13 December 2021. Design | Insects
Let’s design everything for single mums. Everyone else will appreciate it too | Insects have feelings. We just don’t like to think about it.
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#1: Let’s design everything for single mums. Everyone else will appreciate it too
Laetitia Vitaud’s regular newsletter had a simple idea in it last week: that if we design services so they work for single mothers, then they will work better for everyone.
In this she nods towards the influential work in Invisible Womenby Caroline Criado-Perez on gender bias in design, but takes it a bit further. In short:
the default persona we should have in mind when designing public services, public transportation, tax systems and HR policies is the single mum. Single mums have a hard life. If you design something that works for them, then there’s a high chance that it’ll work for everybody else too.
She starts by quoting a piece in Vox by Anne Helen Petersen making a similar point about the US:
If you live by yourself — or as a single parent or caregiver — you don’t have to imagine. This is your life. All the expenses of existing in society, on one set of shoulders. For the more than 40 million people who live in this kind of single-income household, it’s also become increasingly untenable... (O)ur society is still set up in a way that makes it much easier for single people to fall through the cracks.
The piece focuses on two areas that would make a big difference: public infrastructure and transportation, and work. Employers, she suggests, should imagine that all their employees are single parents.
(Making cities buggy-friendly is good for everyone. Photo Joe Shlabotnik/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
In the case of infrastructure, most of our road systems and transit systems were designed to get workers into work—usually with the implicit assumption that they had left a carer back at home somewhere. She links to a piece by Alexandra Lange at Bloomberg which explores the idea of ‘a Department of Care’:
A municipal Department of Care could make sure the trash was picked up and the tree pits were weeded. A Department of Care could pay teens to tend to public spaces and teach them stewardship skills. A Department of Care could check on seniors in a heat wave and basement apartment dwellers in a flood. A Department of Care would start by asking, as urban designer Justin Garrett Moore suggests: What do you need? What do you hope will change? How can we best accomplish this?
Back to Laetitia Vitaud’s newsletter, where she picks up on the transport issue, quoting Chris and Melissa Bruntlett (whose book I wrote about here recently):
Care trips are often undercounted or uncounted because they don’t fall into easily measured, quantifiable definitions. When you think of the average journey to drop kids off at school or daycare, stop at the grocery store, or visit the doctor’s office, they are generally less than a kilometer in distance and seldom take longer than 15 minutes. Most travel surveys fail to take these measurements into account due to their brevity, ultimately ignoring entire swaths of mobility patterns. At the same time, care trips are usually arranged in a polygonal spatial pattern—indirect and with multiple stops—covering smaller geographical areas that are closer to home and made on foot or public transport.
Leslie Kern points this out in her book Feminist Cities, also quoted by Vitaud. When I was writing about the future of cities and the future of work recently, there was a quote from this book that jumped out at me, from the geographer Kim England, that gender roles are “fossilised into the concrete experience of space.”
In contrast, if public transport is designed for pushchairs, then it’s likely also going to work for wheelchair users as well.
The transport literature is reasonably up on this, even if transport itself is only very following suit. There are some pioneering examples, like Aspern, in Vienna.
But her other suggestion, about the workplace, is less familiar.
it would make sense for companies to design their HR policies, benefits, work spaces, culture and organisations with single mums in mind. It would be a great way to make work better and fairer for everyone! The presenteeism and toxic management that make life hard for single mothers are usually what makes life hard for everybody. If you’re serious about making your company more diverse and inclusive, then single mums are the best category to have in mind when you want to design anything.
What this means in practice is designing work for the workers who are under the most pressure, in terms of their time and their attention. She has a useful list of what this starts to look like in practice:
- a workload that’s manageable for somebody with a family life (if it’s 80 hours a week, no single mum can do it) ;
- childcare options and benefits to level the playing field for all parents ;
- “core collaborative hours” (synchronous work) reduced to a minimum like Zillow ;
- inclusive meetings — either Zoom for everyone or office for everyone because “hybrid” is often a disaster ;
- equal pay with benefits (because a single mum can only count on herself)...
There are obvious benefits. The business that adopts this approach will increase its potential pool of employees. And the rest of the employees will probably like it too, and be more likely to join—and stay.
#2: Insects have feelings. We just don’t like to think about it.
So maybe insects have feelings. An article by Zaria Gorvett in BBC Futures says that “the evidence is piling up.”
(T)here's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control. They can be optimistic, cynical, or frightened, and respond to pain just like any mammal would.
All of this is relatively new. Scott Waddell, Professor of Neurobiology at Oxford, used to have disarm people when he told them that he was studying emotion in fruit flies by saying he “wasn’t intending on studying ambition.” Roll forwards to the present and it turns out that fruit flies are more complex than we thought:
(S)ome research has found that fruit flies do pay attention to what their peers are doing, and are able to learn from them.
Gorvett’s article has a helpful reminder about how old insect species are—and that they are both similar to other species and very different. How old? 400 million years or so, so well before the dinosaurs. Parts of their bodies are similar to mammals (hearts, brains, intestines, testicles, ovaries) but they lack lungs and stomachs. The hard shell—the exoskeleton—is made up of chitin, also found in fungi.
And, as with bodies, so also with brains:
Insects don't have the exact same brain regions as vertebrates, but they do have areas that perform similar functions. For example, most learning and memory in insects relies on "mushroom bodies" – domed brain regions which have been compared to the cortex, the folded outer layer that's largely responsible for human intelligence, including thought and consciousness.
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(A fruit fly eating a banana. Photo: Sanjay Acharya, via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
It’s a long article, and there’s some fascinating detail on research into fruit flies, different bee species, and the golden tortoise beetle to try to establish whether they have emotions and express them. Generally, the answer seems to be yes. We perhaps shouldn’t be surprised by this, apparently:
(M)any of the chemicals in our brains are highly conserved – they were invented hundreds of millions of years ago. So an insect's emotional experiences could be more familiar than you would think.
Insects also feel pain: “there's emerging evidence that they can indeed feel pain as we know it – and not only that, they can experience it chronically, just like humans.” Greg Neely, at the University of Sydney, has found that
injured fruit flies can experience lingering pain, long after their physical wounds have healed. "It's almost like an anxiety-like state, where once they've been injured, they want to make sure nothing else bad happens," says Neely. The fruit flies' responses are thought to mirror what can happen in humans, when an injury leads to chronic "neuropathic" pain.
And this, of course, raises huge ethical issues, as the human species presides over a vast “insect Armageddon”. The numbers killed by pesticides on American farms number in the “quadrillions”—that’s a number with 15 zeroes after it. Insect species are disappearing at a rapid rate—German research, for example, found that three-quarters of species of flying insects had vanished in the last 25 years.
So if they have emotions and feel pain, it raises some difficult questions. It’s another area where the human-centric thinking that has dominated since the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century may no longer be fit for purpose.
It might accelerate the bans on certain types of pesticides. It raises questions as to whether insects are an acceptable protein substitute for meat: Gorvett notes that 975,225 grasshoppers would need to be killed to get the same amount of meat that you get from a single cow. As she concludes:
Perhaps one reason we don't tend to think of insects as emotional is that it would be overwhelming.
h/t Tanja Hichert
j2t#226
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