EP 108: Designing Through the Lens of Policy | Rick Griffith
On today's episode, we are going to talk about design through the lens of policy.
Rick Griffith is a British-West-Indian collagist, writer, letterpress printer, designer, and optimist futurist based in Denver, Colorado. As a designer, he works at the intersection of programming, policy, and production. He is a columnist for PRINTmag.com, the two-time programming chair for the AIGA National Conference, and the 2023 Acuff Chair at Austin Peay State University. Rick’s works are collected and exhibited worldwide and can be found in the permanent collections of The Denver Art Museum, The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and The Tweed Museum at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He is a founder and partner with Debra Johnson of the graphic design consultancy MATTER, the designer behind the Black Astronaut Research Project (BLARP.org), The Pledge for Spaces, and the Introductory Ethic for Designers and Other Thinking Persons. One of his favorite long-term design projects is a bookstore for designers and revolutionaries. He DJs a live Internet radio show, Design To Kill, every Tuesday 6 pm Eastern Time.
Episode mentions and links:
Shop at MATTER: For designers and other thinking persons
Rick Griffith: A Love Letter to Design, a List of Demands, and a Stern Look via Print Magazine
Rick’s Book Recommendations:
The Black Experience in Design
Buy Health Design Thinking via Shop at MATTER
50% OFF until 3/31/23 if you use discount code: designlab
The Restaurant Rick would take you to in NYC: B&H Dairy Kosher Restaurant
Follow Rick: Twitter | Insta | LinkedIn
Episode Reflection
Rick dropped some knowledge on us this week! To all of my fellow educators out there, don’t feel bad, this is my first time hearing the words andragogy and heutagogy. Heck, even my spell checker has never heard of it. I found a nice referenced primer on the topic written by a couple of profs at ASU for those who may need a bit more explaining, as I did.
I learned a lot this week listening to our episode with Rick Griffith. Rick’s perspective and the analogies he used to describe topics that I consider myself familiar with really opened my eyes to understanding them in a new light. My favorite analogy this week was the boy scout helping granny cross the road as a way to explain the value of policy over charity and how it relates to empathy in design. The concept that a system that relies on the ideals and skills of an individual to accomplish an important goal is not really a system at all. We can’t rely on having a “boy scout” at every street corner to help every “granny” that needs help crossing the road. That puts too much burden on the individual to solve a problem that should be addressed with a policy requiring roads to be much easier to cross. My understanding of Rick’s argument is that in the same way, we cannot rely on every designer to achieve perfect empathy with users, but instead, our systems must embrace mechanisms that put representative users in the driver’s seat. Whether that be through a co-creative design process or by dismantling systems that prevent diverse representation in higher education. I could go on all day just trying to better understand just this one analogy, but there were so many more good ones Rick shared with us this week.
The last thing I’ll say is how I was struck by how Rick explained his position of being a futurist-optimist, ‘My version of a futurist is a person who has an awareness of the future that [they are] creating, as well as the interaction with various systems that have not created all their futures yet. So, [they are] optimistically engaging with systems that [they] believe could change.’ (paraphrased for readability) I never quite heard of a futurist being described like this. The idea that if we acknowledge that we are creating the future with the decisions we make in the present, we may actually make very different decisions. Add that to the idea that one MUST be an optimist in this headspace because we must assume that there are new systems that have yet to be created and that we are making the decisions on what those systems look like right now! Awesome!
Episodes like Rick’s are the perfect example of why we LOVE making this show. Because each week our guests bring their own unique experiences and perspectives, opening up our eyes just a little bit wider!
Written by Rob Pugliese
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Bon Ku: On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing through the lens of policy. I'm Bon Ku the host of Design Lab. It's a podcast that explores the intersection of design and health. Today's guest is Rick Griffith. He is a British-West-Indian collagist, writer, letterpress printer, designer, and optimist futurist based in Denver, Colorado. As a designer, Rick works at the intersection of programming, policy and production. He's a columnist for Print Magazine.
The two time programming chair for the AIGA National Conference. Rick's works are collected and exhibited worldwide and can be found in the permanent collections at the Denver Art Museum. The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum and Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Tweed Museum at the University of Minnesota.
Rick is the founder partner with Deborah Johnson of the graphic design consultancy Matter. He's the designer behind the Black Astronaut Research Project. The Pledge for Spaces and the Introductory Ethic for Designers and Other Thinking Persons. One of Rick's favorite long term design projects is a bookstore for designers and revolutionaries. And Rick DJ's a live internet radio show called, Designed To Kill every Tuesday at 6:00 PM. Eastern Time.
So definitely check out Rick's bookstore. It can be found at shopatmatter.com. That's shop at M a T T E R. Dot com. There, you can order a copy of my book, Health Design Thinking that I co-wrote with Ellen Lupton.
And put in the discount code designlab for 50% off. That's right. Go to shopatmatter.com purchase Health Design Thinking and put in a 50% discount code, which is designlab. Check out the other books at his bookstore, he has an amazing collection.
Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter at designlabpod.com. Check out the show notes from each week. Learn more about the guests. Look for links for related content from each episode.
Rate us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Give us five stars. Leave us a review. Tell someone about the podcast. Now here's my conversation with Rick Griffith.
Interview
Bon Ku: There's so many ways that we can start, and thread this conversation. I've been reading about, your work in print magazine, your, your writings there, watch some of your talks and,I have some questions lined up,
Rick Griffith: Yeah, sure. What's your impression? I'm always curious about people who might research me, like what do they get, do. My, My,
chaos Life, or do they get something else?
Bon Ku: what I love and appreciate is that it's hard to identify and make sense in the beginning, right? You are a. Collagist, letterpress printer, designer, optimist, futurist. And I, I love that cuz a generalist in many different areas and , it's hard to put you in a box. And to me those are the most exciting guests, most interesting people.
And I love how you challenge some of these paradigms, especially around design and how you're so passionate about design and critical of it. And what I can learn from you there's so many things I can learn from you, even as, even in a practical sense of I'm a technician, I repair broken human bodies, but thinking about your lens of being a future optimist of applying design, the different forms of design, like policy is super fascinating to me.
Rick Griffith: I think what's happened to me over the years is I developed a knack for going to like the root of a problem and realizing that like my discretion as I identify problems and articulate the nature of problems, my discretion about what the root problem is, ends up being a source of authority, power control.
and I'm really interested in how that participates in the world. And so, in my own life, you know, I've looked at the creation of policy much as a way of guiding my own action towards, my own learning, my own education, my own understanding of the world, my own worldview. And then also in the participation in the lives of my children, and my partners.
And. you know, like it's a, pretty tough needle to thread
Bon Ku: yeah.
Rick Griffith: Saying that you understand yourself and your actions well enough to be a force for good in all these places. But, I am trying, that's my effort. That's, my goal. I think policy is a really interesting dimension of both , my practice and my life in so much that it's like such a reliable quality. and if you become reliable with your own internal policy, your own sort of like, and it's turned into ethics. Of course, if you're reliable with your own policy and your own sort of behavior, then what happens is, is that you can start to look at things through that lens and you can start to apply all of that.
to the world that you live in? Like, like you say that, I'm hard to put in a box. I think the challenge that I create for design is, is really just challenges to boxes in general. Like, I like to challenge control, I like to challenge, other people's sense of order. I like to challenge the things that people used to control other people policies.
And so it's become a place of kind of like, it's a dimension of my, of my life, of, of my work. It brings me closer to design at a system level. It brings me closer to design as, as I understand it, operating at really large formats.
Bon Ku: I love that can I read something you wrote in print, Print Magazine?
Rick Griffith: Yeah, sure, sure.
Bon Ku: You write "some say that the system is in need of repair. While that may be true, it's more likely that the systems are not broken. The systems are working exactly as they were designed by people whose hopes, beliefs and fears are present in the policy that they create."
This particularly resonated with me because everyone says the healthcare system is broken. I say the healthcare system is broken, but. As being a physician, working in a healthcare system, working in, in this large behemoth system, that more and more I realized, no, it's perfectly designed to get the results that it was designed for.
And so I I love that statement that you, put out there.
Rick Griffith: Other people have said that systems are working the way that they have been designed to work. But the part of it that I think that they don't share is the last part, which is it's made by people who have, that the policies that they create are their expressions of fear. And I think that it's important to realize that.
Policies don't come out of systems, don't come out of thin air. They don't get made in the abstract. They get made by human beings. And, and we are such human beings, we can participate in that. So, a lot of people will call a system something that's out of their reach. I call a system something that we make.
Bon Ku: Hmm.
that particularly resonates with me around the healthcare system because there are so many inequities in the populations in America, based upon the system that was designed. There's many populations, most of them are specifically non-white populations that have worse health outcomes.
Bon Ku: And because I think if you look back on the decades of policies that were designed, they were designed to not care for these populations in the, in the US and, that's why we see these inequities happening over and over again and exacerbated by crises like the pandemic that we're having.
Rick Griffith: so why not take that a moment, take that like a step further for a moment and say, By prioritizing the health and welfare of white people, what those systems have done is actively work against the health of black people and non-white people, and the only examples we really need are the, the smallest ones, because the smallest, most dangerous ones are examples that are kind of truth telling outliers, right?
Like Tuskegee, right? But if you can see it for a moment, and I think that, My contribution to that conversation lands in something which I'm very much in investigating as an artist and investigating now, which is the concept of anti-blackness and how programs, policy systems that have been constructed to serve largely white people or white serving organizations or whatever sort of acronyms that live out there to, to talk about. Those, those systems that work at that scale and have worked that scale for so long. The reliable quotient of anti-blackness shows up kind of all the time. And the job is, I mean, yes, we can acknowledge and recognize it.
Bon Ku: Mm-hmm.
Rick Griffith: But I honestly think that the job and the work now is to interrogate what is it not doing so that the quotient of anti-blackness could be reduced. So there are certain conditions, like anti blackness is like gravity.
There are certain conditions that you can create to refute the effects of gravity, to defy the effects of gravity. One such thing is to get into a swimming pool.
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Rick Griffith: know it sounds silly to say that, but the water is affected by gravity, but you are not. right? So you are in some ways immune to gravity in that place.
There's a whole different sort of density conversation that goes on when you're immersed in water and being heavier or more dense than the water and how you, deal with buoyancy. But there are, were things that reduce the effects of gravity and there should be things that reduce the effects of anti-blackness.
Because anti-blackness is a reality in this continent for sure.
Bon Ku: Mm-hmm.
Rick Griffith: And then what we could do is think of actions, other systems, ways of, reforming various structures and systems so that they have less capacity for anti-blackness. And one of those things is to have people who are black trained to care for the lives of black people.
And one of those things is not playing keep away with education
Bon Ku: Mm-hmm.
Rick Griffith: And so when we think about the real source of the problem, the real source of the problem is that in other areas that hold anti-blackness at the same scale and have been anti-black for a really long time, they're playing keep away with the education that it takes. to create a cohort, multiple cohorts of black doctors and black physicians and black surgeons, and people who, in their very most natural state would care for the lives of black people in a way that has less reliable anti-blackness.
Bon Ku: There are about 3% of physicians that are black males. And that number, that stat has remained unchanged since the late seventies
Rick Griffith: Yeah, sure. Things have either gotten worse or the same, or the same for black people since the mid sixties, you know, like, it hasn't gotten significantly better. Though we experience more convenience.
Bon Ku: Yeah. and that not just number is shocking to me because, you know, I'm an associate dean at my medical school and the institutions, everyone says, oh, we need to change this. But decades, that number has remained the same. And we, and we know that patients and communities will get better care if they're taken care of by people who look like them or who have their shared experiences often is, the
king.
Rick Griffith: Who in their natural state have no bias against them?
Bon Ku: Mm.
Rick Griffith: You know,or less likely to, cuz we're all, our bias is constructed by the world that we live in, and black people are also trained to be anti-black. So, you know, the generalization there is much more connected to the conditioning of people by the media that we live in. And that black people can also express anti-blackness unless they're being trained actively against that. But it's also to say that, you know, black people can be the source of great relief and great joy, great healing for more than just black people. And black people are no less skilled or capable of being doctors than white people. And so the keep away with education is to me, ultimately the, the barrier because, none, none of that changes unless. More people are put through, given the opportunity to be put into this transformative experience called being educated as a specialist in an area where they, you know, are focused and care deeply.
And, and so those things, those things stand in the way of that. The other thing too, that stands in the way of that is really being trained towards policies of, in healthcare in America, trained towards policies that are legal but still not just. And I think that that's kind of like when someone says that, We're making a good enough bagel, we're making a bagel that everyone will eat, versus the idea of making an authentic New York City bagel that like is, you know, an artisan bagel that people deserve.
Someone says that we have to make a good enough bagel that everyone will eat anyway and not complain about. I think that, you know, it just depends on who you're listening to, who complains and who doesn't complain. People, people who care about artisan bagels complain about crappy bagels all the time.
But also the policy and the idea that there are protocols in healthcare that are good enough instead of, policies and protocols that interact with people in more deep ways. I had two doctor's appointments before I came out here, because I'm, I'm gonna be here for a few. And both of those doctors told me, okay, yeah, well our time is up now. They give 15 minutes to meet with you and spent that long, and I was like, well, thank you. You know, like spending all the 15 minutes with me and that was awesome, and I'll see you later.
Rick Griffith: That's not much of a relationship. We talk a lot about the doctor-patient relationship, but when you put that constraint of, oh, this relationship is gonna be a 15 minute one, it leaves some people hurt.
Well, and the, the turnover in my plan is so strong that like, I think I've met with the same doctor twice in 20 years.
Bon Ku: Wow.
Rick Griffith: Yeah.
Bon Ku: Wow. I wanna follow this thread of how systems are designed because in that same article you wrote something about empathy that I thought was provocative. You said empathy in design operates the same way charity works in government, but you make a call for unburdening the designer from empathy.
Can you unpack.
Rick Griffith: Yeah, sure, not charity in government, but charity in contrast to good policy in government. Right. So a good example would be, The granny gets help to cross the road from a boy scout, and that is a voluntary action from a boy scout. And the reason why is because there's no curb cut and granny's gotta take those like you know, two and a half foot long legs, those little legs and like go down six or seven inches and Granny's gonna trip and fall. So the Boy Scout stands at the curb, extends their arm, helps granny cross the road, and then helps granny get up the other side without the curb cut. This act of charity is a perfect act of charity in so many levels.
And yet we've decided that the better version of that is to create a curb cut for granny and for all other people that are facing disability or facing a differently abled body.
And so there is some wisdom in the idea that now the standard is to curb cut all crosswalks, right?
So in the same way, empathy is a great thing, right?
Bon Ku: Mm.
Rick Griffith: But the problem with empathy and the difference between empathy and helping an old lady across the street is empathy requires a certain amount of training. Like good empathy is not it's not natural and perfect.
It's trainable. And therefore, something that has, is, exists on a spectrum of skills so when designers are asked to be empathetic, they are operating from their own lives, their own centered lives. And because the largest quantity of designers are white. What you find yourself experiencing is a version of white empathy that is imperfect, and I'm not against something that's imperfect, but when there's so much at stake, when we're designing so many things, I think that what you'd want to do is to start looking at standards, and not say, what is a minimal viable product. Right? But what you want to do is like, what is the product that protects its users?
Bon Ku: Mm.
Rick Griffith: What is a product that cares about its users and cares about the quality of their lives? And that is a different kind of empathy. That's a, that's a kind of agape. That is a kind of, experience that where there is a care for your fellow human that is deeper than the kind of empathy that you can put into a UX UI design course.
And I think that it's an amateur act performed in perfectly and ultimately not performed at all. So unburdening designers from that requirement and having, design leads work on qualities and standards of understanding users and understanding those personas and being deliberately focused on being trained to understand their needs and understand their health and their, their caring is probably better than burdening a visual graphic designer or burdening a UX UI designer with that kind of care.
Bon Ku: Yeah. It's something that we try to do in in medical education too when we're training physicians. Care for the patient at the bedside and, and the communities where, where they come from.
Rick Griffith: Yeah. I mean, how do you feel it's going?
Bon Ku: Not too great cuz of the stats that we had before
we're producing the same type of doctors that we did, decades ago. Uh, uh, Aside from that, the gender inequity improved you know, medical schools were only for male doctors and now the enrollment is 50 50 for female and male medical students.
Bon Ku: But there are many, cultures and ethnicities that aren't representative of the demographics of our country.
Rick Griffith: Yeah, I mean, both of my doctors that I saw last week were, two weeks ago were female, and they were honest enough to tell me the constraints of our relationship. I saw a couple of male doctors before that, and they were not, they were just like, Hey, cool. Later. I'm like, okay, see you later, doc. And then I had to catch him walking the hallway again with my door open.
I'd be like, Hey, I got one more question. And he was like, oh, crap. You know, Hey, comes back in the room. He is like, what? What's up? And I'm like, I ask him another question. He is like, that's the answer. Bye-bye. And he, he know like, takes a walk, I mean, My mother was an RN for most of her life. She was a, what we would call a candy striper for her young
life. And she, was medically trained, all through her life. She retired and then eventually died. But the, you know, the experience I have through my mother about like, sort of the healthcare systems in, in two countries at least. Is one where, you know, like she never complained about the work and she never did a profound amount of analysis on the protocols that she was asked to execute upon.
But, without going to a hospital. And so, you know, like remedies and. First aid, and you know, like , I'm the one that looks at something and says, nah, no stitches, scars, but no stitches, you know, you know, like, like that's my way of being in my, in the life of my family is like, I'm gonna call that.
And that's, not a visit. Which is funny, but you know, it's also like who wants to be a part of a system that doesn't acknowledge you or doesn't care about you, or, cares more about, its the scale of its bureaucracy than it does about your care.
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Rick Griffith: you know, and that's ultimately what happens, when systems get really, really big, then they have all these gatekeeping systems that are installed around them.
And those gatekeeping systems are things that care for the bureaucracy and they care for the scale of, of its action. And then, you know, it stops being the thing that it was supposed to do. Or at least it's not its primary concern, but it's concerned with its own perseverance. it wants to still exist regardless of whatever policy comes from the federal government or the state government or whatever funding source it relies upon, and, that's, I suppose, part of the problem in healthcare from my perspective, it spends too much money protecting itself and not enough money doing the work.
Bon Ku: Yeah. Well, there are stakeholders in the ecosystem that are making a lot of money by having the system operate in its current state. And so it's hard to pull all those different levers, because those winners will end up losing revenue if the system were to change.
Rick Griffith: Yeah, yeah. and to somebody that's bad, apparently.
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Rick Griffith: see. To me that's weird because I've always thought of healthcare. As the scale of, like, it's a business that is the size of, of only a business a country should run. You know, like in the UK we have the inland revenue. Which is, in the US it's called the IRS the IRS is run by the United States.
It's a federal organization. It's a program that runs this thing that's tax collection and tax rebates and whatever. And it's, it's, regardless of what you wanna say about it, it's a big system. It's fairly sophisticated and it does a lot. It gives out numbers, right? It gives out social security numbers, it does all sorts of things.
So, but somewhere between the Social Security Administration and the I R S, there's enormous systems and to me, adding something like healthcare, right, not just to the financial part of it, but actually adding like healthcare to it. Maybe, the VA is a good model for looking at that. You know, it should be the thing that helps lubricate all three of them.
Like you have this one number, this one identity. And it should work fluidly between tax, collection and care. And you know, in the future, there's all sorts of names for this, multipass or the show me card or whatever. You know, like in all these various science fiction futures, we have this identification tool.
We know what it
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Rick Griffith: But in other countries too, like in Portugal or in the UK, national health stuff is pretty much, you know, it's either at risk or it's thriving, but, but it exists, but it totally exists. In Germany, it exists. I think we have largely the most, the most in common with the German, healthcare system.
As also for scale, you know, it's one of the larger ones. And they have a very, very low cost to, having someone stay in a hospital. Really, really low cost to that people don't get poor going to hospitals.
Bon Ku: Yep. Medical bills are the number one cause I think of bankruptcy in the US still.
Rick Griffith: You don't think that has anything to do with the reluctance of people to participate in it and then the ultimate like gouging of costs that happens through HMOs and systems that employ doctors and that why it turns into a 15 minute meeting.
Bon Ku: You should teach a class on healthcare policy. You, I, I, I love, I love your perspective there.
Rick Griffith: well, what I'm getting at. And of course, by laughing, I don't mean to take light of it, but what I'm getting at is sometimes the idea that my brain connects a lot of things and whether or not, and whether or not it's completely accurate, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that it's a feeling, it's an intuition that by affecting one thing we can positively affect another. And so if we deploy that intuition from black and brown and, and people of color, if we deploy that intuition across various systems, we can actually, and I don't like the, to use the word disrupt, so I won't, but we can actually change those systems.
And what I mean by change is, I mean, the simplest of change would be to recognize and acknowledge gatekeepers.
Bon Ku: Mm-hmm.
Rick Griffith: And train them to Gate Keep Gates open because a gate has positions that are open and closed,
Bon Ku: Mm-hmm.
Rick Griffith: gatekeepers are largely talked about as people who keep things closed. But I believe that gatekeepers are necessary.
They should be trained though to make things open.
Bon Ku: I'm curious about your thoughts on designers being good problem solvers. is that true? And if it's true, why is that? Are there some principles about design that make designers better problem solvers than others? Because I think healthcare can benefit from designers working in the industry to improve it.
Rick Griffith: Yeah. But, but what's interesting about design and how it's taught in America, and also other places too, but it's housed in the school of art and art history. And it has a relationship with art making. It has a relationship with studio art. And it doesn't necessarily bear a relationship until graduate school or beyond.
Doesn't really like, have a relationship with problem solving as it relates to other problems that are not visual, you know, like it doesn't require that the students of design understand their subject well enough to participate in critical design thinking around
Bon Ku: Mm-hmm.
Rick Griffith: their specialty. The specialty oftentimes provides the expert.
And so expert healthcare thinkers becoming designers is more probable and in some ways more useful to the healthcare industry than it is to take visual designers or people who've been trained as visual designers to train them to understand the problems of healthcare, better and more deeply. Graphic designers are problem solvers. They're visual problem solvers,
Bon Ku: you're trained as a graphic designer.
Rick Griffith: yeah, I
suppose. I'm, I'm self-trained in that regard, but, the designers are the kind of problem solvers that see problems like, if someone is a woman, identifies as a woman and recognizes and understands, various either patriarchal or misogynistic behaviors in their, in their atmosphere. Part of their problem space is how to be acknowledged. And if someone's a black person works very similarly, brown person, et cetera, , they identify what is and is not a problem.
Bon Ku: mm.
Rick Griffith: So the bigger, the more expansive the worldview of the designer, particularly as it relates to undergrad and then of course the area of specialization for graduate school and beyond the larger the worldview, the larger like sort of reasoning they have or things that they encounter, which they decide to call problems. You know, and it's that reasoning, the flexing of that reasoning over various types of problems that makes great designers, so they're looking at the modes of solving problems, not just the problems themselves. They're able to kind of take recipes, if you will, like design thinking is one such recipe for how to solve problems in multiple verticals
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Rick Griffith: Right? is it effective? Well, you know, yes. If you see the problem the way that design thinking kind of expresses the various recipes. I think that like various types of design thinking have got great ideas built into them. But, Sometimes it's the human being that's acting on those ideas that gives it dimension and strength and gives those ideas power and authority in the future.
Otherwise, you know, the person's discretion defines the problem,
Bon Ku: Mm.
Rick Griffith: so they're kind of flat and open. and if you have largely white people defining these problems, then they don't seem to see the problems of black and brown and people of color or women and so on and so forth. But they can be trained to see that, or they can also participate in that.
Bon Ku: Hmm. Rick, I love you what you said at the beginning of that, of healthcare people getting into design may be more effective cuz that validates my existence of. I have no training in design at all, but, I have found design much later on in my career and, and saw that, well, it was like, whoa, we could apply this sort of framework to the healthcare space.
And I know the problems really well. And so it really was able to unlock some creativity in trying to solve problems for me in a way that I have never experienced before. And,
Rick Griffith: Yeah.
That's
cool.
Bon Ku: yeah, and I'm, I'm curious to get your thoughts on how does. Design help us to be more creative. And why is creativity important in solving problems?
Because I'm always trying to talk to my, my world of medical people saying, hey, creativity is very important to physicians, to our field, to solve these really hard problems that we're facing. But it's not taught in medical school.
Rick Griffith: Yeah, I mean, I'll start by saying that this week I specifically challenged teaching art design as a creative practice.
Bon Ku: Oh yeah. You're, you're teaching a new class,
correct? Right now.
Rick Griffith: teaching a class called Design History for now, and this week I challenged the idea that we would teach it using pedagogy and that we would move from pedagogy through andragogy to heutagogy and that we would attempt this very dangerous mission.
This like, sort of, again, I think I defined it as being, imperfect and dangerous, journey away from pedagogy into andragogy, into heutagogy, which is, you know,
Bon Ku: have to explain all these terms.
Rick Griffith: Well, the terms, explain themselves as a journey from having teacher led, teacher focused learning to having learner focused learning
Bon Ku: Got it. Okay.
Rick Griffith: and learner focused learning over here is based on your objectives
Bon Ku: Mm.and teacher focused learning over here is based on what the teacher believes is, appropriate and good for you. And there's very little leadership on the part of the student over here in pedagogy and over here in heutagogy it is self-directed, largely self-directed. the reason why I'm trying to de-center the teacher, Because I believe that in the teaching of creative acts that we really need to center ourselves on the experience of the learner and the intuition of the learner, and help that learner find their own way of being and way of making.
Mm-hmm.
Rick Griffith: And that is our greatest gift to them, is to give them a place to experiment with who they are and who they will become. But in medical school, I imagine, and this is one of the examples that I gave them, I said, well, I imagine that over here in science, and in, you know, Elementary school. These are two places where pedagogy works just great. And the reason why is because all science is based in some part of the science of the person that came before you. And ultimately, all teachers, as scientists become teachers through your entire lineage, like you understand yourself from the teachings of these principles which are done by people.
And, and so pedagogy is a great place for, the teaching of science and it should probably stay there, but you are talking about teaching creativity and I actually sort of hold that thought in stasis for a moment to say, teaching people who have an upbringing through pedagogy, teaching them self-criticism.
And teaching them to think of the objectives of their work as being, sort of independent of the tools that they work with. Like, it's not necessarily creativity, but it is a kind of disassociation. Taking your sort of desired outcomes and isolating them for a moment to figure out what creates that instead of taking your resources and then seeing how good an outcome you can create from these limited resources.
Right? They're both types of design for sure, but one of them centers the outcome. And the other one centers the use of resources, both of which I'm a fan of. I think what you're talking about is teaching people these two dimensions
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Rick Griffith: to design and to the critical challenge of healthcare systems and say, we're designing a healthcare system.
We're also designing outcomes for human beings, and you need it to be, in some places you need the longitudal sort of aspect of creativity to participate. And in some places you need the training and the pedagogy over here to participate in it in a very precise kind of way. So almost doctors become resources instead of creative people.
And you have to figure out, I don't have the answers to this cause I don't have enough SME on this, but you have to figure out how these human beings show up.
Bon Ku: Mm.
Rick Griffith: Whether they show up as participants in the system, or whether they show up as, authors of a system that, you know, builds and breaks down every time a, a customer shows up. You know, in a bakery,
in a bookstore, in a retail environment, the system builds around the customer the minute the customer shows up and you have to ask a series of questions to get them what they need. You have to be able to do that on scale or you have to be able to do that in not at scale, but it's all circumstantial.
Like the way that we've been trained to take care of customers in retail. The way that I train my staff, cuz I own a bookstore, is to say, we're not in the book selling business. We're in the acknowledgement business.
Get someone to tell you their story and you can put them in touch with the resource that they need. That's it. That's it.
ooh, there's so many different threads here. I'm glad that it's sparking a lot for you.
Bon Ku: I want to go to your bio. You say you're an optimist futurist, and, how are you an optimist and what, what, does a futurist
Rick Griffith: mean?
Futurist means a lot of things. I think, first of all, how am I an opt an optimist? My partner and I both say it's too late to be a pessimist.
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Rick Griffith: it's too late, you know,
Bon Ku: I
Rick Griffith: We have to energetically move this forward. We have to move this forward. We say like, if we're gonna do this, then we should really just do this. And that is an energy and so optimism, as a particular kind of energy, is really important to us in the various projects that we do, and it's really important to the way that we participate with other people and acknowledge them and, and move this, this life forward.
We're both widows. And so, and we were both widows at a relatively young age. And so in our combining of our work and our love and our, and our caring for each other and our families, what's happened is, is that we have experienced some grief and some loss, and so of our children and us modeling life moving forward and us modeling optimism in spite of those experiences was, and continues to be part of our work.
Rick Griffith: And we do that in part for all, for all widows or for all people who have lost somebody or anyone who's experienced tragedy. You know, we kind of put ourselves out there and be like, we're okay with that. We're okay with holding space for that kind of grief, or we're okay with holding space for that kind of experience.
The futurist part is, you know, I'm studying a lot of futurists. I'm putting myself in this space that they have created, like the near future laboratory. And I'm feeling connected to the idea that designers are flinging their atoms and their actions into the future. And, I do this thing where I say the present has already happened. it's already happened, man, so whatever future, and particularly as I'm teaching history right now, whatever future we're creating right now is also the history that people will encounter. And so I'm mindful of all of those actions as we kind of echo ourselves forward and as we present ourselves in the present for future activity.
Mm-hmm.My version of futurist is a person who is has an awareness of the future that I am creating, as well as the interaction with various systems that have not created all their futures yet. So I'm, I'm optimistically engaging with systems that I believe that I could change something.
And of course, people say things like one person at a time. I'm like, you know, 18 to 20 something people at a time. You know, I'm, I'm sort of in the hundred person at a time if I'm speaking. You know, like I wanna change as many minds as possible in the time that I have with the audience that I have. And I'm not trying to change their minds towards some sort of thought.
Like some specific kind of thought. I'm trying to change the dimensions that they see in the thoughts that they have because them trusting their intuitions, the way that I trust mine might create the kind of, deliberate and forceful action on systems that we already have that would change them. So I'm just trying to encourage people to participate and to look at changes their.
Bon Ku: Yeah. I think the healthcare system can benefit from some of these futuring mindsets because those of us who work in this system, we just respond to some of these dumpster fires that we need to put out on a daily basis, and there is not that space to think beyond the everyday reality that we experience being in the system.
Does that make sense? That it's hard to imagine a better system than it is, than we're currently in right now. And, and I think because of that, a lot of us who work in healthcare are very pessimistic, jaded, and have no optimism.
Rick Griffith: Yeah, but the problem with that isn't whether or not there is a better system whether or not you've exhausted the resources to make the best of what you have. Cuz that can't possibly be true, especially in a for-profit system. The problem with that is something like, let's use an eclipse as a metaphor for a moment.
You know, if the earth was constantly casting a shadow on the moon, you would never know there was a moon. And so your positionality and the positionality of other healthcare professionals who are either practicing or not practicing design, you know, your positionality has a kind of viewpoint that benefits a particular kind of action without knowing whether there's a moon or not. And other people have a perspective that knows that this eclipses temporary, you know, and has an awareness of this thing called the moon and so and so forth. Like, I honestly think it's about, perspective, positionality, worldview, a number of things that participate and profit. They all participate in the system not being better. They all give permission for the system to not be better. And by doing that, what happens is, is that you're not designing at all.
Bon Ku: Mm.
Rick Griffith: it's back to this sort of, this idea that a minimal viable or minimal lovable product is actually the thing that people want when it's not the thing that people want. It's just the thing that you know how to make. And, I think that that's a perspective that creates a particular kind of product.?
I have one more final question that we've been asking our guests is if a listener were to visit you, where would you take them out to eat?
Rick Griffith: Depends. Would it be in Portugal? Would it be in New York or would it be in Denver?
Bon Ku: your choice.
Rick Griffith: Well, why don't we make it your choice, since you are the person who's visiting.
Bon Ku: Let's do New York. Yeah, cuz that's close by me and only if you promise to make it happen.
my eldest daughter who keeps me in touch with all new things outta New York,
Rick Griffith: I met her mother in New York and I came from New York to Colorado. My eldest daughter has got a couple of really nice reservations set up for us when I come visit her in a couple of weeks. The one counter that has been feeding my family for 20 something years is called B&H Dairy.
And it's a kosher dairy breakfast and lunch counter in the East Village that's been around for a long time. And, I adore that place. And they have challah toast. So, you know, you get your two eggs over easy with potatoes, and there's no meat there of course, it's a kosher dairy place. But you can get challa as your toast instead of wheat bread or white bread or whatever.
It's challa. And that's the one of the defining features of it besides the Wednesday borscht, which is impeccable. So yeah, I'd take you to B&H Dairy on Second Avenue between, Seventh and Eighth.
Bon Ku: I love that and we'll, we'll put a link in in these show notes there. Establish, in 1938, I wrote down, I wrote down so many notes here. My, my brain is just like buzzing. I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to eat something now and digest what you said for hours. I could talk to you forever, but I know you're busy and I wanna be respectful of your time.
But, Rick, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Rick Griffith: I appreciate you asking me to be here. It's very kind.
Bon Ku: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Rick. Follow him on Instagram at R I C K G R I F F I T H and don't forget to buy a copy of Health Design Thinking. At Rick's bookstore or shopatmatter.com uh, 50% discount code is designlab. Today's episode was produced by Rob Pugliese, editing by Fernando Queiroz and our theme music was created by Emmanuel Houston and the cover design by Eden Lew. See you next week.
