Design for wellbeing often presents itself as an uncontroversial ethical aim and wellbeing as an uncomplicated good: striving for more comfort, safety, happiness and accommodating diverse needs and capabilities. However, this framework obscures the fundamentally distributional nature of wellbeing interventions.
Most interventions do not increase the wellbeing of humanity as a whole aggregated good but rather are forced to decide how to allocate the benefits and burdens across social groups, bodies, behaviours. This ultimately reveals that the value of wellbeing in design is, from an ethical standpoint, necessary but insufficient if we fail to recognise the role that justice plays in design practices.
When thinking about how to justly allocate wellbeing across different groups , design functions simultaneously as a distributional claim (a normative assertion about who deserves protection, care, or comfort) and as a distributional practice (a material system that enacts these allocations).
This text focuses on cases in which a person or group’s wellbeing is achieved through the exclusion of others, revealing assumptions about ‘proper’ behaviour and legitimate flourishing embedded in material design. To do so, we analyse three different design approaches: hostile design, attempts at ‘friendly’ or inclusive design and speculative or critical design.
Design for whose wellbeing?
Design is inherently normative. Designing an artifact implies that this artifact is of worth to someone. But what does it mean for something to be good for a person?
Traditional theories of wellbeing in philosophy – hedonism, desire-satisfaction and objective list theories – offer different answers to this question. Each can provide a metric for design for wellbeing, too: pleasure, preference, or a list of goods respectively (Brey, 2015). Still, design for wellbeing, the laudable aim of designing for the general good, has a question to answer: what happens when someone's wellbeing comes at the cost of the exclusion of someone else? What if the design that is for the good of someone is directly against someone else? In these cases, the ethical implications of the inherent non-neutrality of design become politically relevant. The value-ladedness of design can reveal otherwise implicit and unjust social hierarchies that deem the worth of a group, usually marginalized, as inferior to that of another, usually an economic upper class.
This is precisely why Langdon Winner famously argued that artefacts have politics (Winner, 1980), triggering a large academic discussion regarding the ethical and political nature of design. Through his analysis of the low overpasses that prevented buses to reach Long Island beaches and therefore preventing access to poor people, mainly people of colour, Winner demonstrated that Robert Moses’ design made it so the beaches were only accessible for rich white people. Someone that is tasked with designing for wellbeing might wrongly believe that there is not much to learn from this example. Whether this was their intent or not, Robert Moses’ overpasses had racist values embedded in them. Nothing could be further from the commendable goal of designing for human flourishing and wellbeing. Designing for wellbeing seems to be in stark juxtaposition with Moses’ design for exclusion, but is it? When, through a certain design, the wellbeing of some is achieved through the exclusion of others, then we seem to go back to Winner’s premise that design inherently poses constraints on the agency of a social group that is usually marginalised.
The key issue is whether exclusion is merely a byproduct of a faulty design or rather an inherent component of design. In the case of design for wellbeing, any form of exclusion initially seems to be accidental. However, in urban contexts, such design interventions are less about sheltering human exposure to natural forces (like rain, wind or sun) but rather mediates human exposure to other humans by selectively limiting interactions deemed undesirable.
Even if we intentionally aspire to design for wellbeing, implicit biases regarding the hierarchical ordering of social groups necessarily come into play. It might be the case that some users are considered as ‘main users’ or most legitimate users, while others are deemed as secondary or less legitimate users. Someone using a bench for a short rest after exercise is using it the right way, while someone sleeping on it overnight is wrong. This is precisely the idea behind hostile design.
Hostile design
The term 'hostile design' is used to describe design strategies that ward off certain behaviour, and therefore certain people, from public spaces (Rosenberger, 2020). The most paradigmatic example of this is 'anti-homeless' architecture, elements of the built environment that are meant to deter loitering or discourage homeless people from resting or sleeping in public areas: spikes on ledges, armrests in the middles of benches, etc. These artefacts aim to alienate already marginalized members of the community, pushing them further into the periphery. They are, towards this and other groups of people, hostile.
Hostile design could be morally justified by aggregate judgements on the wellbeing of bigger groups. From a consequentialist perspective, if an action that fosters the wellbeing of a big group goes to the detriment of the wellbeing of a small group, then it is ethically permissible to perform such an action. The detrimental effects on the wellbeing of smaller groups can be regarded as an unfortunate, yet justifiable, side effect. As is well known, however, aggregate judgements can give rise to structural injustices. Especially if, as is often the case, these smaller groups are marginalised, then hostile design can further exacerbate inequalities between the well-off and the worse-off.
Hostile design is one end of the continuum of designed exclusion; it is very visible even when hidden behind embellishment techniques. Hardly ethically defensible and not easily politically supported, hostile design tends to backfire and regularly raises objections, as the literature shows (Roesenberger, 2020).
One could therefore think of friendlier alternatives to these hostile designs. For instance, adequate spaces for the homeless to rest or sleep in could be designated in the periphery. But are these design alternatives really friendly, or do they just exclude minorities under a different guise? Is it really inclusion when the marginalized group is relegated to the periphery? Although inclusive design looks friendly on the surface, it further unsettles the deeply grounded inequalities that led to the framing of the intervention in the first place . Therefore, these seemingly friendly design alternatives end up accomplishing the same goals as hostile design.
If the goal of hostile design is to shield the ‘legitimate’ central users from the ‘misbehaving’ marginal others and doing so by material means and design cues that enforce a specific behavioural norm, then a more subtle accommodating design can function just as well by moving the undesired crowd to the periphery. Exclusionary design that functions by accommodating or tolerating in the periphery the behaviours that are ‘inappropriate’ in the centre does not lend itself to the same ethical critiques on the surface, manifesting features designed exclusively with the needs of the marginal group in mind, while still functioning as a display of inequality by reminding that such behaviour is tolerated but belongs to the margins. The answer is clear: these ‘friendly’ designs are not friendly at all.
Critical design for wellbeing
Standing separate from the market, more conceptual forms of design like speculative and critical design can bring more awareness to these types of exclusion and injustice than products that first and foremost aim to be profitable.
Speculative design is a strategy in design theory that removes the commercial constraints usually deeply tied to the design of products and instead uses fiction to present alternate products (and through them, alternate worlds) (Auger, 2013). Critical design can be understood as a branch of speculative design that also uses design fiction and looks to parallel worlds and alternate realities for solutions. What differentiates it from speculative design is its aim to critique, challenge or satirize preconceptions about the role products play in our lives. Through storytelling and scenario-building, it materializes critical thought (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Malpass, 2017).
Just like the anti-homeless benches and spikes provide a paradigmatic example of hostile architecture, speculating through design on what their opposite would look like can be very telling. What would a design look like that is sympathetic to this marginalized community, instead of hostile? What if the designer cared for the excluded, rather than pushed them further away? Instead of a bench that does its best to prevent people from sleeping on it, imagine a bench that provides comfort and safety to a person who may not have another place to sleep. A bench with a built-in headrest, cover, or heater. Although this design obviously doesn’t solve the complex systemic issue of homelessness, a design like this can bring awareness to it, shedding light on who it is we are pushing to the periphery with our built environment, and what it would look like to do things differently.
Wellbeing is not just a feature of a product. The wellbeing of homeless people may be further endangered by anti-homeless architecture, but it is also not aided by designing the opposite (which we can satirically call ‘pro-homeless’ artefacts). Although these speculative forms of design do not remedy the unjust distribution of goods engendered by deeply ingrained attitudes about who deserves what, they have the power to shed light on, and even materialize, these complex social concerns. In conclusion, to avoid exclusion under the guise of wellbeing, we need to start by acknowledging the fact that design for wellbeing is also about justice, and thus functions as an inherently political and distributional practice.
References:
Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: Crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.767276
Brey, P. (2015). Design for the Value of Human Well-Being. In J. van den Hoven, P. E. Vermaas, & I. van de Poel (Eds.), Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design: Sources, Theory, Values and Application Domains (pp. 365–382). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6970-0_14
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.
Malpass, M. (2017). Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practices. Bloomsbury Academic.
Rosenberger, R. (2020). On hostile design: Theoretical and empirical prospects. Urban Studies, 57(4), 883–893. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019853778
Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.