It is safe to say that both design & technology have had big impact on how we handle crisis of any kind, be it of any scale. From prediction models to emergency dispatch responders, social media for easily connecting and broadcasting information, and a lot of design and planning work to efficiently manage emergency evacuations, allocate funds and resources. Saving millions of lives at the end of the day.
At the same time we have to be aware of the materiality of our technology and tools. Most modern technology cannot be created by mining of rare earth materials, factory labour exploitation, growing energy need for data centres and gathering eventual non recyclable e-waste. Our tools themselves are in a cycle of contributing to the climate crisis.[1]
Social media also easily spreads fake news and false information which can be specially damaging to the vulnerable people going through a crisis, desperate to try any solutions. We really need to develop better ways of fact checking and knowing which authorities/accounts/people to trust. Not only that, we need to foster a culture of fact checking and not blindly accepting any video which comes our way. It may sound obvious to us but majority of people are not digital natives and have a hard time understanding what to trust and what not. It doesn’t help that Big Tech companies don’t help as much they should as it comes in the way of their revenue models. AI is being researched and used more and more in crisis technology but AI tech is filled with biasses, misinformation, mistakes and hype[2]. There is a certain risk to rely on AI, specially in sensitive situations like a crisis.
Design for Existential Crisis was a very thought provoking read. Firstly everyone needs to understand clearly what is the crisis we are dealing with, what level of uncertainty is there and what level of certainty we know about it. Let’s take our climate crisis for example. It is extremely hard to acknowledge that we are facing a mass extinction, it becomes hard to think there is value in individual action when you drown in evidence of how bad it really is. We need to understand and empathise that it is very difficult and vulnerable to deal with a crisis, we need to understand our mental models better and design for people with their ongoing existential crisis.
And yet we face countless crisis after crisis, some get the media coverage and some do not. Some become a provocative hashtag and some stay tucked away in their own corner of the world. But do we stop and address the root cause of the crisis and focus on preventing it in future at any cost? Or are we more focused on “dealing” with crisis after it occurs? “Such a phenomenon can be described as western melancholy or the process in which a designer focuses on the consequences of the current situation instead of dealing with the causes of a particular problem.”[3]
We need to shift our focus to complex topics like finding ecological balance, equal rights & opportunity, economic wealth misbalance, culture of overconsumption, culture of growth and scaling, prevalence of politics in design, systems of capitalism and oppression.
References
[1] Nicole Starosielski, Thermocultures of Geological Media, Cultural Politics, Vol. 12 (3), Duke University Press, 2016: 293-309.
[2] https://thegradient.pub/an-epidemic-of-ai-misinformation/
Human-Centred Research and Design in Crisis 
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