A few words on the death of Edgar Morin (1921 – 2026), and the authors who have shaped my way of seeing and doing.

 

“Let us inseparably link Hans Jonas’s statement about the degraded planet we will leave to our children and Jaime Semprun’s statement expressing concern about the shortcomings of our education:

What kind of planet are we going to leave to our children? Hans Jonas

What kind of children will we leave the world to? Jaime Semprun

Edgar Morin, Teaching How to Live

 

“Without for a moment rejecting the relevance of a poetic or philosophical approach to habitability, it can also be grasped by a ecosystem model ;
We are thus interested in the interface and interactions between the inhabitants (individual or collective) of the world (their body, their psyche, their mind) and the environment (natural
and artificial) in which they live: biocosm, technocosm, sociocosm, semiocosm”

Alain Findeli, Design Sciences Volume 1: What are the design sciences?

 

Edgar Morin died on Friday at the age of 104. At that age, it's not a surprise, but it still moved me. It's not to jump on the bandwagon, but out of gratitude, that I'm writing today about the impact of his thinking on My stance and vision as a designer.

And he wasn't the only one. Everything that makes me the designer I am today—my stance, my vision—was built by going through several doors at once: Bruno Munari, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, him. Very different authors, but the same lesson: we never design for an abstract “user”but for people who learn, make mistakes and live. 

During my years at PROJEKT Design Lab, three of his books never left my desk: The Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, Think globally, Teaching how to liveNone of them talk about design; they all talk about understanding and learning to live together.

In Teaching how to liveHe echoes Rousseau: education is not about filling heads but about teaching people how to live. Freire said the same thing when denouncing "banking" education, which treats the learner like an empty vessel. Hence, for us, inclusivity and co-design : designing with people, not for supposed passives. Accessibility then ceases to be a box to tick at the end of a project: it is the refusal to manufacture objects that exclude.

In The Seven SciencesHe speaks of the “blindness of knowledge,” we are mistaken, especially when we are sure of ourselves, and then of understanding others. It is, without the word, a ethics of which Attention to the other, to their fragility, to what we don't see in them. The antidote to the "average" persona: the people for whom we design are never truly average.

In Thinking Globally, he refuses to divide the world into watertight pieces: no parts without the whole, no whole without the parts. This prevents me from isolating a screen from the life of the person viewing it, or a product from the path and social context in which it is embedded, or a user from their environment. Everything is connectedAs summarized in a phrase by Jenny Holzer that I always keep in mind: all things are delicately interconnected. Dewey and Munari complete the picture: learning by doing, ancestor of prototyping; and the idea that a good object, like a good lesson, should be clear, accessible, almost joyful, never a demonstration of intelligence from its author.

I don't derive any grand design theory from it, rather a way of seeing, a posture that can be summed up in one word: Humility. I'm wary of overly simplistic solutions, I prefer to design for lives rather than targets, and I remember that my perspective is always partial, as is theirs. People know their lives better than I do; I sometimes see what they haven't yet been able to articulate. It's in this gap that a sound idea is born. My job is less about being right than...to listen and to question myselfIt's less comfortable, more honest, and probably the most difficult stance to maintain, and also the most important.

And perhaps that is their true way of driving change: not through a method, but from within. You can't change anything around you without first changing your own perspective. ; the posture one adopts already transforms one's way of working, and then, little by little, the people around them.

 

 

 

 

 

Hend Daoud Metoui, Product Designer at UX-Republic