How “standing still” can make you a more empathetic designer
Embracing bioregionalism in an attention economy.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what goes into the things we care about. From my deep dives into random topics, I would enter as a skeptic and emerge from the surface with a new interest (staring into the abyss wondering why it took me this long). Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy discusses how investing in care and rest can be equally productive as devoting every part of our being to the innovation and disruption cycle.
How can designers strengthen their ability to pinpoint their blindspots and know where to explore further? It has become essential to carry empathy throughout the human-centered design process. Humans are messy and complicated with infinitely different impassioned values and lived experiences. The designer needs to care.
Odell uses the concept of bioregionalism as a way of channeling our focus elsewhere for intentions that go beyond one individual. This heightened awareness brings about empathy. After reading the book, I got on board with the idea that “doing nothing” can be productive (countering the thousands of YouTube productivity videos). On the flip side, maybe the frameworks bioregionalism provides can be used as a “hack” to strengthen our ability to seek, feel, and channel considerations outside our steady train of thought.
What is Bioregionalism?
Environmentalist Peter Berg promoted the term bioregionalism as a way of bringing awareness to the many life-forms that are interrelated including humans. (Here’s a fantastic Medium article going into more detail.) An example Odell provides in the book is the ways we can restore habitat and practice permaculture farming by having citizens of the bioregion stewarding that local ecology together. This calls for our attention to be focused on the interconnectedness of every level of our environment.
“It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another.” — Jenny Odell, “How to Do Nothing”, Introduction p. xviii
Odell describes how the rendering of her reality transformed once she shifted her focus. As a result, she began to act and move differently while navigating the world. An endearing and transformational experience she often references is her hobby of bird watching. Now as she walks through the rose garden, she focuses on identifying the different bird chirps, the trees that encompass her, little insects crawling on the tree trunks, and the impact of nearby mountain ranges.
Naturally Wired To Carry On. Where’s the pause button?
Similar to Odell’s revelations rooted in her environment, my patterns of attention were shaken up by contemporary art.
In the past, I kicked myself thinking I should be looking for something while viewing an artwork, but when it’s just red squares on a white canvas its overly simple composition complicates things. It’s hard to devote attention to the seemingly mundane.
Even though I’ve seen plenty of artworks in museums I haven’t really paid attention until recently. In a class lecture, I learned about Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds art installation. The artist’s name sounded so familiar. A few days later, I was digging through my drawers when I realized I bought a shirt with a quote which happened to be by Ai Weiwei. Did I ever consider Googling the name of the artist whom’s quote has been plastered on a shirt I’ve been walking around in?
I saw photo collages by Martha Rosler in another lecture only to have the feeling that I viewed this work before at a museum. Later as I looked through my camera roll, I indeed did snap a picture of one of Rosler’s collages during my trip to DC. I remember thinking the collages were unsettling but not enough for me to explore its context further.
Case in point, each one of these coincidences had me smiling while slightly annoyed at myself for not realizing these facts during my initial encounters. If only I had paid attention from the beginning.
I started to wonder: I exist yet so little do I make the effort to look closely at my surroundings. What am I focusing my gaze on? Why don’t I stop and explore instead of just continuing on?
An Expert in the Field But In What Context?
We’re focused on speed, innovation, and stimulus. It’s sometimes too loud to afford time and space to stand completely still to listen and observe. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to have every product that enters the market to be designed by those who intend to use it. This puts more responsibility on the team of designers in the room where everyone seems to have a target goal: marketers, researchers, project managers, etc. I’ve found it easy to get lost in the specific details where the overall context gets fuzzy.
Let’s put the last standing coastal redwood at Oakland Hills in California known as the infamous Old Survivor into context. In the introduction for How to Do Nothing, Odell uses this celebrity tree to describe the concept of “refusal-in-place” in which its ugly, chunky, and massive presence made it unmovable for decades allowing it to escape the chances of being cut down. What once was deemed as a useless, stubborn tree is now a wholesome attraction for any tree-lover.
Context matters when we decide the value and level of care we should associate with certain things. Which context(s) are worth our attention in an UX research scenario? Who or what determines that worth?
It wasn’t until I realized the back story and context of these artworks that I truly understood the value for each piece. At the moment, the specific eccentric bits of information were “cool” but essentially useless. Or so I thought. These seemingly random bits have the potential of bridging two polar things together to create a new connection and so on.
By understanding our bioregion, we have a better idea of where our community is at and ways it’s lacking in certain areas. There’s a helpful quiz in this Medium article that goes further into methods to explore your bioregion.
Here’s a few of the Bioregional Quiz questions:
Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.
How many days till the moon is full? (give or take two days)
What soil series are you standing on?
What was the total rainfall in your area during June and July of last year?
“Bioregionalism is land-use planning that integrates industry, agriculture, economics and governance together with the ecology of the region. It begins from the premise that humans evolved in response to their environments; and are subject to natural laws and limits; therefore, communities should be designed to fit their bioregion. …Bioregional planning could also be designed to assist the transition to a bio-based economy.”
— Birkeland & Walker
Breaking Free From the Algorithm
Similarly, Odell goes further into detail about breaking free from the capitalistic closed-loop attention cycle. I remember reading a satire article about targeted ads becoming everyone’s new personal best friend. No need to socialize anymore because you’ve got ads that know you better than you can anticipate. I’m often fed the content I want to see or read which can dangerously leave me in the dark — it can get comfortable to focus on me, my ideas, my values, my desires, my painpoints.
In a reality where many people are suffering and struggling, I find a fiery calmness in channeling my attention to things that reflect the majority of someone else’s worries, joys, or happiness. It takes practice and stillness to be open minded enough to hear out ideas and concepts that I’ve already crafted a stance on.
Stand still and try to not interfere with your surroundings. Whether that be listening carefully to what disrupts the silence or focusing on one sight noticing what moves as you remain still. Your favorite mug sitting on your desk in your room in the middle of the city getting electricity from… where exactly?
Spend Time Exploring, It’ll Pay Off Later in Unpredictable Ways
I’ve found myself exploring topics I would’ve never otherwise dwelled in. By using bioregionalism as a starting point of diverting attention elsewhere, I’ve developed an internal sense of feeling small in a vast world where life, chaos, pain, and beauty are happening at varying degrees off a screen I spend most of my days staring at. The quarantine life-style can make our environment feel stagnant. Are we just not curious enough? Or do we just not care?
It’s up to me to shift my attention in radical ways and thereafter make the connections asking myself: how can design intervene? How might these seemingly unrelated things be interconnected? Hopefully, when the opportunity to take actions or advocate for concerns and questions I’ll be able to make connections that branch beyond the walls of any office or studio — maybe it’ll even trail back to the main user or persona in mind.