 We look at our world today and it looks like everything is burning, breaking apart, disintegrating. Look at our devices. There's some fresh bad news on top of everything that happened yesterday, the day before, the week before, the past several years. Put down our devices and look at our cities. What do we see? Injustice. Go beyond our cities. Go to our borders. What do we see? Cruelty. Go beyond our borders. Go to our rainforests. What do we see? They're also burning. In this state of affairs, it's natural to want to think about how do we move forward? How do we go beyond? How do we leave all of this behind? Where do we go from here? But I want to pause before asking where do we go from here? I want to investigate how we got here in the first place. What actions, decisions, policies, priorities, or maybe even inactions, for example in the case of the climate crisis, let us to this world that we live in today. Now I can spend a lot of time just talking about the many things that are responsible for this. But I want to focus on a perspective that I don't think is spoken about often enough, and that is the perspective of design. You see, design and designers have played a not insignificant role in shaping our world. Let's revisit the examples I just spoke about. The social media companies that are in part responsible for the many upheavals we've seen in the past few years, while the designers at those companies have been too busy pixel-perfecting the user interfaces to make the apps easier to use. The injustice in our cities? Well, designers have helped deploy predictive policing algorithms that have been used to perpetuate racial inequality. Our borders? Well, someone designed the walls, someone designed the detention centers, and finally the climate crisis. For far too long, design has allowed itself to become a tool of capitalism, making things or making things prettier or making things easier to use to feed this cycle of never-ending consumerism. There are so many examples we can look at. Let's look at Silicon Valley, for example, where designers are sometimes busy solving non-problems. This is Juicero, a smart juicer that retail for around $700 and required to be connected to Wi-Fi and also required you to buy these small packets of pre-cut produce that you could then use the juicer to make fresh juice. Celebrity designers and a huge team put their time, energy and talents into making this one product, which does not necessarily solve any problems. But from the looks of it, apparently, with all of what you're going through in the world, what we really need right now is a juicer. So while on the one hand we have designers trying to solve non-problems, on the other hand we have designers trying to address very real problems, but still with questionable results. This is the Play Pump, a water pump designed to work like a merry-go-round that can draw water as students play with it. This device was deployed in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and at the outset it looks like a great idea, you know, solving the problem of water scarcity, which is a complex problem with this really simple, novel, really exciting idea, children playing to get water for their communities. Yeah, brilliant, sounds great. But a deeper look reveals many problems. So this pump can only be used in communities where the water table is high enough and the water is of a good enough quality, which is not the case in many communities where it was deployed. Also, there's this problem of children using their energies to draw water, which raises the question of child labour. So there we have it, examples of designers trying to address problems or in some cases not addressing any problems and using their talents and time for these purposes. Now I admit it's very easy for me to stand here and criticize other designs and other designers. What's harder to do is to have a critical look at my own self and my own work, but I'm going to do that. I'll admit and not angel either. I'll tell you a story. Three years ago, I was in Karachi, which is also home in addition to sound about Pakistan. I was feeling rather insecure and thought to myself, well, I'm a designer and every self-respecting designer that I know of is either developing an app, making an app, has already made an app or will create an app in the very near future. What kind of designer am I if I'm not creating an app? While having this internal monologue, I was in an Uber going home from work. At that moment, a street cart crossed the road while we were at the traffic signal. Now, these street carts are a common sight on the streets of Karachi and many other cities around the world and they sell anything from fresh produce to old clothes and shoes and snacks and whatnot. They're an important part of the informal economy. So there I was sitting in my air conditioned Uber looking at this man pushing his car, thinking to myself, naturally, you're an absolute genius. I wanted to create an app and the app was right in front of me. I would create the Uber for street carts. So I went ahead and I created an app, an app that connects street cart vendors to their customers and vice versa, helping them do their transaction more easily. So this is one screen from the app and another screen showing how colorful, black, sharp, snazzy and just nice to look at this app was. I even gave it a nice name and a logo really is the word for cart. I was really happy with it until I wasn't looking back and horrified. While making this app, I did not bother to talk to even one street cart vendor or their customers. Worse still, I did not bother to investigate the broader social, political, economical and cultural aspects that make it necessary for thousands of thousands of people to push these cars along city streets, eking out a living while the heat is intense in Karachi. I was not interested in questioning and challenging the complex realities that made it necessary. I was not really interested in making an app. In other words, I was doomed. So what is doomed? Well, this is a term I came up with while I was trying to understand my own approach and my own attitude towards design. It's an acronym. It stands for designers, uncritical, boundless enthusiasts. So I was doomed while I was making this app. And we can probably also make a parallel with the kind of work that I was doing with my app and the kind of approach that the designers of the play pump had. And with this do mindset, you tend to get married to this idea and you're in this bubble of brilliance and you're thinking that, okay, I'm a genius designer and I know everything I can solve this problem. I don't necessarily need to know much about the complexities of the problem space and most importantly the people that I'm designing for. The world does not need this kind of design. This kind of design is part of the problem. But despite all that I've said, despite the rather hopeless cynical and maybe even bitter picture I've drawn so far, I think there is hope. Arundhati Roy, one of my absolute favorite authors, inspires me when she says, a new world is not just possible, she's on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. I believe that design, despite what I've said so far, design still has the power and the potential to facilitate or maybe even expedite the arrival of this new world that Roy talks about. But how do we do it? In the past two years since I've been in the MDS Integrative Design Program and the STEM School of Art and Design, I've had to really question myself and challenge myself. I've had to revisit my approach as a designer, my mindset as a designer. It's been a process of unlearning. I've had to teach myself that I have to design as a facilitator, not as an expert. I'm not an expert, but the real experts are the people who actually live with my designs, live with these complex problems that I'm designing within. And echoing what Brittany said, we have to learn from the real people who actually live these realities every single day. They are the real experts of their experiences. I have to remind myself that I have to design with people, not for them. I'm embracing this approach, this new approach to design in my current research and design work for which I'm going back to Pakistan. Pakistan is the fifth most vulnerable country to long term impacts of climate change. And among many different aspects of that, including water shortages and extreme weather events, food security and agriculture are some of the major, major outcomes of climate change. I'm going to understand how I as a designer can help assist and facilitate the many different stakeholders working in this space to help Pakistan actually respond to the many challenges arising from climate change. This is a very complex problem space as evidenced by this network of the many different players that interact in this space. I'm working in deep collaboration with researchers, policy makers, social organizations, and of course the general public in trying to understand the problem space and the many different dynamics of it. I don't have any answers yet and might not have any answers anytime soon. I was just thinking the network from three years ago would probably jump into this problem space with oodles and oodles of confidence and just this amazing ability to see, not acknowledge the complexities and apply this boundless enthusiasm to this problem space and probably pretend that all we need is a shiny, fancy, nicely designed app and the problem of climate change would be gone. Fortunately, the network of today here right now knows a little bit better. I understand that before jumping to any solutions before think even thinking about solutions, we have to really spend a lot of time in the problem space with the people with the stakeholders trying to understand what everyone's, what everyone's needs are wants are what assets we have what strengths we have what weaknesses we have. We have to approach the space with not boundless enthusiasm, but with critical optimism. As we try and figure out where to go from here, you must not get doomed. Do sound like doomed and it really is doomed, as I would inspire my work on that fancy, but useless app. I believe that critical collaborative design offers a way forward as we grapple with many versions of the question, where do we go from here. Thank you.