Design is a Necessary Evil (at Best)
I am a designer (said like someone attending a 12-step meeting). I was born to design. It’s in my blood, and will design for the rest of my life.
I’m saying this in a 12-step tone because I am troubled by how the notion of design itself may not be the altruistically neutral idea I’d once imagined. Depending on the goal of a design, a project can be for good or for evil, yet after a lifetime of professional work as a designer, I am no longer convinced that design itself is neutral in the matter.
Design is not just the invention of new things – it is mainly the encapsulation of ideas, and in so doing something is included and something else excluded. In this way design systematically impugns the current status quo — whether in the form of older ideas, or the untouched portions of natural world that might be better off without improvement.
Like the old Pokemon game – design captures otherwise innocuous notions and puts them into battle for the sake of the designer (or his/her employer). The effect may be exactly as intended, yet like those poor pokemon — the ideas themselves — wind up enslaved to purposes for which they may never have been intended, like ‘love’ signed into the service of selling perfume and fancy cars.
Design captures and codifies. It defines and relegates. It says what the world should be like irrespective of whether or not this makes the world a better place. No matter how the world is in reality, or how it could be in the future or once was in the past – design, more than anything else tries to redefine how we see that world.
Yet happenstance does not necessarily require improvement. In fact, the destruction of happenstance replaced by invented environments is far more often no improvement at all. Design is limited to our feeble imagination. Happenstance is virtually infinite — so it is hard to believe that design is always the better pathway ahead in every case.
Design has its designs on the world and as such it can not come to pass without some measure of corruption and malfeasance. Design is a human endeavor, and being a human endeavor design is never entirely altruistic — never.
By three or four orders of magnitude the world is over-populated beyond the natural world’s capacity to support our civilizations without ‘improvements’ and as such design is here to stay as long as the notion of civilization is here to stay. Yet this alone does not intrinsically justify any sort of design because in the end (whenever that may be) design is as much the unmaking the world as it is the creating of something new — and there is no reason to say that any newly made ‘improvement’ can justify what might be irrecoverably lost in the process.
