Design for Resilience

Solving the problems that we created for ourselves

The dramatic irony facing the design profession is coming to a climax with the realization that we have painted ourselves into a corner.

By making our living on being the spokespeople for the leaders of corporate capitalism, we have come to fill the role that is analogous to that of the priests of ancient empires. Priests held the knowledge of the mysteries of cryptic symbol systems and the legacies of meaning hidden in images, symbols and written language. The interpretation of these sacred texts were limited to the literati, a select few who had the time and the resources to expend on learning to read and write and to glean from the wisdom of the ancient sages.

The democratization of literacy, technology, currency and agency have opened the doors to opportunities that could never have existed without the accomplishments of those who came before, and we find ourselves in new, uncharted territory. Yet, we have received an inheritance that threatens our survival. We are discovering that the institutions of education, government, law, business, industry, media, and military are based on centuries-old assumptions and biases that do not lead to human flourishing, but rather an increasing inequality that supports extremes of excess on one hand and oppression on the other. One universal symptom of the trajectory of our global activity as humans has been our tendency to feel less human. By that, I mean that the mental health struggles that we face are pervasive across the spectrum of human experience.

The world is a very different place than the one where, as a junior high school student, I discovered that there was a path to make money as an artist, in contrast to the stereotypical path of the “starving artist.” Almost 40 years ago, I learned about a profession known as a “Commercial Artist,” and I dedicated myself to learning everything I could. Our high school provided access to equipment for silk screen printing, photo typesetting, a process camera, a photography dark room, a waxer for mechanical paste up, a letterpress printing press, an offset printing press, and the equipment for exposing and developing metal offset printing plates. Still, as far as I was aware, I was the only person in the high school I attended who graduated with the intention to become a “Graphic Designer.”

Now, as children are being taught human-centred design in school, and as UX and UI design have come to be a highly desirable avenue of pursuit for those who would like to be a part of the technological revolution, those of us who have dedicated our lives to the craft of design are left wondering if we are special anymore.

The Incredibles is a lesson about what makes us special as human beings. The desire to be special can go to such extremes that we can lose our humanity in the process. As we lament our own imposter syndrome, it is interesting to contrast our own foibles with the extremes demonstrated by the villain of the story, Syndrome. In fact, each of the characters is coming to terms with their own experience of agency in the world, or lack of it.

We credit the work of designers such as Dieter Rams as the influence for the ubiquitous minimalist designs of silicon, aluminum and glass that we use every day in our work and communications.

The modern century collapsed along with its modernist ideals and the metanarrative of an artistic and technological utopia with the fall of the World Trade Center. The building embodied a vision of the unity of democracy, technology, capitalism, and globalism that would

That faith has been in a process of deconstruction ever since, and the postmodern age has yet to determine what, if anything, we should build in its place. The building itself has been replaced, but the core tenets of the faith are in question, and the current political crisis of leadership merely signals the weak foundations of a crumbling nationalist political empire that is quickly being replaced by a global, corporate capitalism, far beyond the constraints of democratic appeals. These hierarchies, representing the largest technology corporations in the world, have assumed dominance over the networks through economic supremacy. As designers, we must take responsibility for the idols we have created in service of big data, key performance indicators, targeted marketing campaigns, and the attention economy. We have learned the language of business, marketing and data science, but have lost our humanity in a Faustian bargain, choosing to focus on present gain without considering the long term consequences. We face a dilemma if we bite the hand that feeds us.

Can we design our way out of this? Or is design the problem?

Something interesting is happening in religious and spiritual circles that is an interesting analogy of the problems that people are facing in business and politics. Postmodernism is a movement away from the metanarratives of modernism. The term itself is a negation of the previous movement without suggesting an alternative.

The “nones” describe their nomadic search for hope and signs of life as a form of deconstruction. Their teachers describe a process of three phases: construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. They realize that they have been handed an orthodoxy by the people in the religious communities from which they came that does not actually square with reality. While their view of the world has been constructed through their relationships with these people in their community, they have come to question the very foundations of their beliefs. The are setting out on a journey through the desert by deconstructing inherited dogmas and orthodoxies, and by investigating the latest scholarship and experiments. Then, leaving behind the traditional communities, they are finding relationships, communities, and ways of living that renew their sense of humanity, connection, and belonging. They are reconstructing their personal life, their relationships, and entire communities by reconnecting with people and with the natural world.

In a sense, the design community is discovering their own complicity in propping up corporate and capitalistic hierarchies that are increasing inequities, maintaining oppressive workplaces, and limiting opportunities for learning, collaboration, autonomy, and creativity. They may be personally experiencing the opposite, but the reality for those who are not part of the commercial, technological and creative classes is that they are finding themselves displaced by technologies that provide no alternatives for finding work that can meet basic human needs, let alone work that is meaningful and rewarding.

How, then, shall we live, given our growing awareness of the situation in which we find ourselves? We are complicit in a hierarchy that we ourselves have created. To question democracy, capitalism, technology, and globalism is to question the orthodoxies that we have been handed, the very foundations on which design, as a profession, have been established, and that we have been tasked to preserve and herald. The role of the priest is to serve the monarch, maintaining the royal records and histories and disseminating information to the people as deemed appropriate by the monarch and the royal advisors. If we are found to have questions regarding the foundations of the kingdom or empire, we shall lose our role and status, and possibly our heads. We face an existential question, to resist and face the consequences of what we ourselves have wrought, along with the implications of refusing to no longer be complicit in the workings of the machine, or to passively accept our lot in life and carry on.

The thought, then, is to extend the realm of design from questions of “how” to the deeper questions of “what” and “why.”

For that purpose, we gather as artists, creatives and innovators to build our future on the foundation of senses (perception), minds (cognition), hearts (emotion) and bodies (action) that have been reoriented to the truth about life in our present reality. We are no longer designing the physical artifact, but we are designing the human experience. This is something that cannot be left to governments and corporations, the most inhuman of human inventions. This is a project for humanity as a whole as we envision life as part of an interconnected and interdependent ecosystem on this earth.

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