Conversational design, the Anti-Brief and systemic change
A Conversation between Amit Paul, Emily Harris and Martin Lorenz

The following text is a transcript. If you prefer to listen to the conversation, visit the World of Wisdom Podcasts website: https://worldofwisdom.substack.com/p/294-emily-harris-and-dr-martin-lorenz

Dr Martin Lorenz (⁠LI⁠) and Emily Harris (⁠LI⁠) came by the podcast. We spoke about their project the ⁠Anti-Brief⁠ and their reimagining of the design profession: from a profession of knowing to one of discovery. Inviting learning and conversation to its very center. This is a conversation about deep codes, conversational design and an invitation towards a different posture. Martin and Emily are currently launching a new master with Elisava – that also shows up in the conversation. This is an introduction to a different way of thinking about transdisciplinarity beyond mere interdisciplinary. We also speak of the generative move between theory (the meta) and that materiality and much more related to the practice of systems change. ⁠Life ennobling design⁠. Enjoy!

Amit Paul: Welcome to the World of Wisdom podcast. My name is Amit Paul and today we get to talk about one of those topics that I’ve thought I understood, completely misunderstood, had a lot of tension to, and gradually kind of relaxing into, which has to do with design and design for the sort of systemic transformation or whatever we would want to call our field. I’m really pulled by a post you made, Martin, about the “anti-brief.” I was like, “Oh, more words,” and then I looked into it and I was like, “Whoa, this is great.” So, first of all, just welcome to the podcast, Martin Lorenz and Emily Harris.

Martin Lorenz: Thank you very much.

Emily Harris: Yes, thank you for having us.

Amit Paul: I tend to do this jumping off into the deep end, so to speak. I’ll stick to that pattern. It’s a very light question to let you introduce yourself as you see fit—but start with you, Martin. Who are you, Martin Lorenz?

Martin Lorenz: Who am I? I’m lots of things now because I did a lot of different things, but I would still call myself a designer. But I started out as a communication designer, and then at Dark Matter Labs, I was called a “conversational designer,” not a communication designer anymore. So I’m trying to figure out what this means. But apart from the design, I’m also an educator. I’ve been with Elisava since 2006 and taught at many different design universities throughout Europe. At Dark Matter Labs, as a conversational designer, I met Emily, and this is actually where we started really giving shape to conversational design. The interesting bit about it is that design by itself, I don’t think it’s that interesting, but it becomes interesting depending on the conversations it has and with whom it has them. Maybe Emily, you can speak about the conversations that we had at Dark Matter Labs.

Emily Harris: I mean, yes, for sure. What Martin modestly doesn’t mention is that one of our colleagues describes Martin as a philosopher disguised as a designer. Martin very humbly always says, “Oh, you know, I do these bits,” but he’s actually an extraordinary person to have a conversation with before design ever comes into it. But I was also having like a slight giggle because I don’t know what it is, but whenever you ask someone who they are, there’s just this nervous twitch. I saw it go off in Martin. And I was just kind of thinking like, “Of course.” Humans have been asking this question—who was it, Plotinus, the ancient philosopher in 205 CE—who’s like, “Who are we?” And I think we don’t know, and that’s why it’s funny. We still don’t know, and I kind of enjoy that we don’t know.

Amit Paul: I am, however, still going to ask you as well. Who are you, Emily Harris?

Emily Harris: I’m not allowed to dodge, okay. Yeah, I guess a big messy melting pot of contradictions and dissonance, just like everyone else. But in terms of how I got to be here with Martin, I basically did a lot of different things, took a lot of exams, and some of this is relevant. I started off studying medicine. And then I was kind of really just bemused and confused about some of the way that medicine worked and some of the decisions that happened. So I went and became an accountant with Deloitte because I was like, “Oh, I think I need to understand how the money works, you know, then I’ll get this. Then it will make sense, right?” And then obviously various things—that doesn’t make that much sense, so I was like, “Oh, I think I need to be an economist. You know, that’s where people know how things work.” And then of course, you know, the economists didn’t know anything either. So then I thought maybe it’s design, you know, maybe if I just understood design. So, long story short, I ended up at Dark Matter Labs, and through that and then starting to work with Martin… it sounds so obvious now, but I had this kind of like… obviously it’s not any of those things. It’s the point where they start to jump together and where ideas bounce and intersect and ricochet out and shape-shift with each other is where it starts to get interesting. So that, I think, is what I’m doing here.

Amit Paul: Thank you. And also, before we get into the conversational design piece and the anti-brief and all of that stuff, as a preamble, I’m also curious if you would kind of articulate some of the tenets of the world that you perceive yourself to be living in. Like, what’s going on? When are we?

Emily Harris: Oh, yeah, the “when” that we’re in. I studied regenerative economics, so I’m going to kind of always come from that angle a bit, I think. But I think we’re in a place of disconnection. I think obviously the choices that we’ve made in terms of stewarding our planetary home make absolutely no sense. I think that deep down, almost everybody feels that, but many people can’t somehow allow themselves to know it and that just means from my perspective there’s just this crippling dissonance everywhere. And I think that’s the place that Martin and I are trying to work into.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah, I can speak a little bit about my dissonance as well. Just briefly before I mentioned how I considered myself a communication designer and then I was told to be a conversational designer at Dark Matter Labs. And I think I’m not the only designer who feels this dissonance. We were boxed into this small space of the “brief” where we were commissioned for a specific task. And at the same time, we see the world around us burning. It doesn’t matter where you look. And we think as designers that we do not have the tools to change anything, so there comes a huge frustration out of this. For my personal experience, feeling this frustration and feeling the urge of doing something and knowing that we are actually a relational craft, is that somehow we have to find ways to use our tools for a better purpose. To me, this is still an open question because I know I’m just one person with a very limited perspective and limited tools, but just knowing that there’s something in there like trying to improve conversations with the right people—there is something powerful in there, more powerful than an Instagram post.

Emily Harris: Do you want to speak as well, Martin, to the lineage of where designers thought they could save the world? Because there was a big design thinking movement where designers did try to do that.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah, no, definitely. Design has such a strong history of trying to make the world better. I think we’re at a point where we recognize that it did not succeed. And I think that’s where the frustration comes from and we are at a point where we try to figure out why we did not succeed. There were a lot of different movements, so it would be wrong not to acknowledge them and why we can build on them. But for me, it’s in many occasions always this “box” that I’m aware of, that even these different movements, they were boxing themselves in something or they were converted into a tool for more productivity or efficiency that has been problematic. You mentioned design thinking; that was definitely in this century a big movement. And out of the design thinking came as well “strategic design,” which is one of the terms Dark Matter Labs also uses.

Amit Paul: Strategic design?

Martin Lorenz: Strategic design became made popular where I met Indy as well in Helsinki with my wife. We have a design studio called 2pts.net and we designed the identity for them in 2008-2009. And they were making the term strategic design popular again. It was a very simple brief that they had for themselves: they were getting a funding from Sitra and Sitra said, “Do something good for Finland. That’s it. You can do whatever you want to.” And then they were remembering an event that they had in Helsinki in the ’70s with Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller talked about strategic design. The interesting thing about strategic design is that they were trying to get a holistic perspective of the different problems that we have and how to approach them. Strategic design at the Helsinki Design Lab was starting what design thinking was doing. The easiest approach was: how can we move the thinking into the doing? So they were bringing different professions to one table. If it was about education, they would bring together a teacher, a pupil, a student, but also someone from politics to the table to develop ways to tackle these problems. I was working really closely with Bryan Boyer, and he’s a smart strategic designer. He was including me as well in the thinking process. I think this is what a smart strategic designer does: he gives you the meta-perspective and allows the craft as well to be embedded into a bigger structure, instead of boxing the craft into something that’s just commissioned and small and just exercising.

Emily Harris: I guess I just would add that a good strategic designer from my perspective also has to have some humility because I never used to know what a strategic designer was until I moved into this world. And I was quite shocked at the beginning that strategic designers would try to redesign the finance system, for example, without really listening to people who actually had in-depth experience of it. Much as I applaud the ambition and the effort, I just remember thinking, “This is just so arrogant in a way and quite misguided.” Why with all this incredible opportunity that design has, why is it not listening to people who are closest to those fires? So I think that was also quite a big part of the motivation here, is that obviously design can’t solve everything and neither can accounting or any other profession. But perhaps between us all, if we can have better conversations, something more interesting can emerge.

Amit Paul: I’m thinking about my experience when I came out of business school and I went into management consulting and I did that for like five minutes. I was like, “I can’t deal with this because we’re solving problems from the outside of the space.” It’s so clear that they’re telling us what to do and we’re just mirroring it back. This isn’t real thinking, it’s just kind of regurgitating. I think it’s a great learning environment, but I couldn’t deal with it then. So then I stepped into the family business which had to do with green chemistry, and so we had this technology that we thought was going to change the world. It’s objectively better because after a few years when we had tweaked everything, it was cheaper and it was greener and it was roughly the same performance as existing technology. It should have been an enormous success, and then it wasn’t. So then I went back to my friends who were of different professions at that point and I asked for help. They kept asking all these from-the-outside questions of really obvious from-the-outside questions, and I was like, “It’s really not helping, you know? We’ve already tried all those things.” There’s something else here. Finding ecological thinking and finding the context and where we are… looking at the intelligence of what is in as open of a way as I can, that seemed to open other possibilities, and then from there something shifted. So I don’t know if that’s helpful as a… but what I’m really curious about is, because I’ve had such a conflicted relationship to design myself, is there a way to… what is the arc? What is it? To give resolution on that?

Emily Harris: Maybe we could start with our journey together through it and how we’re using design and therefore how we designed the course. Martin and I met at Dark Matter Labs and at the time I was stewarding the Next Economics Lab, which is basically finance and economic innovation. Martin came in as the conversational designer. One of the first things that we did together—I’d been writing with Indy a paper on “Life-Ennobling Economics.” Obviously we need this new economy, but we need a new economy that, in terms of stewarding our planetary home, not in terms of supply and demand curves. It was a set of hypotheses of what would really need to shift, like the really knotty questions in the world. It was a really fun paper, but it was really dense and it was not very approachable. So I went to Martin and I said, “I don’t really know what you do, but can we try something? Can we try and do something with this?” Martin was like, “Sure,” but basically neither of us knew.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah, sure. I mean, as a designer, you don’t really know about anything, so you have to ask a lot of stupid questions. But the interesting thing is that the tools that you’re using, they’re not linear. It’s a fun learning process to design something with someone and the questions that you ask, not knowing nothing about anything, are actually great for reflections. In the best cases, then, as well, the people who approached you, they also learn something about themselves, how they think about things, how they express themselves. The project becomes better. I really feel more like establishing relationships between the work and the people who will use the work as a tool for changing something. We were converting something Emily had into a different shape that ideally would make the content more accessible.

Emily Harris: The very first thing we did was start a completely new document and just ask some questions and we were both putting things in there. And then at one point, it was overnight, Martin had come in and just moved everything into columns. Instead of having footnotes, all the references were suddenly really prominent. It was just things like that that suddenly I was like, “Oh, I really want to tell the story of all those people that we’re building on.” It was more fun, it was really enlivening. It was like, “Listen to all these voices that are within this story.” Then we end up having very long conversations about Gestalt, and then the document took on an entirely different flavor. That was my first experience of real conversational design—not one person’s the writer, one person’s the designer or “here’s the economist.” When we write together now, it’s like a totally different tone that is not either of us, which is really interesting.

Martin Lorenz: I enjoy this process so much and there’s so many different conversational threads opening up with every work that we do that sometimes… maybe in the beginning it has been more you would say, “Actually the function of this is this or this is what we want to achieve,” and my head is going there, what’s the origin of this word? Which concepts are opening up here? So I could get lost in different stories. A nice balance at the end is to have a bit of both—to have a clear narrative so people know what you want from them with this piece, but then as well leave enough openness so they can find their own doors through which they step or pathways which they want to follow. And this is when something very linear, that I would call more communication, becomes more conversational because you’re allowing people as well to be part of something that is not a finished discussion.

Emily Harris: That was the evolution. From “Life-Ennobling Economics,” we then evolved it into what was then “Life-Ennobling Design.” We knew that Dark Matter Labs wasn’t the only kind of organization that can work on these things. We wanted people to be able to see these shifts and challenges and to connect it to their context. We didn’t want to be saying, “Well, you should use this framework.” We shifted our focus. It was still all about economics in the wider sense of the word, but then it was like: how can designers come in and actually open this out for different professions and different contexts to be able to engage? So it was a lot of that “zoom in, zoom out” thinking that Martin’s just described. And one of the things that we landed on, which leads into the anti-brief, was this idea of “deep codes.”

Amit Paul: “Deep codes”? It’s cool, but what is it?

Emily Harris: By deep codes we mean the kind of structural norms that sit quietly beneath surface-level decisions and behaviors right across the economy. And they’re things that we take for granted—”it’s just the way it is,” Margaret Thatcher style—but actually when you start to break them down, they’re very common across all professions. They are things like questions you might ask yourself: why is preventative healthcare a cost? Why is it not an investment? Why when we’re seeking funding for complex system change, why does the funder want these neat examples of impact? Why can a bank create money out of nowhere? When we ask these questions at every level of the economy, we started to see these what we’d call a deep code. It could be something like the legal code which assigns private property rights. We take it as so normal but it’s so strange—you wouldn’t say “I own my daughter,” but you’d quite happily say “I own that field full of microorganisms.” Material codes: we basically organize our materials as if the only thing that limits it is cost, the price of extraction. That doesn’t make any sense in terms of the regenerative capacity of the world. What we wanted to do was take these codes, make them visible, but also then create a system that helps people to connect it to their everyday life so that dissonance that we both spoke about. The dissonance that a designer might experience, let’s say a designer in advertising, is going to be really different to the dissonance that I might experience as an accountant. But actually it’s probably being shaped and funneled by the same deep code. In that particular example, I would say something like “economic value”—the fact that we think that it’s driven by price and control would then mean the designer working in advertising, they’re basically just positioned to sell things to people that they don’t need. Overconsumption and all of these things, but they’re very stuck. Their posture is kind of just very predefined by that code that they cannot even see. And so as we were talking to designers, it was just coming up over and over again. We started to show them where it wasn’t necessarily them, it was the system acting upon them. There’s something quite freeing about realizing it’s also happening to the lawyer sitting across the table and it’s happening to your accountant. Then when you start to have that conversation… it feels a lot more even fun to try and redesign them together. So the anti-brief started off as a process, a methodology to do that, and then it’s kind of drawn into the course that we’ve designed.

Amit Paul: You’re in that process and you’re finding things out and now we’re talking about it in the shape of a course. Then you need to bring people into that thinking, and I find that sometimes the process is sort of the thing rather than the conclusion itself, and there’s so much nuance that gets lost as you start interacting with it as an object, as a course. So I’m curious about how you think about that and how that might or might not relate to the anti-brief.

Martin Lorenz: Teaching a course is all about creating very open frameworks. You try to create artificially limitations so you can focus on a specific subject, but you don’t want to dictate what has to be learned. Students come in with different perspectives. They come from different countries, continents, they have a different age, so they are seeing things that you are not seeing as a teacher. Same about being a designer—you don’t see a lot of things, so you have to leave space to learn for everyone. I remember about the anti-brief and Emily you were mentioning the lawyers in London. I was pretty nervous before meeting the lawyers in London because it’s a scary profession, especially if you’re a silly designer, then everyone is more serious than you. But then I was there in the room and they were also just people struggling with the same things. This feeling of, “Okay, we should be working together,” if we would achieve to reconstruct something similar in the Master’s, then we would have achieved already so much. And this is also why one of the fundamental pillars or conceptual pillars of the Master’s is well bringing together designers and non-designers. Non-designers can learn from designers to reflect on their work with different tools, and designers they see that they can be part of a conversation without having to tell everyone on the table where this conversation has to lead. I think this maybe has been one of the problems of design in the last century when designers were superstars, architects, when they’re holding all the truth how to solve the big problems of the world—and of course they’re not able to. So being a little bit more humble and seeing your craft as a relational craft, I guess could mean a different effectiveness of the profession without having to really maybe change the profession but repurpose the profession.

Emily Harris: That was the evolution—from “Life-Ennobling Economics,” we then evolved it into “Life-Ennobling Design.” We wanted people to be able to engage. Each of the modules has a pair, like a duo teaching it: one designer and one non-designer. We really want students to go away and not be afraid of the law or not be afraid of investment—these things that feel so black box and exclusive but actually are not. We want the designers to have this confidence but then also to be able to express it in their own way. We’ve decided to make the Master’s at Elisava Barcelona predominantly online because we didn’t want it to be exclusive and only open to people that can afford to just move to Barcelona for a year. Also we wanted people from all around the world in different contexts to be able to engage. All of the assignments are practical and they will all be grounded by students in their context. It’s not just about design coming up with solutions. This is like flipping that and saying: it’s about designers in collaboration with others trying to redesign those deep codes of the professions that those people are closest to. In a way, it’s like exponential where you could work.

Martin Lorenz: I think what’s interesting is that we are not yet aware that we are actually opening up a completely new field that is undiscovered yet. If we do not have this openness to understand that there might be something in the intersection between the different professions that is not just a combination but something completely new, then we won’t discover it. Design means communicating something, that means that you understood something and now you just have to distribute your knowledge. But if you’re going in with a different approach, the conversational approach, then you are aware that there’s something that you’re not seeing yet. And this thing probably will be new and unseen with any new relationship. I have a 20 years career of being a designer so it felt also a bit weird to just design Google Docs while I’m usually designing for big companies visual identities. But then being in this little detail, in this very limited resources tool with just being able to use links and a limited amount of fonts, you discover a lot of very essential ways of communicating. There is something in being in the craft, in being in the matter, in being in an Excel table that feels very relevant and important.

Emily Harris: We always have such a generative, fun experience doing a publication—why can’t this be more mainstream? Where designers actually feel they have agency to be behind and say, “Well, I don’t know because I come from a really different background and what if we thought about it like this?” It’s like, who can the two of us find about accounting that really could be different? My experience in professions like accounting is that we’ve had our moments where it’s like, “Oh, accountants will save the world,” and all of us little boring suited people were like, “Oh, how exciting.” It’s like flipping it and saying: no, it’s about designers in collaboration with others trying to redesign those deep codes. I think that these designers will be inundated with jobs because it’s a Master’s that opens you up to every other profession.

Amit Paul: Where do people go to find out more?

Emily Harris: TheAntiBrief.org has the course outline and the questions, and we also have something called Life-Ennobling Design (LED) which has a lot of our earlier publications if people are interested.

Amit Paul: Fantastic. I’ll place both of those links clickable in the show notes. With that, thank you so much for making time. I really appreciate it.

Emily Harris: Thank you so much.

Martin Lorenz: Thank you.