A healthy organization is not primarily fueled by money. The same is true of a healthy economy. To the degree an economy runs exclusively on money, it is an unhappy, unwholesome economy.
This is not meant to suggest that money is not important. Money helps provide artificial motivation when organic and intrinsic motivations are insufficient to make action happen. Organic and intrinsic motivations include things like inspiration, curiosity, enjoyment of skillful action, camaraderie, reciprocity in mutual generosity, desire to help, sense of duty, habit, momentum, friendly competition, joy of progress, satisfaction of reaching goals, etc. It is the motivations of play.
Think of money like promises in a marriage. Promises are absolutely necessary to keep a marriage alive, but if a marriage is nothing but forcing oneself to fulfill promises — to do things one would very much prefer not to do — after a point, that marriage is in trouble.
But when most or all of the motivation in an organization comes from money, the organization can be said to run on artificial motivation. Too much of this, and an organization will begin to feel artificial, in the pejorative sense of “unnatural”. That icky, lifeless, meaningless, unlovable feeling we call “corporate” is the result of an organization relying on money to generate service. A corporation can hire professional meaning-makers — “creatives” — to apply a veneer of meaning, play or style to the outer surface of such an organization, but such attempts are skin deep and fool nobody.
A dollars-for-drudgery organization will feel dry, boring and neutral at best. At worst it will feel false, soulless, coercive, manipulative and threatening to anyone with an intact spirit.
The essential purpose of service design is to understand how to organize people with needs to give specific kinds of value and needs to receive specific kinds of value so that they can exchange value with one another in mutually beneficial ways. This kind of organization allows organizations to reduce their dependence on motivation by money to keep things running. Service design aspires to social orders animated by rich, dense, diverse value exchanges of function, meaning and belonging, substantiated by carefully formed material and nonmaterial artifacts.
The goal is to create living organizations that thrive through natural, organic intrinsic motivations, as opposed so socially engineered mechanisms that run on money and which are controlled by afar through monitoring and driven by greed for rewards and fear of punishments.
In this money-driven economy it is easy to use designers to find new ingenious ways to improve the social engineering of institutions. The modern designer’s skillset can certainly be harnessed to creating management systems of control and monitoring. But designers rarely enter the field of design to amass money, otherwise they would pursue something more lucrative, like management or engineering. And the value exchange in such an application of their skill will not work out for a designer who is a designer from the heart.
