PRACTICE: SENSIBILITY DESIGN
OUR EXPERIENCES BECOME OUR SENSIBILITIES
Sensibilities are cognitive tools for experiencing reality. Our sensibilities help us navigate the world and operate as filters for interaction. In other words, they help us construct meaning through action.
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered. But where do sensibilities originate? If they are perceptual abilities emerging from situationally-based sense perceptions over time, how should we evaluate their construction?
Yuval Noah Harari poses a critical question when he asks, “if the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarket?” Well I can answer that, it already has and the consequences have been severe.
Design is a practice focused in shaping human sensibilities.
Design is a craft-centric way of planning and structuring engagements with the world. Designers are educators, or rather we implicitly infuse structures of learning into the things we design. A poster teaches you how to read a complex messages in a single frame. GUIs teach you how to interface with machines. Call centers teach you how to ask for help. As designers we should endeavor to make this practice explicit and intentional. We have built modern society around an evolving command and control structures. These forms of control have evolved as people’s desire for mediation has increased and with command style auto-mediation though machines and distributed computation. Hence, our sensibilities have evolved but this has been a larger unregulated activity managed by clueless policy makers and businesses motivated by profit rather that human enlightenment.
Design must evaluate its position.
The gatekeepers of Design need to collectively evaluate its function and purpose. As designers we all have reasons for choosing this profession. Most of those reason are centered around positive human outcomes in the culturally aesthetic domain, human efficacy in our tools, or in establishing stronger social bonds. Whatever the reason, it’s a practice of human advancement and evolution. Designers need to understand and take responsibility for our role in shaping mass sensibilities.
When we experience events that deviate from expected outcomes novelty introduces new sensibilities about how to engage the world.