Design As Season Finale | Design As ft. Patrick Whitney

Design As Season Finale | Design As ft. Patrick Whitney features Lee Moreau in conversation with Patrick Whitney.

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A full transcript of the show can be found on our website. 

Season three of Design As draws from recordings taken at the Shapeshift Summit hosted in Chicago in May 2025.

Transcript

Lee Moreau: [00:00:01] Welcome to Design As, a show that's intended to speculate on the future of design from a range of different perspectives. And this season, like everyone else, we're talking about AI. I'm Lee Moreau, founding director of Other Tomorrows and professor at Northeastern University. This past May, I attended the Shapeshift Summit at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where designers and technologists came together to try to get a handle on what responsible AI is and what it could be. This season we've talked a lot about where we are and where we're going, not just in terms of AI, but also in terms of design as a whole. And while our finale guest has a lot to say about the future, he's also an incredible voice from our past and our present. Patrick Whitney probably needs no introduction, but he represents a true icon in the design community and particularly in design education. Patrick represents a really important moment in the history of design, which is really the transition from their craft legacy and making into a role where designers are playing increasingly in business and leadership and changing the course of the future. And the work that he was doing at the ID, the way he approached education and the kind of permission that he gave designers to really look at themselves a bit more seriously and with a bit more urgency. I think it's important in a conversation around the future of technology and AI and where we're going, that we have a voice still in our midst that is giving us the space and the time to think about these issues. This interview wasn't intentional. We sort of pulled Patrick aside. He was generous with his time, we were very fortunate, but it reminded me of how important it is to maintain that legacy of space and conversation while we're growing the future of our discipline. I'm really excited to share this interview with all of you.  [00:01:54][113.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:01:58] I'm here right now with Patrick Whitney, who is Emeritus Professor here at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech, and is also at the School of Public Health at Brown University. You were just at the Chan School at Harvard for a few years as well. You're a legend in the field of design. And we're really excited to spend a little time with you.  [00:02:18][19.8]

Patrick Whitney: [00:02:19] I'm happy to be here.  [00:02:19][0.1]

Lee Moreau: [00:02:20] Thanks so much. So this conference, and the reason why we're here, at least recording, is about new technology in effect. And this conversation around AI is emerging at a time when the tool's already out in the world, right? And we've seen this in history several times where technology is already live, affecting our lives, and there are moments where we take stock and try to imagine how to change it or adapt it and make it relevant to us. For me, that's the role of design. Can you talk about your experience in this kind of technology landscape and— [00:02:59][39.1]

Patrick Whitney: [00:03:00] Sure. You can look at the history of design in America, in the West, Europe certainly too, and see the relationship between technology and advances in design. One could argue that design started with people helping manufacturers make things that were more comfortable for people to use. People like Raymond Loewy was great at this, this is what he did. The the term they used to describe design at that time was industrial design.  [00:03:37][37.8]

Lee Moreau: [00:03:39] Industrial design.  [00:03:39][0.4]

Patrick Whitney: [00:03:40] Industrial design. And that didn't go away. Industrial design stayed with us. But something new emerged as the industrial age produced more choices for people. Companies had to sp start to spend attention to brand and to comfort. Then they were stirred the edge into choice. And that would lead to design for branding and design for marketing. And that didn't go away. That stayed with us too. But it was a hot thing in the early sixties and the seventies where branding was what everyone was sort of high fees were in the consulting office.  [00:04:35][55.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:04:36] So we were designing for communication purposes basically.  [00:04:38][2.7]

Patrick Whitney: [00:04:39] Yeah, and to support sales.  [00:04:40][1.1]

Lee Moreau: [00:04:41] Right.  [00:04:41][0.0]

Patrick Whitney: [00:04:41] Sales oriented. And the sales oriented was measured by how much money you brought in by selling stuff. There was nothing to do with measuring how happy people were with what they bought. Design progressed and was brought into designing lines of products, not just runoff products. And they put more and more energy into branding and sales and design for advertising, et cetera. And they this was in the era of what would be called design management, where they were linking principles of design that were there from the previous hot things in design, to coordinate manufacturing with production with sales, etc. They started to look at it as a systems point of view. Then in the search for sales, they-they gave more attention to branding, and to the point where they forgot about the product. And you could see this most blatantly in the car industry, where you could run funny ads where people would be walking out of a hotel and the valet would be building up a car and people would get in the wrong car because all the cars were starting to look the same.  [00:06:19][97.8]

Lee Moreau: [00:06:20] They were interchangable.  [00:06:20][0.2]

Patrick Whitney: [00:06:20] Yeah. And the quality of them was bad. So design management morphed into design for manufacturing. And design for manufacturing stayed an important era until its quality started to creep up. It took a long time to do that. Ford and GM to to illustrate how confusing it was for them, Ford and GM saw the Toyota the small Toyotas come into this country and win in sales. And they said, we can build cheap and inexpensive cars too. But they didn't realize that Toyota and Nissan were building cheap small cars, they realized— they didn't realize that they did not cut the expense on the quality of the car. So the Pintos and Vegas from Ford and GM suffered the one of the things that users really hate about them, if someone bumped into the back of you, the car would catch on fire. And that was really bad. So  [00:07:40][79.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:07:41] Not good.  [00:07:41][0.2]

Patrick Whitney: [00:07:41] No, it was a big bad one. So they went and studied Japanese factories and growing factories in Taiwan and fixed the quality problem, sort of. At that time, this would be the mid eighties, the companies started to put chips in things. So w ord press editors, some of you will remember buying word press editors or word processors, which are really hard to use. You needed a manual to understand how to type a page, which you didn't used to have to do that with the typewriter. But in this passion for economy of scale and making things cheaper that companies have, they kept putting more chips into things, making them more complicated and hard to use. That's what sparked human-centered design. So in 1984, that's an important year for this, apart from the Orwellian reference, Don Norman's book, what's it called—.  [00:08:48][67.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:08:50] The Design of Everyday Things.  [00:08:50][0.8]

Patrick Whitney: [00:08:51] The Design of Everyday Things, and Lucy Suchman's paper and book called Plans and Situated Actions, and this school focus on human-centered design — those three things happened at the same time.  [00:09:08][16.8]

Lee Moreau: [00:09:08] Okay.  [00:09:08][0.0]

Patrick Whitney: [00:09:09] And it was people sensed that there was something going on, but they didn't know what it was to quote Bob Dylan. And the the discussions about what to call it and whether to change the name were serious and hard to know what the answer was. We had discussions about whether to call it whether we should change the name at all. Our programs were communication, visual communication design, product design. Should we keep those names? Or should we change them? And should we change it to user centered design, which was also being proposed at the same time that there were cocaine and crack—.  [00:09:56][47.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:09:56] Epidemics.  [00:09:56][0.0]

Patrick Whitney: [00:10:01] Epidemics in New York and other cities. So we didn't like user centered design, too druggie. So we the second candidate was human centered design. And that sounded too fluffy. But we didn't have a better idea. So we needed a lot we General Electric Foundation had given us a lot of money to create a new PhD program and to reform the master's program, and we had to get it done. So we created two programs. One was human centered design and the other was design planning. That was what some people today call design thinking, but it was twenty years earlier and much deeper. The premise was that if you did things that were good for people and you were living in an economy of choice now, not an economy of scale, you win by getting people to choose you. That it would be good for the company, all all of the things being equal, manufacturing, delivery, pricing, making the car surprising surprise you with nice things, made sense. So that brings us to today. And the challenge was human-centered design, which it is not lived up to. It is in the in the 80s, when it was merged in the companies, it was design of mice to control graphic images, the design of interfaces, the work that Bill Moggridge and team did in designing the GRID computer brought them to the realization they weren't designing a computer, they were designing the interaction and the means for people to interact with them. So so Bill and and others created the field of interaction design. And the sad thing about human centered design is like before focused on keyboards and dashboards of cars and things in 1984, we're still focusing on those same things now.  [00:12:22][141.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:12:23] Which is sort of usability issues.  [00:12:24][1.1]

Patrick Whitney: [00:12:25] Yeah, it's all usability issues. And there are other things other than usability that human centered design should take care of. We've got these terrible problems in the world.  [00:12:35][9.9]

Lee Moreau: [00:12:35] Right.  [00:12:35][0.0]

Patrick Whitney: [00:12:36] What could designers do to help global warming? Well, one thing they could do is show the cost of gathering the materials, you know, the wood from forests and minerals from the ground, and show the cost of disposal of things and build those, argue for building those into the cost of the product and service. To keep- get to another area that's not to do with corporate money directly is we're gonna have to do a lot to help people die in a more civilized way. There there are whole fields of this in healthcare. And but I've yet to see a design project in any school I visited, including this one, that hints at helping people die or helping people plan their life. How do you if if you're want to increase if you're feeling lonely and you want to increase your friendship factor, how do you do that? So we're stuck now by ignoring real problems that we could contribute to and keeping on with problems that we should have solved twenty years ago.  [00:13:56][79.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:13:56] And moved on.  [00:13:57][0.4]

Patrick Whitney: [00:13:57] Yeah.  [00:13:57][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:13:58] Moveed beyond.  [00:13:58][0.2]

Patrick Whitney: [00:13:58] Yeah. And all these trends, industrial design, design for manufacturing are still around. They they don't go away.  [00:14:12][13.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:14:12] Right.  [00:14:12][0.0]

Patrick Whitney: [00:14:13] It's just they the some of them t they take turns or catalyzing the development of new practices of design that can be used for important things.  [00:14:32][19.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:14:33] But I'm sensing a bit of frustration, or I don't know if it's frustration or disappointment in—  [00:14:37][4.1]

Patrick Whitney: [00:14:39] In design education.  [00:14:40][0.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:14:43] Yeah.  [00:14:43][0.0]

Patrick Whitney: [00:14:43] Most graduate programs in design and undergraduate programs in design have the same goal and they have the same teaching method. They use projects, fake projects, to have students do the and then they don't help them deal with the whole problem, but they pretty rapidly move to the interface and to the aesthetics of it. And the type of learning that goes on is what's called informal learning. There aren't tests, there aren't books, there aren't the books that tell historical stories or case studies. That's not formalizing the content. We say, we claim that we can do communication programs that help people understand more things, but we never seriously look at whether they did that or not. The big question is is design a fashion-driven industry or a progress oriented field. And the answer is it's both. Both can live together, but you have to know when you're dealing with which. And you shouldn't be treating things that are big complicated problems as fashion problems. And you shouldn't be treating things that are to do with fashion and fun as big systems problems, unless you're Disney. So the lack of describing the lack of formality in describing what designers do is a problem because it doesn't lead to progress. And when designers hear the idea that they should be focused more on progress, they fight against it. They don't like it because it sounds like it's telling down design and hurting creativity. Just the opposite. Solving the aesthetic problems and the cultural problems and the social problems and the technical problems and the sales problems needs a lot of creativity to make that work.  [00:17:10][146.9]

Lee Moreau: [00:17:11] You talked about designing for death or designing to enable death or something like that. You've been spending a lot of time recently working in health specifically.  [00:17:18][7.3]

Patrick Whitney: [00:17:19] Yes, public health.  [00:17:19][0.1]

Lee Moreau: [00:17:19] You were at the Chan School of Public Health. You're now at Brown University. What does that focus represent in your body of work and in your kind of trajectory overall?  [00:17:30][11.1]

Patrick Whitney: [00:17:31] Public health deals with problems related to quality of human life. We need design to do that too. They are dealing with soft, fuzzy problems and bringing some order to it and structure to it. We should try that out. It's it's having a group of colleagues where you can watch how they deal with framing a problem. You can learn from that. And to the degree that we can provide value for them to help their work their work occur a little faster than it normally does is a good thing.  [00:18:17][45.5]

Lee Moreau: [00:18:18] It's such a gnarly set of challenges. Regulation, complexity, investment.  [00:18:26][8.1]

Patrick Whitney: [00:18:27] Yeah, all all these terms the designers claim they do too. But they they don't, not really. Very few. [00:18:35][7.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:18:36] Do you think we run away from these topics as designers? Is that safe to say? [00:18:40][3.7]

Patrick Whitney: [00:18:41] No, we we run towards them, but then we simplify them, oversimplify them. It's interesting how design approaches a problem versus people in the social sciences. And the people in the social sciences approach a problem, they're trying to build theory. They're trying to explain how the thing works. They're not trying to fix an individual problem. And design, on the other hand looks at a problem and studies it and doesn't care about building a science behind it, the thing that explains it all. It wants to fix the problem. What if you put those two things together? Right now young professors in public health need to get tenure. And to do that they need to do research that has proofs in it. And they have to present their work in a way that other people can replicate it. So to do that, to make that work, they pick projects done by older faculty, and they repeat them with a different twist, a different angle at it. That causes the topics that are in the majority now to expand their dominance of frequency compared to other projects. So thus we have many more projects in anti-smoking causes and and too few projects in family violence. And that's all because there are more papers for the young faculty member to build upon their anti-smoking.  [00:20:44][123.2]

Lee Moreau: [00:20:46] So evolution we're stagnating basically.  [00:20:48][1.9]

Patrick Whitney: [00:20:49] Yeah, yeah.  [00:20:49][0.3]

Lee Moreau: [00:20:49] There's not enough change.  [00:20:49][0.2]

Patrick Whitney: [00:20:50] Yeah, it's it's it's it's a problem that relates to AI in that it builds knowledge upon things that designers do. So the more things that designers do, the more that becomes the dominant thing for AI. So you end up being in a house of mirrors. What if in addition to them taking research that previous faculty had done, what if they took projects that designers had done successfully and studied how those successes worked. That provides a whole new group of projects, sources of material for the public health people to work on. And it and it builds science on successes, which is not often the case in public health, they're normally studying failures. So there's a wonderful opportunity to help public health do something that is more practical and more not more measurable, but more requires a new type of measurement. Designers, on the other hand, could help the public health people write these case studies and papers on why why the their work succeeded. And they could the the few who like to r write, like Michael Beirut, can explain things very eloquently from a practice point of view. But that's hard to do if you have to build the science behind health as well as write about design. It'd be a lot easier if you could take the input from the doctors and work on that.  [00:23:03][133.2]

Lee Moreau: [00:23:04] There are several faculty here at the ID that are v very much aligned with healthcare, right? So Kim Erwin for one, but I think there are several who are both who are really confronting design or or pushing design into the healthcare practice specifically. I know that that's emerging in in many places right now. Is it are we are we is it fast enough to keep up with what we're going to need in in that industry?  [00:23:33][29.1]

Patrick Whitney: [00:23:36] No, but it can a lot better than it is. So we we we shouldn't— success doesn't depend upon being perfect. So so yes, there's an incredible opportunity for designers to do good things in the world in the area of healthcare.  [00:23:53][16.9]

Lee Moreau: [00:23:54] And so the the thing that you just kind of said is this notion of designers and let's say social scientists working together and collaboratively. That would take a fair amount of effort, right? You you need the universities maybe reframe things in a slightly different way. What what should our approach be to AI in a similar way? Like with these new emerging technologies, how do we get design closer to the conversation where things are starting to play out?  [00:24:26][31.8]

Patrick Whitney: [00:24:27] Teach courses in the relationship between AI and design. AI is interesting in that, unlike the web, which was— its big change was giving anyone the ability to publish things, whether they knew anything about it or not. But it was really an extension of printing. What it did is democratize printing. AI is bigger than that. It's a bigger change than that. And we should be doing lots of things to figure out what it should do. There should be programs totally to do with asthetics in AI. What's the what's the appropriate asthetics approach to AI? What are the dimensions of it? All these new technologies started off copying the visual forms and asthetics of previous technologies. Television copied vaudeville, you know, photography copied painting, et cetera, et cetera. We just we just heard part of a talk about AI and design. And I found myself thinking, if every time they mentioned the word AI, we substituted the web, how would it be different?  [00:26:12][105.1]

Lee Moreau: [00:26:13] Right.  [00:26:13][0.0]

Patrick Whitney: [00:26:14] And you can't stop the mimicking of the form, but you want to get through it as fast as possible. Schools could help that. You know, in the 80s, the McCoys at Cranbrook went down the path of narrowing the program to deal with aesthetics. And that isn't very valuable if you think the their mission was to make aesthetics the only game to play, but Mike and Kathy didn't believe that. But what they did believe is that design could be helped by having visual experimentation occur, and they they did that.  [00:27:04][50.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:27:05] And they focused on it.  [00:27:06][0.7]

Patrick Whitney: [00:27:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah. They knew what they were doing.  [00:27:07][0.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:27:09] Yeah.  [00:27:09][0.0]

Patrick Whitney: [00:27:09] When Kathy McCoy printed a a poster that was black ink on black paper sh she knew that there wasn't enough contrast to read it.  [00:27:21][11.9]

Lee Moreau: [00:27:24] That's the point.  [00:27:25][0.2]

Patrick Whitney: [00:27:25] Yeah, that's the point. When Wolfgang Weingart and April Greiman started using funny spacing and lines, breaking all the rules of Armin Hofmann, etc., they knew they were making funny looking stuff. But in if you back up and say they're not—design's problem when they think when design thinks of itself as fashion, it just recycles stuff like fashion does. And if you think of it as you can look at the work of W Weingart and Greiman and think of them playing the role of pushing forward the aesthetic question for it to feed into the feed into the conversation about what's designed, it seems perfectly legitimate. It seems important.  [00:28:27][62.1]

Lee Moreau: [00:28:27] It's a kind of an exciting way to end. Patrick, thank you so much for spending time with us. This was a lot of fun. I think we could have talked for hours. Like it's just a delight to talk to you because I think the field that we are engaged in right now would not exist in the way it does without your stewardship and all the work that you did. So thank you very much.  [00:28:48][20.2]

Patrick Whitney: [00:28:48] Thank you.  [00:28:49][0.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:28:50] Thank you so much for listening to this season of Design As. It's quite a journey. thanks for sticking it out. When we started this show a few years ago, there was a sense that there was an almost a therapeutic need in our discipline for re-engaging and conversation, coming out of a pandemic, not being in the same places at the same time. How can we convene and discuss and converse and you know and begin to heal as a discipline and as a community? When I look at what we've done in this series and with some of the conversations around responsible AI, I think we kind of are shifting a little bit from that sort of therapeutic quality of our conversations into a much more sense of urgency, a greater sense of urgency, a greater sense that there's an urgent need for us to really figure some stuff out. And that's a space for us. That's where we play. And I think there's both an interest and a need, perhaps a desperate need to find our place of responsibility within these conversations. This was a lot of fun, and we hope to do it again soon. If you want to connect with me between seasons, you can find me, Lee Moreau, on LinkedIn. Thank you so much, and I hope you'll join us again next season.  [00:29:58][67.5]

Lee Moreau: [00:29:58] Design As is a podcast from Design Observer. For transcript and show notes, you can visit our website at designobserver.com slash design as. You can always find design as on any podcast catcher of your choice. And if you like this episode, please let us know. Write us a review, share it with a friend, and keep up with us on social media at Design Observer, connecting with us online gives you a seat at this round table. Thanks to the team at the Institute of Design, Kristen Gecan, Rick Curej, and Jean Cadet for access and recording. Special thanks to Design Observer's editor in chief, Ellen McGirt, and the entire Design Observer team. This episode was mixed by Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada. Design As is produced by Adina Karp.  [00:29:58][0.0]

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