Talking Trust, Design and Faith at Dutch Design Week

Discussion participants (from left) Mathieu Frossard, Corien Pompe, Matthijs van Dijk, Scott Burnham, Tim Vermeulen

As part of Dutch Design Week 2011 in Eindhoven, Premsela’s Trust Design and Volume magazine explored the relationship between trust, faith and design in a special edition of the Trust Design debates.

Taking part in the discussion of trust and faith in relation to design was Trust Design project director Scott Burnham; Corien Pompe, Volvo’s chief colour and material designer; Matthijs van Dijk, professor of industrial design at the TU Delft and the author of Vision in Design; designer Mathieu Frossard, student at the Design Academy Eindhoven's IM Masters. The morning discussion was moderated by Premsela's Tim Vermeulen.

To listen to the event and the ensuing discussion between panelists, you can download the podcast here.

For those who wish to remain with the written word, you can read an abbreviated version of Scott Burnham’s introduction to the discussion below.

Scott Burnham

Faith Is Trust: An Introduction

Faith and trust hold great power in our world, equally able to help individuals and entire nations prosper, or tear them apart. Religious scholars have found that the two words were used interchangeably in early translations of numerous religious tomes.

Given the historical companionship of these two words, and their contemporary power and importance, it is necessary to explore their relationship more closely to understand how some of their share qualities may be extended into design.

Faith is in the DNA of design history. The origin of what we know as graphic design today can be traced to the 14th century ‘illuminations’ of religious texts transcribed into calfskin tomes for the Church and wealthy patrons. The motivation of these early designers to create “prayer made manifest” carries through to the design profession today – bringing intangible ideas and information into the physical realm.

The typography used in Gutenberg’s printing press – and its inaugural Bible – was influenced “by practices of proportion and ratio handed down by the scribes and calligraphers of religious manuscripts”, notes Daniel Kantor in his book Graphic Design and Religion.

Faith gave us the most resilient pieces of design, perhaps the first piece of open design - the cross. From highly ornate Catholic or Russian Orthodox crosses to two sticks tied together atop a grave in the desert, its symbolism and intent remains coherent within wide variations of materiality. The cross is the manifestation of a belief in physical form.

Faith is connection to a promise. Whether a religious object or public sign, it’s manifestation is an article of belief in that promise. Much the same can be said about design. Design is ideas, beliefs and promises, manifested in physical form. So as we contemplate issues of trust and design, let us share the enquiry today with faith and design.

Trust is a promise. Sustainability is a promise. Green design is a promise. As is cradle to cradle... there is a long list of promises design makes. The object may not hold the promise in itself, but it is a connection to a promise. Here, the mechanics of faith can be found. Design creates faith. A manifestation of belief. A connection to a promise.

If we consider the almost religious-like devotion many show towards design – from Apple products to Eames chairs – we are already experiencing a form of faith, and devotion, if not outright worship, in design. Are we, as some would argue, replacing our spiritual needs with consumerism or is the quality, the experience of the design we surround ourselves with creating this devout connection for us?

After all, it is the continual interaction with objects and images that makes one religious in a particular manner. Define that religion however you like.

As British academic and author Terry Eagleton says, “What we consume now is not objects or events, but our experience of them.”

If we are indeed creating vehicles of experience, or vehicles of a promise, the responsibility lies with designers to decide which experiences we create - which promise we connect to. Faith is connection to a promise. As with the 14th century Illuminations, faith and design meet when a promise is made manifest. We have a responsibility to make sure that promise is trust.

Trust Design and Faith Discussion, Dutch Design Week 2011

Trust Design Publication 3: Trust, Design and Faith

We're pleased to announce that the latest issue of the Trust Design publication series is out. For issue three, we focus on the relationship between trust, design, and faith.

Faith and trust are the underpinnings of almost all our sociological and personal constructs, yet both can be allusive goals or attributes. What role does faith have in our relationship with design? Can the mechanisms of faith be used to enable trust through design? Apple has created an almost quasi-religion around its products through design, while contemporary faith-based organisations are turning to design as a way to increase and strengthen their role in society.

In addition to discussing Trust Design’s central exploration of the relationship between trust and design, we extend the conversation to debate the role of faith – spiritual or otherwise – within trust and design.

Featured in this issue are the following authors and articles: 

• Scott Burnham - Faith Is Trust
• Andrew Breitenberg - Uthixo Luthando
• Mathieu Frossard - In Design We Trust
• Nigel Cross - The Utopian Design Policy Of The Shakers
• Garðar Eyjólfsson & Thomas Vally - The New System
• Kenneth Fitzgerald - I Believe In Design
• Adrien Petrucci - Deity Emergency

Excerpts from the issue will appear on this site once the hard copy makes its way to subscribers - Trust Design: Faith is Trust is published in conjunction with Volume 29 - more information can be found here.

Bruce Sterling: No Trust Keepers are Trusted

Bruce Sterling in conversation with Scott Burnham.

From his books Shaping Things to Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, writer and technology theorist Bruce Sterling is intimately acquainted with some of the more complex issues at the heart of an Internet of Things. During a larger conversation with Scott Burnham about trust in society and online, Sterling talks here about his thoughts on privacy, trust and governance within an age of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things.

SB: Privacy is a big concern for many people in the context of trust, but the topic isn’t dealt with much in your work with the Internet of Things. Is it an issue for you?

BS: I wouldn’t say that it is a non-issue, but I think it’s kind of a primitive issue. It’s the first thing people always bring up in connection with ubiquity issues — invasions of privacy and so forth. You see people digging down to that, but, point of fact: there’s very little coherent action being done in the way of either systematically invading our privacy or systematically defending our privacy, so it’s all hype. It’s an all-purpose term that seems to have very little practical consequence in terms of the way these technologies are developed and deployed.

SB: Is too much being made about privacy?

BS: Focusing on a term like privacy makes the assumption that the developers of this technology are primarily individuals or sort of autonomous individuals who have something to hide, and that’s not really the case. People involved in RFID chains aren’t interested in privacy, not because they are thinking “my wife will find out I’m having an affair” due to a lack of privacy in the system, but it is more a matter of “I’m in the value chain and it’s in my commercial interest to have some opacity”. If you’re the Pentagon or Wal-Mart, you don’t want everyone to know where the stuff you are selling came from. They don’t want you to know for commercial reasons, business reasons and even military reasons.

SB: So commercial issues are more of a factor in this realm than personal privacy?

BS: It’s like saying that China’s refusal to commit to RFID and their decision to promulgate their own RFID standard had nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with China’s mercantile geopolitical aspects. The personal privacy element is not irrelevant but it’s just not the determining factor. It’s not what’s making things happen. I think the term transparency is more useful than privacy. Privacy somehow brings it into a domestic sphere and suggests that there are just certain things that the public should not know about. Transparency is much more a matter of what does the state want to know, what do commercial competitors want to know about one and other, how do we protect our intellectual property, and so forth. Those factors have had much more of a determining shape on the way ubiquity is deployed and spread around.

SB: And with this ubiquity comes a lot of personal data being produced and transmitted.

BS: Sure, I mean think of issues like who do you trust with the geo-locative data that’s coming off your cell phone? But you’re not going to be in control of that flow of data. You’re not going to be presented with a check box that you can understand. You’re not just going to walk into somebody’s apartment and say “Oh by the way, is it alright if I shut off every Internet connected device within a fifty yard radius of my body” to say nothing if you go out into the street or into a mall? I mean you’re not going to be able to do that any more than you can shut off the video in downtown London and it’s never going to be presented to you as a choice and if it is presented to you as a choice like say Twitter where you can have a locked account, it will be seen as an eccentric thing to do.

SB: Is it possible to have industry leadership in these issues?

BS: In the US, the reason RFID failed was that nobody would go along with the tit tats of the Pentagon and Walmart even though they were the largest military industrial nexus and the biggest retailer in the US. People saw that joining them may have been to their advantage but they just sort of foolishly resisted an ability to streamline and rationalize this distribution system and that’s the way our population is clearly going. I mean we’re abandoning trust in institutions. We’re in a state of damn near ontological chaos actually.

SB: What does this mean for an Internet of Things?

BS: Consider trust in the Internet of Things in terms of other networks that we have — the Internet itself or the cell phone network or influence networks or political parties or the public sphere of political discourse or trade relations between countries or between suppliers or supply chains. None of those are trust centric — I mean trust in terms of something that is verified. There’s nobody around there that would say, “Hi, we’re the most trustworthy supplier of whatever. You trust me, I trust you, our word is our bond”. That’s not a selling point. And it’s not the deal breaker for the Internet of Things. The deal breaker for Internet of Things is subtler. It’s stuff like lack of coding standards and the implicit refusal by somebody in the value chain to follow standards, or mulish reactions by the installed based on something else, etc.

SB: Is there a way to resolve this?

BS: If I were to think, “Could there be a better engineered trust system?” I would begin to doubt if any such thing would ever be built. It’s against the entire sort of small pieces loosely joined effort of the Internet that would require a kind of comprehensive governmental, social overview which is just not there in our G zero world. There is nobody we would trust to bring out our sources of trust. There is no trust keeper that is universally trusted by any group.

SB: Are there trusted networks that developed more organically?

BS: Well, two or three examples sort of leap to mind. The first is bar coding which is an analog Internet of Things. A lot of things have barcodes on them. There are distinct commercial advantages to having barcodes. You’re not really allowed to join the barcode union unless you pon-y up a certain amount of money and have at least a return address. That’s why you never see barcodes on homemade objects or handmade objects. But it’s not a seal of quality. It doesn’t guarantee anything about the nature of the object for which it’s applied, it just needs to work under certain circumstances and it has really worked pretty effectively. Now, compare this to something like QR codes which you can print out yourself and stick on anything and they like open up all kinds of other potentials. If I’m wearing a badge with a QR code and you click it with your cell phone, take a camera phone shot of it, what is the relationship between the two of us? I mean for all you know there may be goatse picture there or maybe I’m going to rickroll you. So that kind of thing has been put out there but nobody has ever said “we’ve got a trust certified QR code”.

SB: Can you envision a trusted system within the Internet of Things in the future?

BS: We’re seeing a lot of initiatives bubbling around that have a very web 2.0 kind of approach to it. I think it’s going to develop, but by the time we have one, the very idea of an Internet may seem archaic. Your sense of comfort or trust may be like a Cloud thing or there’ll just be a sort of creepy feeling you have when enter a city and you suddenly get the sense that “hey - there’s a lot of urban informatics going on here”. Or you turn the corner and feel much more comfortable and just want to lie down. That’s what trust in ubiquity might feel like.

This interview was originally published in Trust Design: The Internet of Things. The publication can be ordered along with Volume 28 here. 

Podcast: Trust and the Internet of Things at PICNIC

As part of PICNIC, Amsterdam's festival of innovative ideas for business, people and society, Trust Design was invited to host a panel discussion on the relationship, opportunities and risks for trust and design in an Internet of Things.

Premsela's Tim Vermeulen moderated the discussion with Trust Design project director Scott Burnham, Lilet Breddels of Volume, Internet of Things entrepreneur Usman Haque of Pachube, designer Richard Vijgen, and Katalin Gallyas, policy researcher Economic affairs Amsterdam, about how a challenging and complex issue such as trust can be aided, or damaged, in a world of networked objects and data enabled devices. 

The discussion was in support of the latest issue of the Trust Design publication, Trust Design and the Internet of Things, published as part of Volume 28.

You can download a standalone MP3 of the discussion here.

Trust Design and The Internet of Things at PICNIC 2011

Joost Grootens: Trust and Information Design

Information Designer Joost Grootens summarizing the Trust Design talks at the 2011 Milan Design Fair.

Joost Grootens in conversation with Scott Burnham: "Information has changed."

Our relationship with information is going to be a central element of our relationship with trust in an Internet of Things. As the things around us begin talking to each other, and talk to us, the amount of information is going to grow exponentially – making sense of it will be the challenge. One of the most respected information designers working today, Joost Grootens is the head of the research program Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. His work in information design has earned him numerous awards and brought him to the attention of Rolling Stone magazine, who listed him as one of the most influential designers working today.

SB: You have said previously that the world has become more complicated because the information describing it has grown. Is the growth of information a symptom or a factor of complexity?

JG: It’s definitely a symptom, but it’s also a factor. To try to understand the world and the amount of information that’s described in the world is very difficult. There are too many facts, too much is known, so you have to filter more before you’re able to understand it. The information is there, truth is there, facts are there, but sometimes you need some kind of distance to understand it better.

SB: Is our relationship with information changing?

JG: Information has changed. There’s a lot more of it, and thanks to the Internet it has never been easier to become an author of information or a publisher of information. The reader has also changed. Readers have become users, so they expect a different role in that process of consuming information.

SB: Martin Rantzer of Ericsson Foresight said “new communication senses will be needed in the future to enable us to absorb the enormous mass of information with which we’re confronted”. Would you agree? 

JG: There’s a lot of repeat language out there and it’s become like a style. I think we need to develop a new kind of literacy for information, a language of information design. It’s a very exciting time now to be developing this new language, this new vocabulary. I’m not convinced that we need to create three dimensional, animation-like visuals to add more dimensions to the information. I believe it can still be a 2D visualization and I think something that is complicated doesn’t have to be told in a complicated way. The whole point of information design is to make information less complex — to make the language less complex than the content or the context itself. We saw a similar thing happen in the 90s with the beginning of the computer age when it was very easy to create visually complex images to illustrate or to explain complex stories. I don’t believe in that. It may look interesting, it sometimes may look pretty, but it doesn’t communicate that well. I’m of the school of less.

Metropolitan World Atlas by Joost Grootens

SB: Should the designer serve as an editor of information?

JG: Yes. I think that’s a very important part of it. That said, I think most of the time when the designer is collaborating with an author of information the designer is not so much trying to filter the information but trying to translate it in an optimum way in order for things to become clear. The designer then is a kind of specialist in that process; I think more and more of these processes are collaborations.

SB: With the designer remaining neutral?

JG: Maybe neutral is not the right word but I try to be as transparent as possible with what I’ve done to the information, what I did as a designer to the information. I’m very open about my techniques, my means, the things I did to it, to guarantee that the reader is aware that the information he or she is looking at is designed, is manipulated.

SB: Do you feel that transparency creates a more honest relationship between the representation and the reality of the information?

JG: It makes it easier for the reader to realize that what he’s looking at might not be the absolute truth, but as the designer I try to be open, to put all my cards on the table and say “okay, this is what I did”. So it’s more about trust between me and the reader in that sense.

SB: That quest for understanding between the raw information and the communication of that information has become a motivating force in the growth of information design it seems.

JG: A lot of designers, especially young designers, are very interested in information graphics and I think they intuitively feel that they need to do something with the flow and amount of information they are confronted with. They are trying to grasp it. Ten years ago, students could say “I don’t know that” if you made a reference to something. Now, you can no longer afford to say “I don’t know that”. We have to be aware of everything and students want to understand what’s happening right now – not only around them but in the whole world. With so much information to process, it is a logical step to do something, to try and make this information into something. You write about it. You visualize it. You make a song about it. You do something with it.

"I swear I use no art at all", 10 years, 100 books, 18,788 pages of book design by Joost Grootens

SB: It seems that we’re still experimenting, that we haven’t really made sense yet not only of what the information is telling us but we haven’t made sense of the deluge of information coming at us.

JG: Definitely. We are not able to handle it and I’m always struck that a lot of the visualizations that we see trying to make sense of it are so similar. A lot of things are based on similar sources so there are a lot of plain things that abstract or animate GPS data or photographs — in these areas visualizing data is very easy now because it’s almost automatic if it has a kind of geographic position. But then to make it into a story and make it into something that is more than an image means more than just a neat graphic translation or the visualization of it. You need to have some kind of clue. It’s just like if you were a scientist, you can go to a lab and do a test but you first need to have an idea of what you’re looking for before you can do the test successfully.

SB: In addition to rethinking the language of information design, you’ve also spoken about the need to rethink the tools designers use.

JG: A product is no longer the only outcome of a design process. For a long time now, we have seen the reader becoming the user, the consumer becoming more active in the process, and it may very well be time that the role of the designer changes also. We have to start earlier in the process, but we also have to stop earlier. We have to design the new tools for this — maybe that’s the logical next step in the computer revolution. In the same way that the computer changed the design profession by making former specialist jobs like typesetter or type designer more accessible to people without specialist knowledge — because they can control a computer, they can also create a book or build a typeface. With all this software, and with so much of it becoming open source, it’s ridiculous that we as designers are so dependent on certain companies for all the things that we do like Adobe or Apple. I think the next step will be that designers will start designing their own tools, not to help their designs but maybe these tools are products of a design process and that the user, the consumer, the reader will use them to filter or to visualize the information.

SB: If you consider the evolution of information vehicles, from the printing press to the Internet, a new tool could be the next information vehicle for understanding the waves of information coming at us.

JG: That could very well be. It could be that certain tools will become the new information carriers.

SB: Instead of more design for understanding, it may be about more tools for understanding.

JG: Yes. Because the information has become endless. It’s unfinished. It’s ungraspable. It’s infinite. That is what we are experiencing with the Internet, and the Internet of things that come next. On one hand, it will be tools, a kind of filter or glasses or other devices working in real-time to try and understand what is happening. On the other hand this will also inspire more objects or information carriers that are the opposite — that are finite. They’re graspable. They’re analog, like a book.

SB: Information has become a form of source material — in the same way that designers would work with certain materials as they became available throughout history, the available material now is information.

JG: When I started to become interested in information and designing information, the first Gulf War was going on. There were press conferences every night that showed photographs of pre-strike and post-strike air attacks. I was fascinated by the images used in these press conferences because they were black and white, satellite photographs, very neatly cropped around the specific bridge or building. On the left you would see the pre-strike bridge or building, and on the right you’d see the post-strike, after the air attack. Because it was black and white, because it was a top view, it was made very abstract so you didn’t feel that that bridge or that building contained human beings. I thought it was a very clever way of hiding information or filtering information in a specific way and then reducing it to make it into an operation. I realized that you can manipulate information in such a way that it becomes almost a method or a formula. It’s the only logical outcome. That, for me, started my awareness of how you can manipulate information to tell a story.

This interview was originally published in Trust Design: The Internet of Things. The publication can be ordered along with Volume 28 here.