlightened, if less widely travelled.
But the attempts to solve the leak itself, and its causes, tell us a lot about the state of design, and the way people look at it.

BP famously came up with several solutions and proposals which were roundly criticized by the experts employed by the media. By which I mean journalists who normally cover other areas such as celebrities crashing into fire hydrants. In the UK there's been a debate recently about why "business correspondents" also cover industrial relations and economics, as if all three are the same thing. In the US reporting there seemed to be few, if any, engineering correspondents at work on the story. Instead the coverage was characterized by a lot of sneering, particularly at the names of the different plans.
Top Kill - blocking the leak with junk - sounds, on the face of it, to be quite a sensible idea. But the fact the "junk" included golf balls seemed to make it completely ridiculous.

Putting a cap on top of the leak also made sense, but calling it a "top hat" also meant the plan was never really taken seriously.

This headline from Newsweek says it all: "BP's plans to stop the oil spill: so crazy they just might work?"
Well call me an old cynic but surely if a plan works, it's not crazy - it's just a plan that might well work.
What was it about this story that made everyone an expert on complex engineering and physics problems? When people said "what is Obama doing about it?" what they really meant was "why is Obama letting engineers come up with engineering solutions instead of, oh I don't know, calling in Superman or something?"

Before we knew it, everyone was coming up with solutions to the leak and its effects, from spreading peat on the oil to soak it up to wrapping a massive metal cone around the leak - something which goes to show that just because you can use AutoCAD does not mean you know the physics at play on a structure that big, or understand the meaning of scale. Either those ships are massive, or the leak is happening at the bottom of a river.

Other schemes suggested included detonating a nuclear bomb, and using hair to soak up the oil (actually not a stupid idea at all, but written about like it was the craziest solution ever).

Google for BP oil spill solutions and you get quite a few results.

This, I believe, is Kevin Costner attempting to single-handedly clear up the oil spill while smoking a cigar.

So that's the engineering response, and other people's responses to those responses. What did our noble profession do to contribute?

We designed some logos!

These started to appear over the summer and at first they were quite interesting satirical comments. But after a while it turned out that this was all the graphic design community (and, by extension, the whole design community?) was doing.

Greenpeace launched a competition for a BP logo redesign with a tiny prize and the chance to be used in a campaign - a free pitch if ever there was one.

I've selected some of the best from around the web - most were, it has to be said, rubbish.

As illustrations accompanying an article on BP these would work rather well. But that's really all they are - satirical illustrations.

They fail to capture the nuances of the story - all the things I've just mentioned, for example - and make this 100% about BP rather than, say, about the lack of regulation, the insatiable demand for oil.

It's all BP's fault. Nothing to do with us.

This one, for example, misses the point entirely. The oil drip has a pound symbol in it. Yes, it's all about profit (and British profit at that!) But oil money doesn't just go to the oil company, it flows through the communities that work for the oil companies, the businesses that refine or sell on the oil, the politicians who are funded by oil company donations, the taxes that are reaped from the whole operation.

It's nice, but it's wrong. BP has a lot to answer for, but making them the sole bad guys lets a lot of other people off the hook.

This is perhaps the only graphic I found that commented on the situation rather than BP.

Contrast it with this one.

Some of these devices made it on to signs used in protests. Ironically, this sign was probably printed using ink made from oil, or certainly contained in plastic made from oil, and I suspect most of the protesters made their way to the protests using transport fueled by oil. But putting an oil-covered BP logo on a stick gets you off the hook for your own part in the disaster.

This flag erected in London (I think by Greenpeace) manages not only to pin the blame on just the one company (admittedly, like I've said, a company that really deserves to be criticized for much of its business practice) but also reinforces the idea that it's British companies that do this stuff, not good American ones.

Meanwhile graphic designers were getting a lot of kudos for their ability to use Photoshop to illustrate how seriously BP was taking the situation. I suspect that most people think of graphic design and think of fakery these days. We didn't come out of this particularly well.

The oil spill, and graphic design's non-response to the problem, stems (as far as I see it) from one big problem.

We think it's art.
Art education may suit the art world, but it's not the way that design should be taught. It's narcissistic, subjective, at the mercy of passing tastes and ideological battles between "schools" and camps, all chasing after the critical approval of a few wealthy patrons or well-placed critics.
This is not an atmosphere that produces good design. In fact it produces awful design. The rare successes are, as a result, feted and held up as examples of what's good about design education instead of being held up as examples of everything that's wrong with it.

Design education insists on putting people in silos. If you're taught product design, your concern is with products. If it's interactive design it's interaction. If it's graphic design it's graphics. The idea that a graphic designer can involve themselves in something else is alien to many students and faculty. Again, the fact that there are rare individuals who transcend disciplines is a sign of failure, not of success.

The graphic design "solutions" I showed you are the direct result of an art-based design education. The focus on teaching methods like the crit produce a psychological need to please, and a need to be heard saying something profound - not unlike giving a talk at a conference.
This leads to a need for peer approval, and a need to be heard. Our desire for social and cultural capital produces a mindset which views design as art, and this means design as commentary.
I know many people think there's nothing wrong with that and I certainly wouldn't take away a designer's right to say things through their work, but that's not the purpose of design.

At the risk of annoying a lot of people, let me suggest that there is a fundamental difference between art and design. If you want to say something about the world, be an artist. The world needs commentators and critics and people who make us think. It's an important job.
But if you actually want to do something, or help people who listen to artists to do something as a result of what they've seen or heard, then be a designer. Artists talk, designers act.

Originally this slide said "Design Thinking" but I'm never sure if this week that term is unfashionable or whether this is the week everyone is all for it. So instead let me talk about how I think design, and graphic design in particular, could be accused of being unthinking.

Put basically, the idea of design thinking is applying a particular way of approaching a problem to areas that are not traditionally seen as "design". At its heart is this idea that the design process can reveal a great deal about any situation, and that anyone - not just designers - can think in a designerly way. One definition gives design thinking five stages: empathy, definition, ideation, prototype and testing.

Empathy is about trying to understand people by observing them, or putting ourselves in their shoes, or involving them at the heart of the process.

Only then can you define the problem.

Once you've got your definition you can start to develop potential solutions, some of them bizarre, some of them obvious, none of them "stupid".

After which it's time to prototype the idea, whether it's a product, a service, an app, a poster...

And then you test it out, and prepare to refine it.

When you approach the Deep Water situation from a design thinking perspective you begin to look at problems differently.

You can debate all you want about whether it should be possible to switch off an alarm, and there's understandable disbelief at the explanation given by Transco about why the alarm was switched off a year before the accident. But a design thinking approach to the problem would ask you to empathize with the people who work on the rigs - hardly an easy or relaxing job. Understanding that the risk of an accident due to mechanical failure was nothing compared with the risk of an accident caused by lack of sleep will help you to understand the real problem (the stresses of the workplace) rather than adopt a sticking plaster solution to another problem entirely. My immediate response to this is that the alarm shouldn't have been something that woke people up, but something that was seen by whoever was awake, and someone on shore so they could make sure the person on watch had seen it and dealt with it.

How do you ensure critical systems can't work without key components? This is actually several problems - the first being that the people receiving the parts shouldn't just have assumed everything was alright. The second was one of basic design. In a train, if the driver isn't physically touching something, the train won't move. It's a failsafe against the driver falling asleep or having a hear attack. What's the equivalent in a rig? At the moment it seems to be someone ticking a box when the thing is constructed when in fact it should be something more reliable, even if it's as simple as the tokens used in 19th century railway design.

All these problems could be tackled - successfully, I hope - by approaching them using this perspective.
The problem with "design thinking" for me is that it begins with the conceit that everybody else could benefit from approaching problems the way designers approach problems. The trouble is, though the design thinking concept and process is a very good one, it's also a lie. Designers don't, on the whole, think like that, because the education system and the industry itself is self-obsessed. These four problems are very real ones, and seeing them as design problems might help us solve them. Instead we got this:

How can we change BP's logo? How can we show off to each other about how clever we are? This is not design thinking, it is unthinking design.

Let me talk briefly about two design projects I think typify how graphic design so very nearly gets it right, and then spectacularly misses the point.

Not long ago the British design agency johnson banks came up with "phonetikan", a way of representing Japanese characters in a way that allowed the reader to pronounce them phonetically. The idea is a good one.
Recently, for a trip to a Chinese exposition the company wondered if the same idea could be translated to Mandarin hanzi, the characters we're all familiar with but quite probably can't read.
These are examples of their solution, called Mandagrams, which is based on the idea that Chinese characters are pictograms - the characters for mountain and hand come from primitive illustrations of those things.
The problem is, most Chinese characters aren't based on the object they represent, and in fact most Chinese characters are not used on their own. The character for cup, for example, doesn't mean cup in writing or speaking without another character accompanying it.
But never let a matter of linguistics get in the way of a nice idea.
The character for tea, cha, is represented as a cup of tea, while the character for monkey is represented as a monkey. I have a few problems with this. The first is that the tea cup is not only a very western idea of a cup of tea, it can also be confused for a cup of coffee. Not only that but while it looks cute, the character for monkey is not one you're likely to see very much around China and when you are, it will probably be accompanied by an actual monkey so is fairly redundant.
My biggest problem though is that it is a patronizing attempt to make another culture's language "acceptable". When I critiqued the idea on a blog, Michael Johnson commented that I was wrong to think it was a tool to help people learn Chinese. Instead, he said, it was a "research project" aimed at tourists and time-poor people.
My response to that is simple. Firstly, it's not a research project. If it were a research project, then my criticisms would have been accepted for what they were, legitimate comments rather than cheap shots. A research project doesn't start out by assuming that there's a problem, it starts out by asking if there's a problem.
Secondly it misses the point. Anyone who travels to China for tourism can't reasonably complain they can't understand the characters. It's like people who travel to other countries and then spend all their time looking for food from home. And as for time-poor people (businessmen, presumably), they should hire a guide rather than expect that everywhere they go these nice but ultimately infantile symbols will be everywhere.
The idea breaks down when you realize that approaching this "problem" from a learning perspective would help, because then you'd know that there is a list of essential characters that you are most likely to meet in China.

Octopus is not one of them. Bus, train, station, ticket, help, police, money, shop, haggle, restaurant - they are ones you'll meet. But the Chinese for bus, which learners encounter, is gonggongchiche - as I said in response to Michael Johnson, good luck coming up with a Mandagram for that!

As it turns out, China's way ahead of us here. There is a Romanised version of Chinese called "pinyin" which converts Chinese into something no more difficult to understand than any other foreign language. And they have another solution as well. They use English.

For my second example I want to focus briefly on Bruno Maags who recently brought his hatred of Helvetica to a head with the design of a new typeface called Akzidens Grotesk. It's pretty much indistinguishable from Helvetica it turns out, though like with fine wines, an expert would spot the difference a mile off. Which makes you wonder who it's aimed at.

The whole thing was launched with an extravagant manifesto with type printed as large as you like on a massive spread using expensive inks.

Ironically, one of the criticisms of Helvetica that Maags gives, is that it's difficult to read.

For me, this is the ultimate vanity project and a good example of what I mean as design as art and comment - though in this case the comment is hardly of mass significance. It's a product of the way that design sees itself as a form of art rather than action, a need to be heard, and to be seen, and to win peer approval. It's also immensely, almost criminally, wasteful.

As Michael Johnson said to me after he read my comments on Mandagrams, "it's easy to criticise, I guess". Well, yes it is. But the real problem I have with these two examples is that they both tackle real issues. Whether it's understanding, or feeling comfortable with, a foreign culture, or the issue of readability in type, these are problems designers should be tackling. It's what's at the heart of "design thinking" and it's what's at the heart of the notion of "design research", something many of us undertake. My own university is a research-led university and while for some colleagues and students the transition from "art for arts sake" to "design for research" has been an uncomfortable one, it is reaping rewards. We still produce pretty good designers, but they no longer remain content with just being pretty. At the moment, for example, some of our undergraduate interactive design and product design students are working with a local group of aphasia sufferers to understand their communication needs and design solutions for them and, crucially, with them.

Just leaping in and saying "what you need is a..." new typeface or whatever is not good enough. That's not design, it's commentary.

But this brings me to my final point. Graphic design has a problem. I've long argued that designers need to be more active and while it's easy to show a product designer or an interaction designer how they can use their skills and knowledge to make a difference, it's harder to do that with graphic designers.

Can graphic design only say things? If you look at the way graphic design is defined it's often as "communication". And because a graphic designer is always communicating someone else's message, is it only natural that, given the opportunity, their first reaction to something like the oil spill is to create a message of their own?
Is graphic design actually, then, graphic art? A form of expression but not action?

I don't think so. I think the problem is that the term graphic design is limiting - it's like walling yourself in, or building a silo around you.
There are three basic ways I think graphic design needs to change.
The first is to act as a graphic designer or, rather, as a person. When something like the Deepwater Horizon happens there are three things you can do: do nothing; complain; change the way you behave and the way others behave. As a graphic designer, the third option means everything from what ink you use to what car you drive. It's not acting as a graphic designer per se, but as a citizen, a human being.

The second is to get out of the silo. Being a graphic designer says all you can do is come up with graphical solutions to problems. So someone else is going to have to come up with a system that alerts people to engineering failures, and it's going to be the graphic designer's job to... what? Design the instruction leaflet? That's how we limit ourselves. Start being a designer.

And the third is to start creating solutions, not statements. Our definition of graphic design is too limited and needs to broaden if it is to have any relevance or impact in the 21st century.

Once you stop thinking that the only problems you can tackle are ones that require a knowledge of photoshop, the world is your oyster. Start creating solutions, not comments. Because while your comments are probably very apposite and well worth listening to, passing judgement on things is, quite literally...

The least we can do.