My frustration with the field of design right now is that its doctrine and practices keep getting “replatformed” on inadequate faiths. It is this frustration that is dyspiring this endless stream of semi-schizophrenic design rants. I am so tired of my field getting ripped out from under me every decade or so, and I am sick of designers helping turn the wheel of this cyclical subversion.
As I’ve said a half-zillion times in myriad ways, a faith is not a magnitude of belief, but a particular configuration of Why and How that does the believing. It is qualitative first — intuiting, caring, seeking, noticing, perceiving, conceiving responding — and only from here is something understood and believed or disbelieved to some degree. Faith is a specific concave form a soul assumes, and that concavity is a capacity for receiving some experiential content and filtering what it cannot accommodate.
When I call something designerly, I indicate a particular faith which is behind design practice or theory or, better, praxis (a virtuous feedback loop of theory-guided practice, practice-informed theory). This faith wants a more palpably meaningful world — a world where we spontaneously experience things as intrinsically meaningful and valuable. There is not a trace of need to figure out the value or to justify it, and explanations dramatically fail to do it justice. We just like, desire, love, je ne sais quois, and respond with equal spontaneity, with minimal or no linguistic intercession.
Design seeks direct intuitive contact with reality and reality’s intrinsic goodness. Design works intuitively for the sake of an intuitable world.
But tragically, it is easy and common for one faith to appropriate the theories and practices developed by another. They take possession of their culture, symbols and style, and much more. They even sometimes claim to be a new and better version of the original that supersedes it! And then they compete for ownership and attempt to displace the originators of what they’ve assumed as their own.
When this happens, the theories and practices and lose their original purpose and meaning and are pressed into service of an alien faith, often against the old faith.
This in fact, is happening to design right now.
Adherents of technicity — that faith behind the maniacal drive to utilize resources to achieve objectives, which always themselves generate more resources utilized to achieve yet more objectives in an endless chain of In Order To’s — want to utilize design to acheive business objectives in order to, in order to, in order to… ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nihilo.
Designer professionals who accept a business-centric, ops-centric replatforming enter this technicity faith loop and, in participation, are gradually reshaped by it. Eventually, they become hard-nosed design consultants, who make a point of agreeing with nondesigners that all resources must serve business and only business. They agree, in the name of design, that design must fall in line. They become what an intensely angry, rude and slightly careericidal designer might call “design kapos”.
Design kapos still mouth humanisms, wear hipster uniforms, produce charming sketches and perform design theater for executive managerial audiences, but beneath the designwashed exterior, they now serve an entirely different Why. And the new Why gradually bends and twists How (“design tools and methods”) until the old Why is not only no longer served, but lost — altogether annihilated. The work feels soulless and empty because what used to make it alive, vital and meaningful has been evacuated and replaced. The discipline of design has been bodysnatched.
Of course, the world of language is ruled by the law of the jungle. Anarchy always favors the strong. So what design is or isn’t is an arbitrary matter of opinion in a world where some opinions are more equal than others. Never forget that in the world of technicity, the golden rule is: “he who has the gold makes the rules.” And he who makes the rules can define whatever they wish however they wish, and do so with increasing aggression.
Managerialism — unopposed, unopposable technicity taken to its natural extreme — wants a constructed totality with no reality beside or beyond it, where people believe what they are told over what they see, hear, smell, taste, touch or otherwise intuit. It wants a world where an alpha technocrat can decree that 1+1=3, and subjects see that and only that. It thrives on intuitive alienation and numbness of soul.
Design kapos sell their designerly souls for business acclaim and social prestige, and so their designless redefinitions of design carry more weight than those who have refused to make such deals. “Who are you to tell an important design personage such as myself what design is and is not. I have been coronated by the head-pats of the executive elite! I am the very embodiment of design.”
But arbitrary redifinitions and constructions aside, 1+1=2, designerliness is a real thing, and the word design still denotes it, even when that meaning is buried under a mass of technik bad faith, TLAs, dirt, filth and permafrost. Designerly design might (once again) go underground, and design kapos might dominate design for a time. But as long as a germ of design lives, there is hope. The soil will thaw, and the design kapos will pretend they were always designerly, and they will even believe their own story, and I suppose that will be okay.