Yesterday I had two unusual conversations with fellow designers.
In each conversation, I started from fire-snorting righteous rage. But in each conversation my anger failed me. It disintegrated as I spoke, and I felt it slip away. And though I felt relief losing the rage, I also missed it.
In the first conversation, I was doing that managerial design leadership legitimacy critique I’ve been developing. But even as I sermonized I felt compelled to temper what I was saying with acknowledgement of the difficulty of any leader’s position. Every leader has a duty to those who depend on them and to those who entrust them with a leadership role. These duties give them a right to make judgment calls regarding the welfare of their organizations. The ideals of design are and should be one consideration weighed in these judgments, but this is not the only one, and it is far from certain that design ideals ought to predominate over other values.
Design ideals, like all other ideals, can become extreme and excessive, succumb to destructive fanaticism, and an ideal is never more vulnerable than when it fancies itself immune to excess or so essentially good that it is exempt from limit and restraint.
I believe the version of myself who acknowledges this is morally superior to the design fanatic who insists otherwise. This does not mean I agree with the calls that managerialist design leaders make. I strenuously disagree. But my disagreements are better when I disagree with strict agonistic discipline.
I do believe design — design as I practice it, know it and love it — is not only in tension with managerialism but incompatible with managerialism, in practice and understanding. I believe design’s greatest value is in providing a different and more humane vision of social organization. To put it in the familiar Kuhnian framing, it is a rival organizational paradigm that is the stuff of crisis and revolution.
But what kind of revolution? In his essay “A Cautious Prometheus” Bruno Latour suggests that a design revolution should start with revolutionizing revolutions. He noted five characteristics of design:
- Design is humble: It avoids hubris, and works at enhancement rather than foundational acts of creation.
- Design attends to details: It prioritizes skill, craft and careful consideration of details, rejecting recklessly radical grand-scale action.
- Design is interpretive: It involves meanings, symbolism and semiotics, transforming objects into “things” meant for interpretation.
- Design is re-formative: It is inherently a process of redesign, working with existing materials and contexts rather than starting from scratch.
- Design is ethical: It carries an intrinsic moral dimension, requiring judgments about good and bad design and engaging with issues of responsibility and collaboration, within a specific ethos.
So far, I’ve mentioned two thinkers I love, and alluded to a third, Chantal Mouffe, when I mentioned agonism. What is agonism?
Conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict does not take the form of an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an ‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries).
Modern science as much as any domain, and arguably more than any other, is strictly agonistic. It was born with liberal democracy (for a gorgeously involved account of how and why, I recommend Leviathan and the Air-Pump).
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, this time with a recommitment to strictly practice it: If I could impart one idea to humankind it would be agonism. It is the cure for what ails us and threatens our existence as a species.
And agonism is a precondition of design creativity — again, design as I practice it, know it and love it.
Which brings me to my second conversation. Here I was making my usual distinctions between art and engineering — and now managerialism. My friend was asking me extremely simple and relevant questions about all the various uses of the word design, and what was common to them. It began to feel like a Socratic interrogation.
I gave many of my usual criteria.
Design crafts things intended for other people.
“Is cooking a kind of design?” Well, no. Design specifies form, function and material, but does not produce the final materialized, functional form. Cooking is a handicraft.
“What about writing a recipe?” Yes. Recipes are designs, informed by the handicraft of cooking. The cooking is analogous to prototyping.
“What about the design engineers do? For example, microchips are designed.” Yes, but in a different sense that specifies form, function and material for something that will eventually be produced. And admittedly, it is produced for other people. But it is specified without reference to how others will experience the thing…
“So art is design?” Art is intended for the artist, made to the artist’s satisfaction. Great art speaks to whatever is universal (or at least greater) in the artist. It reveals what is most intimately shared between the artist and those who respond to the work.
“But Dieter Rams was answering to his own judgment alone.” I consider him, and many other famous designers, to be more artist than designer.
Etcetera, etcetera.
And as we talked, and as I tap-danced, hair-split, ramified and qualified and improvised, I noticed that my intensity was calming. The intensity was not diminishing, but it was a less jagged, jangly, aggressive kind of intensity.
Maybe the vision of design that has gripped me is just one species of design. I care about it a lot, but maybe a sprinkle of Rortian irony will improve its flavor. And maybe design has become a practical vehicle for something else I care about. And maybe I can serve what I care about better if I stop running around brandishing my philosopher’s stone and smashing things with it. There’s enough brandishing and smashing and bellowing and threatening out there right now. Since quoting heroes seems to be my lot today, I’ll channel Marty Neumeier and suggest that maybe some zagging would be a nice contrast.
For whatever reason, my anger has diminished over the last month. Even when I write aggressive words, they come from a less vitriolic place. Susan is also undergoing some profound changes in a peaceful direction. We are both no longer under the direct control of managerialist administrators, both of whom were uncannily similar in certain respects. I cannot promise this mood will stick, especially once projects are underway. I am never going to deny or repress what I experience. I find that kind of emotional self-manipulation to be both counterproductive and non-credible. But I do prefer this to the mood of the last several years.