Cassini Nazir - Curiosity

In this episode we talk to University of North Texas  interaction design professor Cassini Nazir about curiosity. It's (literal) roots in care, how it affects how we think about the war in Ukraine, the defiant ingenuity of the targets of oppression, the pros and cons of empathy, and much, much, more.

Recommended content from this episode 

Articles
Articles about our poor memory of weather (shifting baseline syndrome)
Another article about shifting baseline syndrome
Don Norman - Why I Don’t Believe in Empathic Design  

TV
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander

Transcript

(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)

David Dylan Thomas 

Welcome everybody to another edition of “Lately, I've been thinking about…”. I'm your host, David Dylan Thomas, coming to you from Media, Pennsylvania, formerly home of the Lenni-Lenape folks. I am here with my friend Cassini Nazir. Cassini, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Cassini Nazir

Sure. First, my name's Cassini Nazir. I always tell people Cassini like the space probe that crashed into the planet Saturn, back in 2017 - nice knowing you! Or the fashion designer, Oleg Cassini. His last name, my first name.

I'm recording from the University of North Texas, which is where I work. I teach interaction design and design thinking classes here as well.

David Dylan Thomas

Excellent. So tell me, Cassini, what have you been thinking about lately?

Cassini Nazir

As we're recording this, the war in Ukraine is going on. I've been thinking about that a lot. As you know, David, I've been thinking about curiosity for quite some time, in the past two years more systematically. I think curiosity is one of the things that I didn't realize it's a fascination that I have. In fact, as I kind of look back on my life, I realized that it's the single thread through a bunch of disparate experiences.

I would imagine that maybe a lot of listeners and maybe even just a lot of people in general, if you look at their resume or their CV, it's kind of like a paintball explosion. It's all over the place. I imagine curiosity is probably the thing that ties together a lot of folks when you look at it. That's definitely true for me.

David Dylan Thomas

What is it about that intersection of curiosity and the war in Ukraine that you've been noodling on?

Cassini Nazir

There are so many things with the war on Ukraine, just looking at media response. I mean that from American media, Ukrainian media, and then obviously Russian propaganda that's going out there. One of the questions that I asked myself is if it were possible to uproot myself – I'm sitting today in Dallas, Texas – if it was possible to uproot myself to the past couple of years and go to Russia, what would my thoughts be on this? 

Where would I be, if I was in Belarus or Crimea or any of the surrounding nations too, what would I be thinking? Clearly an aggression from what we're seeing, and clearly wrong.

I think I saw a news article earlier today, Vice President Harris – I didn’t get enough from the title – but is beginning the procedures, I think – correct me if I'm wrong – about treating the war in Russia as a war crime, which I think is exactly what should happen. That's exactly what it is. I guess in my thoughts they were around perspective. What would I think if I was looking at this from a different perspective?

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, and it's interesting too, because I do almost the reverse experiment sometimes. I know I've heard a lot of, I'll be honest, I have yet to hear a Russian be like, “Yep, that's my president. That's exactly what I want to happen.”

I think a lot about the reverse. When have there been actions my president has taken where I'm like, Oh God, I hope the rest of the world doesn't think we’re like that. So when Trump was separating children at the border, I was of a mind that's like, I get it. If some other country wants to just bomb us right now because we're horrible, I can't fight that. 

I can tell them I didn't vote for that, but that feels like a weak response. It's just like, we did it, whether I voted for it or not that's America. I feel like that's the closest alignment from putting myself in a mindset of how would I feel if I was in Russia right now and my president had just invaded a sovereign country and was committing war crimes. 

There's an added layer by the way. If I want to protest that here I am in a great deal less danger than if I was in Russia and wanting to protest there, but that would have set that emotion of powerlessness and rage and shame. That's the closest I can get to that from my own experience to say, wow, that sucks to have the person leading you do a thing that you fundamentally disagree with.

Cassini Nazir

I think it's really important what you're saying, that the ideas that the leaders of a country represent us, whether or not we have elected them. On a world stage, whether or not we agree with their actions. I remember the war in Iraq with President Bush and the shenanigans that happened there.

There’s a lot of parallels to what you're saying. That was at a very different level. It bears a lot of similarities in some ways. I know a number of pundits have really tried to put forward the idea of those parallels, but I live in Texas, I'm originally from Trinidad. I always say the small, tiny, little island that I'm from, Trinidad is 60 miles at its longest point. If you were to take it and plop it into the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, my island would be consumed by the area of land. In other words, the city that I live in, the metroplex that I live in is larger than my entire country.

I think Dallas has 7 million people. My country is 1.4, 1.5. Maybe at this point, it's 1.5. When things happen and just having that perspective and family back home, what are they saying? What are they thinking? It's really helpful.

Here in Texas, I'll make a categorical statement that's probably untrue, but by and large, I think a number of Texans don't get out of the state, let alone the country. And so, they feel like, oh, if I’m going to Cancun, I'm a world traveler. Or if I've gone to Cabo, I'm a world traveler. I think those perspectives of what is life like outside our country is really, really important right now.

Maybe the takeaway there is travel is critical to gaining prescriptive gaining perspective. When my wife and I travel, we do try to get away from the tour guides. If you go on a cruise and there's the spaces that you're supposed to stay in, we try to see what life is like for the average individual. What does that day look like? It reminds us of where we came from. I think that's an important thing because sometimes we tend to forget, what was life like?

Sometimes it's things we want to run from as well, depending on what that was. I know for me, it's very humbling just to think back on routes and it helps me to feel centered. I recognize that not everybody's going to feel that way and that's okay. But, for me and my wife it’s very helpful. My wife is also from Trinidad as well.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah. And I think that it's challenging. I remember taking a trip to Jamaica. My Mother-in-law, very generously, had sort of given us a trip for the whole family. We were staying in one of those resorts, but I was hyper aware that we were in one very tiny corner of Jamaica and you did not go outside the gates. But if you wanted to see the real Jamaica, you’ve got to get out of that resort. The real Jamaica might not be something you actually want to see. 

I think that's part of the challenge. I mean, there’s a bit of a contradiction around “I am going on vacation, so I want to be happy, do happy things because I'm on vacation”, versus it almost feels like a different exercise to say “I'm going to travel now to broaden my mind, travel out of a different kind of curiosity or a broader curiosity.” That would sort of be like, if I were doing that, the one place I wouldn't go would be the resort.

Cassini Nazir

It's a striking contrast that I’m coming to this country and I'm living a day in the life that's not representative by and large. If the people of this country, the inner anthropologist, ethnographer, in us is dying to say, well, let's get out, let's walk around. It can be very unsafe as well; it can be eye opening as well. 

When my wife and I had gone to Jamaica, I believe it was Kingston that we were in. We asked somebody to take us around on a car ride, we specifically told them, we just want to see what the day in the life was like. We gave him some money and I remember him saying, “Me thiefing these Americans” because it was to him, a lot of money just to do this stupid thing of driving around. Like, “do you want to see my neighborhood? Who wants to do that? Let me take you to the million-dollar homes that are here.”

That's not what we wanted. We just really wanted to see what is that day in the life. I do remember during the car ride, having a conversation with him and telling him my homeland is not more than a few hundred miles south from here as well. For some reason that opened up a conversation just to get what that day in the life is like.

I find experiences like that really rewarding. Getting out in nature as well as just centering, putting away my phone, not to say not to Instagram the moment or things like that, but just to really be present and detach from all of the technological things around us. I find it to be centering.

David Dylan Thomas

It's interesting how you're relating that to roots. One thing I find, ‘we’ I’ll say broadly, as you know, people who have some ties to sort of African-American descent, is a lack of curiosity or even knowledge around the fact that most of us when we were taken from Africa did not ends up in the US. The vast majority of us ended up in South America and very much so, and even more I'd say in the Caribbean, in Haiti. A lot of us went to Haiti.

Again, a similar story in that, kick out the people who were living there already and then install an enslaved workforce. That template played out in Caribbean and in south – especially Brazil and south America, but just at a much bigger scale. And we don't talk about that. I remember, I think it was the African-American museum in DC where I first saw the sort of map and I'm like, “Whoa! Most of us went there!” A tiny fraction of us, and that was bad enough, but that bad enough was a tiny fraction.

So, I've increasingly become curious about that heritage, which I don't think I have seen us talk about much at all. You're one of the few people that thought of that visitation as being at least to some extent about your roots and about your history.

Cassini Nazir

Yeah. And you know the ironic thing there is as you talk about roots, I remember when I was in my twenties, early twenties in college, and trying to square myself with my homeland, that I felt that I didn't know well enough and that, who am I? 

When you're that age, you're trying to figure out what is your identity? And sometimes we look to our past and say, well, “that's who I am.” Sometimes, we look to the future to say, “this is who I want to craft.” And I was in the sort of liminal stage of like, well, I want to take some of my past, and who I'm going to be in the future and meld those together and just try to learn more about my country.

So, asking my parents about – and I didn't know my grandparents, they knew me, but I didn't know them. I don't remember my grandparents, I should say. And you know, for me looking back at my history and heritage, I really can't because of a couple of reasons. One, the records are not good. Slaves, whether, no adjective in front of that or the word indentured in front of it, generally had a singular name. And so, you know, if there's a name of an individual who was part of my family, it's really hard to tell who that individual was and to separate them from others with similar names as well.

The further back into the past that I go, the denser that fog of history is, and so I know things at a general level, but it's striking to me. I know you and I may have had this conversation in person once, but I think one of the things about Trinidad – and maybe people in general, I think this is true for designers. What I'm about to describe is truly an act of design. The European countries that came in and carved up the Caribbean, like a melon over and over, and just sort of almost handed things over from the Portuguese to the Spanish, to the British, to the Dutch, to whomever, Trinidad was known for its oil.

If you think about it, oils are refined and then they're put into barrels, while in Trinidad, there were a number of barrels that were just empty and left behind. What the people of Trinidad did, which is just amazing – I get goosebumps when I talk about this, quite honestly, they literally took this metaphor of oppression and anger and subjugation, they literally turned it over, so that the bottom of the oil barrel, which had a base to it so that the oil can go out now at the top, they took a hammer to it and they said, I'm going to take an act of creativity. I'm going to make something beautiful out of this. And so, they would hammer into it to be able to make different notes.

My friend, Brian Stone, who I think he was at OSU, Ohio State now he's I think in Singapore, he tells me that these steel pan – which is what they came to be known as – this is the only musical instrument created in the 20th century. I'm quoting Brian because I don't know that for a fact. So, if you think this is false, take it up with Brian!

But what an amazing thing, to be able to say, yes, this happened, but you know what? I'm not going to let it stop me and I'm literally going to upset it. I'm going to take it so that it's now something that allows us to create beautiful things out of it.

Maybe folks belong to religious communities where – a mosaic is very similar to this. Little shards of broken glass are dangerous on their own, but you put them together and you put some adhesive between them and you shine light through it, and wow! It becomes something that transcends itself. 

And so I think there's maybe two things there, just to kind of think about. With the mosaic it talks about needing to be in a community. And I think with steel pan, it talks about the lesson maybe that one lesson that can be taken from that is that the indomitable spirit is important and that we still have the ability to design things of beauty around us.

David Dylan Thomas

I think there's a lesson there and just to clarify, you're just saying the steel drum, that we sort of associated with so much…I remember you were telling me that I'm like, wow! But I think that's indicative of kind of a larger movement. 

I've been thinking a lot about resiliency and this idea that one consequence of being the target of oppression for millennia is that you are building in resiliency. And there's a resiliency that black communities in America have that rich white communities will never have. There is a problem a black community will solve with creativity and community, that a rich white person will solve with money.

One of those solutions is more sustainable than the other. I seriously think about this, as we move into a stage for a long time where we're going to be living with the deprivations that come from climate change. There's going to be less of everything. The folks who understand resiliency can show us the way, in a way that the folks who only understand privilege will simply be unable to do.

Cassini Nazir

You know what you're describing, last year in February in Texas, the energy grid was severely tested and because Texas in its “wisdom…”

David Dylan Thomas

Major air quotes over that “wisdom!”

Cassini Nazir

…decided to have an independent energy grid. If you exclude Texas, there are two energy grids for the nation and that may in itself be a problem. But the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) decided to not winterize its grid, which meant that it was an efficient system, but not a resilient system. And it went down. 

Resilient systems when there's massive change can resist, they have the better ability. I shouldn't make it an absolute, they have the ability to better resist those massive forces of change.  Resiliency is really important. I remember discussions around sustainability led to the notion of, we don't need sustainable systems, we need resilient systems. Resilient systems will help with the longevity and the inevitable change that's happening. 

You look at science fiction, movies and books, and many of them talk about global warming and climate change, whatever the term is that you want to put in there. Some of them look at the effects of that and say coffee, as we know it may very well become a very rare commodity because of the thin band across the world where Arabica beans can be grown.

David Dyland Thomas

Okay, now you’re scaring me! Climate change has got real!

Cassini Nazir

For coffee drinkers, as that band narrows and thins out in fewer parts of the world, that also means that there's probably less coffee that that can be grown. What does that mean? For me, I've already started drinking tea!

David Dylan Thomas

Smart move!

Cassini Nazir

But more seriously, there will be consequences clearly that no one will be immune to. There's a really wonderful article. I'll see if I can find it, maybe we can put it inside the show notes. It’s a two-page article that talks about how people, when we talk about weather, our recollection of weather is about from now, today to the past seven years.

And so, there's this notion of how things were 20 years ago, or 25 years ago, it's this dust and residue that kind of remains, but it doesn't have the solid form that those seven years ago have. And so, when we think about weather change – the article does a good job better than I am right now – but describing how weather change is, as we're thinking about it in our heads, it's so relative and we do not have a sort of reference point if we're thinking about it from ourselves.

Some of us who are listening might be thinking, well, I remember when I was younger, blah, blah, blah, summers were this, that and the other. And that's true, but I think the saliency of what things we remember quite clearly, that seven years is sort of that window.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, it’s difficult for us to imagine. I mean, kind of going back to the curiosity and Ukraine, I mean, my son has actually become quite an expert on geography and kind of military history. It's sort of his obsession now, but he was bringing up this this idea that we forget that his very first act, Putin took out Chechnya – that was his claim to fame. And then when he was up for reelection again, that's when he took Crimea.

So, there’s this shock and awe of like, “He's not really going to invade Ukraine? He invaded Ukraine. Oh crap.” A lot of that disbelief, besides the people whose job it was to study Putin, all of them are like, “he's going to invade”, but everybody on the global stage, there was just a remarkable lack of perspective. I don't even think they went back seven years in sort of understanding the context They were thinking more in the past, like two, three years. “Oh, there's a pandemic and China is having the Olympics. He's going to put some troops there, but he's not really going to invade.”

Cassini Nazir

What you're describing makes me think of techno-optimism that we had in ‘99, going into 2000, of, wow, this new World Wide Web thing will connect us in ways that it hasn't. You remember the AOL CDs that you would use and the dial-up modems and how that was just so common. There was an optimism at that point in time around what technology could offer.

You fast forward, 22 years from that and look at where we are. I would not describe that techno optimism. I think the techno-optimists, people look to them and say they're naive because there's so much evidence now. It didn't take that long for that evidence to accumulate around what technology could do for us, what the internet has done or enabled, both for good and for bad.

I think replacing the techno-optimism that was common in ’99 and 2000, is now this techno-pessimism in the 2020s. You'll know this David, because I talk about this in some of my talks, but curiosity as an emotion, some people who have taken emotions and sort of pieced them together as a model, as a framework, curiosity – the opposite of that is cynicism.

I think cynicism is really a powerful thing. It's powerful because it's the opposite of curiosity. It has the ability to dry it up very quickly. If we don’t channel our cynicism correctly, it also gives the veneer of intelligence and that's not going to work. We may be right about that's not going to work, but we are not right or know why it's not working. 

So, it gives this veneer of intelligence that may not actually be there and I think it too can be dangerous. I'm not saying there aren't things in the world to be cynical about, there are plenty and we can talk about those too. But I think that with the pendulum having swung in completely in the opposite direction, I'm hoping that there is an opportunity for us to be able to look at the world in new and to be able to say – and this is what I think the fields that are attached to design offer is the ability to say, “what could we do? How can we change and improve?”

David Dylan Thomas

It's funny because when I think about cynicism versus curiosity, I feel like there's a distinct lack of humility invested in cynicism because there's a certain degree to which the cynicism is saying, “I've seen this play before. I know what's going to happen and it's going to be bad. I don't need to be curious because I already know everything there is to know about this.” Whereas curiosity sort of suggests a more humble approach, “if I don't know all there is to about this, I'm going to ask questions.”

It's interesting because I was a techno-optimist in a big way. I think I had a very biased curiosity in that “tell me how technology will save us”, but there's an inherent assumption in there.

I was only curious if it was about the good things. I wasn't curious about the bad things. I feel like it's important to think about humility as undergirding some of these approaches in a way that they’re basically maximized for the best of both – the curiosity and the cynicism. 

Cassini Nazir

Yeah, and I'm guilty of something, when I talk about curiosity. I'm guilty of a positivism around it that I almost make it seem like it's this it's this inherently good thing. I need to take a more balanced approach to talk about it too, because curiosity is not just an individual phenomenon. Me turning on the gas and forgetting to turn it off affects not just me, but – and depending on where I live, not just the home that I'm in and not just the people there, but maybe even the entire block, my neighbors. The kid who turns on the gas, but forgets to turn it off or doesn't know how to and the ensuing events that happen afterwards, they affect us.

So there's inherently a social phenomenon attached to curiosity. We're not curious for ourselves, but the first person who looked at where a chicken egg comes from and said, “you know what? I will be the first person to crack that open, stick a fork in it and eat it.” They forever changed cuisines for the world. Just because they did it, it affected a lot of people. It's something that I need to be more balanced about whenever I talk. But I do think that a disciplined curiosity and curiosity – how you’re saying – connected to humility is so critical.

Humility is one of those assemblages, a balancing force, that I think is critical to design. Looking back at some of the literature on design – and I'm pointing at you IDEO!

There's this lack of humility. There's this hubris that, “you know what, I'm a designer, we solve problems and all it takes is one powerful “how might we…” statement and boom, we can solve your problems.”

Entrenched problems are not like that. Changing problems and cultures are not like that and I think we're at a place where people are starting to see the effects of the things, or the effects of the things that were built on those notions are starting to crumble. And maybe in their wake, we can build new things on top of it with more humility?

David Dylan Thomas

That’s kind of the interesting opportunity. There's that moment in the pandemic where everyone is saying, “Okay, when can we get back to normal?” Shortly followed by, “Should we get back to normal? Because normal wasn't really working for me.”

We're just starting to see some of those, I would say post-pandemic, but I’m not sure that's a thing, but later-stage pandemic moments of, “Hey, maybe we don't go back into the office. Maybe we rethink who we're even working for.”

To your point of these things that have been knocked down, like trust in approaches, like design thinking, we have the opportunity to replace them with indigenous ways of knowing. That's an interesting space. As destructive as it is because tearing down some of those ways of knowing also leads us to QAnon.

That’s completely a part of that conversation. It also leads to introducing space for, “Hey, here’s where people have been doing things for a millennia before we came along and fucked it up, and they survived much worse stuff than we've survived. So maybe we should be giving them a little more credit.”

Cassini Nazir

Absolutely, and that humility that says, wow, my way of living may b, massively destructive, even though I'm not seeing it, it's a troubling thought to be able to say that and to be able to square with that. It's great that there's this movement of tiny homes. Texas is a very big space and so people have massive homes and until most recently, prices of homes were very cheap compared to – well a lot of people are coming from California or New York – and so a home in California or New York, you could buy a mansion here in Texas. 

I'm not saying that that there's anything wrong with that, but there's a relativism here that we need to think about it. Like how much do I really need? What's really important in my life? Do I want the added payments that go with that? I'm kind of straying from the notions that I have and I wouldn't blame people for disagreeing with some of the things that I'm saying right now. They're just sort of unordered thoughts that are bouncing around in my head, but I see curiosity as a powerful way to open people to new things.

Openness, isn't enough. We've got to have structures that enable us once a new aperture is open, what do we do with it? What do we do with this possibility? That’s where I do think design has power to enable people to build things. I think it's important that we're opening up the space inside design where a couple of decades ago, just listening to business leaders talking about, “well, you know, we did a focus group and it was a diverse group of people and they liked the ideas that we're presenting.”

I'm glad we've moved from “let's have a diverse group of people at the moment of evaluation”. We've gone further upstream and said “diversity at the moment of ideation”, when we are evaluating ideas, it's not good enough, we're having diversity when we're actually thinking of the things that we might build. And I think that's progress, not everywhere, not equally in any way, but I do see a shift in just general temperament and I think it's a good shift.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, I think it's even more interesting when it's diversity at the moment of funding because that's where the rubber meets the road. So, we talk about things like participatory budgeting, which I know Philadelphia has kind of dallied with a little bit, but it's this notion of where your treasure is, your heart will be also, you know someone cares about a thing when they're spending a lot of money on it and who you give access to that money, I think says a lot.

I think a lot about power and at the end of the day, and a lot of ways power is expressed through the distribution of funds. Like I trust you with this project, therefore I'm gonna give you this much money to do this thing. To say that is a thing, we're going to have diversity of thought, I think it's equally important with the diversity of thought of, what ideas do we want to even conjure, but then which ideas are we going to fund? That to me is really where you start to see some interesting powerplays happen and not coincidentally ends up being much more rare, even as it's rare to bring people in for the ideation, I think it's even rarer to see them brought in for the funding of a thing.

Cassini Nazir

That's an interesting thought there too. There's probably a larger talk there, I imagine you've gotten materials on that too. I'm going to turn the tables here. You've been asking me questions. Just taking that forward. You mentioned Philadelphia, can you give an example of that? Can you unpack that a little bit? 

David Dylan Thomas

I have a friend, we've been discussing about there's a scene toward the end of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier there this discussion of this idea of well, who is in the room when powerful people are making decisions?

It's usually the same suspects, are there people who are going to be affected by your decision who were in the room? So, when you ask are there examples of what it looks like to have multiple people in on the budgeting session? Their kind of should be, because that's supposed to be how democracy works. 

The way we try to scale the concept that many, many, in this case 330 million people, get to decide how their tax dollars get spent on them and others, we can't just put 330 million people in a room and say, “Okay, raise your hands.”

So we say, okay, well, this person, he's going to represent 300,000 of you over here and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So now we just have to deal with hundreds of people in Congress and a hundred senators in this one place. It's easier to handle. In theory, that is how you have participatory budgeting. You have a representative to say, “this is what my client's interests are” They're supposed to advocate for them.

Now in practice, for many reasons, what you actually end up with is a bunch of constituencies lobbying for position. So, a corporation or an industry will say, “Okay, oil wants you to do these things.” Oil can get more FaceTime with that Senator than the 300,000 constituents of whatever. So it breaks down pretty easily. 

But theoretically, that's why these concepts seem so revolutionary and yet are not because we live in a democracy. It’s funny, I was talking to a friend about this. It is weird that we try to pair democracy with this very individualistic version of capitalism. Those two should actually no go together very well. The more collectivist ways of thinking about things pair of much better with democracy as a concept. 

You can look at a place like New Zealand, which is way more collectivists than we are, but it's still a democracy and still Capitalist. It's interesting to me, like, so when you say, like, how do you see participatory, budgeting or participatory ways of thinking about funding things? We should be doing it already, but we've made it really easy not to.

Cassini Nazir

Maybe there's a cultural component there too. The literature on participatory design came out of Scandinavia, I think in the sixties. That's a very different culture that what you're describing here. There’s not capitalism in those countries, there’s a very different flavor of it as well.

We began by talking about Ukraine. We mentioned President Bush, and it strikes me that maybe taking the idea of participatory design is like trying to build democracy in Iraq where there are central structures that need to be erected inside an organization for it to have lasting impact.

I think there's a lot of folks who want to see what we're talking about here, whether participatory funding is something I've just taken notes - and I'm going to look into that. You sparked my curiosity, that's what I love about talking to you David as well – and what conditions need to exist for these things to not just to be there till the next quarter. Maybe this is part of the problem here is what is our rhythm for things where is our interests really held? There seems to be something there I'm not able to articulate it better than what I’m doing right now.

David Dylan Thomas

The other is there's a bit of a catch 22, because I'm saying that the reason participatory budgeting matters is this whole idea that we don't really care until money is involved. At the same time that's not good. It's not good that we only care once there's money involved. The reason that we only care once there's money involved is because that's kind of like how it’s been on culture, but it's sort of like, I somehow have to get you where the power is. You being any target of oppression at scale. I need to get you where the power is and where the respect is. And that's where the money is. So let me get you there, but at the same time once I've done that, the whole system of the most important thing is money that has not been touched at all.

So how do I play the long game, middle game, short game of ultimately, I want to get you to the place where what matters is public health or social good, or respecting, and dignity and things like that. And decouple those from money without actually making - a lot of the reason we have trouble instilling democracy in some places is because it fundamentally goes against how people think of themselves. So, how do I scale people thinking of themselves differently? Because if everybody was sort of in this position of, I value things other than my wealth and we value each other – even more importantly - it becomes harder to use wealth as the thing to keep people down with. 

It's still very possible, don't get me wrong, but it's way, way harder. And you're a lot closer to getting to that post-capitalist state or wherever you want to call it where it's like, oh no, we still use money to buy things but we don't use it as a sign of respect. Respect is our sign of respect.

Cassini Nazir

Money is a signifier of traditional things, It's also an affordance in the dual senses of that term. What we can afford – and that's not the dictionary definition of affordance…

David Dylan Thomas

I never thought about that connection, but that’s totally provocative.

Cassini Nazir41:41

Yeah. The first six letters of affordance. When you ask undergraduates, what does the word affordance mean? You can tell if they've done the reading, because they're like, well, that's how much things cost.

David Dylan Thomas

But in a way it is, right?!

Cassini Nazir

And I think you're connecting that too. I think this is where – I’m laying a lot it and IDEO's feet, but I think they popularize this notion here of design in maybe a way that enabled business to take over the field of design.

I think for a lot of us who our role and I'm using that term – let me just say - I use that term very loosely, design is really just the shaping things in order to achieve an outcome. And you can take that to mean a lot of different things, but think there's a human component to design that is so critical to designers that as a design educator, teaching design, one of my challenges is to say, yes, my students would like jobs after they graduate. 

They absolutely need to learn the methods that they're going to use there, but there are also people who are going to change things in the way that things are done currently. I'd like to whatever's burgeoning in them around these notions of something that I'd like to introduce here in a second, but whatever they're thinking about what human, not human centered design, because there's problems there too, but I'd like them to look at that and to be able to square that away. 

One of the things that I've discovered - I don't know that we've talked about it very much - is this notion of curiosity. The word “curiosity” or the word “curious”, I should say, has its root in a Latin word, which means to care. You used this word not so long ago in the recording here. The idea to care – the original word is “C U R A” Cura, which you can read the English word, “cure”, which also has that meaning. If you look at the Oxford English dictionary, it has something like 17 different connotations to it, which are important because it's very encompassing.

When we use the word “care”, it's oftentimes – there's an industry for it. At the end of it - healthcare. But I think care is so powerful and I'm only starting my research into this but I think empathy can be dangerous. I think empathy is powerful, but it can be dangerous. 

There is an article from Donald Norman, 2018, 2019, ‘Why I Don't Believe in Empathic Design - provocative title. Donald Norman in this article says, I, I don't always know what I'm thinking or feeling, let alone what somebody else around me is thinking or feeling, to be able to design for them.

I think that's really important. We talk in the design space about empathy as if it were a silver bullet. I think we're beginning to confront the limits of empathy. Paul Bloom has this book, its title is it's very clear – ‘Against Empathy’ and he lists a lot of things for us to consider. We empathize more frequently with people who look like us. If I'm a white male, I'm going to empathize with white males. If I'm a black female, I'm going to empathize with people who look like me. And so there's an inherent bias in the notion of empathy and yet we're supposed to give this to other people around us when there are these implicit biases that are built into it.

The other thing is that the lens of empathy applied to the wrong areas, leads us open to having bad actors exploit our empathy as well. I'm thinking of televangelists, right? That's one way, you mentioned QAnon earlier. The notion that why are Lulu lemon wearing folks all of a sudden big QAnon fanatics?

Well, putting this idea forward that there are people killing children, eating children, right? False notion. When you begin breaking it down, which is worse? That I would say that's false or that it could be right and I'm wrong and I'm not doing anything about it? This notion of empathy means that we can be exploited. And I think for some folks in the QAnon phenomenon, that that idea of kids are being taken advantage of, they feel like they're not being empathetic.

There are articles that do a better job of drawing that line between sort of the QAnon phenomenon and yoga videos on YouTube.

But we can be exploited by empathy and this is where I think care is an important thing, because it's a little bit more encompassing. I can empathize our 21st mindset tells us only with humans. I'm not emphasizing with the chair that I'm sitting on. I'm not empathizing with the computer that that is being recorded here.

We just don't have that capacity, but we can care for those things. I can empathize and care for you as a human being, but I can also care for the things around me, the planet being the biggest thing that we should be caring about. And I think that again, I'm just early in pulling at these threads, but I think they're important.

I think I'm not saying I have a problem with empathy, but I do think it's very important to identify the borders and edges of it and then assemble onto those additional emotive capacities for us too.

David Dylan Thomas

I think about that a lot. I mean my gut reaction, every time I hear and I get it, like empathy is bad. My immediate gut reaction is you know that the defining characteristic of a psychopath is a lack of empathy. Trust me, you do not want a society of people who don't have empathy. They will kill the shit out of each other! Serial killer city!

And by the way, we already know what it looks like to have people in design who have no empathy. They're called CEOs. CEOs consistently over-index for a psychopathy and when you look at their decisions, you're like, yep, there was no empathy in that decision.

So, to me, it isn't about eliminating empathy any more than it is about making everything about empathy. Like anytime you want to go binary on a thing, you're going to mess up.

To your point though, I like the idea of figuring out what it can and can't do. It's like saying, is it the heart? Is it the lungs? Is it the spleen? It's something, but it's not everything and it's not enough.

I like your notion of care as being this more all-encompassing – we have discussed this part. I think it's fascinating that curiosity and care and cure – I didn’t know that one - all come from the same sort of route of care. And it's almost to say if I am curious about something that is a way of showing care for that thing, which I think is true.

It's an emotional aspect, because I think we think of curiosity as largely an intellectual phenomenon. But I mean, as you described, I agree there is an emotional aspect to it that is fundamentally different from hate or anger or fear. It's very hard to be afraid and curious at the same time.

Cassini Nazir

And yet, it's such a fragile thing that maybe that's possible too? I remember when I was a kid, my parents used to tell us, “Don't watch TV past a certain time.” Both of my parents worked and so I had two older brothers and we would watch TV, me being the youngest of these groups. I remember having this idea, because my mom used to come back and she used to put her hand on the back of the TV and see is it warm?

David Dylan Thomas

Smart mom!

Cassini Nazir

So being a kid, I was like, you know what, I'm going to one up my mom, before she comes home. Okay, we're watching TV. We hear the car, there's a glass of water. Let me go grab that…!

There are ideas that we can have about how things work that are wrong. This is why I think, I want to point out, I fully agree with you. We need empathy. It is a so critical thing to who we are as human beings to understanding the experiences of others, but even to begin having the experiences of others, we have to be curious about them.

Once we are, have that sort of capacity of empathy, I think that the emotion of care is really critical. I see this, maybe you played the game Civilizations?

David Dylan Thomas

 I've never played it, but I'm familiar with it.

Cassini Nazir

Essentially, not board games, but digital computer games where you've got to explore the map and as you're moving around, the map begins to present itself. And what are the edges of empathy in that same way? I think we're starting to see that. 

Then if you think of care, maybe as the ocean that is around it. What's the ocean of care that's there? Both of these things we have, I say that because I use the word capacity and I'm starting to use this because my wife's a nurse. The pandemic has really made that capacity for empathy and care, it's strained it. It's challenging when she come comes home. I feel like I'm like, I would love to give her my extra reserve because that reservoir has dried up. 

I think it's something that we need technology that we have a capacity for it. If we do that means that that capacity can be extended. It means it can also shrink. And we need to be aware of that, but it can dry up. We can get burnt out. It can be tough designing for other people. It can be tough giving care to others around us as well. We have a specific capacity. Again, it can be stretched, it can dwindle. It can change is I guess what I'm saying there, but that's an important thing to consider.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, absolutely. It has been wonderful talking to you. As you know, I can talk to you for hours more, but thank you so much for being on the show, Cassini. I hope to see you again soon.

Cassini Nazir

Thank you, David.

David Dylan Thomas

For the cognitive…I keep doing this…for the cognitive bias podcast that’s our usual sign out. You know what, I'm going to keep it in every time I do it just to learn! So, people can go on the learning journey with me!

Anyway, for “Lately, I've been thinking about…” I've been your host, David Dylan Thomas, thank you Cassini and we will see you all next time.