Staying Relevant

Continuing from posts found here and here

"For years, I’ve wondered how most of the world ignored the Holocaust even though they knew terrible crimes were being committed against the innocent. How could people be so callous and unresponsive? I have contempt for such people. And then I realized with a chill that our time has been marked by events of incomprehensible brutality and evil, and I have done almost nothing. ... I am embarrassed by the possibility that another generation will point at us and say, 'How could they have been so callous and unresponsive?'”

Milton Glaser

The more we learn and model how cultures respond to emotion during disaster, the more we can effectively help those in need. Why emotion and culture? Simple: Are people rational when disaster strikes? No, of course not. Yet for some reason, the planning for disaster response expects the opposite. The Katrina disaster put this error in planning in sharp relief – the emergency planners did not account for much of the behavior that happened before, during, and after the event.

They did not understand the culture – A culture in which some people had cars and places to go while others had only their houses, if anything; a culture where communities rely heavily on word-of-mouth, where rumors travel quickly. They also did not understand the phenomenal impact of emotion on this culture. The media understood it, and exploited it to boost ratings (I found it so odd that news crews – vans, helicopters, cameras, lighting, etc. – could get in and out of NOLA with ease, but emergency personnel could not) The emergency planners also did not account for the effect of emotion on their personnel either. Fear and hysteria became so out of control that police officers left their posts, first-responders simply did not go in to some areas of the city, and security personnel were told to shoot-to-kill and were hyped-up for some kind of Mad Max shootout. I remember watching soldiers delivering food with their guns up, ready to fire, and Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who DID understand the culture but was brought in to the situation late, was yelling at them to “put those damn guns down!”

This is why the disaster after the disaster happened. The people involved in planning expected that certain things, like everyone evacuating and/or taking shelter, would simply happen. Then, when these expected things did not happen, people on both sides – citizens in need of help, and those in positions to help them – were gripped with emotion (fear & hysteria) which was spread by the culture and the media.

In the most basic terms…this was a communication problem. And how do we solve the problem? By being able to understand cultures and emotions. So, what kind of person knows about communication and its relationship with culture and emotion? That’s right, designers…I’m looking directly at you.