Design for Informality

Design for Informality

James Frankis

Design forInformality

James Frankis MFA Transdisciplinary Design, 2014

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nformal systems are characterized as problematic, undesigned and emergent. The upsides to their

existence are very rarely taken into account, yet, informality often achieves things formal systems never could. The value of informal systems comes from the unique human ingenuity that drives their development. Because of this natural ingenuity all human systems contain a level of informality, even those, which are traditionally defined as formal. Designers often refer to this informality as the ‘unintended consequences’, ‘misuse’ or ‘hacks’ of design. The idea of people informally re-appropriating design for new uses is antithetical to most definitions

of good design and planning. Informal systems, although often problematic, are actually the workarounds individuals use in reaction to failing formal systems. Design can, therefore, look to these systems as a method for diagnosing and redesigning broken formal systems. Furthermore, if we know that it is the natural reaction for humans to re-appropriate, hack and change designed systems, then we can begin to design and predict this evolution. We can use these theories to manufacture emergent and resilient human behaviors and bring the value of informality to the design of human systems.

Abstract

I

COMMUNITYCENTERS

NGOS

GOVERNMENTWORKERS

COMMUNITYLEADERS

“CRIMINALS” YOUTH

YOUTH GROUPS

GOVERNMENT

FAVELA

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he red brick homes of the favelas of Brazil have become a cultural icon across the

world. They represent the wealth inequalities across the nation and stand as a monument to rebellion, poverty, music, violence, dance and drugs.1 As such, these homes have become iconic and now through favelaexperience.com tourists coming to Rio de Janeiro can stay in a favela.2 AirBNB.com has listings for Rocinha, in “Rio’s safe, vibrant, centrally-located favela”3 and NPR recently reported on the rapid gentrification of favelas such as Babylon and the new young professionals living there.4 While it is questionable as to whether this is a positive development for the inhabitants of favelas, this incredible turn of events would have seemed

impossible only 20 years ago. The favelas of this time are characterized by films like City of God, as dystopian violent worlds of drug barons and running gun battles through un-policed concrete jungles.5 The Brazilian government led multiple eviction efforts and has destroyed favelas many times over.6, 7 Their reasoning was that they were unsafe, untenable and illegal developments. Yet, the favelas achieved something the government was fundamentally failing to do: provide low-cost housing for the influx of rural workers to the rapidly developing urban-centers. Unfortunately, it seems that it wasn’t until middle class people began visiting and staying in favelas, through the pressures of gentrification, that they begin to become ‘useful’. The reality is that favelas have

PART ONE

Bazaaristan Informality, a valuable commodity.

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Rua 25 da Março, São Paulo

©smartercitieschallenge.wordpress.com

PART ONE: BAZAARISTAN

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fallen into the category of ‘informal’. A tag that carries a heavy load of unwanted additional associations; illegal, unsafe, improper, undemocratic, untaxed and undocumented. None of which are positive. Across the world there are billions of people engaged in informal systems and informal economies, just like favelas, many of which are highly valuable and without which, our fragile societies would collapse. Yet, the informality of them means they are often purposefully designed-out. Instead of the rocky path favelas have trodden to viability and positive social status, they could have been re-framed as a crowd-sourced, bottom-up alternatives to low-cost housing. The purpose of this thesis is to attempt to define these systems, identify their value for design and suggest how designers can begin to design for informality, not against it.

WHAT IS INFORMALITY?

Informality is a difficult thing to define. It doesn’t quite mean illegal, although informal workers often fall outside of the law, it also doesn’t mean poor, as informal workers often earn more than their formal counterparts. Informality is so difficult to define because it is an externally imposed definition. The UK’s Small Business Council defines informal work as follows:

“Informal work involves the paid production and sale of goods and services that are unregistered by, or hidden from, the state for tax and/or benefit purposes but which are legal in all other respects.”8

By this definition the only difference between a formal and informal system is a governmental or social ruling, which is a very fine and constantly shifting line. Waste pickers, or informal recyclers, during the 17th century in the US were considered a necessary part of life, but with the advent of formalized waste collection they drifted towards informality.9 Today, across US urban centers it is easy to spot waste pickers working to collect recyclable materials for deposit returns or re-sale. Their function has stayed much the same, helping to reduce waste and provide work for those who find other employment hard to find, yet, they are now classed as informal. The definition of what is or isn’t informal is constantly changing with social trends, legal precedents and new policies.

Robert Neuwirth, in his book Stealth of Nations, reframes informality as ‘System-D’ or ‘System Débrouillard’, French for resilient, self-sufficient or

Informal waste picker, New York City.

Informal transaction, New York City.

Young children playing in the favela Paraisópolis, São Paulo


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ingenious.10 The wonderful thing about this expression is that it begins to define some of the benefits of informality, rather than the presumed negatives. In fact our ingenuity is often heralded as what makes us uniquely human. It was our ability to repurpose rocks and sticks into tools that led to our evolution from ‘cavemen’ to the high-functioning complex societies we live in today.11 Now, we see this continuing drive, ingenuity and determination most clearly in the informal sector.

Across informal systems workers generate income, deliver services, clear waste, create jobs, build business, distribute goods and provide shelters; many of the same aims that governments purport to provide. The pervasive nature and huge successes that informal economies display; clearly shows that informal systems have value and, although often illegal, should not be overlooked.

INFORMAL VALUE

Through our design-led research process and creation of Mandou Bem, we uncovered the existing informal system of youth activism, most notably in the favelas of Brazil and Colonias of Texas. Informal systems, however, exist across cities, cultures and demographics from market sellers and grey market importers in China, to waste pickers and under-the-table delivery boys in New York city, to public transport and water delivery in Lagos; informal systems exist across all societies. We, formal society, see them surrounding us and often shrug them off as poverty, desperation or inferiority. In reality, these informal systems and economies are highly valuable from a cultural, business and ethical standpoint.

Markets, street sellers, panhandlers and hawkers inhabit every city across the globe. It is the visibility of informal street sellers that give so many places their

A hand made bicycle souvenir from favela artist, Barbella.

cultural vibrancy and booming tourist trade, from the heaving crowds of Brick Lane market in London, to the knick-knacks sold under MASP in São Paulo, to the caricaturists and informal artists filling Central Park every summer. When tourists go abroad they often seek out local culture and strive for cultural ‘realness’. The lack of authenticity and global availability of big name brands makes their ‘souvenir-worthiness’ very low; we look for uniqueness, so we can attach meaning to an object, treasure it and physically remember a special journey we took. What could be more unique than a hand-crafted trinket sold by a local street seller? In this culturally significant moment, we seek out people like informal sellers so that we can get something ‘real’ and truly connect with another culture. It is a common association when framed one way to view informality as the ‘real’ culture of a place. In São Paulo, every middle class house is fortified against street crime with walls and security guards.12 This made, Megan’s and my, visit to the favelas a refreshing change. We saw little moments like people laughing and talking on the streets, drinking coffee at bars, sitting on benches and children playing with toys—all things that are largely invisible in the rest of the city. It is unusual that in one moment we enjoy an entire country’s culture through its informal systems, yet, in the next, we write them off as unimportant, illegal and inferior.

Furthermore, these informal systems often prop up society. Across New York, it is easy to spot a hunched figure rifling through a trash can, pulling out recyclables and shoving them into a bulging plastic bag. We find ourselves looking at these people with a sense of pity and shame. The dirtiness of their informal work paints a negative picture of them and their business. It has been estimated, however, that informal waste pickers collect and recycle between 50% to 100% of waste in many of the worlds cities.13 These informal waste pickers provide cities like New York with a relatively low-cost service that tends to be overlooked and even outlawed. Without their existence many cities would be in a potential garbage crisis. Waste pickers are just one example of an informal system that supports society and provides services that, without which, cities would be greatly impoverished.

Not only do these systems support society, provide services and stability, their economic value cannot be understated. For example, the single street market, Rua 25 da Março,in São Paulo, pulls in four hundred thousand people on weekdays, which adds up to $10 billion of business a year in sales.14 This puts this one street market in the top 20 biggest businesses in Brazil.15 Neuwirth, in Stealth of Nations, imagines

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CosanFood Processing

BRFFood Processing

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Rua 25 Da MarçoStreet Market

CSNIron & Steel

CPFL EnergiaElectric Utilities

CemigElectric Utilities

EmbracerAero & Defense

11—18 of Brazil’s largest companies by revenue compared to the São Paulo street market, Rua 25 Da Março. Source: The Forbes List and Stealth of Nations.


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the entire world’s informal economies altogether as though they were a single country. In his work, he nicknames this hypothetical country ‘Bazaaristan’. Neuwirth, estimates ‘Bazaaristan’ would have a $10 trillion economy placing it in the same GDP league as the United States and China. To be clear, this does not include highly criminal activities such as gun-running, drug dealing and other organized crime, and is considered to be a very conservative estimate of the value of informal economies.16, 17

It is easy to imagine that informal economies are mainly in developing countries, yet, In the United States many small businesses begin as informal systems. Either due to high taxes, expensive licensing or ignorance of formal systems, small businesses often operate informally until they reach a scale where formality is viable. The Women Entrepreneurs of Baltimore say this is as high as 25% of all the entrepreneurs that come to their meetings.18 Frederick T. Stanley, of Stanley tools, started his career as a peddler selling tools from the back of a Mule and Dick Sears began Sears Roebuck by selling watches

on trains.19 The British Small Business Council estimates that even in developed countries, like France, the informal economy is as large as 23.2% of the total economy. The same report also points out that the informal economy is heavily engaged in and consumed by wealthy sectors of society and there is no evidence to show that informality is correlated to race, wealth, social status or unemployment.20 The global value of informal systems is only just being realized in what was previously thought to be a damaging economic practice.

Informality is also not a way of life, nor is it a permanent state. Rather, it is often adopted for a short period of time or as a partial state. Informality is not just practiced by the habitually unemployed or migrant workers. The majority of people engaged in informal work are ‘income patching’ or getting by on a combination of formal and informal incomes.21 Often, the lure of bar or restaurant work, in a city like New York provides the opportunity to work for cash and therefore work outside of the formal taxation and wage systems. This provides a living

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Comparing the world’s largest economies (USA, China, India and Japan) with the total GDP of all informal activity. Source: CIA World Fact Book.

Categories of informal work in the UK. Source: Small Businesses in the Informal Economy, SBC UK.

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47%

23%

5%25%

of Informal work isconducted by formalsmall businesses.

In the UK

MicroEntrepreneurs

Paid Favors

Pre-Organized

make up the remaining 53%

Ireland

French Informal SectorFrench Informal Sector

Min.

Percentage of GDP

Minimum estimate Maximum estimateAverage Estimate

Max.Av.

Greece

Key

Italy

Portugal

France

USA

Spain

Belgium

Canada

Sweden

Denmark

Netherlands

Germany

Australia

Great Britain

Norway

Austria��

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23.2%

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Minimum, average and maximum estimates of informal economies as a percentage of total GDP in developed countries. Source: Small Businesses in the Informal Economy, SBC UK.

for people ranging from illegal immigrants to college graduates. In the UK, 47% of all informal work is created by formal small business.22

So often informality skirts, subverts or breaks laws and, is therefore considered to be immoral. Yet, at the same time without informality, New York City’s heavily informal restaurant industry would collapse. Informal family businesses like

Sears would never exist and over a quarter of France’s economy would disappear. The idea that informality should be associated with marginalized communities and poverty-stricken areas is therefore clearly outdated and incorrect. A wider and deeper understanding of informality is needed to appreciate its features, functions, values and shortcomings.


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EMERGENT INFORMALITY

If we look at informal settlements on the systemic level and without the lens of formality or informality, then we can move away from value judgements like legitimate or illegitimate, legal or illegal and, instead, discuss purpose and function. As Donella Meadows says in Thinking in Systems “purposes are deduced from behavior not from rhetoric or stated goals.”23 It is often the case that designers of everything from policies to products, tell the world what their new design ‘does’. However, this is just the rhetoric not the actual purpose. In reality designed objects and systems have many unintended purposes. Informal systems have no rhetoric only purpose, there is no formal or top-down design lead to claim what the outcome is, or should be. This makes them highly functional, without the deceptive or inaccurate design claims of pre-supposed purpose informal systems are left to their own devices. This means that because there is no enforcement of a specific usage, people revert to what, we can perhaps call, ‘natural’ models of existence.

The famous computer scientist, Alan Turing’s, only biology paper discusses morphology, or the interaction of microscopic particles to make macroscopic patterns. He theorized that the same basic chemistry guides everything from the creation of patterns on the scales of a fish to the whirling arms of a spiral galaxy. Turing’s seminal paper introduced this topic, which is now widely referred to as ‘emergence’. Emergent phenomenon are defined as many independent, unaware and unthinking particles interacting to create higher-order systems and patterns.24, 25 Humans are far from exempt from this emergent behavior. We see the results of this commonly in traffic jams, which are often caused by one individual slowing on the highway, causing a cascade of ever harder braking behind them. This complex system happens as a combination of technology and human interaction but is dependant on separate humans (particles) making individual decisions (braking hard to avoid crashing).

The ungoverned and emergent interactions of human systems created our modern society. The natural benefit of resource exchange encouraged trade and created links between different communities. This created cultural and economic exchange between these places and brought a multitude of benefits. No-one designed this system—it just emerged from a natural human desire to increase personal wealth and standing. This is essentially the theme of the seminal economic text The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith, refers to this as the ‘invisible hand’ guiding the market.26

In human systems, value exchanges are essential to creating large

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DESIGNER

DRIVER

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REGULATOR BUS PROVIDER

INFORMAL BUSNETWORK

PASSENGER

MIDDLE MAN

MANUFACTURE END USER SECONDARY USER

CHAIN EXTENDER

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“Purposes are deduced from behavior not from rhetoric or stated goals.

”Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

scale emergent systems. As independent, and often self-serving creatures we want to gain something out of every interaction we make. This does not have to be necessarily monetary gain. Humans are highly susceptible to many other forms of currency including; social standing, reputation, feeling good, services, resources or time.

The collective human production and exchange of value is most raw in informal systems. Without governance or intervention, massive systems of value chains are free to grow and morph into any number of shapes, which create a range of purposes. In Lagos an otherwise unconnected group of individuals and vehicles, becomes an informal bus network through a series of individual value exchanges. In this system, drivers, for example, know that if they get in a bus and drive it they can pick up passengers, and that

these passengers will pay the driver for the service. If bus routes become more regular then they also become more predictable, which forms higher density clusters of passengers along known routes. Drivers pick up the most passengers when they avoid other drivers’ routes and driving times, which creates an evenly distributed service. This system is a real and functioning bus network in Lagos. The individual informal transactions create a system that transforms people and value exchanges into drivers, bus routes, fare regulators and passengers.27 It quickly becomes apparent that without the help of design, policy or planning, individuals acting independently can naturally create balanced, highly-functional systems.

The science of complexity gives us an existing framework to understand, diagnose and even model these systems. In viewing human systems as a series

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A simplified system map and value chain of the Lagos informal bus system.

Rhetoric or purpose


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of particles that have a variety of behaviors one can accurately predict the outcome of a variety of systems. In a sense, the tendency of informal systems to be, individualistic makes them prime candidates for this type of analysis.28 The abstraction of informal systems through a scientific lens serves to humanize them. In looking at these systems from a scientific perspective one can abstain from creating value judgements and look past rhetoric to purpose. From this vantage point it is possible to identify and maybe even prove some potentially powerful benefits of informal systems.

COMPLEX EFFICIENCY

The tendency seems to be that these ‘natural’ human systems are highly resource efficient. They are competitive and encourage a constant drive to squeeze out a little bit more space for profit or value, creating a multitude of middlemen and chain extenders. These middlemen find value in spaces between existing links and extenders find value in previously discarded resources. This creates chains of constant resource manipulation and value creation, while at the same time, ensuring that everyone along the chain is receiving a viable wage. The constant search for new value along a chain means that resources are perpetually repurposed and re-configured to then be injected back into a profitable market, which creates looping product cycles of manufacture, use, disposal, repurpose, use, disposal etc.

In natural food chains we see the same type of efficiency and highly complex patterning. Humans have removed themselves from these food chains through the division of labour and industrialization. It is unsurprising, however, that across all societies’ informal systems closely resemble the dynamics of food chains. Instead of demeaning informality as something animalistic, this analogy aims exemplify the power, efficiency and potential exhibited by informal systems.

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“The abstraction of informal systems through a scientific lens serves to humanize them.

”

Value chains in informal systems. Informal bus system, Lagos

RESILIENT NETWORKS

The links created by systems are important to the relationship between particles and how they interact overall. The name given to the mathematics of this study is network theory, or universal behaviors of networks, which are based on their structure not their contents. The highly convoluted and long value chains in informal systems create a large number of links between the different members of the system. This creates a multitude of social links across vast numbers of people, removing separation of individuals and creating decentralized networks. This creates another benefit to informality: resilience. Decentralized networks, as described by Albert-László Barabási in his book Linked, are much more resilient

than other structures. In spreading links widely across a network without one centralized node, the likelihood of network collapse rapidly diminishes.29 This perhaps explains some of the pervasiveness of informal systems that are constantly under attack. Pirate DVD sellers are found across the world in most informal markets. They are under constant threat of being arrested or having their wares seized. Even if a police crack-down occurs, however, and large numbers of sellers are caught, it has very little effect. The distributed nature of the delivery network means supply can be up and running within a few days. This network resilience is essential to many informal systems, as participants regularly drop in and out of the system.

Decentralized network

©imguol.com 2012

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here is something deeply unsettling about imagining humans as just interacting,

unthinking particles. We pride ourselves on our free will and our ability to make decisions independent of our basic biological needs. Something about the idea of informal systems being as valuable as formal systems challenges this notion. If unplanned human systems can function, then why should we plan or design at all? Perhaps it is this deep sub-conscious self-doubt that encourages and perpetuates the demonization of informal systems.

While the assumptions that informality is always bad is incorrect, the assumption that formal planning is therefore useless is also wrong. Informal systems, unsurprisingly, do not always grow into an optimal solution. In Ghana, following the same stigma and stereotypes imposed on most informal systems the practice of night-soil collecting is so socially

shunned that almost no one will do it. Being a night-soil collector involves collecting weekly sewage from peoples houses around the town. They pull the sewage out of the back of houses through a small door, which is accessible from the outside. Night-soil collectors, take money from each household at the end of the month and earn around 3 times more than the average unskilled labourer in Ghana. In a country without formal sewage systems, the alternative to night-soil collecting means leaving the house to pay for public toilets, defecating in a bag and dropping it in a ditch or walking to an open defecation field. Despite the incomparable service night-soil collectors offer and the high potential pay, social stigma towards night soil-collectors is so high that people force them to work at night and are unwilling to do this dirty job themselves. In the case of Mr. Atia, a night-soil collector in Kwahu-Tafo, Ghana, even his own children will not take up his

PART TWO

The Death of the Designer

Design’s battle against the informal sector.

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Activist youth from the Colonias, Texas, USA

PART TWO: THE DEATH OF THE DESIGNER

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work. As this informal system begins to fade out, the already unsanitary conditions in Ghana will only worsen. This is due to not only a lack of money but a stigma against a dirty and informal profession. 30, 31, 32

Informal settlements also suffer from a multitude of negative side effects of informality, such as poor sanitation systems, low life expectancy, little garbage collection and unsafe living conditions.33 Alongside the wonderful successes of informal systems, the undesigned nature of them is not always positive or helpful. Becoming a proponent of an entirely informal world is unrealistic, damaging, irresponsible and unethical. To some degree, formality and design is required to provide major infrastructure, legitimacy, services and incentives that informality cannot always realize.

This thesis calls for a greater balance between respecting both informal and formal systems for their unique capacities to provide specific benefits. What is required is a recognition of the benefits of individual informal systems on a case-by-case basis. As has been demonstrated, informality is not limited to just informal settlements and developing nations. Rather, it exists across all human systems, rich and poor. As such recognizing the values of informality has wide reaching consequences but also varies drastically by context and culture.

Design Against InformalityIn the design and creation of Mandou Bem we have regularly reported on the value of informal settlements, systems and economies to some agreement and much resistance. We have encountered every attitude from disbelief to anger. We have been called ‘Los Gringos’ and been personally insulted in blog post comment sections, but we have also been directly emailed by a number of like minded individuals.34

One of these people was Stefan, a young architecture student in the University of North Carolina. He told us of how he presented his plan to empower informal recyclers in Trinidad and Tobago. A core part of his design work involved a bridge over a six lane highway that would connect recyclers with a nearby landfill site. This would help to save lives and increase a recycler’s haul. An expert panel of designers told Stefan that he was institutionalizing waste-picking and should instead be extracting the ‘slum dwellers’ from the situation. This is designing with bias—not extracting your own personal value judgements from an external situation. Unfortunately, this is a much more common practice than searching for value in informal systems. Waste-pickers earn

FORMAL INFORMAL

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SECURITYINFRASTRUCTURE CULTURERESILIENCE

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Night-soil worker, Ghana.

There are positive and negative sides to both formal and informal systems.

Ruy Ohtake’s Heliópolis tower project.

relatively good wages in most countries and provide an invaluable service. The bigger problem is the jobs dangers and unsanitary conditions. To combat this, design and formalization can provide the legitimacy and infrastructure required to ensure that waste-picking is a safe career.

We see this ignorance surrounding informality come out in many ‘slum’ development projects, which focus on building alternative structures. In Heliópolis, a favela in São Paulo, Ruy Ohtake worked with the community to build circular tower blocks to house residents of the favela. The project was intended to improve housing for the favela residents. However, this aim is problematic, because it is unclear what needed to be improved or what the risks of not improving were. Favelas are dense and twisting informal settlements. In a number of cases they are built on especially unstable or dangerous terrain. This is not

the case in Heliópolis—it is a flat piece of centrally located land. Ohtake’s previous project focused on re-painting the favelas to “unite an irregular street facade of characteristic red brick structures”. This project seems to be more about aesthetics than public need.35 And it appears his tower project followed the same formula. Ohtake’s towers are currently being populated by a number of residents who told us that they actually dislike living there and find it to be quite lonely. The greatest shame in this project is its failure to recognize that the favelas own informal system of creating houses is not the real problem. A designer saw ‘informality’ and automatically assumed it was negative. Heliópolis is faced with the challenge of being recognized as a legitimate community. These tower blocks further undermine the existing community housing and make favela recognition in formal government even less likely. It is probable

©arcowebarquivos


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that this design intervention in the long-term will be damaging to the people it is trying to help. Instead of first identifying the functioning components of the favela, the architect used an aesthetic value judgement to define the problem and then took a discipline-based role in response; architects build buildings. This lack of understanding of informal systems is the antithesis of good design. It ignores context and culture to impose outside ideals onto a people helpless to respond. Our argument for Mandou Bem defines this as designing with bias. In the case of informal settlements and systems, designers are not seeing the value of these spaces and letting their own subjectivity block meaningful solutions.

Informality vs. DesignHistorically, design has mainly ignored informality as the unintended outcomes of poor urban planning, policy or design. Across all design disciplines and in design rhetoric, unintended outcomes are viewed as bad, it is presumed to be the designers job, by definition, to design all the required features of a

product or service. If users have to repurpose, fix or adjust a designed piece then, in someway, design has failed. This puts design directly at odds with informality but it is not the opposite of informality. Informality is just the re-design of the design—there is just a difference of scale and timing. If a professional, or perhaps a formal designer, designs for a scale of 1010—with many types of individual in mind—then informality is design at the scale of 101—on the individual scale.

These unintended consequences or reappropriations of designs are assumed to be negative but often the opposite is true. The cellphone towers we use everyday to communicate via mobile phones were designed to use small signals that bounce between the towers and your phone in order to hold its location.36 Although unplanned, we now we use this signal all over the world to send text messages. Supposedly, everything from insoles and braces, to smoke detectors and baby food were invented in the quest for space travel.37

In fact, the recent spate of ‘life-hacks’ celebrates these unintended or wider consequences of design.

Design at 1010

Design at 10 1

Formality

Informality

The popularity of this repurposing of products is huge. Online social news and entertainment site Buzzfeed, now has an entire DIY section and hosts articles with titles like “18 Everyday Products You’ve Been Using Wrong” which have over 6 million views.38

The same human ingenuity and repurposing we see in informal systems is being celebrated as part of this DIY movement. This trend began in its modern form in the 1920s as part of the radio hobbyist scene, followed by the punk ‘zine’ scene in the 1970s. With modern access to technology the DIY movement has now expanded to include makers, hackers, hobbyists, lifehackers and citizen-scientists.39

To aid this growing movement we have seen designed products to support the growing number of participants. Products like Squarespace and Wordpress support the informal and amateur development of websites. Forbes article “30 Terrific Tools for Small Businesses”40 categorizes a host of tools to help starters build their own business. Across all sectors there has been a growing demand for

designed platforms and tools that enable individual people to do more on their own.

The open-source software movement has redefined economic models, software creation and our understanding of social dynamics through informal and emergent action. The creation of programs like Linux relied on many potentially, untrained, undocumented, unregistered and unknown software coders 41—many of the same features we associate with informal systems. In the world of design there has been a growing movement towards morphogenetic design, or the creation of a set of variables, which through either computer modelling or chemical interactions, grow into emergent structures.41 The aesthetics and strengths of Turing’s patterns have been recognized across architecture and product design.

In these contexts we celebrate collective unplanned human ingenuity, emergence, informal development and re-appropriation. Yet in the context of informal human systems we demonize them and shrug them off as unimportant, potentially dangerous and inferior.

This example of life hack, turns a toaster on its side for grilled cheese

This example of a life hack, is a power scrubber built from a drill.

© seriouslyforreal.com© seriouslyforreal.com


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HackingProducts like Lego leverage this DIY human ingenuity to make a toy with potentially unlimited variations and iterations. The creation of interlocking micro-pieces creates a low barrier to entry for children to tangibly manifest their imagination—a DIY product for children. As a result, Lego has become the world’s largest toy brand, the worlds most popular toy and even the world’s largest tire manufacturer. 43, 44, 45

Products like Lego create a low-barrier to repurposing. Although a Lego model comes with a suggested form, the barrier to remaking and expanding on this form is so low that even a six year-old can do it. Lego requires this low-barrier as there is little final utility for Lego creations. Compare this to computing platforms such as Arduino and Processing, which have much greater final utility and therefore a higher payoff for users. This allows them to be successful despite forcing users to learn electronics and a coding language to interact with their products.

All systems have this tension between barriers to repurposing and potential utility. This could be thought of as a walled garden. If the wall is especially high it is difficult to climb, but if the garden is full of delicious fruit then it might be worth climbing. If the garden, however, is mainly full of thorns with a few grassy areas the wall would have to be very low for you to want to climb over and get inside. At the advent of an informal settlement, the risks and benefits of not building their own community are at the scale of life and death. In this context people quickly abandon the formal systems and resort to drastic unplanned and ingenious behaviors no matter what the barriers to entry are.

These barriers to entry often perpetuate an assumption that design is ‘successful’. If something

User

Barrier to Hacking

Potential Utility

HIGH BARRIER HIGH REWARD

LOW BARRIER HIGH REWARD

HACKING IS DIFFICULT

HACKING IS EASY

HACKING IS NOT WORTH IT

HIGH BARRIER

LOW REWARD

works just well enough for people not to complain, or to be able ‘hack it’ then it will continue to be used, inspite of its imperfectness. However, as soon as you lower the barriers to ‘hacking’ and repurposing you realize that every design is flawed. The IKEA Hackers website neatly demonstrates this. IKEA seemingly has a product for every situation and every home, and their products are often built with modular components to increase compatibility. Yet, inspite of this, people have found the components inadequate for a wide range of uses. The fact that IKEA furniture comes flat packed and unassembled has lowered the barriers of entry just enough to encourage people to ‘hack’ their products. This has led to a remixing and repurposing of multiple products to create improved solutions in specific contexts.46

Products solve this problem through modularity, or the creation of interacting pieces that converge to create higher-order forms, whether they are Lego models, or IKEA furniture. This modularity helps to ease the imperfectness of products. Lego and IKEA find a balance between formal design and informal hacking. Lego is both a designed product, and an informal play-tool. IKEA builds formal products that require informal construction and can be easily repurposed and “hacked”. And the success of these solutions is because they rely on, instead of playing down, human ingenuity—they design space for informality.

Death of the DesignerThere is a perpetual tension between humanity and governance; the heterogenous nature of humanity requires unique products and solutions, yet, the hierarchical, top-down and cost-saving nature of business and government requires the efficiency and speed of uniformity. Design is the mediation of the homogeneous needs of big organizations and the heterogeneous needs of individual people. Informality is the workaround an individual creates to massage a designed product, service or system to better meet their own unique needs. Informality, is in a sense, an essential component of the design process. When a designer unleashes a ‘thing’ (in the loosest sense of the word) upon the world, they can make claims as to its purpose (actually rhetoric) but it is for the user to decide what it’s real purpose is. In other words, informality is the right of the user to interpret a designed object in the way they see fit. As Roland Barthes claims, in his famous literary critique the Death of the Author, “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author” 47 so too must the birth of the user come at the cost of the death of the designer.

DESIGNER USER

INFORMALFORMAL

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here is a shift from thinking of design as a practice of things to a practice of “protocols,

platforms, services and systems.”48 Design now creates work in sectors as diverse as public health, government services, humanitarian relief, public education and infrastructure. These are all highly complex, interwoven systems of people and policy that are designed with a purpose in mind, but often create unintended consequences and results. When dealing with public policy and large-level systems, despite a greater degree of heterogeneity we see a ‘one size fits all’ style approach. If a system isn’t working for someone, and the risks of hacking or repurposing the system are lower than the potential utility or benefits, then informal alternatives will appear. The way these large-scale system policies are currently designed means that this informality is seen as failure. Hacking is seen as taking advantage, finding loop-

holes, corruption or abuse. The repurposing of land for informal settlements is viewed as collective theft, not as “zone-hacking”.

Unfortunately, when a government designs a system, unlike products, they rarely encourage ‘correct usage’, rather, they discourage perceived misuse. This makes the barriers to entry extremely high. By ‘hacking’, or repurposing a governmental policy you risk imprisonment, fines and social stigma. It is only because of the extreme conditions surrounding informal settlements that there is chance for informal policy, space and ‘zone-hacking’ to exist.

However, informal policies and urban planning, like ‘slums’, achieve a number of things that governments often fail to provide for: central and affordable shelter, pedestrian-oriented planning, high public transport usage, high social capital, diverse space usage, organic or slow iterative architecture and voluminous

PART THREE

InterdependenceDesigning with and for informality.

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PART THREE: INTERDEPENDENCE

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cultural production.49 Not only do they achieve all these benefits but they do it incredibly quickly and at a fraction of the cost of most urban projects, inspite of the common government efforts to stop their progress. Informality can be viewed as a human need to exercise their own creativity and better fit products and services to their own unique requirements. This is seen as a success story when focused on Lego, Linux or IKEA, but as a negative quality when looking at informal settlements, informal business or waste pickers.

Designing with InformalityInformality only exists as an extension of the formal world. Informality is the reaction to incorrect systemic purpose for individuals. Informality subverts the rules and regulations to create new systems that don’t fit within formal frameworks. It is therefore possible to argue that informality is a response to the broken systems of formality. In the case of the favelas, the formal world could not provide low cost housing and informal settlements subsequently arose; for small businesses formal tax laws and regulations devour start-up capital and stifle growth so informal businesses start; and with waste pickers high barriers to formal employment and the failures of current waste collection, provide them with informal work. If these informal systems are the collective repurposing and redesign of broken systems on a massive scale then, instead of ignoring or demonizing these spaces, shouldn’t this be the first place design looks to diagnose and fix these systemic problems?

Returning back to the example of the disappearing night-soil collectors in Ghana we have a prime case study of how design can intervene within informal systems. Ideo.org, alongside Unilever, is piloting a new system to continue the practice of night-soiling but legitimize it in a way that makes it sustainable. Alongside improved technology and home sanitation the Clean Team project is rebranding the night-soil collector. One of their core impact metrics is focused on their personal wellbeing and social status. Hopefully, in drawing out and rebranding this informal worker as a formal and important service, Clean Team can perpetuate the positive benefits of the informal system while removing the negative. This project exemplifies how design can transform existing negative informal systems into preferred situations. Design’s role can be to examine informal systems and extend, amplify, re-connect or tease-out the positive elements while minimizing, removing or disconnecting the negative components. 50 51

Design also has a role in the diagnoses of the positive elements of an

informal system. Through Mandou Bem, and before that Mark, we used design to build knowledge around existing informal systems. As codified and categorized by Meagan, design is a powerful tool for discovering and uncovering positives. This is an essential first step in any intervention, especially within an informal system. Mandou Bem uncovered and amplified the existing system of youth activism in both favelas and Colonias. We hope this project serves as a further case study to show the results that design can have when, through an unbiased approach, you identify and amplify valuable aspects of informal systems.

Designing for InformalityThere are copious examples of designers leaving room for informality, emergence and human ingenuity in products and even services, to great acclaim. Yet, in policy, urban planning and other large human systems-design, informality is given very little space. As design shifts into a mode of building large-scale systems, designers, need to develop a level of trust for our human users. Instead of treating unexpected consequences of systemic design as misuse we need to openly design room for informality to grow, and to create resilient and efficient networks. The two systems of formal design and informal repurposing are interdependent—both systems require the other to function optimally.

Mandou Bem attempts to leverage this interdependence by encouraging informal youth to get active in their community and become part of the formal voice for policy change. The platform is also only a framework for emergent content that allows youth to express themselves in a variety of ways. The hope of Mandou Bem is to communicate the value of informality through the voices of the youth and help them redesign and hack the formal policies that so often oppress them.

Design’s New RoleInformality is undeniably a huge part of modern society—it transcends culture, wealth, development and disciplines. Furthermore, it has incredible economic and cultural significance, often more so than parallel formal systems. Informality even has strengths that formal design often seeks to replicate, such as efficiency and resilience.

There are many design precedents where repurposing and hacking is celebrated as human ingenuity and creativity. Informality is just as much a representation of this ingenuity, yet it is often demonized and ignored, specifically in the context of large scale human systems, such as informal settlements. Unfortunately, informality is too often mistaken for illegal, unintended or inferior consequences of a formal system. In actuality, informality is the name we give to specific workarounds or hacks practiced by people when formal systems fail. Instead of ignoring these informal systems, design should look to them to help diagnose and rebuild failing systems. Informality, however, has significant problems and fails in its own way, which is why it too requires top-down design.

Design and informality are therefore interdependent systems. Moreover, leaving space for informality has wide ranging beneficial consequences. Design, as a practice needs to, therefore, respect human ingenuity in systems and leave more room for informality in the design of everything from products to policies. Mandou Bem is an attempt at designing for this formal, informal interdependence.

“Informality is a response to the broken systems of formality.

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Favela Paraisópolis, São Paulo

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MFA Transdisciplinary Design, 2014Parsons The New School for Design