Making sense and meaning¶
This course featured a variety of inputs from practicioners as well as far-ranging conversations about many different topics related to design as an evolving practice and its relationship to social and ecological processes of change. The deliverable for this course is an essay. You can read mine below (1761 words).
Redesigning and dedesigning - the role of design practices in transitions towards less extractive and less hierarchical worlds¶
Faced with climate change - and the many interlocking crises it is entangled in - some designers are redefining their practice as contributing to and facilitating transitions towards less extractive and exploitative ways for humans to live on Earth (see, for example this article by Kevin Slavin). Under the resulting emerging paradigm(s) of design, many practices engaged in by people who would not call themselves designers could also be conceived as such. This raises two somewhat orthogonal but related questions. 1) Does it make sense to redefine design in this way? And 2) What role - if any - can design play in moving towards less actively harmful forms of human life? I will attempt to answer them in order.
There is a difficulty in answering the first question. Usually, we might first give a working definition of the central terms involved in a question and base our arguments on it. This angle of attack is unavailable here, since the question is about the process of defining itself. How can we evaluate whether it makes sense to redefine design if we haven’t agreed on what design is? To escape this situation, let’s zoom out a bit.
How we think and talk about social phenomena not only reflects patterns of human behaviour, it can also itself contribute to their normalisation and continued ubiquity. Deconstructing and redefining a field of human activity can help change the activity itself by changing the self-conception of practitioners, the external view on it, activities that are considered part of it, etc.
Consider the case of accounting. There are efforts to transform the practice of accounting from one that serves extraction to one that may help us transform society, build resilience, and perhaps contribute to a liberated society. Examples of this include the creative use of Resources, Events, Agents (see McCarthy, 1982) accounting in Web3 communities and alternative currencies. An example out of prefigurative politics is the concept of ‘anarchist accounting’, an exploration of what accounting would look like in a radically different and egalitarian world (see Sandstroem 2021).
The reason it ‘makes sense’ to redefine accounting in this manner is that there are recognisable similarities between the historical (and contemporary) practice and the proposed alternative way of engaging in it. Both involve counting, carefully writing down numbers intended to reflect the world in an effort to act upon it in some way. While the goal of the practice, and some of the activities proposed are different from the ‘original’, arguably some core part of accounting (as it exists) is captured and remains part of the proposed, redefined sense of accounting.
The effect such a redefinition can have on social reality is one of the reasons why one may think it worthwhile to redefine ‘design’. However, while it may make sense to redefine accounting as a practice that accounts for environmental impact, it does not make sense to redefine the banana as a bathtub (or banana-eating as bathtub-making). There must be some connection between the new meaning and core features of the previous one (in the context at issue). Failing to do so leads to confusion and is unlikely to convince a significant amount of people.
If there is a fruitful way to redefine design as an activity that contributes to (desired) transitions, the activities that newly fall under the label must be in some way ‘designy’. They must have some understandable connection to practices that already fell under the label in its historical or contemporary sense, and core practices within it should somehow be adapted or transformed in a way that serves a new purpose (as in the example of accounting).
This leaves us with the task of defining design in its ‘original’ sense (the one we might wish to define away from). Design, in this sense, arguably includes at least three definitions: 1) an academic discipline 2) a set of roles one can play (e.g. work as) as part of companies, corporations, and other organisations that make up our current political economy, and 3) an evolving set of practices already understood as being ‘design’, such as product design, UX design, service design, architecture, system design, graphic design, speculative design, etc, etc.
Definitions 1) and 2) partly motivate the project of redefining design. The resources available to design as an academic discipline and as part of business and other activities could be diverted towards liberatory and transformative practices. They are less relevant, however, if we’re searching for a definitional core to be preserved as part of a project of redefinition towards a more liberatory and less extractive understanding of design, at least if we agree that a transition towards significantly less extractive ways of living requires a radical transformation of social reality.
Here is why: it is unlikely that such a transition can be solely - or even primarily - driven by academic and professional practices that are dominant today. If global social systems are transformed so significantly, then design may not consist in academic or professional practices of the kind that we know today. Academic, and especially professional organisations (such as companies) form part of the very structures of power and domination existing today that enable the extractive practices which we are attempting to transcend (for information on the complex interplay between extractive practices and status quo social organisation, see e.g. Moore 2017)
While it is possible that legacy organisations are radically transformed while maintaining their names (e.g. university, ‘corporation’,…), leaving aside the definitions of design which conceptualise it as an academic and professional discipline will allow for a more realistic and open-ended understanding of how design could transform the world by and while transforming itself. So let us use the third definition, which concieves of design an evolving set of ‘designy’ practices and approaches. These could potentially be repurposed and mobilised for a transition towards a less extractive and hierarchical world.
Given this definition, what role can design play in moving towards less harmful ways of living? Two distinctions can help us answer this question.
First, we should differentiate between design practices that are practiced within legacy organisations (e.g. corporations, governmental bodies, traditional NGOs, etc), and those that form part of a collective effort to build alternatives to such ways of organising (e.g. grassroots NGOs, mutual aid networks, some DAOs, alternative currency initiatives, community land trusts, some cooperatives, squats, self organised cultural centers, community gardens, etc).
We can also make a distinction between two poles of design. One is closer to engineering and for example includes the more technical aspects of architecture, systems design, and product design. The other is more about aesthetics, desire, and shaping experience. This includes for example most practices that fall under graphic design, UX design, the design aspects of marketing, and the more aesthetic and sensory aspects of product design.
This rough typology leaves us with two times two, so four ways design could (and to some extent arguably does) contribute towards a social and ecological transition.
The first set concerns designing within legacy organisations.
On the more technical side of things, concerning how various elements are put together to form an artefact or system, there arguably isn’t that much to be gained. The goals for which designers are optimising for here are usually pretty clear (for example, given a certain product, make it cheaper and sturdier, but also modular). Design is to a large extent about making decisions, so within the relatively narrow space left, designers may have some agency. For instance, a more sustainable material may be chosen, or a system made more accessible to people that diverge from some norm. But overall, this does not seem like the place where radical change can be implemented consciously.
On the more aesthetic side of things, which includes shaping and working with desires of potential users, we are in a similar situation. Again, designers have some agency here. For instance, they may choose not to use an enticing aesthetic that reproduces harmful patterns (like sexism)¸or avoid contributing to an overly homogenising cultural patterns by working in a way which is sensitive and interested in local idiosyncracies and sensibiliities. But, again, the potential here seems relatively limited.
This leaves us within a second - perhaps more promising - set of ways design could contribute towards less harmful and more regenerative ways of living. Outside of legacy organisations, design certainly has a role to play in building alternatives.
On the more technical side, it can help redesign patterns of human life, either by bringing together existing technologies in new ways or by innovating on and remixing older techniques, thereby building alternative systems that serve regenerative purposes. Think, for example, of designers making an open source system for water purification, small-scale farming, or energy production using off the shelf parts combined with parts that can be manufactured in a distributed manner (e.g. with 3D printers, CNC mills or laser cutters). Given how central (for example) energy production, food systems, and water scarcity are in global political and economic dynamics, redesigning them - e.g. making appropriate and decentralised deployments of technology easier by designing and open sourcing alternative patterns - could end up having profound emergent effects on social and ecological reality.
The more aesthetic side of design (which some may consider design proper) can be mobilised to support the aforementioned more technical redesigning efforts, for example by making artefacts aesthetically appealling, alternative systems desirable, and decentralising efforts beautiful. It may also play a broader social role in redesigning cultural patterns This side of design also bears significant potential worth exploring by those who seek regenerative change.
In addition to the practices of redesigning just mentioned, design practiced outside of legacy organisations can also contribute in significant ways to practices of contestation that we may collect under the umbrella term ‘dedesigning’. This includes speculative and critical design, using graphic design in political projects that pursue liberatory purposes, as well as reverse engineering, remixing, deconstructing, subverting, and undermining existing systems and artefacts that stand in the way of regenerative change.
Overall, it makes sense to carefully redefine design more broadly in an effort to leverage the liberatory potential of design practices, especially when mobilised as part of collective efforts to build alternative systems to legacy organisations. Fleshing out the details of such a liberatory design practice could be an interesting continuation of the approach sketched in this text. Design thinking, the cognitive patterns associated with certain design practices - which we left aside in this essay - could be examined as part of such continued research. That would make sense, I think.