TL;DR — Designers are being gaslighted by their own “design leadership” and are being made by these leaders to labor in ways contrary to design’s own ways and ideals — and this is why designers feel that the meaning of their work has become worse than meaningless.
Design is, at best, a poorly understood discipline, but more often a systemically misunderstood one.
Design has its own “designerly” ways of thinking, doing and valuing, which represent a completely different and incommensurable social paradigm from that of managerialism. Design knows this; managerialism cannot.
Managerialism, by its very nature, is unable to conceive anything beyond itself. It naively believes its own given truth is absolute. Viewed philosophically, it is locked inside a quite stunted ontology that it believes is reality itself, an epistemology it understands as its sole access to true truth, an ethic it mistakes for morality, and so on. But managerialism famously does not give two shits about philosophy, because it is about action, not speculative dreaming. It cares about what it cares about, and what it cares about is resources it can leverage and utilize to achieve its own quantifiable outcomes.
Design, on the other hand, cares about a plurality of ways of approaching, understanding and shaping the world — what could be called enworldments. This should include managerial worldviews, but it should not include managerialism, the -ism suffix signifying ideological closure that accepts nothing above or even beside itself.
As design is very much and emphatically not managerialist, managerialism does what it does, and reduces design to what managerialism takes it to be. It subjects design to a smug, objectifying, degrading condescension analogous to — and perhaps more than analogous to — that smug, objectifying, degrading and unwarranted condescension to which testosterone-drunk adolescent boys at their worst subject their female counterparts. And similarly — and perhaps identically — when protests are made by these misunderstood, objectified, degraded counterparts, and, inevitably, these protests make little sense to the objectifying, degrading, degraded objectivist minds of businessboys, the protests are jocularly dismissed as nonsense rather than as failures to understand.
Note another -ist. Degraded objectivist minds are an active ingredient of managerialism. To a managerialist, “objective” is a synonym for “absolute.” Reality itself is objective. Subjectivity is only a distorting or blurring or occluding interference to objective access to reality. Managerialism is incapable of apperceiving its own subjective imposition of this objectivism, which is its essential limit. This is a limitation design does not share, but managerialism is oblivious to this truth because managerialism is oblivious to anything it cannot objectively comprehend in its own objective mode of cognition.
Anyone familiar with metacognitive incompetence (popularly known as Dunning-Kruger) will recognize my accusation: I am diagnosing managerialism with ontological metacognitive incompetence. And essential to its metacognitive incompetence is a stubborn refusal to think beyond the strict limitations that are the very source of its malady. It won’t think about how it thinks because this is idle philosophizing and a waste of time. If it did, however, condescend to philosophize, that moment of meta-thinking would destroy its delusions of privileged access to objective reality, starting with the painful insight that objective reality is a naive and manifestly foolish subjective hallucination. Subjectivity objectifies, and reality itself is something that largely escapes objectivity’s comprehending grasp. Designers understand and respond to this reality in ways managerialists cannot.
To say it again, design is a radically pluralist, poly-centered and polycentric social paradigm incommensurable with the managerialist paradigm. Design can and should understand and collaborate with managers, engineers and any other pluralist enworldment. That is what we do. But pluralism is also an -ism — albeit a higher order -ism, a meta-ism — and it must insist on pluralism from its fellows, lest it tolerate aggressive intolerance, and allow its metaphorical “bill of rights” to become a metaphorical “suicide pact”.
Managerialism has all the power in the practical world. It controls business, for sure. But it also controls the state. And worse, it controls most alternative visions of governance. Leftists point at managerialist abuses and call it “capitalism”, while remaining pristinely unaware that their own dreams of seizing technocratic control of society are managerialist through and through. If they manage to get their way their system will generate the same life-sucking nihilism. And indeed, every radical leftist success has repeatedly demonstrably generated horrors and nihilistic despair. Leftist revolutionaries only seek to annihilate one form of managerialism with another, because, being managerialist, managerialism is all they can know. The leftist radical’s self-assessment of radicalism is too shallow to register the sameness of their vision and that of their enemy. They lack anything deeper with which to make a comparison of relative depth. For them, too, reality is objective, which is why they can construe the material mechanisms of history, devise a way to deconstruct the current social order and logically reconstruct a system to replace it. But enough about that — back to business. Back to design.
What concerns me at this moment is a question of legitimacy. How did our design leaders gain their “design leadership” status?
How exactly did they rise to prominence within their organizations and win that coveted seat at the executive table? How do they keep that status? Or better: Who gave them the power and at whose pleasure do they keep it?
Were they raised to leadership by fellow designers who felt that they epitomized designerly virtues, pursued designerly goals and helped their fellow designers excel at their craft? …Who, if dissatisfied, will choose another representative?
Or were they fingered for the position by managerialists who thought what they were saying about design made clear, objective sense, who saw how design might be leveraged to achieve their managerialist aims — and who consequently bought what these design leaders were selling? …Who, if dissatisfied, have absolute firing and hiring authority?
Even a cursory glance makes it crystal clear who answers to whom.
Design leaders often claim their primary role in their organization is to translate design and design’s value into business language, as if these were just two vocabularies for expressing the same ideas and for achieving shared goals.
But they are not. They are incommensurable, clashing paradigms.
Consequently, something must be lost in translation.
What is lost is design itself.
Designers, it is time we interrogate those who claim to represent us.
We must ask them what exactly they think that they are representing when they represent design.
Because it is far from clear that they represent what we do.
Do they represent design to nondesigners on behalf of designers?
Or do they misrepresent design to designers, on behalf of the managerialist order who butters their bread?
Again — Designers are being gaslighted by their own “design leadership” and are being made by these leaders to labor in ways contrary to design’s own ways and ideals — and this is why designers feel that the meaning of their work has become worse than meaningless.
I’m not telling designers to take up pitchforks or torches or start assembling Molotov cocktails or anything — but if designers were to stage a mostly peaceful revolt against managerialism, they’d be wise to hold elections among their own kind to decide who leads them to the ramparts, lest the movement be superverted and snuffed by yet more of the same mutiny from above.
This will be compressed and intensified in later iterations.
It is threatening to become a manifesto.