excerpts ( CAPS LOCK )
excerpts ( CAPS LOCK ) :
-
It is great to be passionate about being a designer, but beware that making your hobby into a job has become a strategy for clients and employers to demand work situations that would be unacceptable elsewhere: unpaid internships, pulling all-nighters, working weekends, and unpaid designs competitions. These are all common practices in design because there are more designers than jobs, and secondly, people assume that because designers do what they love, they will happily accept any working condition no matter how problematic.
What doesn’t help is that this work culture is promoted, even celebrated by designers themselves. In the well-known book for beginning designers How to be a graphic designer, without losing your soul, designer and writer Adrian Shaughnessy kicks off by saying ‘always remember there are millions of people who’d swap jobs with you if they could’. He continues with ‘Design is about commitment : if you want to have a nine-to-five existence, go and get a job in a government tax office’.
Passion is what makes designers the ideal workers in this stage of capitalism. Designers are flexible, always available, dress up, don’t strike, don’t unionize, and are inspired on demand. Designer Daniel van der Velden warned designers not to become the working class of the creative industry. In his article ‘Research and Destroy’ Van der Velden quotes a Dutch politician saying: ‘We are making a turn, away from the assembly line to the laboratory and the design studios, from the working class to the creative class.’
…
The Happy Show
Design is obsessed with positivity. A big part of graphic design is making companies, events, and objects appear more joyful using positive associations. Design studios are the example of ‘fun’ workplaces with football tables, colourful knickknacks, and inspirational posters. Designers are also expected to project a sense of happiness themselves at all times. ‘Niceness’ is considered a necessary quality in the creative industries today, as Silvio Lorusso comments. In order to find work, designers are expected to keep developing, improving and optimizing personal and professional profiles. To stay hireable and competitive, designers have to exhibit positivity and personal growth using frequent social media updates and networking events. Forcing oneself to exhibit positivity and success for long periods of time takes its toll. In the UK depression is now the most treated condition by the NHS. The Designers’ Inquiry by Brave New Alps from 2013 among Italian designers mentions that 44 percent experienced stress, 30 percent had anxiety or panic attacks, and 73 percent suffered from depression. A survey of 767 designers is not representative for the entire design discipline, but the rates are still alarmingly high.
The philosopher Mark Fisher pointed out that the rise in mental health issues is a result of capitalism’s demand for workers to continually self-improve. He observed ‘that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough’, and ‘if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame’. Mental health programmes at work are mostly focused on alcohol and drug addiction, and are only focused on employees’ individual mental health as long as it boosts their productivity. The individual is supposed to cope with the stress in a labour market where flexibility and confidence are seen as necessary qualities.
Unattainable productivity benchmarks have created a culture of efficiency aimed at economic growth at the expense of the well- being of workers. With smartphones the concept of downtime is disappearing. We are expected to always be available for employers or clients. As a Dutch business expert boasted: ‘Stress is not a matter of not having enough time, it is a matter of prioritizing.’ The design world should be more alert and responsible about rising mental health issues, as they remain largely undiscussed. After the barrage of criticism presented in this chapter on the working conditions of designers, it’s about time we take a step back and keep in mind that work in its current structure is not likely to disappear overnight.
…
Desktop computers and graphic design software changed the access to graphic design production completely in the 1990s. Even though computers and printers were expensive at first, soon every person with a computer and (bootlegged) graphic software could achieve the same technical quality as professionals, much to the dismay of many designers who feared to lose their status and livelihood. ‘By making our work so easy to do, we are devaluing our profession’, warned design historian Steven Heller. ‘With everything so democratic, we can lose the elite status that gives us credibility.’ That hasn’t been the case, as Ellen Lupton points out in her book on DIY design, seeing that ‘the field got bigger rather than smaller’. The democratization of graphic design, print production, and online publishing has allowed people without prior access to media to claim their space in the production of knowledge and culture.
…
The Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius believed socialism was better achieved through industrial mass production. Design education at the Bauhaus was based on the pre-industrial workshop model, and divided along lines of materials such as stone, wood, metal, textile, clay, and glass. Each workshop was fitted with the latest industrial machines, so students could become acquainted with industrial production techniques. In these workshops the school would ‘create a new guild of craftsmen’. The Bauhaus wanted to get rid of the ‘classist’ division between the arts and crafts, but this time with the most modern techniques available, using the slogan ‘Art into Industry’.
The pedagogy of the Bauhaus was influenced by the new education movement in Europe. Educators such as Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner believed that children’s development would benefit from more freedom. They integrated arts, gardening, games, and gymnastics in education, while discouraging standardized textbooks and strict attendance. The Bauhaus extended this more holistic vision to higher education, with the belief that every human is talented, and talent could be applied to all disciplines. Following the new educational principles, gymnastics and theatre were integrated in the Bauhaus curriculum.
Despite its socialist ideals, politics at the Bauhaus would not get in the way of individual artistic expression. Gropius and many teachers were careful not to be overtly political. Only under director Hannes Meyer the Bauhaus briefly turned ‘red’. After three years he was fired, and commented: ‘A training centre for socialist architecture is impossible under capitalist conditions.’ His successor Ludwig Mies van der Rohe shied away from politics, and right before the Nazis closed the school, Gropius defended the school’s existence by claiming there was no subversive political intent at the Bauhaus.
During the existence of the Bauhaus, few of its designs were mass-produced. Partly because of the technological limitations of the time, but also because the working class wasn’t very enthusiastic about the aesthetic that was envisioned for them. Bauhaus had its biggest impact after it closed. Bauhaus professors Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Mies van de Rohe fled to the US, and found employment at corporations. Thanks to post- war US economic and political influence, the modernist Bauhaus aesthetic spread across the globe, albeit mostly stripped of its socialist ideals.
In search of a more socialist role for design, the Bauhaus found an effective way to merge art and industry. This in turn created the blueprint for a design method that flawlessly connects with the needs of industrial production. With its emphasis that politics should not get in the way of creativity, its apolitical appearance has made the Bauhaus the ideal model for design schools for industrial production in capitalism. Precisely because it centralizes objects and production, and not the social relations under which they are created.
…
Education can be expensive. Not just because of tuition costs, but students need to pay for study materials, housing, food, and clothing. Even if tuition is free, most design education is time-intensive, and not every student can combine studying with a job that covers living expenses. Students will either have to loan money or receive financial aid from family or friends. The cost of education and the dependency on external financial aid has made it harder for students from lower income backgrounds to study design.
The problem with unaffordable education is that voices from lower income communities are less represented in society. The voice of the uneducated, the poor, and the marginalized are mostly absent from history books, for this very reason. An expensive design education could lead to a wealthy class of designers who assume their audience is also well-off, which can obfuscate some of the most important social issues in society such as inequality and privilege.
Viewing education as a monetary exchange overlooks the possibility that education is perhaps not only about preparing for work. The German word for education is Bildung. It means a process of personal and cultural maturation, both in a philosophical and educational sense. If we see education not merely as a commodity but as a familiarization with public culture and knowledge, then it is logical that everyone should have access to it. Education is therefore also a commons, a public source of knowledge exchange which has become more and more enclosed by capitalism for the purposes of profit.
Curricula and school structures has been largely shaped by those who supply its funding, which is why we are faced with an educational system today that mostly serves the needs of capitalism. Fortunately, there is no lack in ideas about alternative education, which can provide useful perspectives for a different kind of graphic design education.
One of the pioneers of alternative education was the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). Written during the military dictatorship, Freire found that existing educational forms were unable to empower those who were oppressed. The problem with education is that it does not invite critical thinking. Students are simply asked to copy and memorize the knowledge of the teacher without question, which he called ‘the banking model’ of education. Instead, he proposed a ‘problem-posing’ method of education, where the teacher is no longer dictating but exchanging knowledge with the students. The teacher presents the material and the students critically reflect, allowing them to challenge the ideas of the teacher. While the banking model becomes a form of indoctrination, the problem-posing model invites critical consciousness. He argues that an oppressive regime will never allow problem-posing education, because the very foundations of the regime would be questioned.
Ivan Illich was a contemporary of Freire, and introduced the idea of the ‘hidden curriculum’ mentioned earlier. As an alternative he suggests that everyone should be a student and a teacher. Radical pedagogy should not limit the education to teachers, or limit the spaces of learning to classrooms. He proposed that all knowledge should be accessible, and every space, every factory and institution should be a space of learning. It would certainly be a radical idea that anyone can walk into a hospital, a space engineering lab, a farm, or an artist studio and learn all there is to know without restrictions.
Illich’ ideas about ‘deschooling society’ were written when the internet was in its infancy, but today his ideas could almost sound like a call to abolish schools and use the internet to facilitate a libertarian form of education. This would sound like music in the ears of Silicon Valley tech companies, who aim to ‘disrupt’ the often state-controlled education market by further privatizing education and who would benefit from facilitating courses via digital platforms. In her article about remote teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic, Naomi Klein writes that this would worsen education for children who are in abusive, crowded, or noisy homes, with limited or no access to internet. This would not mean a democratization of knowledge, but a total enclosure of education as a commons, ensuring that tech companies can profit from education.
…
In response to the privatization of education, there have been many alternative ideas to transform design education from different sides. On one side there are those who are tired of design education being expensive and business-oriented, and wish to change it towards a more affordable, inclusive, and socially oriented education. On the opposite side we find educators who are pushing for more collaboration with businesses to ensure more employment options for designers. More focus on UX design and design thinking, where design education tends more towards a hybrid between design and business.
The first, more social view of design education has brought an abundance of small-scale educational initiatives.
The second, more market-oriented view on design education comes from the notion that design education is not preparing students enough for market demand. The rising market value of subdisciplines such as UX design, design thinking, and service design are still underrepresented in many design schools. There is the ‘Future of Design Education’, a recent call to change design education to better face the problems of the twenty-first century. Design theorist Cameron Tonkinwise points out that its founders are from multinationals such as IBM, Proctor & Gamble, Philips, and JP Morgan Chase, which begs the question which ‘twenty-first century problems’ they have in mind.
The model of the European design school, which originated in the 1900s, is still firmly in place but under increasing pressure from neoliberal economic thinking and a diversifying discipline. Debates about the future of education mostly focus on what designers should be learning, rather than how and where. What the radical pedagogies by Freire, Illich, and bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress (1994) reveal, is that capitalist education is not just about training people for work; it is the system of learning itself, the disciplining structure, power structures, and the student-teacher relation that block radical changes in society.
If graphic design refuses to only serve the interest of capitalism, a radical transformation of design education is necessary that questions the very nature of how knowledge is produced and commodified in society. That means abandoning the idea that graphic design can only be taught in school, and acknowledging that everyone can be a teacher, everyone can be a student, and the classroom can be everywhere. It would be wrong to interpret this as a call for a ‘flexible desk university’. Nomadic universities have been around, but inevitably lead to a socially alienated form of education with high carbon emissions.
Meaningful design work exists by the virtue of strong social relations that are locally rooted. Colleges and universities can play an important role in fostering social relations and preserving local cultural specifics. Institutions also harbour a lot of knowledge and have important public facilities such as workshops, libraries, and lecture halls. But institutions need to be subjected to far-reaching forms of democratization and de-financialization. Education needs to avoid spending its time and energy on disciplining students into embodying capitalist values of efficiency, productivity, and obedience. If we regard education as a fundamental public service that should be accessible to everyone, education is a commons. As any other commons, education should be protected and defended against the pressures of capitalism to privatize, own, or influence the exchange of knowledge in society.
‘We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society’, said Ivan Illich. A design education that wants to produce creative and critical thinkers should start by listening to the needs of people, rather than the needs of industry.
… …
Before the age of data, graphic designers needed access to photo type equipment and printing presses. The means of production of graphic design were owned by companies and rarely by individuals. The arrival of the first personal computers—in the early 1980s—meant designers could be involved with all stages of production. Forty years later, everyone with a computer has access to the same quality of digital media production as professionals. The shift from analogue to digital design goes beyond the production process. Earlier industrial processes required specialists from different fields to develop, maintain, and customize technology. Material craftmanship has been largely replaced by an ‘upgrade addiction’ for graphic design software and hardware.
As the production and infrastructure of publishing has radically changed, the designer as a hacker offers potential new roles for designers. The role of a hacker is not just about learning to code or tinker with technology, it is a mentality towards a more ethical digital production. That power is harder and harder to secure, as the online publishing and production platforms are now effectively governed by a handful of billion-dollar companies.
A hacker is often thought of as someone who breaks into computer networks with malicious intent. Even the Oxford Dictionary defines a hacker as a person who gains unauthorized access to data. This negative frame—sadly brought on by news media in the 1980s— has tainted the original meaning of the term. A 1984 glossary for computer programmers explains that a hacker is ‘a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.’ Of course there are hackers who break into computer networks and/or engage in cybercrime, but those are called ‘crackers’, or ‘black-hat hackers’.
Now that digital networks are critical infrastructures, the role of the hacker re-emerges at the centre of society. Graphic designers can share their skills across digital networks that are global and real-time. As many of these networks were imagined and built by hackers, they can provide designers with useful strategies and critical insights.
The internet was developed during the cold war by the US military as a communication network that could withstand a nuclear war. Until the 1990s its function was limited to military and scientific purposes. That changed with the invention of the web / HTML by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Berners-Lee refused commercial offers and convinced the scientific institution to make the code freely available. Initially, as a space for the free exchange of knowledge, the internet was regarded as a commons. The potential for free exchange did not last long. After US congress passed a law in 1992, the internet was opened up for commercial use. Companies rushed in to own parts of the web, sparking the first dot-com boom. Today the five most valuable companies in the world are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. Almost all tech companies that produce mostly digital products and services. These handful of tech companies do not only own most online platforms, but also much of the physical infrastructure that the internet is built on. Internet follows a nineteenth-century infrastructure, which puts the power over networks firmly in the hands of former colonial powers.
How does the infrastructure of the internet influence graphic design? Perhaps the computers that designers use are made by Apple, their design software by Adobe, their files are stored on Amazon webservers, using Google’s internet cables, sent via cell phone towers owned by AT&T, and published on Instagram. The production of visual communication today is almost impossible without using the platforms, products, or services of these media conglomerates.
While people need sleep and crops need sun, information never rests and isn’t limited by geographical boundaries. A world economy based on information can stretch time and space to serve the needs of capitalism. In the network society everything is on-demand and real- time; from working and shopping to finance. Inequality will revolve around access to information and technology. A digital divide between those inside and outside the network.
4.5 billion people connected to one network offer a tremendous marketing potential. Any promotional message can potentially be viewed by billions. To stand out in the crowd, visual communication in the network relies more and more on exploiting our psychological instincts using algorithms. In the ocean of websites, luring a user to a site is akin to setting a trap. Once you take the bait, the clock starts ticking. The longer we spent on digital platforms, the more ads we see, the more likely we are to make a purchase. UX designers deploy legions of tricks to keep users on websites as long as possible. Infinite scrolling, dark patterns, bright and noisy notifications, intentionally confusing navigation, and auto-play, are some of the tactics that designers have copied from the gambling industry to keep us hooked to our screens.
Google was one of the first who pioneered the gathering and monetizing of data in the early 2000s. The first Google search engine used people’s input to optimize search results. Individual data profiles were later used to present users with tailor-made advertisements. Reading a person’s emails and tracking movements with free services such as Gmail and Google Maps could produce even more precise profiles. ‘Content-targeted advertising’ had made Google more than $10 million in revenue by 2004.
Companies that profit from people’s data engage in what social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. Contrary to the saying: ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’, Zuboff suggests that our data profiles are the products, not us. People supply the data—the raw material—which is then refined into data profiles. Detailed data profiles can predict what you desire, but also what you will desire in the future. It doesn’t just show better ads, it can also nudge people into certain behaviour and predict financial markets through understanding collective behaviour.
Designing user interfaces used to be a subdiscipline of graphic design. Now rebranded as UX design, the discipline is rapidly taking the lead. Contrary to print design, the effects of user interface design can be measured immediately and in great detail. Programmes such as trackers and cookies collect data about user behaviour. As ecommerce keeps growing—worldwide online sales have almost doubled between 2017 and 2020—each design decision has the potential to be monetized. Design ethicist Tristan Harris wrote how UX design has learned how to make people addicted to their smartphones, and that by intentionally confusing users, using addictive stimuli, and limitations, users can be manipulated into spending more and more time on websites. Real-time communication accelerates the speed of production, with little time to reflect ethically. Harris gives designers the advice that our time is scarce, and should be ‘protected with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights’. ‘Do not forget that your brain functions in time, and needs time in order to give attention and understanding. But attention cannot be infinitely accelerated.’
… …
Another quality that separates data from other raw materials, is its abundance. The amount of data is so enormous that it cannot possibly be processed manually. This is why tech companies need to use artificial intelligent (AI) software to process data. Machine learning is a form of AI, where software learns autonomously by using large sets of training data.
Visual AI went from being a scientific field to consumer-ready software, as ‘neural filters’ are now incorporated in the 2020 version of Adobe Photoshop. Its ‘Smart Portrait filter’ can alter the facial expression of an existing person’s portrait: ‘...generating happiness, surprise, anger, or aging any portrait’. Although marketed for personal use, it is clear how such computing power can also be used for manipulation or a culture of visual fake. A New York Post article interviewed influencers who said: ‘Everyone’s editing their photos’, adding that being natural on the popular app: ‘... isn’t always financially rewarding’. This pushes visual culture towards an algorithmic capitalist aesthetic; a world of digital fakes and post-truth images, engineered to maximize likes, clicks, and advertising profits.
Contrary to the promise that capitalism creates an abundance of choice, the aesthetics of automation have evolved into a more uniform visual culture. On top of that, access to technology is distributed very unequally worldwide. High-bandwidth internet is limited to urban areas, primarily in wealthy countries. One in four people in the world does not have access to internet, and 60 percent doesn’t have a smartphone. Large parts of the world population have to make do with low-resolution images, pixelated cinema, or no digital communication at all. HD, 4K, and rich visual media are available to those with access to technology and the money to pay for copyrights, while the rest of world is left with visual debris, the so-called ‘poor images’. Understanding images as an expression of inequality, reveals the ownership and production standards of images. ( class of images )
The data economy has proven to be just as exploitative and proprietary as the manufacturing economy that preceded it. The more digital the work of graphic designers is becoming, the more the privately owned infrastructure will influence the production process and the aesthetics. ( Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Linotype ) who create the code, standards, platforms, colours, and filters that shape a lot of graphic design.
What designers can learn from hackers is that in order to use tools critically, they need to be understood, adapted, and customised. ‘Designers need to learn how to write, read, and fix code. They need to get literate before they can call themselves hackers. This is why more and more design schools teach coding, so that designers can create their own tools and filters in order to customize their designed output. This makes designers less dependent on preformatted tools from media companies. Some argue that designers don’t need to learn to code in order to understand the tools they use. In his book New Dark Age, James Bridle warns that good programmers can be just as uncritical of the economic and social context of technology and that it is more about learning a critical understanding of technology than the skill of coding itself. No matter how ‘smart’ technology is, a good idea can still outsmart it.
Activism surrounding open-source software reminds us that a reciprocal exchange of knowledge is not a given, but must be defended against continuous attempts at enclosure by capitalism. The software and hardware that is now sold, was in large part collectively built using open-source software, by exchanging ideas and blueprints. Tech companies have understood well how collective sources can be enclosed and exploited.
Technology that respects human rights is decentralised, peer- to-peer, zero-knowledge, end-to-end encrypted, free and open source, interoperable, accessible, and sustainable. It respects and protects your civil liberties, reduces inequality, and benefits democracy. Technology that respects human effort is functional, convenient, and reliable. It is thoughtful and accommodating; not arrogant or demanding. It understands that you might be distracted or differently-abled. It respects the limited time you have on this planet.
Designers who are intrigued by the hacking mentality, but don’t know where to start: it’s a good thing that hackers embrace the digital commons and often share their knowledge. Documentation, tutorials, and instructional videos can be found everywhere on the web for free. Hacking is a way to emancipate users of technology from being passive consumers to becoming critical makers.
… …
The future is fertile ground for creativity, in the form of dreams, oracles, horoscopes, or science-fiction movies; humanity is always eager to find new ways to anticipate its fate. The future is a way for designers to imagine fantastic worlds and float ideas that are not yet feasible. In that sense the future can be a space for experimentation but also an escape hatch from the constraints of reality. The logic being, that if designers only respond to briefs, there is little room to think about a different future society.
Speculative design and design fiction are some of the design methods that imagine future products and services, often in relation to new technologies. Inspired by futurology and science fiction, speculative designers imagine and visualize future scenarios that do not produce new products or tangible results, but act as discussion pieces to help long-term strategic decision-making. Creative and conceptual imaginations are design’s core strengths, but unfortunately these qualities have been appropriated by capitalism to yield financial profits rather than to improve the lives of most people.
Speculative designers are usually motivated by the possibilities of new technologies. Consumer products outfitted with the latest technologies are introduced at such a fast pace that there is little time to reflect on long-term impact. Speculative designers create design briefs for themselves that question the use of technology. What will a city full of drones look like? What if all energy was renewable, free, and abundant? What if entire countries would flood due to climate change?
Speculative forms of art and design have always existed, but as a distinct discipline speculative design emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. It did not take long before Silicon Valley companies noticed the potential of speculative design, and adopted its methods to imagine new markets and float ideas for future products under the name ‘design fiction’. While early speculative design came from architecture and product design, the field later also included graphic design.
Speculative design is closely related to science fiction. Movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Minority Report (2002), Wall-E (2008), and the television series Black Mirror (2011–present) are often cited by speculative designers as examples. Science fiction is a narrative genre that was born out of artists’ imaginations of how technology could influence society.
As a creative medium, science fiction has been used to serve every purpose imaginable. Many science-fiction works have devel- oped parallel to, or in response to capitalism. Star Trek’s motto ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before’, embodies a form of space colonization that aligns with capitalist ideas of unlimited expansion. On the other hand, novels by authors such as Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Black Quantum Futurism collective imagine futures that are feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist.
Science-fiction offers inspiration and guidance for moral questions by using the future as a mirror for the present. As an art form, science fiction is first and foremost a form of entertainment. Design on the other hand, creates products or services that have use value. A recurring question in debates on speculative design, is whether it has use value like other forms of design, or is it art or entertainment like science fiction?
If speculative design is like science fiction, then what purpose does it serve? Fredric Jameson wrote: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’. Philosopher Mark Fisher wrote that anti-capitalist futures: ‘...performs our anti-capitalism for us ... Allowing us to consume with impunity.’ The fantasy being that Western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.
Science-fiction movies that warn against climate change and foresee the end of the world are more popular than ever, but that hasn’t stopped the climate crisis from happening. Series such as Black Mirror and Years and Years show the possible future impact of social media in our lives, but that hasn’t led to stricter policies for tech companies. A risk is that even critical and dystopian futures can end up creating economic value in the form of traded futures. Fictional scenarios can be critical and clever, but in the end merely serve as artistic commodities. This is how critical forms of speculative design can become a capitalist tool to profit from the future, without taking responsibility for the present.
Digital tools like computer graphics and 3D prototyping have made it easier for designers to visualize future scenarios convincingly. The largest companies in the world are financial and technology firms, and their immaterial commodities need to be visualised: apps, websites, 3D environments, animations, games, digital finances, and so on. Just as the manufacturing industry of the twentieth century needed designers to style products, speculative design is perfectly equipped to visualize the immaterial commodities that are being produced today. Speculative design also serves tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Samsung, Microsoft, and Uber to materialize their innovative claims. We tend to view these companies as innovative businesses that work on free internet access in remote areas, or ending poverty with microloans, or eradicating disease using ‘disruptive’ technology. The economic reality is that Google and Facebook make most of their money from advertising.
Digital visualizations are an attractive way to spin positive press for companies to obfuscate their harmful business models. The oil company Saudi Aramco and the United Arab Emirates both commissioned speculative designers to imagine post-energy futures, which conveniently allows them to shift the conversation away from the damaging effects of fossil fuel industry on which their business model depends. Speculative design is able to create value without selling products or services, independent of whether these speculative scenarios are actually realized.
Design consultants and trendwatchers use speculative design to provide their multinational retail clients with ideas for new products and markets. Scenarios, for example those envisioned by consultants such as Future Laboratory invariably depict wealthy households using expensive products. A future productivity vision by Microsoft show how their products can be integrated in the workflow of 2040. All sleekly designed gadgets and invisible screens in the video that plays in South-East Asia, without any mention of climate change, waste, or scarcity. Other industries, such as the much-criticized energy companies, use speculative design to paint pictures of green growth future that cannot be further apart from their actual strategies. Deliberately using speculative design as a way to obfuscate the realities of the climate crisis is perhaps the most unethical outcome of the use of design fiction.
Faced with the dilemmas of a pandemic, an impending environmental crisis, and rising inequality, it is logical that designers resort to speculation to avoid facing the complexity of society’s problems. Especially considering design’s involvement in the current production cycle, which has produced so much exploitation, waste, and carbon emissions. Speculative design should stop imagining luxury fantasies for the one percent, whether it is the form of lab-grown meat, extra-planetary colonization, or augmented interfaces for consumer electronics. As Françoise Vergès pointed out, a new green and sustainable world ‘rarely addresses who will do the work of post-disaster cleanup’. The only ethical future imagines a world that protects and respects the life of all living beings.
That doesn’t mean speculative design doesn’t have a role to play. We need to imagine societies with less products and better social relations. Where fixing, mending, and social organization can be part of a thriving society, which is more inclusive and less servient to profits. The paradox of speculative design is that designers can avoid taking responsibility for a future by imagining it outside of their own social context. A lack of intergenerational thinking is a typically Western phenomenon, according to philosopher Roman Krznaric. The risk is that futures are imagined that are seen as separate from bodies and communities. In contrast to certain indigenous cultures that focus on long-term responsibility.
If speculative design wants to play a role in imagining better societies, designers should assume responsibility for the current crises and understand their own role in them. By embracing the emancipatory potential of the future and resisting the enclosure of the future by capitalism. If not, the future will only exist as commodities for entertainment or financial speculation. We should imagine futures built on notions of solidarity, justice, and equality that can be used to solve today’s crises as well. They might not look as sexy, and not as flawless as the futures we are used to seeing. But at least they will be futures for the many, not for the few.
… …
How can designers help others? It can be disappointing for designers to learn that their work is merely used to sell products, or ends up as luxury items on the shelves of the rich. A growing movement of designers is strongly motivated to use their skills for the benefit of the public good, instead of serving capitalism, come up with strategies that can employ to avoid getting locked in the cycle of capitalist production. The philanthropist is born from the realization that designers are partly responsible for waste, the extraction of resources, and the climate crisis. The designer as philanthropist donates time and skills to address social issues that benefit the public good, instead of selling more products.
Victor Papanek (1923–1998) more or less pioneered social design. He wanted designers to work with NGOs rather than for the industry. He also suggested that designers shouldn’t wait for clients, but ‘be more sensitive in realising what problems exist.’
Following the Silicon Valley mantra to ‘move fast and break things’, the problem-solving capacities that are attributed to design today are considerable. Poverty, climate change, racial injustice, deforestation. No problem is too big, too controversial, or too political, to be ‘solved’ through design. Hackathons, design challenges, and conferences use design to address social, political, or environ- mental issues. Design has come from a position of being humble, to one of hubris. Confident that design can do what is considered too big for governments and NGOs alone’.
Giving is universal. Whether it is gifting, tribute, charity, or philanthropy. Upon closer inspection there is a fundamental difference between reciprocal giving, and philanthropy or charity. Philanthropists are persons of means, who choose to spend their wealth for the purpose of helping the less fortunate. This may appear like a selfless act of kindness, but it is always a ‘competitive and strategic’ act, writes political scientist Rob Reich. In other words, the wealthy usually don’t just give their money away without expecting anything in return. Philanthropy has historically been used by the rich to increase political power, spread religion, improve a public image, or divert attention from less admirable activities.
In colonial times, European philanthropy in the colonies went hand in hand with violence to ‘civilize’ indigenous peoples, and philanthropy has been shaped by these policies ever since. Christian missions used education, medicine, and hunger relief as an instrument to ‘help’ those who were regarded as ‘backward’ by Europeans. The tremendous wealth that Europeans hoarded by exploiting the colonized was defensible by those in power because of its ‘good intentions’. Before the twentieth century, a way for wealthy merchants and industrialists to gain political power was by donating to the poor, founding schools and hospitals. Excluded from political participation by the aristocratic elite, the new wealthy class used philanthropy to successfully build a political power base. The belief that capitalism is better at social emancipation and the redistribution of wealth, is what historian Mikkel Thorup calls ‘philanthrocapitalism’. Lavish donations to social causes is a way for corporations to be seen as benevolent, without damaging their business model by changing unethical practices. As philanthropy is tax deductible, it is also a financially attractive strategy. The structure of philanthropy undermines community-based solidarity. A small group of ultra-rich individuals can decide how money should be redistributed. It is hardly surprising that they choose forms of spending that best serve their own interests.
Designers that choose to work for the benefit of social causes, isn’t a recent phenomenon. Especially design work in the non-professional sphere is often done for the benefit of the community. People who make their own clothes, tools, and build their own houses is how design started in the first place. The fact that the beginning of social design is usually placed in the 1970s with the work of Victor Papanek, is because he wrote about it, practiced it, and taught it in a professional context. In his book Design for the Real World, Papanek emphasized that design ‘operates mainly as a marketing tool of big business’, while 75 percent of the world population at the time lived in abject poverty. He suggested that if every designer could allocate one-tenth of the working time: ‘...designing for many instead of designing for money’, that would add up to an enormous effort to help the developing world. The industrial designers did not appreciate his critique, and he was kicked out of industrial design trade organisations. He continued working with his students on humanitarian projects for non-profits. From Papanek’s call to action, a series of terms have emerged with a philanthropic attitude towards design, such as design for development, social design, and design thinking. Especially social design has flourished since the 1990s, with books, conferences, and academic programmes. Its popularity proves that many designers do not adhere to the modernist interpretation of the designer who should stay out of politics. Accumulating crises of climate change, racism, gender issues, fascist politics, and a massive rise in inequality demands designers to actively scrutinize their own responsibilities within these crises.
But there is another, more opportunistic reason at play where the good intentions of the designer collide with the economic logic of the design industry. If social designers seek to ‘improve’ areas that are poor or struggling, how does that rhyme with social design programmes for which students pay vast sums per year? This shows the gap between those who design, and those who are ‘to be designed’. This highly unequal relationship becomes apparent in that many prominent social designers are from more affluent backgrounds. The consequence is that designers ‘tend to focus on communities with the following criteria: run down, poor, and the furthest away from their own personal experience.’ Designer and researcher Danah Abdullah calls this problematic relation ‘design imperialism’. The role of the designer as a philanthropist is a profound ambiguous one. Certainly, it provides ways for designers to get involved in work that benefits a larger public. The fact that so many designers are willing to donate time and resources for a public cause is admirable. On the other hand, overconfidence in design’s abilities, and unchecked privilege on the part of the designer can lead to an unequal power dynamic.
Social design is no longer something practiced by just a few rebellious designers, it has become big business. Design thinking is a subdiscipline of design, mostly found in business and management contexts. It is perhaps at once the most successful and the most hated form of design, as the popularity of Natasha Jen’s article ‘Why Design Thinking is Bullshit’ illustrates. Coining the term design thinking is credited to the multinational IDEO, a design consultancy company in Silicon Valley. According to CEO Tim Brown, ‘Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.’ In the world of Design Thinking, all aspects of society are privatized and ‘solved’ by design consultants. This is the design version of what technology writer Evgeny Morozov calls ‘solutionism’: ‘The idea that given the right code, algorithms and robots, technology can solve all of mankind’s problems, effectively making life “frictionless” and trouble-free.’ The danger of solutionism is that we trust private companies in the hope that they can solve complex issue that are social, political, and collective in nature, such as poverty, housing, or health care.
Its practitioners often call design thinking ‘human centred’, and emphasize its ability for social innovation, while in fact applying a ‘dumbed-down version’ to the world of business, of what designers always have been doing. Upon closer inspection, Design Thinking is a different form of management and business administration, that further entrenches design ideas within capitalist enterprise. Design should be subjected to critique, whether its intentions are honourable or not. With the history of Western philanthropy in mind, doing good cannot be separated from the political and economic context that makes it possible in the first place.
Social design and design for good have thus far proven to be mostly unable to escape domination by capitalist and neo-colonial power structures. The underlying problem is that designers sometimes see their work as being separate from their personal circumstances and privilege. It doesn’t mean that individual designers cannot make a small but important contribution in the form of a poster or in support of a cause, as long as designers acknowledge their privilege, and do not confuse ‘designing for’ with participatory forms of design or solving social issues using design. If designers choose to work with a community, being or becoming part of that community is necessary to engage with reciprocal forms of aid. A useful concept how to be part of a community without domination is mutual aid. According to the Oxford Dictionary, mutual aid is support or assistance given and reciprocated, especially as a social or political mechanism. This basically means ‘we help each other’, rather than ‘I help you’. Mutual aid is an ancient idea, it is how societies have helped each other to survive for thousands of years. Using it as a political strategy was popularised by anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in 1902, and is more relevant than ever. Dean Spade explains in ‘Solidarity Not Charity’ that charity and philanthropy are never free, and often come with disciplinary and stigmatizing conditions. Mutual aid groups are horizontally organized aid collectives, often based on consensus-based decision-making.
If designers, or any person for that matter, want to use their skills for the benefit of public good, they should be encouraged to do so. But not in the way that a complex issue somewhere in the world, can be randomly selected and ‘solved’ with a new design, an object, a video, or a workshop. Any socially engaged form of design has to be grounded in a designer’s own personal environment and social circumstances. To effectively and ethically help others, only locally informed and reciprocal forms of aid can truly avoid power domination. When offering to help others, it is always better to start with the people you know before getting involved in faraway situations, or remote areas, in situations that are nearly impossible to understand from a distance. Designers can become involved in mutual aid organizations, or think about how design can help mutual aid projects to be effective. Freelance designers who have no access to pensions or disability insurance have formed groups to build up collective funds to help those in case a critical health situation occurs. Mutual aid offers a practical framework to redirect ‘design for good’ and ‘social design’ projects in more ethical and reciprocal ways
… …
There have been ways in which designers have attempted to resist the grip of capitalism in recent decades. By taking on roles as hackers, futurists, and philanthropists, the idea was to escape from being a cog in the machine of capitalist production. These roles may have appeared to have offered a way out, but turned out to be just as easily appropriated by the forces of capitalism. It has become clear throughout this book how, historically, capitalism has been able to enclose different forms of resistance by designers. Each era saw a different generation, using tactics such as writing manifests, designing anti-capitalist campaigns, and political organising.
The Oxford Dictionary calls activism ‘the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change’. That leads to the question which political and social change is intended? Activism often implies social or progressive ideals, but capitalists and fascists also want political and social change, although in an entirely different direction. What constitutes ‘change’? Is it enough to design a poster and posting it on social media? How do we know what amount of ‘change’ is enough for activism?
The designer as an activist is not easily defined, and can be misinterpreted. That is why design theorists have put forward terms and definitions to solve this paradox. Design theorist Ann Thorpe introduces four criteria for design activism: framing/revealing/ challenging an issue, making a claim for change on that issue, working on behalf of a neglected, excluded, or disadvantaged group, and disrupting routine practices or systems of authority outside traditional channels of change. When design activism is loosely defined, it may only produce a less harmful version of design.
The ways in which graphic designers respond to capitalism show a recurring pattern: time and resources are donated for a social cause. Designers do this by donating a small amount of their time and resources to non-profits, social causes, or activist purposes, in trying to do their part in changing the world. The logic is, that a donation of time and resources is seen as a ‘solution’ for social causes, while the power structures stay in place. but this does not address the underlying reasons. Designers who spend a few hours a week making posters for social causes, do not resist the underlying power structure (capitalism), especially when the rest of their week is spent working for corporations. Activism for social change is reduced to a task that is scheduled in for a few hours a week. Undoubtedly, these are generous and admirable gestures, but that’s what they are: gestures. They give the appearance of benevolence while keeping the status quo firmly in place. What we have learned about capitalism and graphic design, is that this relationship doesn’t limit itself to a critique of consumerism or advertising. Critiquing capitalism involves both work and non-work. This doesn’t mean work and life are interchangeable (as capitalism would prefer), but that working ethically and living ethically go hand in hand. Any serious attempt to see design as ethical must also look at how designers work, how they treat/ pay their co-workers and interns, how they function in the community, and scrutinise their personal privilege and positions of power.
Graphic design is a creative process. Designers continuously create new ideas, objects, spaces, and forms of knowledge that are shared with the world. Some of these designs are made outside of capitalism (without profit motive) and can be accessed and used by everyone, in which case they could be part of a commons. However, capitalism needs to grow, and in order to do so it will try to enclose these ideas and spaces by finding ways to make a profit of them. Capitalism’s logic has been, and still is, to find the last remaining spaces of equal exchange and open access, and privatize those spaces for profit. The paradoxical question then becomes: how can you practice design outside of capitalism, when capitalism itself will do everything to try to appropriate anti-capitalist ideas or practices for its benefit? Commoning, which is the process of creating and defending commons, has proven to be a useful strategy for designers to avoid their work being appropriated by capitalism.
… …