GROWTH CANNOT BE THE GOAL

The 21st century global economy consists of competing, irreconcilable imperatives. On the one hand, the economy has been designed such that it must grow. On the other hand, expanding economic activity is extremely closely correlated to higher levels of pollution, emissions, resource depletion, climate change, and extinction in the biosphere. To make things more confusing, growth at the global level does not appear to have a predictable impact on global inequality, or a continued impact on human well-being beyond a certain point. Of course, economic growth is not entirely bad–20th century economic growth and attendant resource utilization contributed to unprecedented contemporary peace, cooperation and material prosperity (Pinker 2018). The problem lies in applying last century’s solution to this century’s problems, namely a growing population, increased ecological impact, and significant global inequality.

The US economy over the past decade is an example that economic growth and other measures of well-being have been effectively decoupled. Following the economic contraction that followed the 2008 financial crisis, the US economy expanded substantially and unemployment eventually reached an all-time low in 2019 (www.bls.gov). By these traditional measures, the economy would be said to be thriving. However, other measures of economic flourishing did not automatically follow the GDP trend upward. During the same period of time, wealth inequality has become greater. Mental health statistics have dipped since 2008–suicide in particular increased over 25% in the US in the meantime (www.cdc.gov). Likewise 45% of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61.1 % in 1987. Thus GDP expansion cannot currently be equated to human flourishing.

Nor can future economic growth solve some of the most substantial problems facing humanity in the 21st century. Of the 21st century social and ecological challenges, economic growth is either tangential or antithetical to meeting the affront. Even global poverty is unlikely to be assuaged by growth alone. While global income inequality generally improved over the 20th century, the world remains very unequal (ourwordlindata.org). For those who wish to normalize inequality through economic growth, expansion must be maintained at relatively high rates for many years (e.g., 6% growth for 60 yrs) on end to achieve a world above the global poverty line of 14,500 int-$ (ourwordlindata.org). However, if the world managed to achieve present USA-level consumption for all its citizens, the human footprint would eclipse 4 Earths (https://persquaremile.com). Clearly the population of humans living in that world would be able to take little solace in their relative equality. Economic growth only improves human lives up to a certain point, after which it appears to experience diminishing returns (Harrari 2016).

The 21st century’s challenges span material-environmental limits and, in a related way, the impact of a state of perpetual growth on humans. Together they intimate that, in a physical sense, single-mindedly pursuing traditional economic growth in the 21st century is an unsupportable course of action. It is theoretically insupportable because 3% economic growth will literally boil the surface of the earth (dothemath.ucsd.edu) with entropic heat loss in less than 400 years with no help needed from carbon dioxide induced global warming. This is simply due to entropy. Economic activity traces a very tight correlation with total energy expended (Smil 2017). Thus with 3% growth, the entropy from energy use, renewable or not, would cause the surface temperature increase. It is practically impossible because unknowable ecological tipping points exist that, once triggered, could drastically reduce Earth’s carrying capacity, thus effectively and automatically reversing the growth of the global human economy. On the social side, the rate of growth has led to a profusion of stress (Harrari 2016), exploitation and inequality.

Presently, the inhabitants of the biosphere, the Earth’s layer of living organisms and their inter-relationships, find themselves squeezed between calls for growth and the empirical realities of pollution and depletion. Human inhabitants increasingly create an economic system that exacerbates capital, material and environmental inequality. Meanwhile, the benefits of growth and resource extraction are concentrated in developed nations and already relatively wealthy individuals, while the negative effects are experienced predominantly by socioeconomically marginal humans.

Yet growth is an imperative for the current economic instantiation, due in large part to the implicit collective expectation that the future economy will be larger than the present one. This belief, grounded in several hundreds of years of economic growth, has led us to design techno-monetary systems that take growth as a systemic assumption. To demonstrate the necessity of growth, take the United States Mortgage crisis of 2008 when a temporary decrease in the expansion of US credit, caused by mortgage defaults by marginal borrowers nearly led to the implosion of the international banking system due to the amplification effect of collateralized debt instruments. On a more mundane level, any interest-bearing loan carries with it a similar expectation–that 100 dollars of a loan will lead to a future where that dollar yields more than 100 dollars.

The same high-level expectations for growth have propagated through nearly all of our enterprises and institutions. Universities pursue increased enrollment each year in order to thrive. Rarely does a university actively curtail admissions. Corporations pursue increased adoption/revenue/market penetration each quarter, or it risks investor flight. Rarely does a corporation content itself with stable metrics but greater value, or upon being profitable, but not growing. The call for growth has trickled down to every corner of the economy, even ethnographic practice in industry. While changing the monetary system or economic system as a whole is beyond the scope of this paper, or our agency as individual actors, I describe alternative ways of thinking, doing and building that seek to provide innovation value to people within the limits of the planet. It situates these ways of thinking and acting as primal, and subordinates growth to the level of epiphenomenon–something that start-ups do, or an unintended effect–rather than the nomothetic goal of all economic activity.

Perhaps we should simply adopt a human-centered perspective, rather than a growth-centered one, in order to attain our clear and obvious implicit goal of a thriving economy?

HUMANS CANNOT BE THE CENTER

Many EPIC members work in the design or technology industries, where human-centered design process are integral to developing the products and services upon which our firms depend. Human-centered design emphasizes empirical humanistic research as the starting point for creating products and services that are designed to serve customer/user desires. While it is prudent to emphasize end users’ needs when considering technology development (Cooley 2016), our collective design process might already be overly human-centered. Aside from technology and humanity, all most other considerations are excluded from the design process. This occurs in large part because such externalities do not factor into our current pallet of economic incentives.

Other inhabitants of the biosphere are increasingly marginalized, taxed or exterminated. Today the biomass of humans and their mammalian livestock (˜.16 Gt C) far surpass that of wild mammals (.007 Gt C), while the same is true for poultry (.005 Gt C) versus wild birds (.002 Gt C) (Bar-On et. al. 2018). As humans and domesticates have outcompeted other species, species extinction rates have already exceeded 1,000x likely background extinction rates, which have pre-historically roughly equated to speciation rates (Pimm et. al. 2014). Further exponential increases in extinction are expected, as geometric increases in human economic activity have been associated with ongoing extinction events. Even for extant species, considerable population losses portend an ecological limit to human expansion. To wit, oceanic phytoplankton, the base of the aquatic trophic pyramid, have been declining in reverse proportion to pollution and economic growth (Boyce et. al. 2010). Their loss is problematic because they create ~50% of the organic matter on Earth and emit ~50% of the oxygen. Without a self-sustaining population of phytoplankton, the productivity of continental shelves would be much lower. This decrease is directly caused by various sorts of human-made pollution, both run-off and atmospheric. There isn’t enough room for humans and for microbes.

As the previous section alludes, present levels of human economic growth increasingly come at the expense of important support systems of the biosphere. A glaucomic focus on human needs obscures and enhances well-documented externalities of our system of production.

In that human-centered design is primarily focused on meeting human needs with the goal of driving use and adoption of a product or service, it is ideologically complicit with the unsustainable growth paradigm outlined above. Human centered design emerged in a time when the needs of corporations, governments or the technology itself was given primacy over the present needs of the humans making or living with the product or service (Cooley 2016). Human-centered design is an unquestionable step in the right direction over machine-centered design. Although the human-machine conflict is not yet entirely resolved, human-centered design is insufficient to provide for a thriving world populated with technological, non-human and human actors.

While human-centered design is effective for designing more effective products and services, it fails to effectively address the social and ecological impacts of its services and technologies. For instance, let’s take a hypothetical example of a technology ethnographer working for an ecommerce company. She interviews participants, most of whom are dissatisfied with shipping times and porch theft. She analyzes the results and facilitates a workshop to ideate solutions to the problems she identified during her studies. The team posits that delivering packages with drones during evening hours is a parsimonious solution. The packages are delivered when users are at home, often at least 12 hrs before they would be delivered otherwise. Moreover, the technology does not require that delivery people work after-hours, away from their families. Even better, the drone technology is inexpensive to operate, so the e-tailer’s profit increases. A pilot in densely settled, suburban Silicon Valley is encouraging. Yet in the world beyond the product manager’s spreadsheet, high levels of crepuscular drone traffic disrupts the local bat community at key feeding times, leading to lower populations. Lower bat populations lead to higher mosquito populations in the freshwater creeks that drain into the South Bay. Higher mosquito populations tempt local governments to control the problem with pesticides, which filter into the Bay and have further unexpected, negative entailments within its estuarial ecosystem. In the end, the firm launches the drone delivery program. It gains market capitalization, increases revenue and grows its user base.

Yet, because of humans’ propensity for shifting baselines, end-users are no happier. In the end, requiring that they wait half a day for a package or get reimbursed for a new one was not a real drag on their ability to thrive. However, the new baseline of expectations remains while the bat population doesn’t come back and the insecticides remain in the bay.

In this scenario, the firm and product team responsible for the drone pilot program have designed an effective human-centered intervention that would be a complete success by most standards. Yet their product has not measurably contributed to human thriving. Worse, it has several negative externalities associated with it. This kind of product is an example of innovation without progress. It is precisely the type of product error to avoid in the 21st C economy.

Humans are appropriately the center of our worlds, but we are not the central hub of Earth’s functioning as a whole. Paradoxically, the human center cannot hold if humans are the only focus of the design process.

TIME FOR A REDESIGN: HOW MIGHT WE ETHNOGRAPHERS____?

Because economic systems help to establish the conditions under which businesses operate, the growth model has profoundly influenced the way products and services are designed. Technological innovation is nested within the economic matrix in which it occurs. Therefore, most of the technological innovation to which industrial ethnographers contribute is either implicitly or explicitly in the service of growth. Yet, as detailed in the first section, total economic growth may not continue to be to our collective advantage to the extent it was in the past.

This conundrum is a powerful example of the narratives, technologies and rules which people have created exerting undue agency over the creators of those cultural objects. The things we have made are now making us instead of vice versa. In his Right Livelihood acceptance speech in 1981, technology philosopher Mike Cooley stated, “Science and technology is not given. It was made by people like us. If it’s not doing for us what we want, we have a right and a responsibility to change it.” (https://www.rightlivelihoodaward.org) Cooley’s enjoinder reminds us both of our created system’s power over us, and that we are its original architects–we have the ability to change what we’ve created if those things no longer serve the purposes for which they were intended.

We need a solution that holds a balance between technology, human society and the natural world. This paper explores how we might design products and services that account for the needs of all users (including bats, for instance) within the means of the planet. First, I explore how we can conceptualize alternative goals by theoretically emphasizing the holistic, systems approach to the economy. This section begins by defining donut economics. It points out that such an economy exists in a sort of dynamic equilibrium, much like most ecosystems do. Such an economy in dynamic equilibrium might borrow more processual understanding from the complex nested interrelationships of ecological models, rather than the rational, exponential functions of 20th century economic theory.

Second, I explore service design and permaculture design as repositories of ideas that could be used to form a research framework to aid design for those designing within the 21st century’s constraints. Service design provides a useful starting point for thinking about how we might design a system that functions in a sufficiently holistic way to address systemic, complex, interrelated issues. Ethnographers in industry are uniquely positioned to affect the design. Ecological design, specifically permaculture (a sustainable agriculture design paradigm that emphasizes ecosystem mimicry), has developed a system-level approach to designing productive landscapes in the image of productive ecosystems. This design system focuses on empirical observation to identify the relationships between the component pieces of the design.

Third, I explore how we might gather and apply our findings to illustrate appropriate focus points for our teams. While human-centered design has been and will continue to be an effective tool for designing viable technological solutions, I build on its foundation to introduce donut-centered design (Raworth 2007)–a frame and method of design that considers humans within their eco-sociotechnic reality and designs for their relationships to one another and the environment. Improving these relationships is, strictly speaking, growth agnostic.

THE DONUT ECONOMY

We made the growth economy, so we can unmake and replace it. Where as a growing economy has generally, in the 20th century, been synonymous with a thriving economy, the same may not be true in the 21st century. A growing economy can be an unequal, destructive one, while a thriving economy may be growth agnostic. Although many potential alternatives to a growth-oriented economy exist, this paper pursues the idea of donut economics (Raworth 2017), an economic construct that emphasizes a balance between social and environmental outcomes, while remaining inclusive of other alternative approaches (e.g., circular economy, solid-state economy, b-corps). “Doughnut Economics” describes the pressing contemporary need for a type of economy that addresses human aspirations within environmental bounds: “Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend (https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/).”

Figure 1. The Donut of Donut economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model)#/media/File:Doughnut-classic.jpg. Creative Commons.

The donut itself, like the hockey-stick exponential growth curve that preceded it, is a useful metaphor for explaining the goal of a system. The inner circle of the donut represents a “social foundation”, below which individual want becomes systemic shortfall (see Figure 1). In this space, the “pie” is divided among metrics intended to characterize how well humanity is serving its own needs. Key performance indicators include food and water availability, public health measures, levels of political violence, social inequality of various sorts, public education, and energy availability. The outer circle of the donut represents the ecological ceiling, beyond which humanity over-taxes its biospheric support systems. In order to measure the types and levels of overshoot, Raworth offers the cycles of key chemicals such as nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, o-zone, freshwater and various pollutants, as indicators of ecological performance.

Ultimately, the steps that Kate Raworth outlines boil down to a single enjoinder: treat the economy like the ecosystem it is, rather than like a single mathematical function, which it cannot be. In order to shift the economy from its present form toward the donut, Raworth outlines a seven-step program that is worth recounting briefly in Table 1.

Table 1. Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist

Adapted from Raworth 2017

If we examine the typical modi operandi of most corporations, we see that the goals of the economy at large are mirrors at the individual corporate level. In Raworth’s plan for transformation, the word design appears more often than economy. In this sense, the problem of infinite growth on a finite planet is less an economic problem (mainly because economists seem to lack the tools to conceptualize the problem and conceive solutions), and more of a design problem. The purpose of the system was misidentified and, as a result, the possible components were arranged in a way that optimizes for a tangential outcome.

Since the values of the larger economy trickle down to the individual actors and components of the system, it we have an opportunity–as applied ethnographers–to exert change by researching and advocating for rearranging the people, infrastructure, components, metrics of the system through research and advocacy. In other words, our companies are also optimized for the wrong thing in their efforts to match the bars set by traditional economic reporting. Below I outline the ways in which contemporary corporations fail to meet Raworth’s enjoinders.