Think Forward Ep 116 - The Future is Plural with Dr Dimeji Onafuwa

🎙️ Think Forward Show Episode 116: The Future is Plural with Dr. Dimeji Onafuwa 🌍🌈

I’m Steve Fisher, your guide on this futurist journey, and in this thought-provoking episode, I sit down with Dr. Dimeji Onafuwa to dive into pluralism in design and the concept of the pluriverse, where diverse perspectives create a more prosperous, more inclusive future. From transition design to ontological design and beyond, Dr. Onafuwa shares insights on how embracing multiple viewpoints can lead to more impactful, lasting solutions.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

•The importance of pluralism in today’s globalized world

•How transition design can address complex, systemic issues

•Shifting from traditional inclusion to acknowledging difference

•Real-world examples of design for social impact and regenerative communities

Dr. Onafuwa’s approach challenges us to rethink design’s role, moving beyond the singular view to embrace the pluriverse. This episode is a must-listen for anyone aiming to foster a more inclusive and sustainable future.

What does a plural future mean to you? Join the conversation! #ThinkForwardShow #FuturesDesign #Pluralism #TransitionDesign #SustainableFuture

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Think Forward Show (Light Version): https://lnkd.in/eVBVJRCB

Think Forward Show: www.thinkforwardshow.com

🔗 Steve’s Site: www.stevenfisher.io

Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.

Transcript

Steve F: 0:00

Dimeji, welcome to the podcast.

Dimeji: 0:02

Thank you. Thank you. Glad to see you again, my friend.

Steve F: 0:06

Great to have you. And I can't wait to have this conversation with you. You and I always talk all the time about design futures, transition design, plural verse. So for those who don't know you why don't we get started? Tell us about your background and your journey from Nigeria to your current work, everything that's in between.

Dimeji: 0:26

Yeah a couple of days ago. And one of the things I was reflecting on is that statement that you are your ancestors wildest dreams. And Really, that was my story. I grew up in a typical upper middle class Nigerian home, but that's saying very little. You see my, there's this ancient Adyghe symbol called Sankofa, which says you have to go back to tell the, to, you can't you you're at risk of what's been left behind. So you look back into the past to look into the future. And so when I map my journey I often try to start with my father, who left everything behind in the 1960s and moved to the United States on a soccer scholarship. And while he was here, he actually took the same steps that I serendipitously took without even knowing that he did. He was in New York for a while. Bye bye. He lived in North Carolina where I am right now and decided to earn an MBA at one point, which I did. But my journey diverges from his, when I discovered design and art and had a passion for the fine arts and design. So I have a bachelor's of Art degree in studio art. I have a bachelor's degree in design from a small, beautiful university in West Virginia called Concord university. And then I earned an MBA while I was trying to run a design studio for almost 10 years. And then I went to Carnegie Mellon and did a PhD. That was actually the first PhD I was going to tell you this, Stephen. I'm sure you're probably tired of hearing this. The first PhD student

Steve F: 2:05

We're here for the audience, so you go ahead right ahead.

Dimeji: 2:09

PhD student in transition design and the first black graduate from that program as well.

Steve F: 2:15

That's fantastic. Love it.

Dimeji: 2:17

No, that's awesome. Yeah. So for me, I've always been interested in systemic approaches to problem solving. And transition design is definitely a systems thinking and featuring discipline. It looks at multi scale, multi scope, multi modal interventions into wicked problems. And that's what drew me to transition design. Now I am practicing, not actually mostly as a designer. I am a UX research leader, but I also do run a design practice as well as teach design at a master's and PhD level.

Steve F: 2:50

That's wonderful, the experiences you've had, how has it influenced perspectives and your approach to design?

Dimeji: 2:58

Yeah. So I'm someone that gets restless quite a bit. I actually listened to a podcast that I, I was on several years ago. And his podcast started with Dimeji is someone that's always restless. So I'm I've always like dabbled in so many different things. I'm originally from Nigeria. I was born and raised in Nigeria. At one point I was in the sciences. with a desire to get a medical degree. I dropped out of college back then in Nigeria. I shifted to art and design and then an MBA and then a PhD. But I also worked as a graphic designer. I worked as a UX designer. I worked as a service designer. I worked as a transition designer. I worked in social innovation and I and now I'm managing a team that's focused on life cycle improvements for AI products, and other things. So I've always used all of those, I knowledge, the ways of knowing that I have accrued over the years. To be able to inform my practice. I feel like a lot of designers are linear and they're thinking they don't look back. They don't look to the future. They also don't look diagonally and across. And I feel like that background, that, base that I was able to build for myself has allowed me to be able to do that.

Steve F: 4:12

Fantastic perspective. And you had mentioned that you did the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon in transition design. It's a very a,

Dimeji: 4:21

Awesome. So

Steve F: 4:23

type of space, many people here have speculative design, critical design, lots of, something with design, but transition design is very interesting, I have my own descriptor of it, so I don't want to bias that I will curious what you hear and then I'll give my tea leaf interpretation of it. But if you could, for the audience, like talk about the core principles and, how do you integrate them into projects?

Dimeji: 4:50

Instead of going into all of the core principles, I'll talk about the one that I actually draw from. So transition design looks into the future in many ways. And I often like to share designers are feature makers. So in other words, we make political judgments about the features, then how do we want the features to, the feature to look. So designers go into the future and actually say, Hey, I've seen the future. This is how it looks. I'm coming back. Almost like the back to the future music movie. I'm coming back to the present and tell them, Hey, this is what it should look like. And they're often wrong when they try to do that. And but transition design leverages curated set of frameworks, such as back casted, for example, to situate yourself in a vision for the future and walk back to the present. It is through this kind of work that we, I discovered personally other ways of approaching transition design. So I draw from the microeconomic theories of Eleanor Ostrom on the commons and the idea that we have this shared resource that we are all responsible for stewarding And there's something called a negative externality, the impact of the resources that you are exploiting can be felt by other people across the world. Transition design attempts to shift that trajectory. And so this is what I anchor my practice on. And there's this idea called new ways of designing. So presenting while we understand the consequences of what we have designed, presenting a new approach to to solving for social technical problems. So problems that exist in the social and technical space. And and that's just one of the facets of or two of the facets of I just shared with you. Visioning. And new ways of designing. And I feel like those are the ones I leverage the most, more than anything.

Steve F: 6:39

And I talk about transition design, I talk about the wicked problems, which, so this was originally created. So for the, some background for people, and you can please amend anything that I might get, might get wrong

Dimeji: 6:52

No worries.

Steve F: 6:54

came together to Cameron Tonkin Wise gideon Kossoff and then Terry Irwin at Carnegie Mellon. And Terry, I know, teaches there. Cameron's from Australia. They came together and a lot of it was around the wicked problems which are deeply systemic. I'm from Baltimore, take the larger the poverty issue or the, within the city, like, how do you, that there's so many things connected to that then they put it through more of the academia side of it. They talk about a lot of sustainability.

Dimeji: 7:24

Yeah.

Steve F: 7:24

But I find that it is a deeply evolved version of service design where service design gets into, One product or service and a journey and how we transform that. This is like multi layered and how we have to, and it exposes things we have to address societally.

Dimeji: 7:41

Yeah.

Steve F: 7:42

Yeah. So anything that I had said there, should I,

Dimeji: 7:46

Oh, no, I think you definitely touched on it quite well.

Steve F: 7:49

thank you

Dimeji: 7:50

wicked problems, the concept of wicked problems was formed by Horace Riddle, the mathematician from several years ago. And the idea of a wicked problem is a problem that is so complex and so interconnected that any attempt to solve the problem leads to new problems. So it's an unsolvable problem and it's a problem that when you think about it many times, it's a problem that has great scale and great scope. And so because you cannot solve it so easy, you have to map all the conditions around the problem so that you'd be able to identify points of intervention. And so that's the argument that or the angle that Terry Gideon and Cameron bring into transition design is we are transition design. The concern of transition design is to approach wicked problems through visioning designers can set an ideal state, the one that we hope to transition to, but then it also acknowledges that we are also always in a state of transition. So designers that are working in transition design. And not only designing for future transitions, they are designing within the current tradition transitions that we're experiencing, I like to quote Gibson who says that the future is here, but not evenly distributed. So the ideal futures might actually be existing in a different context within our society. So acknowledging that and actually bringing different perspectives into that problem solving is the concern for transition design. Now transition design has a quite a number of limitations itself. It's not perfect. It's a many times it's a way of understanding the world and how we intervene. So it's a paradigm, but then it's also a framework. And the framework as most frameworks are, is less than perfect, but that being said. Being able to understand the different facets of the problem that we're looking to solve leads us to new ideas and also draws our attention, and this is the part that I am personally excited about, draws our attention to those that are often ignored. in addressing the problem. So I often take folks thinking about what if a problem is seen from the perspective of the non human participant, right? If it's a problem that has to do with seafood, sustainable seafood, what have you looked at a problem for from the perspective of the ocean and the water, will that kind of lead to a different way of approaching it? And I think those are the areas where I find very exciting when I approach transition design.

Steve F: 10:38

Do you have an example of, you mentioned C's, is there a particular project where you think transition design made a significant impact on

Dimeji: 10:47

I think there's several of them. So I often name projects that I personally have been involved with. So I, I at one point founded a group of designers of different persuasions and and we called ourselves common cause collective, and we came together to address systemic problems in the Pacific Northwest. One of the example of the work I did, we did while I was there, is to look at how we can think of a regenerative Seattle that involves the BIPOC community, the often underrepresented communities, the indigenous communities, And we work together and this project was actually funded by the city and we work together to map a different futures that these organizations that are supporting these communities can exist in and that allowed us to bring to build parts of intervention across these organizations and for them to see opportunities where they can collaborate and actually work together to solve the problems, but then also work together to get funding. by different grant givers and by the city to be able to address this problem. I feel like if you had not had a transition design framework or approach, we wouldn't have gotten to the point that we got to with that work. And that's a good example of mapping out that space, understanding the wicked problem, and then seeing how we might actually leverage intervention points.

Steve F: 12:12

Great. Learning this in Carnegie Mellon you've shared kind of the things you brought into your work. Are there other lessons or experiences during your time there that have stayed with you through your career?

Dimeji: 12:23

Yeah. So the first thing, so I was coming into Carnegie Mellon as a design practitioner. I actually did not realize there was so much design theory out there. There's so much design philosophy out there. There's so much perspectives from other spaces that you can bring into design. And one of the ones that I think I, that settled with me is this idea of ontological designing. So some of the, best design designing is actually subtractive. You take away and sometimes design is sometimes most effective when nothing is designed. And and there's some people that, two people that I actually draw from one is Arturo Escobar quotes Tenny Winograd and Fernando in their book. It talks about, we encountered the Deep question of design when we recognize that designing, as we're designing tools, we're designing ways of being, right? And then you layer that with the work of Anne Marie Willis, who says design designs, the things that we're designing are coming back and designing us. And that's the argument of ontological designing the relationship we have with design. So when we up design objects, those objects act back and design us. That is one of those things that kind of stayed with me because not only are those objects and the things that we design are designing us, they're designing ways of living, they're designing cultures, they're designing others, back to that negative externality thing. Sometimes the things that we're designing, the effects are felt. Elsewhere in the world, or somebody once told me, my good friend, Matt Wyszynski, who wrote design after capitalism, that negative externalities are disappearing. And so the things that we're designing are now being felt by us. And so for me, that was one of those really sustained concepts or ideas that I learned at CMU that it's I've been carrying with me throughout the rest of my career.

Steve F: 14:17

mentioned pluriverse design. I've had that, Something that's you introduced me to and it solidified. How some of the theories that I've had and how I approach futures with client work, product work, my work, and let's go back to Escobar because that's, I think, a hugely underserved area. I think his approach to this is really groundbreaking and I think the gap, what I'm trying to serve is how to actually do application of it. And because it's not in his work, it's conceptual it's a, it's design theory, but it challenges your way of looking at the world. Can you, in kind of your words, and you've spent so much time with it, can you explain that to, for the audience, like the concept of it? Of pluriversal design and its importance on a globalized world.

Dimeji: 15:16

Yeah. Yeah. I may actually, I may oversimplify it. So

Steve F: 15:20

Now, I think it's a good place to start. We can continue to add on to it, but let's start with a kind of a core thesis, and then let's add layers to it.

Dimeji: 15:28

And the reason I try to simplify it is because I feel like designers need to understand this concept, so Escobar draws the definition of pluriverse from the Zapatistas. Who are engaged in liberation struggle in Mexico back in the day, in the eighties. A world where many worlds fit, but I've seen another definition that I actually really is where diverse hopes are sown, multiple opportunities are cultivated, and the plurality of meaningful lives are achieved by the richly different people that we are. I like that definition because what did, yeah, it's really great because it says that and now I often map that to my thinking of design, that when we design, we are actually seeking to understand how we live together in this world. That is my version of design. And so if we frame design that way, and we ensure that we have to think that then, The features that we are making should include the lived experiences of everybody, including those we are ignoring. So it means that we have to draw from multiple perspectives. And that's the purva. That's the kicker. That's a beautiful part of the purva. The purva forces us to think less in binary terms. And approach our practice from a different paradigm. And we have to ask ourselves, whose stories are we ignoring? Escobar talks about, and he draws from the colonial theorists and talks about, Delinking from EPIs stems and ideas of the ways of the world that are rooted in a Western ontology and re linking to new perspectives that actually bring us to shift. It's a systemic shift in a way we understand our world and re linking to new perspectives that are non-Western and so that we can broaden it. So the idea is. Removing or de centering from purely Western ideas around design to multiple centers, and actually bringing all different ideas about design into the fore. And actually saying that now everybody can participate in this new way of designing. And it's a very radical argument. When you think about it, it's quite radical. It's saying,

Steve F: 17:56

Yeah, it is.

Dimeji: 17:57

Everybody. is that everybody can be a designer, small d, and also there are big d designers out there in the world. That we often do not not intentionally, but we're just not aware of the work that they're doing, and so you think about there's a set of ideographs in Nigeria called incibity, which are a set of tools that have been designed and that people use them in everyday life. So symbols and things like that, that have actually appeared in everyday life. These folks are designers. Two. And that perspective can be brought into our understanding. It also, now this is where the features come in. It also requires us to go back and change narratives. Those narratives are an assumption that we've held about what design is and what it can do. We're changing those narratives so we can actually re emerge into this new way of understanding design.

Steve F: 18:53

You mentioned narratives. What I see so much, I'm curious to get your opinion on this, is the narratives people hold, create the biases that people bring into this. And they are, it's almost like the futures are more extrapolated versus diversify, right? And a good example of this is hilarious. I people have heard this on other episodes. Blade Runner is a great example. They had like pay meters or, for car or they had my favorite is like they had a video phone, which is fine, but it was in a pay phone booth. So it was like the inability to think about real change, like really far, far stretches and that just, that's just objects, things from the future, but I'm just talking about the, but it goes to this lack of the diversity.

Dimeji: 19:42

Yeah.

Steve F: 19:42

My, my take on pluriversality beyond just, I'm not a fan of the word decolonization because it's like you can't dismissively get rid of something, but you can understand. The history of something so that you can change it. So to me, it's like pulling down it's almost like rewriting history. So I don't necessarily prescribe to the term, but I look at a, a broad spectrum of existence because you can have this plurality of people. What frustrates me sometimes and is a lot of the scenario methods are. archetypal, they're

Dimeji: 20:19

yeah, exactly.

Steve F: 20:21

a collapse or about a, or here's two drivers out of 30 you have to pick and then you make a So it's limitation, even morphological or other types of methods leave out a lot because people have, there's, just look at right now, there are people here in this world who are wealthy beyond Midas and they're thriving and that's their transformative future, right?

Dimeji: 20:46

Yes.

Steve F: 20:46

in that, but then there are people who. Because of inflation here in the United States, they can barely feed, put food on the table, pay their mortgage, and they're almost in a collapse scenario. So there's a simultaneous existence, right? And I see plural verse as the way to break through and acknowledge that there are other narratives, other perspectives that are going on in the same possible future. And I think that is Yeah, I think that is, that was a groundbreaking kind of thing for me personally, as a designer to think, in the big D, but also participatory design to get all the little D designers involved.

Dimeji: 21:25

Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing I would add to you were talking about, not a big fan of decolonization. I get it because that has to do with reparations. That has to do with like giving back what you've taken. But I actually would propose that decoloniality in opposition to decolonization is quite different, which is an epistemic shift. So shifting in the thinking, in understanding the fact that there's the, we can think when we think about design, we can think of design with a colonial mindset and think of design as narrowed and actually start, like you were saying, broadening our thinking by bringing all different perspectives into the space. So that's the way I think about it. I don't, I'm not I don't usually, I don't, that's not my space is decolonization. I don't think so, but I've read a little bit of decoloniality of theorists and authors and stuff like that. And they think about how might we shift the paradigm. of the thinking. So it's a thinking thing. It's an epistemic thing. It's a way of understanding to start teaching people to understand new perspectives. I like that. I, and I think for me, that's a much better approach. Yeah.

Steve F: 22:42

Yeah. I, where I grew up, we, there's a lot of problems and is, it's class, race, there's a lot of systemic, there's a lot of programs that enable things that are, I think not helpful to the people that live there. And I think that at the same time, If everybody like getting people who live there to think differently about the outcomes, then it also influences how, and it goes back to transition design. Cause they're there to me, they're linked and transition design and plural verse are linked in a way because transition design gets you into the systems side of it and the systemic deeper problems and the action, or at least the mapping of it and the plurivisality is the mindset and it is The way to bring the people of the future into the transition design,

Dimeji: 23:34

that. I like that. That's a good way to put it. Yeah.

Steve F: 23:38

that so yeah, no, it's it do you find challenges advocating this I when I talk about the Kind of spectrum of people the same people in the future, right? The people shake their heads like yeah, that's that I get that but sometimes I think it's too hard for them to Archetypes can be very neat And very packaged, right? I find it, it almost is too much of a leap sometimes because it's the complexity of it. Do you find what challenges do you face when you're trying to advocate for this? Like, how do you overcome it?

Dimeji: 24:10

I think one of the opportunity areas for us as folks working in this space. It's to present it not as a long termist approach of thinking, but to talk about it in, in sequence with what's happening today at the moment. So as we're thinking about the future is already happening to us. And so we have to think about it across different scales. What's happening right now, what's happened before, what could potentially happen in the future. And I think because of that, because we don't do that as well, I think there's an assumption that this work is tedious. This work is overwhelming. This work is long. It takes time. We don't have time. particularly in the age of AI. There's no time. We're trying to compress time. But if you tell the story, the fact that now there's a pluriversal approach to it, that time, as we think of it, is not currency. It's not linear. It's not wasted. It's not spent. It's not saved. Time itself is cyclical. And it's past it's when you think about past, present, future, it's not as linear as we think about it. We can think about it in terms of seasons. We can think about it in different ways. When we do that, it can start to present us with a different view that we start to realize that this work is important. This work is meaningful. This work is embedded work that is, that we carry with us for the rest of our lives, as opposed to work that's just overwhelming because it's just gonna take, quote, too long.

Steve F: 25:50

Do you think that people will Use gen AI when transition design, I feel that it actually having that collaborative partner, that brain with all the data with all the insights, instead of having the human limitations of analysis, that there might actually be ways to use that to actually, I would say, bring out alternative to. Solutions map the wicked problems. Like I, I feel like there might be, it is, like you said, Jenny has fast. Like this might be a way to actually keep the Excel to meet that acceleration problem to

Dimeji: 26:31

Yeah, I think the question we want to ask is that which whose futures are we talking about?

Steve F: 26:37

Cause it could be biased. You're right. The gen AI, the LLMs. Absolutely. Put. Yeah. Yeah.

Dimeji: 26:43

But again, if we bring it, if we bring everybody into the, into this new then we're shifting to collectively, then you can actually we can feed those models with, the right type of information so that it's not as biased and it leverage different perspectives to the same problem. And I think that's where GenAI can be useful is really at the very core of it is how many people can we bring in? Because that's what it's doing. Essentially, it's bringing in perspectives. We just need to broaden the view on the number of perspectives that we can bring in. And so that way it can be a little bit more representative of Quote those lived experiences that we talked about a little bit earlier.

Steve F: 27:34

with all this, these concepts we've talked about, I wanted to talk about, you mentioned earlier the Common Cause Collective, and the social impact it does. How does that work contribute to your vision of socially impactful design? Like, how does it, you've taken all these things you've learned in this work that you do, and applied it and things you want to do with it. How does it, how do you leverage CCC, C3?

Dimeji: 27:58

Design. I think, one of the things that we start to do is one equipping designers with more tools. To be able to start engaging with communities differently. Designers who are embedded, one of the things I actually teach and I teach my students is what does it do in terms of change the role of a designer? Now, a designer has become a meta practitioner, a designer is a co commoner, a designer is an embedded facilitator, a designer. Is someone who surfaces the ideas a designer is a provocateur, a designer, so you think about this new roles designers are now playing. I think that's the first thing is like when you're working within social impact, you start shifting your role. And then also the posture. of a designer needs to shift. A designer is not at the center of the problem. This is another pluriversal argument. We are not at the center of the problem anymore. We are all impacted by the problem. We all contributed to the problem, and we are just one part of the solution or the intervention to the problem. So those are the different ways in which it shifts the way we engage with a community. So one of the, another thing we did at Common Cause was we were invited by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to actually teach a bunch of educators. About over 240 university leaders on how to leverage. Transition design tools and frameworks and pluriversal tools to be able to understand future problems. So we went what took them through a workshop to do that. So this is another way of community oriented design and you're working with certain communities of leaders that are actually the future makers because they are educating the future and in teaching them tools, tactics and approaches to thinking about the future.

Steve F: 30:03

They obviously are grant based and a lot of, funding. Do you use do you have any, Metrics or indicators you use to measure the impact of the projects, the social impact, because that way, I'm sure there's a, if you pitching, there's gotta be some way of this was measured in the success, at least of the project itself, not a, maybe of long term, but do you do

Dimeji: 30:23

yeah, no. So one of the things that we tend to do less is use metrics, right? Because I feel like metrics are sometimes somewhat misleading. But that being said, I work in tech, right? And we have. Okay, ours, and that's one of the things I do is think about even our measurements across time span. For example vision in team vision as it relates to okay, ours as it relates to actual tactics. At a team level, semester planning and things like that. But beyond that, I think what's interesting is how do we map to, how do we map to, how do we show in a positive deviance kind of way What are the ways in which we are like growing success across scale and seeing these, okay, now that we've done this is what's been, what's happening now. Can we replicate that thing that's happening now and have more of those instances of behavior? So I think one of the, that's another thing that makes it really difficult when it comes to social impact is actually one, we can think purely in terms of hard metrics or metrics as we all regionally think about. Two, we can leverage metrics like OKRs to strengthen the success of the work. We do that sometimes. And then at three, we can find ways in which we can leverage a positive deviance method as opposed to numbers, but showing instances of success and saying, these are the conditions that existed for this to happen. How do we replicate those conditions for that to happen a lot more? So those are the ways that we think about it.

Steve F: 32:02

That's, I like that approach, and it draws to mind the, we'll call it a, it's a bit of a derisive word this, these days with inclusion. There's a good side of inclusion and the bad side of inclusion. Let's talk about the good side where diversity of voices, importance of perspectives, addressing bias, things that we're just, it's not about, Anything that people are good or bad. It's just the things we've grown up with, like how do things we bring to come to the table with right when you try and do that through design, like if you ever encountered challenges promoting that or or barriers to add in, like when you even when you work on community projects or just even in general in the work. Just anything like that because I think it's in if you're gonna have plurality if you're gonna have spectrum of voices You have to have pathways for people to come to the table, right and to do it You're not like it's not political in that way It's just more of just getting the right people and you know involved to be participatory interesting

Dimeji: 33:07

So in my current org, I used to, I actually used to lead, run inclusive research. And

Steve F: 33:13

Can you describe inclusive research for those people? People may hear from the DEI sitting here on the HR side, but in the design world itself,

Dimeji: 33:21

Yes. And so inclusive research is an approach to research that actually seeks to leverage historically underrepresented perspectives in the research process. So in terms of recruitment, in terms of the conducting of the research, in terms of the research methods that you use, And then also in terms of cracking the success of the research. So there's so there's a process that's like pretty much I would say that's that's pretty much, that's set and controlled. And it's like this company does it in a specific way, so I can't speak to the details of it, because it's like almost proprietary, but the approach is really essentially that. That being said, I'm not a big fan of the word inclusion. I don't use the word inclusion as much. Instead, I think more about difference. And I think about more about pluriverse and this difference. The reason I do that is that inclusion,

Steve F: 34:19

it takes the politics, takes any perceived view of that

Dimeji: 34:22

That, that's number one, the label inclusion presupposes also that there is a center that you're bringing folks to, including them into this paradigm. But again, the arguments I've been making from the beginning of our conversation is there are multiple centers.

Steve F: 34:37

Right.

Dimeji: 34:38

So it's really just more of acknowledging difference. And being able to work with different approaches, different perspectives, and different points of view in a problem space. So that's what I tend to do, is I tend to think less of, quote, inclusion, because inclusion could be potentially Yeah, it could be, like you said it could be potentially problematic and challenging as a term, but then I think in terms of multiple centers, acknowledging the difference. I often talk about the quote, Edward Glissant, which was a Martinican post colonial theorist that says that I have the right to be opaque. Which is like the right to be who I am, and you have been you for you, you have to recognize who I am and what I represent and how I show up. I think that's way more important than inclusion.

Steve F: 35:35

It's well, said I completely agree with you. So let's put a, even go far in the future. Let's talk about future design.

Dimeji: 35:43

Yes.

Steve F: 35:44

It's you and I could riff on this for probably hours. The field is changing just specifically within UX design. Those who are not specifically UX designers I would see if I can give the last 15 years in a nutshell, it went from a nascent group like information architects and human factors people. To a field called user experience where it was flooded during I will call it start the startup boom of the 2010s With lots of people going through 12 week courses, and it was just inundated the tools changed Design systems came about things got a little more efficient But what has happened is it's almost because A. I. Is not replacing the jobs, but there's definitely efficiencies in the system, and it is in the nature of what we how we design what we focus on as designers is radically changing right now. And there's a lot of. Layoffs and a lot of we'll call it extra fat in the system because of ovid people overhired What do you is that a fair take would you agree disagree on any of that?

Dimeji: 36:54

I think that's a I think that's maybe one of the symptoms of the problem. I think there were others. But I think yes. Yeah.

Steve F: 37:01

What do you see? Let's looking out. We're in 2024 looking out the next I don't know Excuse me the rest of the decade

Dimeji: 37:10

Yeah. What do I see?

Steve F: 37:13

trends you're seeing context of, digital, digital transformation. What are you seeing? Change the field.

Dimeji: 37:21

I I will lean more on the positive. Okay. So

Steve F: 37:25

Oh, that,

Dimeji: 37:25

is what I would like to see.

Steve F: 37:27

Yeah.

Dimeji: 37:28

This is what I think I'm seeing,

Steve F: 37:30

is, we'll call this a future projection. Projecting out what you want, right? The.

Dimeji: 37:34

I think the newer generation is going to reject throwaway design for durable design. So durability is going to become sexy again and durability because even within the practice of UX. There's been a lot of challenge with making sure that the discipline itself is rooted and strong and durable. And so now the products, so instead of thinking about, so I think about durability and I steal this idea from a guy by the name of Peter Paul Beverbeke, that you think about products in three different categories, right? Technical perspective, products can be discarded because they're broken and can be repaired. But then also, they just don't, you create a like button and it's not fun anymore. And then you discard it and create a new button. And then there's like the economic way where it's not, there's no product market fit. People are discarding it because it's not fit. So you think about this is might be a little bit controversial, but you think about subscription software over time, people are going to be like, yeah, I don't want that. And so that model might get discarded because there's no fit in the market anymore. And then psychologically, people just don't see it in their lives. And it's, and that's the worst for a product is like where you have products that people just don't see where it fits anymore in their everyday life. And we can give lots of examples. There's a wasteland of different products that people are just not going to use anymore.

Steve F: 39:03

I have a friend, he calls it future trash,

Dimeji: 39:06

T shirt trash. Yeah, exactly. I like

Steve F: 39:08

like they, cause he looks at things like his kid was like, that's just future trash. I don't want it in my house.

Dimeji: 39:13

Yeah. Yeah.

Steve F: 39:14

going to contribute to that.

Dimeji: 39:15

And a lot of these are like even tech, technological trash they're not even just all physical objects. They're sometimes like apps and all that crap. But I feel like because of that, we're going to shift to a future that where people want to have products and experiences that age with grace, that live with them and are embedded in their everyday life. And they can keep with them for a long time. And I think we're going to slowly start shifting into that. And that's where I feel like the future is going to go.

Steve F: 39:49

Do you think the elephant in the room, is gen AI machine learning shaping the future? Do you see it

Dimeji: 39:57

I think it's, I think it's certain in certain ways it is, but we have to understand history as well. I'm just recently watched a series of videos by Pelein, who I like a lot. Pelein is like one of the Scandinavian designers at the beginning of participatory design. And he actually was at the very beginning stages of that, where graphic artists, used to map out magazine layouts and everything like that by hand. And then this new technology showed up. It's a computer and it has like layout software. Even before the Adobe's and the InDesign and all that showed up, this was showing up in Scandinavia. And these people were so mad and they were, they just lost it and they were going to go on strike and there was a little issue. And so the government brought out, brought in a bunch of designers to work with these graphic artists. And also to start thinking how might we build computer based software that is just not automating processes so people lose their jobs. Right now in AI, we're talking about making things quicker and easier and stuff like that task, quicker, save time, but we should think less about that because what they were thinking is that not so much save time and automate the process, but actually become a tool that these people can use to improve the quality of their jobs.

Steve F: 41:24

Okay.

Dimeji: 41:24

And that's where it worked. And so I feel like the age of AI in the age of AI technology, AI, a generative AI technology is going to be most effective when it improves the quality of our jobs.

Steve F: 41:39

I agree, I've

Dimeji: 41:40

Yeah. Yeah. So that's right.

Steve F: 41:43

Oh, go ahead.

Dimeji: 41:44

As opposed to saving time and automating, because what are you going to do with the time you saved? Exactly.

Steve F: 41:52

more to your plate, right? And yeah, I, no I look at it now as a, right in the state it is now as a collaborative partner. And there's concepts or things that I'm trying to communicate. I have tools in which I can do that I couldn't do, or I didn't have the design, the skill set, or the knowledge of something. I think what's really interesting to watch is there's a few generative AI design tools that will draw your screens based, draw a concept based on prompts. So there's taking the mental model of say, like a purchasing a product, right? There, Amazon has set that and there's seven or eight steps to do that. That hasn't changed, right? But there are design patterns. I think what is going to change as the systems we use will actually become more conversational. Designing for conversational is different than just designing static, fixed flow screens with steps. It's got to be more dynamic. So we're going to have to be able to be anticipatory in the design and look at how we. Would account, and this goes back to Pluriverse, that the different people that would come into this, some that are very technically proficient, some of that are underserved, how would they interact with the design? And this is where your durability issue, this is where your durability message comes into play, because if it's more reliable, more sustainable, it allows for more time spent with the system. And it evolves. It's not just going to be like, learn it fast. Then I throw it away and I get rid of

Dimeji: 43:29

exactly. Exactly.

Steve F: 43:31

It gives us time to, work with something that is just much more long term. So yeah, so this is great perspective. What I'd like to do is get some kind of do some rapid fire things. As

Dimeji: 43:46

Okay, let's do it. Let's do it.

Steve F: 43:48

So what's a big, bold prediction you like to make about the future that you think people should prepare for?

Dimeji: 43:54

I think I already did. I think it's like we're going to go back to durability.

Steve F: 43:59

I'd like, I wanted to frame it in that. I thought it was, but I wanted to hear it from you. That's a great, that's a great one. You've mentioned a few books in this conversation. Is there, is, would you recommend a book that's influenced your thinking? Is it in that list? Is it something else we haven't talked about?

Dimeji: 44:15

Oh, yeah. I think you want to read the designs for the pluriverse by Arturo Escobar. I think that's a good starting point. I think I like this book by John Thackara, how to thrive in the next economy and design the tomorrow's world today. That's a good book.

Steve F: 44:30

It's a great

Dimeji: 44:30

Yeah. And then obviously if you want to literally you just want to read a work of fiction, I like Teja Cole's books. Open City is a good one that you want to read. It's a masterpiece.

Steve F: 44:42

Great. That's great. Great. Great recommendation. When we talk about the career that you've had an amazing career, what's the one thing you think you've learned you wish you knew when you started? What would you wish, what would you like to tell your younger self?

Dimeji: 44:55

That's a great one. I I've been messing around with these words. And it's just a series of words and it's reminders to myself. Listen, notice, and noticing is different from seeing, practicing the art of noticing. Noticing what's around you. Noticing the cues. Noticing relationships. Meditate or pray. Spend time alone. Believe. And be inspired. And care. There's a lot of research on design for care. The way you approach your design for care. And then finally, always seek find ways to grow. Grow in your practice, grow in your relationships grow in your perspectives. We might do this next year and we might have totally different perspectives. So I think those are the things I've been teaching my students. I've been meditating on for the past, for this year.

Steve F: 45:47

It's great. What it leads to the other time in the other direction, say 20 years, 30 or whatever you you may never retire, but look, looking back. At a wonderful design career and the impact you've had, how would you want the work to be remembered? Like, how do you want the impact to, what do you want that impact to be on the world?

Dimeji: 46:12

That we now understand a little bit more how we live together in this world. I think that's, like I said at the beginning, that's my definition of design and that's my driver. That's my life's work is seeking to find ways to understand how we live together in this world. And the more folks are on this quest, I think the more effective we are as designers to actually design solutions to real problems. Not pseudo problems.

Steve F: 46:45

That's great. That's, it's a great way. So I now wanted to let people know where to find you. I know how to get ahold of you, but if people want to find you on the internet or,

Dimeji: 46:55

Oh, yeah, please. I actually want to start with the things that are fun for me, which is my art practice. Art by Dimeji. Art by Dimeji on Instagram. ArtbyDimeji. com. This is where I share my paintings and have conversations about art. I am always on LinkedIn just look for me by name and I'm, I'll be on LinkedIn and yeah, I think those are the two main areas, two main spaces you can find me. I also try to engage in, design discourses and things like that. I've written a few things. So if you search me on scholar. google. com, I have a few articles I've written and stuff like that.

Steve F: 47:34

That's great. Thanks for being on the show today. It's been great to have you. Great perspectives.

Dimeji: 47:39

Thank you so much, my friend. I always enjoy our conversations. It's always it makes me think a lot more.

Steve F: 47:44

Thank you. We appreciate those kind words and we'll have you back again to dive even deeper on things, but thanks for today.

Dimeji: 47:53

All right. Cheers.