hi! this page and this manifesto are a work in progress, but here's the first part of it while ya wait...
boooring! take me home!
DESIGN, DECOMMODIFIED
The role of the contemporary designer is not exclusively visual; designers are arbiters of process. As David Stairs described in 1997, we are no longer just form makers-- we are the interface between lived environment and the internal human experience, the engine driving the cycles of nature and culture. We translate human instinct and psychology into the built environment, and we construct new realities within technology and culture. Sitting at the bleeding edge of popular culture, our roles as artists and media curators change that culture in turn. By default, the designer is assumed to be a corporate servant. The flexibility and commodifiability of the discipline makes it arguably better-suited to capitalist applications than the “fine arts.” But designers are more than commodities for the corporate grid -- we have the power to transcend it. Design sits at the intersection between art and science, pragmatic and utopian, and the internal and external boundaries of the human ego. What happens when we use this leverage to spur collective action?
WHAT IS DESIGN?
Before i discuss the power of design, i need to define what “design” means. This manifesto will define design as “the intentional unification of form and function.” If a project or movement does not possess both intentional form and a purpose, it cannot be considered ‘designed’. This definition encompasses every field of design: product, graphic, industrial, architectural, urban. It extends to engineering, science, and the humanities. The power of design is not concentrated in any one discipline; rather, it is a philosophy of intention. It can be repurposed for any end, good or evil – and therein lies the conundrum of the modern designer.
Design is not inherently moral or immoral; it is a tool for moral or immoral agendas. Unfortunately, the contemporary understanding of design carries with it a profit-driven subtext. Caught in the breakneck acceleration of late-stage capitalism, designers are assumed to be the pistons driving the machine. We invent systems of products and services that deplete natural resources, only to invent strategies like greenwashing that ease consumers’ moral concerns about consumption. We are the engines behind the “culture industry,” or the capitalist ambition to turn rebellion and its culture into a marketable commodity. We have assimilated every countercultural movement from underground music to queer activism into the slop trough of marketable aesthetics, which both stops revolution in its tracks and feeds the endless mill of content keeping industry afloat. As Adorno writes in The Culture Industry Reconsidered, “What parades as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance over culture.” Though the trend cycle boasts constant change, its purpose remains the same: marketing rebellion for the sake of profit. Adorno continues, “To the detriment of both, (the culture industry) forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total.” Art subordinated to purpose, and rebellion subordinated to civility – is this not a description of the role of the designer within the corporate structure? The capitalist designer must always make form a slave to function, must turn culture into a commodity. And yet, none of these objectives are essential to design as we have defined it. In the “intentional unification of form and function,” the “form” need not be art and culture, and the “function” need not be profit and social control. The principles of design can be a tool for structures of domination – or they can be used to dismantle these structures entirely and construct community-focused alternatives in their wake.