He’s back.

But most people who aren’t baby-brained or blue-pilled saw it coming in the distance.

The Democrats resisted running with, frankly, any vision, causing Kamala Harris to receive 11 million fewer votes last week than Joe Biden did in 2020. With 95% of votes counted, Trump received nearly the same amount as four years ago. So, rather than wholly embracing fascism, the reality is that the American people abstained from liberalism.

The inexplicable thing here is that the Harris campaign started with some semblance of a vision—“brat summer,” “weird,” “we’re not going back”—before playing back the almost completely disintegrated loops titled “Bipartisanism” and “Republicans are our friends, actually.”

Democrats dared the American people to a game of chicken and lost. We (as people, as designers) are playing a similar game: cultural change or ecological collapse. Although all the technology necessary for a sustainable transition exists, we lack the will to turn sustainability from a social anomaly into a social norm. We lack vision. And with the planet, we don’t have the choice to abstain or look away.

Unlikely bedfellows

Think of a popular social movement. Any of them. 1960’s Civil Rights, The French Revolution, The Arab Spring. What did these have in common?

They constructed new social narratives, building them on a foundation of what could be instead of simply rejecting what was. They drew a map so people knew where the movement would take them.

While the climate movement might have been invested in social narratives at one point, the movement in its current state focuses on technical solutions like Net Zero, carbon credits, direct air capture, and solar geoengineering. It doesn’t show people another way to live or visualize what the future could be like. Most people don’t know what these terms mean. Through their vagueness, they depict an uninspiring world that’s essentially the same as the current one: unequal, individualized, and exhausting, but with high-tech ways to create energy and avoid emissions. Technofascism isn’t exactly enticing.

For all the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and generally terrible beliefs that exist on the far right, they do know how to communicate. Their focus on narrative and in/out-groups shows a lot more returns than the minutia and means-testing that the left, or the sustainability movement, for that matter, relies on.

How can we—progressives, designers, climate activists, creative people—co-opt right-wing communication strategies, not to return to a so-called golden era but to improve the world and make the climate movement a social norm?

Teaching an old dog old tricks

One way is to use a favorite tactic of the far right: solidarity.

Solidarity creates an “Us versus Them,” a memorable mental image that clearly divides good and evil. The right tends to use this distinction to frame Mexicans as rapists, Arabs as terrorists, and trans people as predators. But there are two sides to solidarity.

The typical reactionary solidarity employed by the right reinforces the status quo, keeping things the same as they always were, which often means entrenching control and division and increasing pain, even for those who employ it:

Racism, while it elevates whiteness, is weaponized to erode the welfare and wages that would enable white people to lead healthier, less precarious lives. Misogyny hurts men economically and emotionally, as gendered pay gaps suppress overall wages and through the trap of destructive and often violent standards of masculinity. Transphobia impacts everyone by imposing state-sponsored gender norms and curtailing freedom and self-expression. Ableism, by devaluing and dehumanizing the disabled, dissuades people from demanding the social services and public assistance they need as they cope with illness or aging. Solidarity, 2023; xxxiv

Rather than facilitating regressive change, transformative solidarity shows us a clear path toward progressive change. It tells a story of a better future and helps us visualize the kind of change we can bring by valuing wholeness instead of sameness:

Transformative solidarity must conjure possibility, as much as address an injustice. By constructing an Us to fight a specific and oppressive Them, we commit ourselves to a future where that wrong is righted—a positive vision to accompany the negation. This forward-looking, utopian aspect is key; without it, solidarity is reactionary, reinforces the status quo, or loses steam. This future-oriented dimension works against the limits of the current moment, creating new collective identities—enslaved, peasant, woman, worker, queer, disabled, debtor—and imagining the forms of power these groups can wield. Solidarity, 2023; 73

This idea of transformative solidarity is nothing new. It has been used throughout the past 600 years to create broad alliances: in 1400s post-feudal Europe before capitalism took hold, with late-1800s French Solidarists and pan-Africanists, and in the 20th century with socialist revolutions across South America and Africa (many of which were eventually crushed by US-backed coups, but that’s for another newsletter).

Despite this long history, we’ve lost touch with solidarity, often seeing it as cliché, corny, or naive, especially since the 1980s. Thatcher’s conception—and Reagan’s promotion of the idea—that “There is no alternative” to the market has completely dominated the past 40 years. This idea introduced neoliberalism to the mainstream and repositioned individualism as the ultimate freedom. But by now, it should be clear that individualism that exists without collectivism implies freedom for some, not freedom for all.

Solidarity in motion

Humanity depends on nature, just like individual humans depend on each other; Elon and Don’s fortunes didn’t appear from thin air, nor did the vast amount of coal, oil, timber, water, wildlife, and vegetables we consume daily. We need to fundamentally change our mindset from seeing the rest of nature less as Them and more as Us. The real Them are those humans who continue to drive us at full speed toward the precipice of planetary boundaries; it is they that we need to have solidarity against on behalf of the rest of nature.

If we give it time, the climate movement will grow in the gap between Us and Them, but we need to fill this gap with collective IRL actions. Individualized online actions are as easy to ignore as they are to take; organizing in-person is harder but shows dedication and builds identity. Designers need to consider what that means inside and outside the creative industry.

One starting point is the labor movement classics: coordinated and thoughtful boycotts, worker-owned coops, and industry-wide unions. Another is finding a commons to build. Solidarity is more likely to be built with these unsexy theories and actions than the commercial output the design industry mistakes as ‘culture’; the aesthetic that grows from those actions is the true culture. If organized people create power, and money often stands in for people, organized people who speak with their wallets are doubly effective.

When various groups join in solidarity, polarization between Us and Them can become a tool for improvement instead of destruction. This doesn't happen automatically because people are in the same situation but because they're led to recognize themselves in others and question the status quo; it has to be cultivated and consciously made. It has to become a lifestyle, not a tagline.

Here are some ways to get started:

Political Organizations

Progressive International (Global)
Democracy Next (Global)

Worker Organizations

Zebras Unite Startup Cooperative (Global)
Union of Designers & Cultural Workers (UK)
Pelican House (UK)
Guide to striking for climate and the law (UK)
Platform Cooperativism Consortium (US)
Workers Strike Back (US)
La Xarxa d’Economia Solidària (CAT)

Creative Organizations

Climate for Creatives Collective (Global)
Index (US)
Post-Office (EU)
re:arc institute (EU)

Books

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea
A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy
Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change
Workers Can Win: A Guide to Organising at Work
Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human
Design after Capitalism: Transforming Design Today for an Equitable Tomorrow
Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead

Podcasts

Working Class History
Upstream
Scene On Radio

When we think of modernism, we think of Bauhaus. By now, its rational, minimal style seems like an almost intrinsic part of design, with major elements acting as the basic visual template for Western design more than 100 years after its founding.

But the European Bauhaus—the original version of its younger American counterpart—was about more than aesthetics. A focus on social issues and ‘intangible spacial qualities’ differentiated it from the school that traveled to the US. That second iteration, whose founders fled to various cities in the US due to political strife in Nazi Germany, was ultimately more interested in ”adopting the Modernist aesthetic because it was a highly popular and profitable one. The holistic tenets were lost in what was the wholly different economic climate of a mid-twentieth century capitalist environment.” (Schranz, 2024; 62)

The European Bauhaus placed a “great emphasis placed on intuition. If the Bauhaus became synonymous with a rigid, white-rendered international style, its early years were far more expressionist.” Is it time that we reacquaint ourselves with what may be a less data-precise but more humanistic way of designing?

What if rationality isn’t the designer’s most valuable skill and simplification their greatest asset? What if those are intuition and wise decision-making? I’d argue that we know this deep down, but to survive in the current design paradigm, we misattribute many of our actions to rational thinking.

Let’s see how.

Unknown knowns

It’s hard to blame designers individually for embracing rationalism; more or less, over the last century, the industry has fully committed to it as a visual style and strategic process. The continued deification of modernist design heroes, extensive coverage in design school curricula, and the business world’s wholesale adoption of the style don’t give us many alternatives if we want to be successful in this industry. Peer pressure is a helluva drug.

While rationalist design has sustainable potential because of its modest, clean aesthetic, its real effect is increased commodification and less sustainability. “I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities, and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk,” [Dieter] Rams said in 1976. “The times of thoughtless design, which can only flourish in times of thoughtless production for thoughtless consumption, are over. We cannot afford any more thoughtlessness.”

If only Dieter were right. Rather than avoiding thoughtlessness, rationalist design stimulates economic growth and consumption through cost reduction on the manufacturing end and increased desirability on the consumer end—similar to how, in the 1800s, corporations increased margins by using mechanization to imitate the ‘artist’s touch’ while employing far fewer artists than before.

We’re also told that rationalism ‘makes sense’ and that we can make correct, bulletproof decisions by basing design decisions on so-called universal principles. There’s an aspect of moral authority; you can’t argue with geometry, so rationalism must be universally ‘good design.’ But in a world with a plurality of universes and myriad methods to apply geometry, how can just one way of thinking take the title of good design?

It’s important to note that this ‘emotion-free’ way of thinking is built on the false premise that we can make completely emotionless decisions; even the fact that you value rationalism over intuition or ornamentation is, in some way, an emotional perspective. What are values, if not a reflection of deep-seated emotions?

While revolutionary in its day, the ongoing attempt to disassociate from our emotions leads to a disassociation from nature and the qualities that make us human. This ‘othering’ allows us to exploit and appropriate one another, wildlife, and the planet’s natural abundance. But nature lives in the physical world, not on a balance sheet, so as we’re seeing now—with the climate starting to act more erratically—actions have consequences, even if they happen decades or centuries in the future.

Play logic

Despite attempts to present themselves logically, to a large extent, designers do deeply intuitive work. Anyone who has built a brand, product, or business could tell you this. Our work risks mundanity when built on purely rational, mathematical principles. It needs humanity and intuitive nudging to make it feel just right. From naming, typographic forms, and audio composition to color palettes, brand systems, and illustration, there’s often a smudging of the rules—a lens de-correction—that needs to be applied to make our work look, sound, or feel right even though it’s technically wrong.

Often lacking a business degree, do designers feel we must emphasize our rational side to gain credibility—to get a “seat at the table,” as we tend to call it? Especially with bigger brands, we’re nearly obliged to justify every decision, not only because there could be millions (or billions) of dollars in revenue on the line but also to satisfy decision-makers who might not see the work until later stages. Rather than methods to make sense of the world, in the modern day, rationality, quantification, and provably ‘correct’ solutions seem to be the price we pay to get our work through and avoid starving artistry.

So, rationality makes getting approvals easier, but intuition (and years of experience) makes the work connective. How do we clear space for what’s important? I want to make a high-level connection to what Holly Haworth says in Solastalgia concerning humanity’s contact with nature:

A story can be told about how the disappearance of the world around us corresponded with the replacement of the feeling human body with machines. The Industrial Revolution mechanized handiwork. Mechanical innovations seemed to hold out the promise of mass-producing happiness. Workers’ hands were cut off often in factories, as they rushed to operate machinery. Modern people used their hands less and less as simple household tasks became automated, and goods they would have made by hand could be bought at stores. As each decade passed, the hands touched more human-made things, less of the earth from which the “raw” materials for those things came. …

We have touched every place on the planet now, but as our species’ reach has expanded, ironically, we touch the world less and less with our hands, and we’ve lost the feeling that we are being touched back. To touch is active, but to be touched is passive; it requires us to acknowledge the agency and power of what touches us.

In conjunction with rationalism’s emotional erasure, this ‘dematerialization’—epitomized by the featureless rectangles we carry daily—further divorces us from our physical senses and the ability to know what nature feels like. In the current moment, when we’re on track for 3.1ºC warming by 2100, what makes less sense than creating design work that adds another layer of abstraction and increases the separation between us and the world?

We clear space by realizing that the economy—and design—depends on the livability of the planet, not the other way around.

Many worlds

There may be one physical world, but there are many ways to live in it. Rationalist designers' “universal” conception of design was—and is—a paternalistic, Eurocentric way of saying their way was the only way.

We miss a lot of subtext when we only think, act, and design rationally; maybe that’s why, over fifty years after Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, the design industry still responds to climate change with little more than (more) sustainable materials. The industry at large sees it as irrational to consider wider system change. Perhaps the only thing more irrational is the thought that the system should stay the same.

Rationalism has forced our ideas of intelligence, imagination, and the future into a narrow perspective that is not inclusive and, by necessity, removes alternative ways of thinking. It forces us to live in a “One-World World,” say some design theorists like Arturo Escobar and sociologist John Law. Plant communication seems irrational if you only think about communicating as humans do, and introducing wolves into a habitat to save deer seems irrational until you learn about ecosystem management. Likewise, using design for something more than business seems silly until you realize our industry is at the center of a planet-destroying machine called capitalism.

The 21st century—and the unfolding climate crisis it will surely be known for—are asking us to think more intuitively as people and designers. To think beyond the rational, mechanical, and reductive methods of the 20th century.

An intuitive, social focus will help us think in systems—which we desperately need to do because, as it turns out, design affects the entire world around it. Not in a ‘we’ll save the world way,’ but in an ‘actions have consequences’ way. We can no longer nihilistically isolate ourselves in the corner, but by the same token, we can’t believe we hold all the answers; the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Shades of grey

The problem with intuition is that it’s not exact. Leading only with intuition can cause us to miss things, just like leading only with rationalism might. Biases are inherent.

But rationality, for all its quantification, doesn’t eliminate biases either—summed up nicely by influential Austrian modernist Adolf Loos’ belief that ‘ornament is a crime’ and linked with earlier, now obsolete forms of human evolution. For him, a lack of ornament was a sign of a more advanced civilization. (Yes, if you’re wondering, he was super racist.)

As we’ve seen from the last 40+ years of neoliberalism and privatization, data-driven decisions don’t seem to work so well for all but a sliver of society. Rationalism—at least in how it’s currently deployed through technology, capitalism, and control—tends to turn social value and commonly held goods into private, commodifiable business value.

If rationality is, at least in part, causing the poly crisis, maybe our response should be, at least in part, "more-than-rational”—intuition, emotions, poetry, art, and more. Maybe developing an emotional connection with nature inspires you to change how you design a business, a brand system, or how the furniture you create will move through various ecosystems. Maybe it drives you to integrate non-human personas into your design process.

The authors of Relationality recommend ‘going awkward’ instead of going forward, which

might mean flourishing in the cracks and fissures of oppressive designs and practices; attuning to the intuitive, the irrational, the feminine, the sacred, the ineffable; building rhizomes in all kinds of possible directions with like-minded experiments, concepts, and struggles; committing to place despite the pressure to delocalize and de-communalize; creating pluriversal kinds of collective intelligence on the heels of digitality; meditating on and organizing horizontally for the phasing out of a civilization premised on infinite growth, unbridled competition, and extractive capitalism.

No one way of seeing the world is complete; we must develop the right methods for the circumstances. But the 21st century might have to be one in which we make design productive instead of reductive, lead with intuition rather than the rational methodology that seems to have led us astray, and regain the Bauhaus’s social focus that’s long been abandoned in lieu of KPIs and MVPs.

By the time I post this, Hurricane Milton, the fastest Atlantic storm in history to advance from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane, will have made landfall in Florida, barely two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore from Florida to Asheville, North Carolina—a town 300 miles (483Km) from the coast.

This hypergrowth is the new normal, both in nature and society. But as growth happens quicker, we’re given less time to react, and with that comes less quality and more stress. At a certain point, something breaks.

News of Apple potentially steering away from annual updates—at least for some of its products—is a small sign of that breakage, a moment of clarity, a shift we wouldn’t have imagined even five years ago. It may seem like a small step, but it’s a moment of admission that shows that even Apple, today the world’s most valuable company by market cap, has limits.

It also signals the growing consensus that we can no longer see growth as a universal good. Stability is the new growth. In this case, I mean growth as the exponential advancement of technology, the speed of life, and economic growth, not personal, spiritual, or emotional growth.

But this idea still hasn’t grabbed hold in the design industry at large; design is still seen as a way to plan, build, and communicate with the goal of increasing profits and reach. In short, design is used as a growth catalyst. Considering the current state of the world—from the climate to mental health crises—does pursuing endless growth through design avoid a—the?—main goal of design: to make wise, thoughtful decisions?

Rising undercurrents

For years, there has been a surging anti-growth undercurrent. TikTok trends like “quiet quitting,” “act your wage,” and “bare minimum Mondays” only put a name to familiar feelings nearly all of us have had at some point.

Outside of work—and this is purely anecdotal—there’s been a sharp uptick in the number of people I’ve talked to who daydream of moving to a small town and starting some version of a commune—or at least communal housing. Various friends have contacted me about moving to Barcelona to escape the inflated prices of the US and Northern European countries.

In economics research, ‘degrowth’ has existed since at least 2013. A concept in part defined by the voluntary winding down of ‘extraneous’ sectors, it has formed, thanks in part to a sub-discipline called ‘ecological economics,’ which foregrounds issues like “intergenerational equity, irreversibility of environmental change, uncertainty of long-term outcomes, and sustainable development.”

With the worsening climate crisis, these undercurrents have become visible. Degrowth as a solution has exploded into relative popularity, or it has at least moved from the ‘innovators’ to the ‘early adopters’ phase, with discussions popping up on various news channels, editorials, and newspapers.

Anti-capitalism and capitalist critique—barely mentioned in mainstream culture in the mid-aughts and twenties—have also caught on because of the system’s increasingly apparent ties to growth and unsustainability. Even Greta Thunberg, one of climate change’s most prominent spokespeople and a media favorite, has transitioned toward a more anti-capitalist and anti-colonial ethic over the past few years. We’ll see how that affects the media’s coverage of her.

Degrowth and design

So what does ‘degrowth’ mean besides a casual reversal of the social system we’ve grown accustomed to over the past few centuries? 🫠

While I can’t describe all of the ins and outs here—for that, you may have to read a book like Less is More or, more broadly, Doughnut Economics—I want to talk about some of the central tenets and how they could benefit design.

What is degrowth?

The main idea is something many can agree with: our obsession with growth—and in particular, with quantity over quality of growth—causes widespread destruction, human suffering, and waste. For society to continue without major catastrophes, we’ll need to change our entire conception of what growth is good for. Namely, we have to decide when not to grow, on purpose.

Cool, simple enough. 🥹 But how?

The first aspect is restructuring how we produce our products and services, with the idea that shared risk exploits less. Many things change when the main goal isn’t more GDP: power relationships, cash flow, wealth sharing, and—a polarizing feature of degrowth—decision-making processes about what to produce and how. It’s no surprise that cooperativism plays a big role in degrowth, but anti-colonialism may play an even bigger one. Through this lens, it’s vital to not only acknowledge but undo the power dynamics of the colonial and post-colonial world. “Justice is … key to solving the climate crisis,” says Jason Hickel, author of one of the more popular degrowth manuals.

Based on this first element, degrowth proponents also say the purpose of work should be realigned with social well-being. Right now, the profits of growth are reinvested in more growth, but they could just as easily be invested in what people need to live well: healthcare, education, parks, good jobs, and, crucially, free time.

When we’re busy—as we ever-increasingly are—we fill our free time with dopamine-rich and carbon-intensive activities like long-haul flights, on-demand food delivery, and retail therapy. Studies show that “when people are given time off, they tend to gravitate towards lower-impact activities: exercise, volunteering, learning, and socializing with friends and family.”

Finally, community and relationality become guiding principles that indicate that we only exist because of our relationships with other humans and non-humans. This is the opposite of what a growth-based system asks: that everyone be a separate, marketable consumer. Likewise, our mind doesn’t simply exist in the brain, ready to be exported like an .mp4 to another body when we die. It’s an inseparable part of our embodied experience that wouldn’t exist without the rest of our senses.

In short, degrowth helps change our ‘social purpose’ from market-driven to community-driven.

What does this look like in design?

Transition from techno-optimism to socio-optimism

Instead of seeing all tech progress as inherently good, we can begin to view it through a more conscious social lens. Rather than being first to a new technology, we can take a broadly Apple-esque approach: they may not be first to do something, but when they do, the bar for quality is set high (except for their new Camera Control button 🥹).

What does X Technology do for humanity? How can we use Y Technology to create new social relationships? Should we promote Z Technology if we know its popularity will be socially detrimental? How might we create value that can’t be commodified?

These questions imply a shift from the designer as a ‘salesperson,’ as Ruben Pater says, to the designer as a social actor. They also help us avoid losing credibility by uncritically promoting new, overly-hyped technologies that lack substance.

Embracing complexity instead of simplicity

Modern cultures tend to simplify. They flatten time and space. This is ostensibly to make life easier and create more accessibility. I won’t deny how comfortable this can be, but ultimately, that same ease creates a monoculture where everything is a copy of everything else. Even new social media—Read, Cara, etc.—rehash the same like-comment-subscribe-timeline paradigm that’s been the norm for over a decade. It seems that modern culture tends to flatten culture itself.

Instead, designers could embrace the beauty of complexity by embracing degrowth. What if we show the ‘seamfullness’ instead of the seamlessness in digital applications, so people know where their data goes and what it’s used for? What if we lean into the beauty of local cultures and designers instead of applying a ‘global’ aesthetic? What if we let messy, unproductive, but culturally rich systems flourish?

Progress and the standard of living

“But what about progress and raising the standard of living?”

This is a common counter-argument to any critique of growth or productivity. If progress comes from growth, then growth is not only necessary but inherently good.

The catch is that, often, social progress doesn’t come from economic growth. Indeed, in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, a period of massive economic growth, there was a regression in living standards for nearly everyone except the upper classes. Benefitting from extreme enclosure and land appropriation, where many people were forced into cities to survive,

Industrial capitalism took off, but at extraordinary human cost. Simon Szreter, one of the world’s leading experts on historical public health data, has shown that this first century of the Industrial Revolution was characterised by a striking deterioration in life expectancy, down to levels not seen since the Black Death in the fourteenth century. In Manchester and Liverpool, the two giants of industrialisation, life expectancy collapsed compared to non-industrialised parts of the country. In Manchester it fell to a mere twenty-five years.

Much progress in life expectancy and well-being is not due to economic growth but to public works and social movements that demanded more of their governments. Left to the market alone, economic growth can worsen public health outcomes.

It’s not growth or capitalism that creates innovation; it’s human nature. The forty-hour work week, child labor laws, social security, and public sanitation all became normalized in opposition to what the market wanted. Ironically, the market is again threatening some of these victories.

Degrowth has also, at times, been misconstrued as a totalitarian approach to sustainability—after all, who decides what industries are unnecessary?

This argument might seem superficially reasonable until you realize that a small group of people already decide what industries matter and grow. But they do so through undemocratic means. In the US, for example, corporate owners—through the sway of their lobbyists—have the power to decide that a functional public transit system or universal healthcare shouldn’t exist.

This conflation of degrowth with conservative politics ignores that degrowth is about intentional, democratic decision-making and reintegration with the rest of nature. Essentially, degrowth is sustainable design.

So again, we can no longer see growth as a universal good. It needs to be replaced—at least in the minority world—with stability. This means a drastic change in the way we approach design, but at the same time, it means returning to design’s basic definition: to make wise, thoughtful decisions.

Pushing the industry and your practice forward may mean acting on some of the questions above or simply talking about these ideas with friends and colleagues who may be interested.

Most of us are dying for a change, and degrowth could help. While capitalism and exponential growth may seem ‘natural,’ the reality is that they’re part of a young, volatile system waiting to be disrupted.

Low-lying ethereal clouds clashed, nearly at eye level, with the mountains ahead of us; those covered in emerald green trees, thick grasses, and dotted with barely-intelligible specks of white, which I knew to be sheep. The obsidian asphalt complemented a vibrant, earthy color palette that any Scot would be familiar with. As a passenger in the back seat of my wife's parent's small VW crossover, driving along a string of beautiful backroads in the Spanish region of País Vasco from her hometown of Vitoria to Bilbao, I dreamt of being a character in a dreamy Studio Ghibli masterpiece.

A few days later, the return to Vitoria was a quick 55 minutes on the N-622 that passed so rapidly that it evaporated from my memory by the end of the trip.

All stories, fictional or not, have some friction. In the story above, the friction is between the beauty of going slow, the efficiency of going fast, and the effect each has on imagination. Friction is an element that fulfills our desire for conflict and resolution. One that makes the story memorable. Stories have flawed characters, goals they want to achieve, and obstacles that stand in their way; friction is the indispensable core of all of these.

What's odd is how we try to eliminate as much friction as possible in real life. In design, it's as constant a nemesis as Comic Sans. But that makes me ask, by creating frictionlessness through well-designed products, services, and algorithms—whose side effects often reduce human contact and any iota of discomfort or self-reflection—are we also making life less memorable?

Despite our industry's efforts this century, striving for complete frictionlessness feels like a mistake. Without friction, there's no opportunity to learn or connect. When everything is taken care of, we continue to exist in individualized bubbles, ushered to the next thing we're told to care about. Without friction, we lose a path to understanding, confidence, and sufficiency.

I want to take that a step further and say that frictionlessness keeps designers, and those who use the products and services they make, from truly understanding and identifying with the climate crisis. Being open to experiencing friction is the first step to changing your and your community's 'frame,' or worldview, as Spencer Scott says:

A climate activist, in the most basic sense, is asking you to shift the relative weights of your frames. They are asking people to rearrange their time/energy/resource allocation to align with a sustained emergency value-set that might be mutually exclusive with many preexisting value sets.

The catch? There is a large social opportunity cost for initiating a “wartime” mentality when your social group doesn’t.

A lack of friction gives us many things in modern life: we can order food at a restaurant and have a robot bring it to us, instantly translate from one language to another, and fill our refrigerator without ever leaving the house, for instance. In a way, living in the minority world brings us a satisfying predictability and convenience. But we often ignore the social drawbacks. How does that friction-free ease affect our social bonds and add to the loneliness epidemic (not to mention externalized harm in the rest of the world)?

Friction doesn't exist in a vacuum or linear spectrum, but in a chaotic ecosystem, so we must consider what and who else its elimination affects.

How does using Material X change Environment Y? How does Business Model B improve the lives of the surrounding population that Business Model A ignores? Learning about the climate crisis is full of friction—full of inconvenience and unpredictability that forces you to rethink how you work, socialize, and operate in the world. That may be part of why many people sweep the issue under the rug. They have more immediate pains to remedy, so finding the time and energy to understand how their actions affect lives other than their own falls down the list of priorities.

But I think that's part of the problem. Many try to face the friction of the climate crisis alone, in the vein of an individual consumer, when we should do it with community-oriented thinking. We need to allow the climate crisis to push us to embrace the messiness of humanity rather than see it as something to scrub clean. That's the only way we can break through to another way of being besides this one, which is not working for so many.

That's not to say we should increase friction across the board. No one wants to touch a hard-to-use interface or service. However, the conscious use of friction to create connections between people (or between humans and non-humans) needs to become a central design goal rather than the myopic reduction of friction to increase sales.

Design theorist Arturo Escobar says that friction, "the messy and shifting, what some might call the excess or the incomprehensible, is necessary. Excess, often experienced as pain, grief, or other forms of rupture, are the motor of life and are often essential parts of a bridge or portal to relationality [a social narrative that says we exist because of the links we make with a community, the land, spirituality, etc., rather than the dualist idea of existing separate or independently from them]."

Frictionlessness is often advertised with the idea that it "lowers the bar for entry" and "democratizes" design. I can't argue that the time and energy saved by reducing friction is immense. But, many times, having a bar for entry makes an experience worthwhile, and its removal creates a transactional experience where there once used to be community.

The design process, for instance, is interesting and worthwhile because—not in spite—of its uncomfortableness. Alongside labor and environmental concerns, friction is one of the main reasons I'm against technologies like AI, which attempt to remove the discomfort of developing creative concepts. Discomfort is a vital part of the process, and we should resist buffing it to a smooth finish.

Of course, there is nuance to the situation. Frictionlessness can be helpful when it brings people together, and friction can be harmful when it pulls them apart. But my point is that we have to take the time to use friction as a tool, not a goal.

Lou Downe writes in Good Services that

It’s easy to see all steps within a service as annoying hassles; bits of a broken process that could be eliminated altogether. We dream of a bright shiny future where everything is done for us, and delivered without us even having to ask. Or do we? Every new step in your service is a transitional moment. The difference between choosing and buying it, or buying and returning something.

Those "transitional" moments—those instants of reflection—are vital. 'Good friction' shows our values and makes us aware of what we find essential on both a personal and communal level. It can help mold communities and movements, such as those surrounding the climate crisis.

So, how can we put this 'good friction' back into our lives? When does choosing the scenic route over the express one make sense? How can we make friction enjoyable and worthwhile? And how can we make it a reminder of the world we want to see?

I have bad news: your design agency is unlikely to solve the climate crisis. At least not through design.

Our individual technical knowledge and the industry’s laser focus on business are only part of what’s necessary for the next generation of design; the world needs more meaningful skills beyond improving efficiencies, making brands grow, and spurring endless sales.

Making design the only lens through which we see sustainable actions creates a situation where a physical output—countless printed objects or tons of data center emissions—is all but guaranteed. But there are other ways to be sustainable apart from our actual design work, like changing the business model of our design studios, incorporating business design into our client work, socializing or commoning resources across the industry, or educating other designers on the changing cultural role of design.

In other words, not everything has to be a one-to-one relationship between us and our visual (or industrial, or fashion) design work.

Matthew Wizinsky points out in his book Design after Capitalism that we can act on three familiar levels—Project, Practice, and Discipline—to be more sustainable and erode a capitalist system that serves almost no one. By asking open questions like How might we incentivize collaboration, participation, negotiation, and compromise? on the Project level, or How might we appropriate and distribute social surplus collectively, with and for the practice and its community? on the Practice level, we can think differently about how to make products and how our industry should exist in the world.

Four principles are applied to these three levels: social power, community economies, degrowth, and ‘post-capitalist subjectivities,’ the last two dealing with how to reduce ‘overgrown’ economic sectors and how to imagine ourselves in a post-capitalist world, respectively. These principles give us an outlet to act through design as something besides ‘Designer.’ Acting as Designers limits us to the posters, manifestos, and commercial projects that, as we’ve seen, have little impact or are easily co-opted; it also limits our idea of what’s possible through design.

We must reframe our idea of “Design” and what it means to work in design.

A couple of months ago, on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast, design researcher Safouan Azouzi compared the English and Arabic definitions of “design.” In English—and the Western world in general—the concept of design centers on ‘problem-solving.’ But in Arabic, the word for design, تصميم (“tasmim”), comes from صَمَّمَ (“ṣammama”), which simply means ‘decision-making.’

You could look at the Arabic definition as ‘problem avoiding’ instead of problem-solving, he says.

With this in mind, how much of Western design’s problem-solving has been problem-shifting—to other people, classes, or regions? And how much could we benefit from the wisdom of not trying to solve the world’s problems? Just like at home, we’ll never get to the end of the world’s to-do list; a more novel idea of design might focus on making decisions about current issues rather than being perfectionistic about how the future should be.

In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein says

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

Right now, the design industry—and seemingly the Western world at large—doesn’t seem too bothered by the change in the climate. To provoke a change, we need to make climate change a crisis. We need movements and ideas to make them bothered and create a crisis worth addressing.

Bridges to cross

What kinds of movements and ideas make a crisis worth addressing?

We can look to social media as an example: until now, the concept revolved around self-contained gardens with extremely high walls. But with the enshittification of basically all networks—but primarily Twitter—the idea of a ‘Fediverse’ or ‘open social web’ has caught on. In the future, through protocols like ActivityPub and AT, you’ll be able to easily take your followers from one platform to another; in theory, this and other improvements should de-shitify the multiple platforms that, at present, seem to actively hate their users. Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky are built on these technologies, with many more, like Tumblr, WordPress, and Ghost making the transition.

These protocols act as bridges from one internet to another. They’re ideas and actions that highlight long-held and widespread feelings. With climate change, there are a few bridges we need to cross to turn it from an edge case to a crisis. These bridges would, hopefully, lead from the destructive industry we’re currently propping up to a more balanced future one.

Well-being

First, we need to focus on well-being instead of growth. At growth’s extreme, we see people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. At the time of writing, Musk has $247.2 billion to his name. Bezos has $195.6 billion. They’ve grown (financially) to the highest heights imaginable, but how much better are their customers or employees for it? How much better are LVMH and Inditex’s customers or employees for their high valuations and shareholder returns?

Beyond a certain point, growth is purposeless unless it’s a means to something better, not simply more growth. Like money or technology, using it as the driving ethic for what you do creates a vicious cycle. ‘Enough’ as a principle signifies meagerness and apathy.

If we want to design more in line with nature and to be about ‘problem avoiding,’ we, as people, communities, and industry, need to consider the impact of our designs and hold peoples’ well-being as a core design principle. Unintended outcomes of design—like the addictive effects of infinite scrolling—must be seen as flaws to be minimized rather than trivial side effects to be ignored in pursuit of profits or engagement.

How much of our work—whether your specific job is in communications or landscape design—is ‘calorically empty’ and socially isolating rather than ‘nutrient-dense’ and socially integrative?

Sufficiency

A second bridge that runs directly alongside the first is from efficiency to sufficiency. While growth demands efficiency to make more growth viable, well-being implies you build as much as necessary, not as much as possible. The expansive gap between these ideas gives us room to question how we see the planet, society, and our personal lives—from our conception of nature to our understanding of the purpose of work to how we raise our children.

While efficiency favors the fortunate individuals with access to means, sufficiency favors communities regardless of their means. This naturally creates different types of products, designs, and ideas.

Systemic thinking

Wrapped up in this is a third bridge to cross: a move from reductive to systemic thinking.

I understand why the design industry has so highly valued efficiency and reductiveness. It’s easier to be more efficient than sufficient. Centering sufficiency is messy and complex. Lots of people and consequences to think about. Lots of intersecting systems to consider. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s less productive—just less reductive.

A typical grid-plan city might have wide, straight streets, but it often misses the character of medieval cities or neighborhoods built before city planning was so rigid. A lack of permanent street seating might let people move more quickly through busy streets, but it also prohibits them from stopping to chat. Productivity can be attached to more than a dollar amount.

Maria Farrell notes that

when we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late. That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.”

The impulse to simplify complex and messy—but thriving—systems stems from our preoccupation with control. But is that a habit that still serves us? Has it ever?

It’s worth examining how many of our social habits were temporary mends that have unconsciously calcified and if those deposits of salt do more harm than good. Maybe modernism and reductivism have reached their end of life. They’re certainly well past their prime.

Have you all seen this Chobani spot from a few years ago?

It borrows from the “solarpunk” style of futurism that paints a world where humans, technology, and nature are balanced. Robots harvest apples, rain is made at will, and we finally get the flying cars we’ve been asking for. (Apparently, Chobani is also the only consumer packaged good that survived into the future.)

This ad and other climate branding projects that superficially portray sustainable futures put us at risk of entrenching branding as a tool for greenwashing rather than for systemic change. The incentive continues to be 'buy different' instead of 'think different.' “Natural” forms, imagery, and colors are used to sell a lifestyle more than signal values, and graphics are easily appropriated.

While I’m thrilled that nature is going mainstream and the design industry is moving from easily forgotten climate pledges and manifestos to tangible work, recently, the most high-profile projects generally belong to a few categories: carbon offsets, impact VCs, and sustainable materials.

Notably, these industries’ impact prolongs the problems they claim to fight.

Offsets

Carbon offsets allow companies—from tech companies to construction firms, car manufacturers to (incredibly) fossil-fuel producers—to claim they’re “carbon neutral” while, for the most part, continuing with business as usual by simply paying to make their carbon usage ‘go away.’ They offload the work of harm reduction onto other people. To put it another way, it’s hard to claim you’re neat if, in reality, it’s an underpaid maid from a developing country who is responsible for keeping your house clean.

Companies externalize the responsibility (and admittedly hard work) of developing a sustainable worldview and making concrete changes by paying someone else in another part of the world not to pollute. Carbon insetting, on the other hand, internalizes that responsibility.

Impact VCs

As I’ve mentioned before, impact VCs, just like regular VCs, still look for exponential monetary growth in their climate startups, which implies an exponential effort to cut costs, grow margins, and monopolize markets. This tends to create conditions that hurt workers and the environment—something the startups are ostensibly against.

Until VCs change their payment structure, the trajectory of the climate tech startups they fund will be unsustainable because the payment structure demands that.

Sustainable Materials

The last of these industries, sustainable materials, is theoretically valuable, but, in the long term, it’s liable to do more harm than good because of the rebound effect; like with VCs, when the economic objective is growth, any new efficiencies go toward making more growth. So, despite our material and methodological advancements over the past century, we still pollute and work just as much as a century ago.

For material innovations to matter long-term, we need to find another metric for success beyond growth and GDP. In the meantime, material sustainability helps us sell more things people don’t need.

What the companies that finance our branding projects do well is fall into the trap of sustainability as usual: they set unrealistic goals and quickly abandon them when they don’t show profit or can’t charge more for the premium perception that sustainability brings. Despite new sustainability campaigns, AI has caused Microsoft’s emissions to jump 30% since they pledged in 2020 to go carbon-negative by 2030. And despite Nike’s well-branded sustainability initiative, they’ve cut 30% of their sustainability staff (never mind that this initiative set out with the mental gymnastics of doubling growth and halving impact).

By making these ‘solutions’ attractive, I wouldn’t say designers and design agencies are wholly responsible for what amounts to greenwashing, but we can’t, in good faith, claim we’re wholly innocent. Just because we see more sustainability work doesn’t mean corporations consider it anything more than a line item on a list of tactics to increase sales.

That raises a couple of questions: Does climate branding sell sustainability or just the social desire for sustainability—the anticipation that, at last, businesses will put people and the planet over profits? What kind of power does design have when the impact of our work is greenwashing on the scale of unicorns and mega-corporations?

We’ll end up harming more than helping if we continue to craft an attractive, sustainable image for these environmentally and socially unsustainable companies that show zero reluctance to abandon initiatives at the slightest indication of more shareholder returns.

Next Level

If branding—and design in general—is to be genuinely helpful for climate action, we need to look at sustainability with a more holistic lens. We need to stop beautifying and hyping products without looking critically at their social and ecological effects; we need to ensure our work helps change the system rather than sustain the current one.

Cultural, social, and emotional dimensions of sustainability are just as—if not more—important than technology and materials because they’re further upstream. A saying goes, “The most sustainable product is the one that’s never made.” Likewise, the most sustainable design is the one that changes how we think about the world, organize our business, and interact with one another, not the one that uses a bit less ink, plastic, or paper.

A social framing to support our design decisions could help us engage with those upstream dimensions. Thinking about the world we collectively want to experience—as people, not designers—is what Stuart Walker calls ‘appreciative inquiry,’ which

tells us that the questions we ask should be directed toward those conditions we wish to attain.

If we ask, “How can we develop a more environmentally friendly product, such as a car or a clothes dryer?,” we are framing the question in a way that implicitly subsumes a problem—that is, currently available models have a problem that needs to be fixed. By framing the question in this manner, the inevitable result will be a new design concept. Alternatively, we might ask, “How can we live in ways that are attuned to natural systems and facilitate environmental care?”

Addressing this kind of question would result in very different understandings about our priorities, needs, and desires.

A future-oriented design industry shouldn’t ignore finding efficiencies—but it also needs to make deep investments in the big picture. It should value downstream social effects, not just increasing quarterly revenue. But because the questions are broader, they’ll likely require more diverse teams—maybe ones that include anthropologists, sociologists, or geologists alongside designers and strategists.

That might help make a structural change. At least, it has more chance than a fresh logo, mission statement, or plant-based inks would.

Although designers acknowledge the climate crisis more than ever, the industry is still rife with resistance and indifference. Action is seen more as a noble cause than a survival technique.

While it might feel like the climate crisis is just one more thing on an already insurmountable pile of methods and frameworks to learn, scuttling the livability of humanity’s only known inhabitable planet feels slightly more important than learning to code (or these days, learning to prompt).

Still, we don’t act. Why?

Loci of resistance

Within design

Although we’re shifting toward an ostensibly more collaborative working model, the design industry still rests on exceptionalism and individualism. The need to differentiate and demonstrate expertise is overwhelmingly strong across the industry, from individual designers to international agencies. Because of this, studios gravitate toward high-profile, high-budget work that, as a byproduct, often enhances, enriches, and enlivens destructive industries.

Designers might not necessarily agree with the goals these corporations have—or they might just think of design as an apolitical, instrumental activity—but, either way, they want to be involved because, in some way, our portfolios express who we are as individuals.

There’s precedent for this in politics, too: “Many conservatives don’t oppose climate science because they are ignorant,” says Per Espen Stoknes. “Rather, it is a way of expressing who they are. This obstacle becomes the innermost barrier to climate communications: The messages crash against the wall of the self.”

Communal work is at the center of addressing the climate crisis. Does our resistance to getting involved stem from the dying era of the hero designer, where design solutions are granted from above instead of developed by the community that will use them? Does this communal messaging crash against the designer’s wall of the self when it becomes apparent our work is no longer an expression of who I am but of who we are, creating social dissonance that prevents us from doing what we know is correct simply because we feel we won’t fit in?

The urge to fit in is a strong one. I’ve had a similarly dissonant sensation while building this newsletter (and yet-to-be-released sub-projects). I constantly debate what it means for me as a designer if I do less design. Questions loop in my mind: If one calls themself a designer but doesn’t constantly add projects to their portfolio, are they still a designer? Do they, at some point, become a fraud?

Ultimately, what lets me rest is that the social dissonance of not fitting the stereotypical mold of a designer is less anxiety-inducing than the cognitive dissonance of knowing there are more sustainable ways to design but continuing full steam ahead with unsustainable but well-established practices.

That’s not to say I’m not forced at times to do business-as-usual design work. This is another, more immediate reason for our resistance: our profession and the lifestyle it grants us often block out competing worldviews. If that project helps us put food on the table, we’re generally not going to bite the hand that feeds; we’ll see Nike for the story they sell to athletes rather than their sweatshops.

Without design

However, another factor, maybe as significant as any, is how climate news is communicated, which leaves us disconnected.

For all the coverage the crisis gets, you’d think there would be more direct involvement, but our view hovers at 10,000 feet. We understand species are dying and ice caps are melting, but what does that mean for our day-to-day lives, especially as designers? “Typography can change the world just kidding” has never felt truer.

The climate crisis feels impossibly large and hard to change, let alone understand, making us and design feel useless. The inherent distance and ambiguity in this framing make us disassociate. So, the climate crisis remains an issue perpetually ‘over there’ and not quite urgent enough for us to care (for now, at least, depending on where you are).

In contrast, while the hole in the ozone layer (remember that?) was a huge problem, it had a clear and understandable solution: stop using aerosols. With comparatively little legislation and social change on our part, the issue was solved. In that case, lucky for us, the answer was within the confines of consumerism. The intersectional facets of the climate crisis (the ‘polycrisis’) are more diffuse and boundless.

Denial and avoidance often feel like better choices when there’s negative messaging and no clear solution to a problem. It may be that because of the messaging we receive outside of design, we perpetuate resistance within design. What if we reframed our relationship to the climate crisis?

Finding a new frame

Could the actual barrier to action be the crisis’ destructive and diffuse framing, not simply designers’ preoccupation with their portfolio, market differentiation, or concern over what it means to be a designer? Are we losing because of our laser focus on loss?

What we stand to lose is helpful, but only short-term. Of course, we need to avoid disaster, but then what? If there’s no long-term strategy for managing the climate ‘underbrush,’ humanity’s job is limited to damage control; rather than caretakers, we’re emergency responders limited to putting out fires.

Ironically, destruction-focused climate messaging grabs our attention but deters us from action. It has the same disabling effect as doomscrolling. It doesn’t help that news about the climate crisis—the biggest ecological event in the history of humanity—is presented alongside the latest gossip or corporate quarterly returns call, essentially creating hyperinflation in those topics’ significance. This is the same normalization that happens when we see tweets of genocide alongside exceedingly cool Olympic sharpshooters, a US presidential candidate saying we won’t need to vote again if he’s elected, and ChatGPT counting to 50 ‘like a human.’

Negative, individualized messaging—e.g., “86% of people don’t recycle”—deters us from action because it reinforces inaction as the social norm. If most people don’t recycle, what damage will my not recycling do? However, positive, socially focused messaging reaches places never imagined with negative messaging.

For example, who likes hearing that we need to use less? Pretty much no one. However, if that reduction is tied to a social identity, the action becomes intuitive. You get up early every morning because you’re a runner, not because you want to run. You design with less because you’re minimalist, not because you want to save bandwidth or materials. The identity and feeling part of a bigger cause makes something appealing, not necessarily the action itself.

Crises present us with opportunities for gain, not just for loss; they give us chances to understand what we stand for and uncover new allegiances. This framing unlocks climate action and imagination: it’s not just the destruction we can avoid globally but the worlds we can create locally.

With the present crisis, designers’ social status could change substantially—although it would no doubt degrade if we pigeonhole climate actions into the paradigm of the Hero Designer.

As temperatures move further into uncharted territory, more people are forced to migrate, and younger generations gain more purchasing and political power, designing through a climate lens will signal premium quality, thoughtfulness, and an eye toward the future. I firmly believe that within 10-15 years, a thorough structural understanding of the climate crisis will be more valuable—financially and socially—than the efficiency and innovation focus of the last hundred years.

Reciprocal change

This framing, that focusing on what we stand to gain changes what we find important, is nothing new. Although it’s rarely applied to the climate crisis, it’s evident in the way the design industry has changed since the turn of the millennium.

Thirty-five years ago, accessibility was barely a thing. Twenty-five years ago, neither was a collaborative model of design. Today, by focusing on the upside, we see digital interfaces improve when more people can use them, and products and services improve when created with and by the people who use them. When we focus on what we stand to lose, these advancements are instead seen as getting in the way of a ‘unified vision.’

The dialogue of a collaborative model creates space to develop what we consider essential. Relationships are inevitably valued in that back-and-forth, in contrast to the Hero Designer model, which eschews the ‘we’ for the ‘I.’

Likewise, dialogue and relationships are critical in climate action since it is through community, not individual triumphs, that we’ll make progress; ‘de-individualizing’ climate communications, organization, and solutions allows us to rebuild social bonds, provide support, and gain systemic understanding.

Returning to the original question of climate resistance in design, it’s vital to bring sustainable mindsets to design, not just design to sustainable mindsets. Sustainability doesn’t benefit from being another club, separate from all the others to which we belong, another framework to add to a list of expertise, or something corporations do as a bare minimum to gain social capital.

It’s interlinked with nearly every topic and activity imaginable and has to be an integrated conversation in the same way design has become. If we integrated it more into who we are as designers, it wouldn’t be another framework to learn; it would be the whole point of design.

It’s well-known within the sustainable design community that phrases like “earth-friendly,” “inspired by nature,” or “for the planet” are greenwashing. Through their vagueness, they help companies avoid any real accountability. But is there no way for these things to be true? Surely, there are products and services that actually are inspired by nature, right?

If you search for ‘biomimicry,’ you’ll likely come up with one-to-one tech solutions—emulating sharkskin to swim faster, mimicking burrs to create fasteners, or imitating the shape of humpback whale fins to increase wind turbine efficiency. While these are technically nature-inspired and undoubtedly useful, they also offer a bland vision of what biomimetic technology and design could be.

That vision fits a little too nicely into the modern idea of progress and innovation, which is almost exclusively focused on material and economic growth and generally ignores any growth in emotional, personal, or communal well-being. It lacks the experimentation that would come with truly reframing our relationship with nature. The fact that biomimicry means aping plants’ and animals’ bodies but not their actions shows a superficial understanding of what makes nature nature.

In a way, these solutions are also greenwashing. This uni-directional, status quo vision continues the tradition of imagining what humanity can take from nature without contemplating what to give back; it’s the same dualist mindset we’ve used for centuries. In that way, the future isn’t so much a re-visioning of what could be, as it is a rerun of what already is.

Biomimicry shouldn’t necessarily be about creating organic or living forms but replicating the fundamental principles of dialogue and sufficiency that drive nature and learning how to apply them to our design process.

‘Forward’ is backward

Contrary to popular belief, oases are not natural paradises but highly productive, cultivated land. The misconception of oases as leisure spots comes from the influence of French colonists. A native culture exploited and oppressed was the dark side of that leisure.

Those colonists changed the literal structure and purpose of oases in Tunisia, shifting them from productive, tightly packed gardens with diverse plant life to sparse, monocultural plantations so crops were more accessible to harvest and return to the imperial core. Over decades, this had ecological impacts, like the loss of the three layers of vegetation that create the “oasis effect,” and social ones, such as the growing unpopularity of community-managed land. Privatization and competition took over, sapping the land of its abundance and the people of their solidarity.

So what is the real purpose of oases, if not a goldmine of produce or a resort to relax?

They’re a collaboration with nature. But I would also say they’re an excellent example of how to think about biomimicry and exercise those principles of dialogue and sufficiency.

While underground aquifers often feed oases, their cultivation also keeps those aquifers fed. This phenomenon is similar to the water cycle we see in nature: the humidity from plants in the Amazon creates rainfall, encouraging more plant growth, which creates more humidity and rainfall. A similar dialogue happens in oases. Each layer in the three-layer system supports one another to increase moisture and transpiration: Palm trees shade fruit trees, which then shade smaller vegetable bushes, whose transpiration—plants’ version of perspiration—returns moisture to the higher levels of vegetation.

Historically, people across Northern Africa have used the water from oases to create ‘acequias’ that feed their farmland. These canals of slow-moving water carry vital hydration from oases to neighbors’ plots and, because of their porous walls, support the growth of wild vegetables and vegetation along the way. This secondary effect causes the ground to become hydrophilic instead of hydrophobic, accepting water rather than rejecting it and creating the conditions for more water to fill the aquifers. Water is actually ‘created’ by slowing it down. Again, we see a dialogue between humanity and the rest of nature.

I say all of this because design also creates oases. However, right now, we do so with a colonial mentality, setting our sights on frictionlessness (relaxation, extraction, monetization) rather than resilience (cultivation, community, sufficiency). And as the underground aquifers of literal oases dry up due to mismanagement, at times, it feels like our aquifer of ideas has started to run dry.

‘Backward’ is forward

So, how can acequias and oases, in their pre-colonial meaning, influence design?

Slow information

At one moment or another, we’ve all been hypnotized by social media, scrolling infinitely without knowing exactly where to. This happens when we ingest too much information too fast; we check out while our brain is hot-wired and taken for a joy ride. With a trip to the mountains or seaside, the opposite happens: we come back recharged specifically because of the reduced pace and volume of information we take in.

This reminds me of something L. M. Sacasas wrote recently in his newsletter. Quoting philosopher Albert Borgmann, he made the distinction between devices and things:

Something is technologically available, Borgmann explains, “if it has been rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” At the heart of [modern devices] is the promise of increasing availability.

Borgmann goes on to distinguish between things and devices. While devices tend toward technological availability, what things provide tend not to be instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, or easy. The difference between a thing and a device is a function of the sort of engagement that is required of user.

So, devices’ immediacy, ubiquity, and frictionlessness make falling into a social media trance much more likely. “Things”—instruments, sewing machines, cameras—feel so calm, at least partly, because they don’t have those qualities; they make us think and often have a singular purpose, such as music making or capturing a moment.

While there are times when ease and speed are good, these are now goals of every part of society, from dating to exercise, fashion to design. I would argue that many of these activities would benefit from a slower pace and that we don’t gain much from going faster. For instance, using AI to write an essay or email response doesn’t make you a better communicator; it outsources the process and makes a beeline toward the accomplishment. It ignores that the goal is to write, not to have written.

Slowing the in- and out-flow of information makes us more receptive in the same way that slowing water makes the ground more permeable. It gives us space to be “dreamy,” as David Lynch says. Or to create an animation masterpiece. How much do the devices and interfaces we design and use keep us from feeling anything other than speed? And how much does this speed keep us from feeling anything other than the drip of dopamine?

Resilience

The idea of three vegetation layers also fits nicely into the regenerative design idea of Three Horizons. This framework helps us understand the possible futures of an industry or society and the transitory period that bridges the gap between the old and new paradigms.

By exploring potential futures, we can understand what causes “business as usual,” what kind of future we want to build, and what disruptive actions push us there or drag us back to the status quo. Like pre-colonial oases, having in mind this global vision of the future gives us respite from The Future™, avoids the brittleness of monoculturalism, and creates the resilience of diversity.

But the future never stops coming, so we must build ongoing climate processes—not climate goals that we inevitably overshoot. We need to develop resilience that’s both durable and ephemeral, depending on the situation or environment’s needs. More than anything, it’s essential to be relevant: Does usage need to create beautiful wear, as in the case of a well-built wooden chair, or should a cup start disintegrating just hours after coming into contact with liquid?

With plastic, we’ve managed to paint ourselves into a corner of material durability and usage ephemerality (i.e., disposability). Often, it should be the other way around, with materials being ephemeral and usage being durable. We know this is possible because this was the norm from the beginning of humanity—conservatively, 300,000 years ago—until 1907, the year that plastic was invented.

Returning to the well

These lessons give us clues for how to “return to the well” of biomimicry; rather than a short-term execution, it becomes a long-term strategy that is integrated early in the process before any visual, industrial, or product design starts. Maybe a better way to say that is that it becomes the process; it should be a mindset, not the greenwashed marketing scheme that ‘sustainability’ has sadly morphed into.

The rest of nature produces things for others. It’s rare that one species’ waste or activities can’t be used for the benefit of another. In the indigenous history of humanity, we’ve often acted as caretakers of nature, with it becoming more abundant thanks to us. As I’ve mentioned, this role has largely been surrendered (and exterminated) over the past centuries. But I think bio-mimicry—the thought process, not the visual cliché—is one piece of the puzzle that could help us return to stewardship.

This way of thinking could remind us that humanity is defined by its relationships in the same way that nature is. Though we see ourselves as separate, above, and more evolved, we can’t deny our relationality with the rest of nature. Although Modern Man doesn’t want to be human, we can’t deny reality.

To acknowledge our inherent relationship with nature and the collaborative work needed to balance the system that is Earth, we must see the value in dialogue and sufficiency. Doing the opposite—giving sermons about growth and excess—often comes at the expense of people or places. It heavily dehumanizes our basic needs to tack on just 2-3% more GDP every year.

Like the biology it mimics, a bio-mimetic economy should deliver ‘nutrients’ across its entire body. Instead of the leggy, spindly growth we now see, we need to imagine and create an economy that grows dense and bushily. I don’t have all the answers to how we get there, but I wanted to leave you with a question:

How can design create thriving instead of growth? What do you think?

Eleven years ago, at the beginning of my career, when I thought about what designers do, it seemed relatively straightforward. For whatever reason, my aunt would always go on about how I could ‘design wine labels’ and how excited she would be to have one I designed—but for me, design came down to a few things:

Beautification. Organization. Possibly expression.

Naive? A bit.

While these basics might have been true at one point, design has become much more than that. It’s now integral to how businesses communicate, operate, and strategize, and for a long time, it’s been the catalyst for increasing revenue. But we can do better. I’m not saying these elements of design are unnecessary. It just feels like we’ve hit a cultural wall by limiting our focus to 'what’s good for business.'

Design’s entanglement with capitalism buttresses that wall by faithfully supporting the system and mimicking its actions.

Although billions of dollars worth of products and services flow from producers to consumers every day, the system doesn’t create the abundance we’re told it does. Instead, it generates a scarcity of time, income, autonomy, and social connection (to name a few). In its current form, the design industry mirrors this with a scarcity of ideas.

That may seem odd since the design industry is known for its ideas; we’ve crafted a deep mythology around conjuring them at will. However, similar to our focus, the mythology of ideas is limited—in this case, to visual or strategic realms. When I talk about a scarcity of ideas, I mean the upstream social ideas often filtered out of our strategic and visual decisions. (How many creatives at Uber, Airbnb, or any associated agencies agree with how those businesses create precarity in housing or their drivers’ livelihood?)

This scarcity expresses itself in at least three ways:

I: Hype

The design industry enables capitalism’s bread and butter: hype cycles. These cycles—in which design and tech are both implicated and ensnared—create, out of thin air, the scarcity the system demands. With hype comes a cycle of desire and purchases. But if capitalism created true abundance, we wouldn’t need adverts to tell us we’re ugly, weak, or unproductive. Nor would we suddenly need AI assistance to write that much better, design that much faster, or read that much more insightfully.

Hype turns regular activities into goals constantly achieved then readjusted. Along with scarcity, it invites us to a better tomorrow that never quite ends up arriving. They’re the mirage and the stretch of desert that continually separates us from it.

II: Incrementalism

Scarcity also shows up in the incremental progress we make in design. We can’t reinvent the wheel every day, but we could at least think about different ways to use it. One way this is evident is in the industry’s lackadaisical approach to sustainability, which is the main reason I started this newsletter and why it focuses on cultural change.

As Future Observatory director Justin McGuirk says

The problem with so much ‘sustainable design’ is that it’s trapped in the existing paradigm and so struggles to move beyond the most narrow goals: reducing a bit of plastic here, improving a bit of recycling there and so on.

While we explore new territory through materials, we fail to see that materials are one of the weakest leverage points to act on—likely No. 10 (of 12) on Donella Meadows’s list of Places to Intervene in a System. Besides their low utility, new materials fail to inspire the way building a radically new cultural story would.

The preference to make minimal improvements shows a scarcity of ideas and is a specific example of how design reinforces the status quo it often claims to fight against.

III: Normality

Last time, I wrote about how dualism imposes normality on society. Design has helped enforce this normality through its global standardization of corporate aesthetics and, more recently, its copy-able mood board process and hyperfocus on doing things fast instead of doing them differently.

This combination makes it easy to go to opposite ends of the earth and get the same tourist experience. Or to various social platforms, even brand new ones, and encounter the same like-comment-subscribe structure. Or create “AI designs” that look a little too similar to the stock Apple Weather app. While this reduces friction, friction is often the whole point. The moments of friction—struggling to find your way around a city, build a new community, or design something—are when interesting ideas appear, and you find growth. Outsourcing friction turns us into walking Lay-Z-Boys.

Maybe I’m speaking for myself, but until COVID, it feels like this standardization was seen more positively. The world deserved good design, and it wasn’t uncommon for designers to be itching to ‘improve’ the ‘undesigned’ world. Now, it feels like ‘good design’ can actually create what it claims to abolish: mundanity and a lack of diversity. Or maybe the standardization dial got turned up to 11.

These outdated ideas hold us back from constructing new ones, and if design wants to be useful for more than economic growth, we need to lay them to rest. But that’s easier said than done.

For one, our definition of success is defined by what we consume. How much of that definition has been thought up in the boardrooms of multi-trillion-dollar companies rather than by close friends or great literature? For the design industry to stop supporting the unsustainability of the current system, we need to see with a beginner’s eye and find new references. If designers are really lateral thinkers, we need to apply that thinking to more than design systems and brand strategies.

Dreaming Big

By mid-way into my career, more than one boss had told me I needed to let go and experiment if I wanted to do more exciting work. In fear of going too far and getting rejected, I didn’t go far enough and made that reality. I think the design industry is in the same place now, where we’ve developed an aesthetic dream but lack the will to experiment and create a social dream—one that might deliver on the ‘change makers’ role we like to claim.

But this social dream can’t just appear from nothing. It needs the right conditions. Along with embracing diverse, radical, and meaningful ideas—the opposite of the scarcity-driven frameworks above—it requires a historical, systemic worldview; without this, we’re left to focus on what happened instead of why.

We see the events—Figma and Adobe scraping our work for AI training by default—without seeing through to the system’s underlying behavior—that the nature of capitalism is appropriation and enclosure. Likewise, we’re easily persuaded to focus on craft and beauty; these are key leverage points for design, no doubt, but when they lack a social identity, they turn into instrumentalism. With these blinders tightly fastened, we repress the deeper consequences of our work so we can collaborate with the industry’s biggest players, beautifying ideas that actively harm us.

In this paradigm, “designers are both exploited and exploiters,” says Ruben Pater.

We forego much of our power by not demanding more from ourselves, our clients, and the industry. We reduce ourselves to the whims of the market because we have to pay the bills, but that forfeiture keeps us from imagining better futures. It probably shouldn’t surprise you that there’s a precedence for this from early capitalism. In contrast to feudalism, riots in this period started to be about hunger rather than people’s quality of life. The level of inequality kept people ‘fighting for scraps’ instead of autonomy.

It’s great that we have a seat at the table, but now we have to take a stand and ask ourselves if this is the table we want to be at. If we don’t, we’ll continue to enrich (and be enriched by) the corporations destroying the world. I don’t claim innocence about cashing their checks—most of us can’t. But I do think we, collectively, have to make a decision. The industry and the people who make it up must ask what’s driving design culture: profit or planet?

Practical Power

What could we do with radical change? Again, craft and beauty are major leverage points for design, so why not use these for social ends rather than capitalist ones?

For starters, I believe designers have the power to make community ownership attractive. We’re well-practiced at doing the opposite—creating exclusivity for luxury brands—so, in theory, all it takes is a flip in perspective to put the public good in the valuable, desired position. We could guide companies in strategy and identity to create more products that bring people together, with network effects of enjoyability, instead of forcing them to lead individualized lives.

Secondly is the idea of using advertising as a lever for social cohesion instead of individualism. How do we, as designers, thread this needle of spreading regenerative products and services without falling into the trap of consumerism and “throwaway culture”? What if advertising can link these things to a collective identity instead of individual identity and social acceptance? In this sense, we have to learn how to master our tools instead of being mastered by them. This “hacker ethic” develops personal agency.

Design is the transition space between stories. The coincidental part is that humanity is between stories right now, from separation to integration, which means design can play a much more useful role than simply increasing revenues.

According to physicist Fritjof Capra, “What is destroyed when a living organism is dissected is its pattern. The components are still there, but the configuration of relationships between them—the pattern—is destroyed, and thus the organism dies.” If that’s true, creating new patterns—i.e., new relationships—also creates new life.

What new ‘life forms’ would emerge if design patterns were focused not on progress and profit but on people and a thriving planet? I’m sure the answer would genuinely excite my aunt.

Capitalism is stronger than ever, but its public image is imploding under its own weight.

How can that be?

While capitalism might seem more and more exacerbated, critiques of it have also reached a fever pitch. In the design industry, a bastion of capitalism, this critique has regained popularity in the past 5-6 years, with books chronicling how our industry aids and abets capitalism’s ills—among these, CAPS LOCK, Designs for the Pluriverse, Design after Capitalism, What is Post-Branding?, What Design Can't Do, and more. Before these, critiques like Victor Papanek’s now half-century-old Design for the Real World and 1995’s The Green Imperative were also popular.

Outside of the design industry, critiques have also been voiced for decades. Centuries, even. Ok—truthfully, since the inception of the capitalist system. Until the arrival of public services demanded by socialist movements in the late 1800s, capitalism had been a scourge for everyone except the capitalist class, and with that scourge came revolts, revolutions, literature, and calls for a new system. The idea that capitalism improves social welfare is actually (surprise, surprise) an appropriation of gains won by opponents of capitalism.

Shifting discourse

The evident effects of the climate crisis seem to be changing the discourse. We all see increased temperatures, wildfires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes. While capitalism has always survived because it externalized the harms it created, it’s evident that those harms were only ever externalized on paper; the climate doesn’t care about the stock market, GDP, or other economic fantasies humans make up.

The confluence of these increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and a more politically conscious youth, who are not as tied to the current system, could potentially create significant change quickly. The Boomer generation’s luck of the draw, which landed them in the golden age of capitalism, heavily influenced how their politics changed over time; the older they got, the more possessions they had, and the more conservative they became.

The same can’t be said about the following generations. What is there left to conserve when we can’t afford houses, children, or, in many cases, basic economic stability? Faith in a political system is earned, and the current system has earned nothing for Gen Alpha, Gen Z, most Millennials, and some Gen X’ers.

But this estrangement from capitalism is accompanied, perhaps more subtly, by the skepticism of the dualist* mindset with which it’s deeply entwined. Science, which has long been a field of setting boundaries on what is (or isn’t) legitimate, is starting to understand ideas that animist cultures have known for centuries. Everyday people are noticing how many of the normative stories—around everything from gender, health, happiness, and success—we’ve been fed over the years are just that: stories. In recent years, there’s even greater enthusiasm around esoteric practices like astrology, tarot, and paganism, maybe due to the falling popularity of monotheistic religions.

To understand why capitalism is dying and how this affects society and design, we must put a magnifying glass on dualism.

* This mindset is also known as mechanistic thinking, Cartesianism, rationalism, or Separationism. It’s the mindset made famous by the Enlightenment.

The Ministry of Truth

Dualism is the standard attitude of most Western cultures, which uses science and reason as the basis for decisions. While that sounds great in theory, the process of making it the standard has been, for many, more akin to the coercion and doublespeak of George Orwell’s 1984.

I want to talk about a few aspects of this mindset, how we’ve internalized them to the point that they’re invisible, and what effect that has on design.

War is peace (Separation)

Separation—of divine and earthly, mind and body, men and women, able and disabled people—serves to consolidate power and dispel resistance. Separation gives leverage to the powerful. It causes infighting. It obscures connections. The place of privilege that humanity, the mind, men, or the able hold in society are used as self-justification for that same privilege; without creating separation, there is no privilege and, therefore, no dominance.

This separation relies on an emotional numbness from ourselves, others, and nature. Within this paradigm, emotions are a liability, busy and individualistic workers are ideal, and our disassociation from nature allows us to exploit it. Capitalism couldn’t survive without these numbing agents, and as a bulwark, it ensures numbness is the number one product.

This numbness often seeps into design in insidious ways—especially when paired with technology, its partner in crime—creating a dealer-user relationship instead of one that creates agency. It makes us see design as an instrumentalist profession whose primary focus is on how impactful we make a project or what our technique was rather than assessing the harm (or benefit) the project might cause. Our hyper-specific, differentiated—in other words, marketable—design practices reinforce the individualization that separation encourages; the more we compete, the less we collaborate, and the less power we have.

Freedom is slavery (Productivity)

A second element of dualism is the glorification of productivity.

During the 15-16th centuries, as capitalism developed as an economic system, a shift occurred in how the body was viewed: from something that had innate worth to something that only had worth if it was producing something (generally, for capitalist ends). This transition, previously forced on nature, played out in various ways.

Women began to be valued only inside the house, and even then, only concerning how well they obeyed their husbands in cooking, cleaning, and birthing children. 16-17th century women were forced out of social, political, and work life. On the threat of sexual assault or death, many times, their only option was to be wholly subordinate to their husbands and/or hide themselves from public view. As Silvia Federici explains in Caliban and the Witch,

One of the main rights that women lost was the right to conduct economic activities alone, as femme soles. In France, they lost the right to make contracts or to represent themselves in court, being declared legal ‘imbeciles.’ ... In the Mediterranean countries women were expelled not only from many waged jobs but also from the streets, where an unaccompanied woman risked being subjected to ridicule or sexual assault. In England, too, (‘a women’s paradise’ in the eyes of some Italian visitors), the presence of women in public began to be frowned upon. English women were discouraged from sitting in front of their homes or staying near their windows.

In the 19th century, mentally ill and disabled people were jailed or euthanized because, through their idleness and ‘irrationality,’ they undermined the ‘reason’ and productivity that the theory of Enlightenment promoted. Later, psychiatry and psychology emerged out of a desire to push these people back into the workforce so they could continue producing instead of being condemned to outright segregation or death.

By the early 20th century, eugenics took hold among prominent politicians like Winston Churchill, who said that the “unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a race danger.”

Rather than a simple output metric, productivity was—and in many cases, still is—tied to morality and social worth. The upper class, aided by the religious ideals of Protestantism, washed their hands of the oppression inherent in continually increasing productivity by convincing the masses that productivity is a virtue, not an imposition. Any deviation from this virtue was an excuse to be ostracized.

It’s not a stretch to see how this continues to impact us today. Disconnected from any true sense of communal support, designers often shun solidarity for efficiency and refuse to question the role of work in our lives.

On one hand, this is, again, because busy, individualistic workers don’t have the time or wherewithal to think about systemic effects—all that matters is doing better, faster. On the other hand, it’s because the capitalist paycheck hypnotizes us: the design industry has a strong through-line of promoting ‘consumption for happiness’ and even ‘consumption for distraction’—only when demand for consumption fades do we realize or critique our involvement or responsibility in the boom-bust cycle.

Ignorance is strength (Normality)

The last idea that took hold in this same period was ‘normality.’

Science was twisted to legitimize this social rule, which was then applied wholesale to body types, skin color, facial features, cognitive abilities, marriage status, social class, and more. Phrenology mainstreamed normality among the public and explicitly reinforced, through biased statistics, the already implicitly accepted idea of white, middle/upper class, cognitively able people as superior to all other races, classes, and cognitive abilities. In this way, science was an alibi for domination.

Capitalism during this time affected health physically through poorer working and living conditions, heavy pollution, and lost hands or fingers, but also in structural and conceptual ways. The rhythmic pace of the factories set the pace for working, and thus for ‘normality,’ while, at the same time, a population expansion reduced the social leverage of individual workers. People were forced into the box or left behind, and the conception of the body shifted from a dynamic organism to a machine that was either working or broken.

Normality applied to those outside of Europe as much as those within it, and with that distinction, the binary was created between the ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized.’ Ironically, although the pejorative of ‘savage’ or ‘uncultured’ was (and sometimes is) lobbed at Indigenous people, it was (and still is) those same people who, through their resources, cultural ideas, and forced labor, funded Europe’s—and later, America's—rise to power, its concept of liberty, and overgrown standard of living.

Many habits we take for granted in modern times started with the need to separate reason from body, holiness from filth, and civilized from uncivilized. Again, from Silvia Federici:

Many practices began to appear in daily life to signal the deep transformations occurring in this domain: the use of cutlery, the development of shame with respect to nakedness, the advent of ‘manners’ that attempted to regulate how one laughed, walked, sneezed, how one should behave at the table, and to what extent one could sing, joke, play.

How much of our desire for ‘good design’ comes from the idea that lousy design is ‘uncivilized’ or that the uncivilized can become at least a little ‘civilized’ or ‘normal’ by adopting good design? The idea of ‘good design’ comes from an era that praised the universalist, totalizing design theory (and aesthetic) of modernism, which, despite all the beautiful lines it produced, was, at its base, a paternalistic attempt to say, ’This is the way.’

In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar notes that

it is practically impossible to demarcate a single, stable real. To be able to do so, one has to parcel out entire domains of the meshwork as inanimate; … indeed, moderns imagine the world as an inanimate surface to be occupied; for many relational cultures, on the contrary, humans and other beings inhabit a world that is alive.

This ‘single, stable real,’ this standardization, tends to replace vernacular culture with frictionless efficiency—the cultural equivalent of clear-cutting a forest and planting a monocrop. It’s time to stop imagining that modernism holds all the answers, just as a plantation doesn’t hold biodiversity.

New truths

How does this all tie back to my statement at the top of this post claiming that capitalism’s ‘public image is imploding under its own weight’?

Believe it or not, we’re in a moment similar to the 1400s, when the Black Death wiped a large portion of the population off the European territory. That pandemic made mortality an omnipresent issue in daily life, which caused people to understand life is about more than social hierarchies and changed everything from work ethic to sexual attitudes. “For a broad section of the western European peasantry,” says Federici, it was “a period of unprecedented power.”

While power dynamics haven’t shifted to the same degree, I think something similar has happened with COVID. In the few years since, exploitation and corporate profits have reached new heights, but at the same time, our muscle for questioning and desire for change have gotten stronger. We’re looking for new ways to relate with each other, our technology, our work, our pleasure, and ourselves.

A relational mindset is gestating and, in small ways, starting to erode the dualist, separation-dependent mindset. The design industry would be wise to follow this pattern. By flipping the ideas outlined above, we can lead the design industry to a more fulfilling place—aligning our work with the value of relationships instead of capital.

What if we based our truth on collectivity and sensitivity instead of separation and numbness?

On sense-making and solidarity with people instead of profit and efficiency for corporations?

On a diversity of cultural ideas instead of a homogenization of them?

Modern design is care-less.

Not in the sense that we don’t care for what we do, but rather that we’re willing to sacrifice culture for efficiency. Contrary to the idea that designers ‘create’ culture, we must ask ourselves to what extent we standardize it. There’s evidence of this standardization in that everything looks the same now, from brands to cars, and Airbnb’s to architecture.

Efficiency is excellent for reducing friction—to do more, better, faster—but that ignores friction being a necessary, depth-giving part of life. When efficiency wipes out the chance of future abundance, it becomes a curse rather than a blessing. We don’t need to fear the AGI paperclip maximizer theory—we’re already subject to it daily in capitalism. But it increasingly seems like the extremes we’ve reached could cause a shift in the system.

People are reawakening their awareness of capitalism’s shortcomings in health, labor rights, community, and general life satisfaction. They’re questioning, speaking up, and searching for new ways to live, work, communicate, and organize.

Even science is beginning to understand what Indigenous cultures have known for a long time: that spending time around plants is essential for health, that trees communicate to share food and medicine, and the necessity of not taking more than required. That we didn’t understand this before comes from empirical science being a language of boundaries; what scientists don't know isn't named, and what can't be named isn't worthy of science.

We have to be aware of our worldview so we understand its bounds, how it shapes our reality, and how it affects our actions due to the blind spots it creates. The mechanistic worldview, which, if you live in the West, is the prevalent ideology, says that hierarchy comes from the top down: reason rules emotion. Jason Hickel writes in Less is More,

‘I am not my body,’ Descartes insisted. Rather, it is disembodied thought, or mind, or reason, that constitutes the person. Thus the phrase by which we all know him: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes succeeded in not only separating mind from body, but also establishing a hierarchical relationship between the two. … Any inclination towards joy, play, spontaneity – the pleasures of bodily experience – was regarded as potentially immoral. In the 1700s, these ideas coalesced into a system of explicit values: idleness is sin; productivity is virtue.

This worldview, which focuses on productivity and efficiency—and of which Modernism is a descendant—also birthed the climate crisis, among other crises. We need to deconstruct this mentality and create a new one if we want to have any positive effect on the climate. I think the concept of care can help us get there.

Care as a signpost

What if the barometer for successful design in the 21st century was care instead of efficiency? Care, not just for our craft and the beauty of the final product, but also after the fact, concerning our designs’ social and environmental effects, as well as designing for the ‘acquired knowledge’ that objects pick up with use over time.

This change can start with language, affecting how we see and interact with the world. For example, in Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer says

A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the [Potawatomi] verb “wiikwegamaa”—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.

Or take Tuvan, a South Central Siberian language, in which

the preferred way to say “go” in Tuvan refers to the direction of the current in the nearest river and your trajectory relative to the current. They keep track of that information as they’re moving around the landscape.

Language profoundly changes how we show respect and who we imagine deserves it. In languages like English, this respect is limited mainly to people and maybe animals. However, in various Indigenous languages, people understand that everything has a spirit and, thus, deserves respect and care: rocks, water, fire, and hills become active, animate beings with whom people have relationships.

New words that describe new feelings—like solastalgia, as I talked about a couple of weeks ago—can create new relationships between people and the world we inhabit. What new relationships could ‘care’ create or strengthen in design?

When we devalue care, we, as a society, avoid intimacy, and relationships become transactional. If we were to embrace care and the emotional connections it creates, we might view the system’s exploitation in a different, more consistently critical light. Ignoring what binds us together breeds ignorance and disconnects us from our humanity.

However, the blame does not solely lie with us. Capitalism, by its very nature, encourages emotional disregard. It fosters an individualistic mindset that prioritizes personal gain over communal well-being because if there's always something we can improve as individuals, then there's always something to produce, look forward to, accomplish, or pine for. To truly foster a sense of community, we must move off the capitalist plantation.

This is becoming ever-more clear. Social media, which ostensibly creates “community” and which many creatives use to make a name for themselves, overrides our sense of validation. Social validation used to be more or less predictable: if you did something good, you got praised, and vice versa. This kept our identities in line with society. But social media has overridden this by aligning our identities with an algorithm. We change our identities to get more likes, shares, and followers—based on what the algorithm determines is "engaging” (read: sellable), not what brings people together.

However, the issue of social media is downstream from our unending faith in market value. Like a cultural Ouija board, our collective pushing and pulling has created the false notion that everything comes from the market, and the market is our only choice. The success of this idea relies on our missing the forest for the trees, a skill we’re encouraged to abandon. Again, Kimmerer says that

We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa’s sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.

However, a more communal, socially driven system could change the purpose of production, design, and branding. Addressing needs (i.e., care) instead of increasing consumption (i.e., efficiency) naturally creates different types of products, designs, identities, and aesthetic goals.

Fulfilling design

Maybe care can allow us to fulfill the promises we sell in design. It could move us toward a 21st-century idea of design that shifts gears: from expert to facilitator, from salesperson to social actor, and from object-oriented to earth-oriented.

A few specific ways come to mind:

Collaboration

When we value care, we also start to value our now-unnamed collaborators—the trees converted into paper and the cows who supply casein for adhesives. But nature isn’t the only uncredited collaborator. Care might also extend value and visibility to the many designers, illustrators, 3D artists, and project managers (and more) who routinely go unnamed on projects so studios can keep a unified facade of coolness—and, undoubtedly, protect their ‘intellectual property.’

Being more thoughtful about how we design, produce, and consume reconnects us with the reality of interconnection with nature and each other, even in an industry as ‘modern’ as design. No person, designer, studio, or industry is an island, so we’d do well to honor the collaborators with whom we engage every day.

While taking life to live is part of being human, what's changed is the connection to the things we consume. While (some of us) are materially much better off compared to just a few centuries ago, we're disconnected from the origin of our belongings and the critical connections we, as a society, must sever to obtain them.

Not only that, our understanding of sharing—an integral part of collaboration—is often viewed as a zero-sum game; if you have something, I lack it, and vice versa, so we each guard what we have and take what we don’t. I think this is a relic of a care-less society that increasingly seems like it’s in its death throes. Care could shift us from seeing sharing and cooperation as acts that reduce value to ones that increase it. Instead of value degrading over time, it becomes increasingly distilled.

Creativity

How we approach care (or avoid it) changes how we express our creativity; depending on this, we ask different questions during the design process. In a way, a lack of care is why an Apple product will never look better than the moment you open the box and ever-so-delicately remove the paper wrapping. Meanwhile, a De Buyer carbon steel skillet gets more beautiful over time because of its patina, as does a Rimowa suitcase with the dings, dents, and scratches it picks up over its lifetime. While Apple front-loads all of its care during the design process, De Buyer and Rimowa understand that products must incorporate care throughout their lifespan.

I’ve started to see this short-sightedness in design a little how Kimmerer sees land restoration:

How we approach restoration of land depends, of course, on what we believe that “land” means. If land is just real estate, then restoration looks very different than if land is the source of a subsistence economy and a spiritual home. Restoring land for production of natural resources is not the same as renewal of land as cultural identity. We have to think about what land means.

In the same way, we need to consider what design means. Do we want to continue with the current throwaway culture that has led us to find microplastics in our blood, breast milk, and testicles, or do we want to use design more deliberately, more mindfully?

When we respect how a product or brand is used over its life, we can embed sentimental growth into the design, encouraging care and deterring disposal. The resilience of a skillet that still looks great after 50 years creates a ‘safety net’ for the product, person, and planet. Likewise, designing that resilience can be a springboard for creativity.

Reduction to the simplest forms doesn’t have to be the holy grail of design. In the 21st century and beyond, striving for simplicity without considering longevity must be considered negligent.

Systems thinking

Lastly, because of its relational nature—it needs at least two parties—care can push us to see the bigger picture and think in systems beyond brand and UI. While designers are used to leveraging systems thinking in our work to recognize the relationship between things—brand elements or product proportions, for example—that doesn’t often carry over to our relationships between people, industry, and society.

Deprived of these connections and without a social context, the focus of our work hovers around what we do instead of why we do it, often making us, for lack of a better term, “useful idiots” instead of mindful participants. We end up shunning care and solidarity as people for efficiency as designers.

Care can make us think of how a design affects the community it lives in. How does a studio’s structure affect its employees’ health or self-confidence? How might sourcing local producers affect our city’s economy (and people)? While we might think about these individually, we must understand and act on them systematically.

Is climate change old news? The short answer is yes. But, somehow, the long answer is no.

I recently read that people in the US see climate change as less important than they did three years ago. Maybe a part of this change is shifting focuses—increasing cost of living, Palestinian genocide, et cetera. However, it could also be how climate change is communicated; these other news stories seem more immediate and palpable than the typically data-driven climate change stories.

You know the ones: the articles about polar bears clinging to tiny ice rafts, the warnings about pollinators dying off, and the graphs showing ever-increasing parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

These don’t connect anymore—if they ever did in the first place. They shut us down instead of lighting us up, making us feel small, ineffective, or bored. On a psychological level, this happens because they’re big, slow-moving, distant, and there’s no clear way to fight against them. Often, if these stories leverage emotions at all, they paralyze, not encourage, us.

Speaking of fighting, over the past few weeks, I’ve interviewed designers from various backgrounds, asking them what they want to learn about sustainability. A typical response was that they wanted to know what they could do, even if only in their immediate area, on a small scale. They want to feel effective somehow.

These two situations are more related than they seem.

While climate stories do need to be told more thoughtfully, and taking action is essential, I also wonder if designers’ bias toward action doubles down on avoiding a crucial step in our climate journey: feeling emotions.

What would recognizing this often-ignored aspect of the climate crisis allow us?

Emotional Imagination

Disillusion is a natural step in seeing reality for what it is. In addition to general unhappiness with current affairs, it’s defined as “the process of becoming freed from false belief.” Without this step, we couldn’t create a new reality.

Since there’s been a relatively small cultural shift regarding climate change, I wonder if we’re not disillusioned enough. Somehow, what’s happening hasn’t impacted us emotionally. Our feelings haven’t had the same wild swings from dismay to clarity and back that you would get even from a teenage breakup. The world is shifting beneath our feet, and we, as a species, carry on walking the same path.

If you think of any pivotal moment in your life, it’s likely bound up with various emotions. In design, we use this to our advantage, connecting people with joy, sadness, compassion, or desire to get our point across (typically, that point is ‘buy this thing,’ but that’s another story). Social movements are built and grow because of an emotional story, not because they’re the most logical solution; the strong social identity formed around MAGA doesn’t reflect that you can’t just turn the clock back on cultural norms.

In contrast to these examples, when did we last feel grief or sadness, awe or compassion about climate change? Emotions help us form concepts, which then inform our imagination. However, when it comes to climate change, designers’ bias towards action can cut us off from feeling, so we end up understanding the problem in theory but not in reality.

This is backed by research. Norwegian psychologist, Per Espen Stoknes, writes in his book, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming,

Attitudes consist of three main parts, as captured in what psychologists call the ABC-model:



• An affective or emotional component: What feeling is connected to the thing, person, issue, or event? (I really do love oranges.)
• A behavioral component: What kind of action or readiness for behavior lies dormant in the attitude? (That daily glass of juice.)
• A cognitive component: What thoughts, knowledge, and beliefs come up from memory when attending to the issue? (Yep, the vitamin C.)

An attitude is strong and consistent if all three components are aligned: “I love oranges and eat one daily because they contain vitamin C.”

It seems that, in design at least, we’re missing the emotional component.

Quickly trying to solve a problem without sitting with it—without grasping its contours and feeling the emotions that bubble up—isn’t solving the problem. It’s forcing a solution. Hurriedly, we lose sight of what should stay and what should go; everything is up for discussion when we undervalue what the world needs and overvalue our specific objectives.

Our imagination for alternate futures becomes blunted, and we fumble our commitment to addressing the climate crisis.

The Climate Journey

So, if disillusion is necessary to fight climate change, but designers have a knack for avoiding it, how can we bridge the gap? We must first digest the climate crisis as people, then as designers. We have to strap into the emotional rollercoaster that it is.

A ‘climate journey,’ as this rollercoaster is often called, is not unlike the stages of grief; what we’re grieving for, in this case, is a relationship with the planet that we’ve let languish. But it’s a relationship that can be rekindled over months or years, gradually moving from ignorance to action.

I’ve come to understand this in four non-linear stages:

Awareness

A logical, information-driven understanding of what’s happening: deforestation, biodiversity loss, CO2e emissions, etc. There’s an understanding that emissions = bad. Here, people learn about nature and are generally convinced by technical solutions.

Embodiment

Although it’s the second stage, this is where disillusionment lies. We often skip or don’t notice it because we’re trying to implement the solutions we learn about in the Awareness stage.

Organization

Here, we start to search for a broader community:

What groups should I join?
Who are the people to know?
Who can I trust?

We start talking openly about the climate because it validates the feelings we all have individually. This lets us know we’re sane. This stage may be why you signed up for this newsletter in the first place.

Action

Finally, we do something. Together or alone, we try to make the future different than the past, whether through technology, culture, or policy.

Of these stages, embodiment feels like a crucial moment. While you can skip this step altogether—as noted by the entire movement of green growth—doing so also avoids a transformation in what society is working toward.

Like the immersion phase in a branding project, embodiment gives us a deeper context for what we feel, what we want to say, and how we want to say it. It helps us understand why we organize and why we take action. It (ideally) gives us an ethical compass rather than seeing our current situation as a technical problem.

Here, we start forming a stronger emotional connection with the earth. We often feel distraught over the state of the world and the loss of environments that have existed for millennia, epochs, and eons.

Embodiment is the stage of eco-anxiety—sometimes called “solastalgia”—which is sorrow due to unfavorable environmental change that’s out of one’s control. This might be mixed with rage and confusion. But it’s also a stage where compassion and love appear, otherwise known as “soliphilia.”

These two rather foreign-sounding concepts animate the sensitivities that capitalism numbs us to, and these sensitivities nuance our arguments. If the current system, and the poly-crisis that stems from it, survive because of our numbness, then it makes sense that the only way to change the system is to amplify sensitivities—to feel the emotions we’re often pulled away from or don’t have time for.

In a way, the solution to the climate crisis is inside us. Experts agree that the technical solutions already exist. What’s missing is the grief. The rage. The love.

But without an outlet, this cocktail of emotions can turn to depression, especially in individualized societies. In that context, emotions become a liability more than anything. However, a liability in an individualized context becomes an asset in a collective context. Sharing your thoughts and experiences publicly helps build connections with others who feel the same way; it lets them know they're not inventing emotions. It validates them.

On the back of this validation, we collectively push and pull, organize and act, to build power and shift culture toward a place that works for more people. And for the planet.

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a free course from the University of Amsterdam about post-growth economics, and the professor, Melanie Rieback, mentioned the current structure of how startups and VC investment work.

What struck me most was the “2 & 20” model, a fee structure that compels startups to become unicorns—companies valued at $1B or more. Not because they necessarily want to but because they need to pay the bills (i.e., VC debt). And they often pay the bills by getting more funding from other investors (i.e., more VC debt). Higher valuations make dollar signs pop up in investors’ eyes because they signal bigger returns; for the startups, this cash injection also means they can quickly grow and monopolize the market.

We know startups often make us, their users, the “product” through data extraction, but those who work in them also become products for their investors, morphing the tech sector into an economic version of The Human Centipede.

The chaser to that shot is that according to Melanie, climate tech VCs—or “impact investors,” as they’re often called—use that same “2 & 20” model. While these investors and the startups they fund say they want to build a better world that’s less wasteful and more equitable, the borrowers’ overgrown debts and the lenders’ outsized returns say otherwise.

Somehow, the unsustainable model of endless growth has appropriated the end goal of sustainability. It wouldn’t be the first thing capitalism has co-opted, and certainly not the last. But how does this continue to happen so easily?

The annexable grammar of sustainability

One hunch is that we often understand ‘sustainability’ as a verb rather than a noun. Focused more on the means rather than the end, it usually describes what we do rather than who we are. This small state change has an outsized impact because it’s much easier to parrot actions than to develop or maintain an identity.

Many ride bikes, but few are bikers. Reducing our meat consumption doesn’t make us vegetarians. Although we buy secondhand, we may not be thrifty.

While actions are necessary because they create visibility, they evaporate when we stop. On the other hand, identity connects us with long-term emotions, goals, values, and lifestyles; it’s the atmosphere that holds in what we find essential, which carries us in weak moments when we may not want to follow through with our actions.

On a personal scale, a lack of identity isolates our actions from one another, turning them into random phenomena rather than a series of conscious choices. On a social scale, this absence stops us from growing a stronger sustainability movement that raises awareness, deciphers between true and false, and holds the feet of corporations, clients, and bosses to the fire.

Without the social pressure to demonstrate these connections or prove their credibility, greenwashing companies can quickly appropriate what we do, turn them into marketing opportunities, and sell them back to us. Once-revolutionary actions become the next TikTok meme and the purpose of Earth Day morphs from climate activism to selling merchandise.

Is there a way to stop this degeneration?

A system’s purpose is how it behaves

I don’t think the appropriation problem is a question of ‘how to do sustainability right’ within capitalism. Understanding it simply as people looking to get a leg up would be naive: it’s an integral part of the system that makes viable growth that would otherwise be unviable.

For example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism wasn’t as natural as you might think: it was a centuries-long fight that the working class resisted at every step, often involving revolts and organized solidarity. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici notes that

…capitalism was not the product of an evolutionary development bringing forth economic forces that were maturing in the womb of the old order. Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power, and truly gave ‘all the world a big jolt.’ Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle ...

Capitalism and its benefactors survived this revolution by severing meaningful connections and appropriating what they considered ‘surplus’—the land from the commoners, people’s profit from their labor, and women’s bodies from their autonomy. This was done by force, not by convincing people of the benefits of a new system. Put another way, capitalism separated people’s identity from their actions and the individual from the collective.

I would argue that present-day sustainability (and myriad other) movements are so easily co-opted, at least in part, because of this same divide-and-conquer tactic. Maybe a more accurate way to describe current sustainability is what I do not who we are.

How can capitalism be sustainable when it’s a system fundamentally built on exploitation and separation? How can consumerism ever be “conscious”? As long as we design and market for ever-increasing growth, there is no such thing as sustainability—it doesn’t matter how organic your cotton is or how many times your plastic bottle has been recycled. As I mentioned in my first newsletter, “green growth,” the idea that we can technologize our way out of climate change, is scientifically impossible. It’s a rhetorical device as empty as “carbon footprint” and “recycling.”

But this doesn’t mean that markets, buyers and sellers, and money can’t commingle with sustainability; these things existed before capitalism and will exist after it, too. We just need to distribute the surplus differently.

Stronger Together

So, how do we claw back sustainability’s soul?

It seems growingly evident that we need to reverse the flow—from atomization toward integration—in two (unsurprising) areas: actions and identity. If capitalists and the capitalist system as a whole appropriate sustainability by pushing these areas towards individualism, designers need to build structures and spaces that pull them toward collectivism.

On a design-action level, this means getting involved earlier in the process, partnering with sustainability-focused business strategists, and helping companies redefine their business model in addition to their brand and how they market it. Holistically changing the structure of companies, not just the brand values that communicate that structure, will help us build alternatives to the neoliberal business models that infect sustainability.

On the social end of the process, we must design incentives for IRL interaction. While the internet does present us with a wide net of social relations, at a certain point, it becomes a handicap to meaningful community building.

On a design-identity level, we have to change our relationship with labor. The action of designing makes you a worker, not just a designer. Too often, we forget this in our efforts to differentiate ourselves and pack into the elevator of social mobility.

Designers need to be reminded that collectivity doesn’t negate individualism. In fact, the security afforded by collectivity allows you more freedom individually—that’s the whole idea behind systems like social security and universal basic income. Changing that relationship means increasing awareness of labor rights, leveraging worker ownership models whenever possible, and, crucially, making unions fashionable.

To loop back to the title of this issue, “Sustainable action is superficial,” I should reframe that by saying sustainable action alone is superficial. But it’s equally true that a sustainable identity alone, not tied to actions, is superficial. Integrated, these accomplish a lot; atomized, they’re easily co-opted, and the sustainability movement stagnates.

We must develop a collective sustainability identity that holds us together while taking actions that move us forward, along with the people around us.

The idea that there needs to be a “business case” for sustainability—that it has to be economically ‘worth it’ for businesses to be sustainable—sounds like a bad take cooked up in some corporate exec’s corner office.

But it’s true. If you look at it from a human-centered perspective.

Companies must turn a profit, shareholders need to see a return, and the economy has to grow, whether or not there’s any sustainability initiative.

“Business case” is usually a euphemism for ‘cheap enough not to eat into our margins.’ Sustainable materials need to be as cheap as plastic. Sustainable energy needs to be as affordable as fossil fuels. Sustainable production needs to be as inexpensive as sweatshop labor. In other words, for sustainability to be considered, it can’t affect the bottom line.

However, because ethics have market value, sustainability allows brands to be marketed as premium and capitalize on the social desire to have less impact. That’s also why greenwashing exists: brands want the appeal of ethics without doing the work of being ethical. Whether making sustainability the new luxury or lowering the bar for greenwashing, the system is set up to externalize the cost to both people and the planet.

We’re viewing sustainability from a perspective that, far from creating substantial change, centers on incremental changes that keep the machine running. If we flip the polarity and view sustainability from a ‘life-centered’ point of view, we can ask a much more transformative question: “What’s the planetary case for growth-oriented business?”

A global enterprise

I thought looking at this from a business perspective would be interesting. We often judge the planet on what resources it provides to our businesses—why not do a thought experiment reversing the roles? What are we providing to Earth?

COGS

The planet’s “Cost of Goods Sold”—the materials, labor, and so on needed to keep the world’s economies afloat—is astronomical. As I linked in last week’s Growth Imperatives, the global economy relies heavily on nature. Sarah Murray writes in The Financial Times,

According to the US Department of Agriculture, pollinators underpin one in every three bites of food eaten on the planet, while the World Economic Forum has estimated that, through everything from water retention to carbon sequestration, $44tn of economic value (more than half global gross domestic product) is “moderately” or “highly” dependent on nature. Given the accelerating rate of nature loss, the WEF’s figure is alarming. Scientists say that, unless measures are taken to slow the drivers of biodiversity loss, many of the roughly 1mn animal and plant species currently threatened by extinction will disappear within decades.

Ironically, we’re so dependent on nature for our modern way of life—it powers the world as we know it—yet we generally see it as something ‘out there,’ somewhere we go to, instead of something we’re constantly surrounded by. It's to be taken advantage of, at times ridiculed—and rarely has something of substance to teach us.

Old-growth forests and grasslands are continually demolished to make way for vast corn, palm, and soybean plantations: 46% of Earth’s entire land mass is now dedicated to agriculture—and 77% of that goes to feed livestock. Flying insect populations have dropped 25% globally since 1990, with specific areas like Germany (75%) and Puerto Rico (98%) showing more population loss. The latter primarily stems from pesticide use on those former forests and grasslands and, to a lesser extent, light pollution in and around towns and cities. Forests and all plant life are essential for carbon sequestration, but many of those plants rely on pollinators—of which bees are only one type, among moths, butterflies, and hummingbirds—to reproduce.

If we don’t remember to place business and economics within the web of life instead of outside, there will be cascading implications for food systems and daily life. A company whose COGS threatens its existence would at least draw questions about restructuring. Or worse, liquidation. Why would that be different when the COGS endangers the planet’s livability?

Profit

Okay, so what about profit—the remainder of revenue minus costs? Is nature seeing returns from business? Humanity is, sure. But the rest of nature? Signs point to a net loss.

Umair Haque sums it up well:

The rest of the world is “producing” stuff — goods — too. Unlike us, though, they are producing goods for everyone, not just [themselves]. Everyone, as in “all of life,” not just “us humans.” Think about the fish. They clean the rivers — from which everything drinks. Or think about the trees — they are happily producing air, which everything breathes. The soil is helping produce plants and other organisms, which are eaten by all kinds of life. The worms clean the soil, which benefits much, much more than just the worms.

Although the ideological trend of the last 500 years has been that we’re the highest form of life, another way to understand the situation is that, in reality, we’re one of the younger species, with various other plant and animal species, like horseshoe crabs and sharks remaining unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Homo sapiens has been around for ca. 200,000. A life-centered view of the world might see the rest of nature as our successful parent and humanity as its child trying to make a name for itself; growth-oriented business is our latest venture.

Much of that endeavor is concentrated on taking power, from gaining the maximum rather than giving it. Increasingly, it feels like we need to start giving power to have long-term prosperity. It makes sense. No relationship has ever survived where one party always gives and the other constantly takes. We’re draining our parent’s bank account right now, and we’ll likely be cut off at some point. Looking at recent temperature and biodiversity trends, that may be happening already.

With that in mind, what if we start thinking about our usefulness to the rest of nature, not just ourselves? What if businesses profited not by exploiting more but by empowering more?

Value Proposition

COGS are through the roof, and profit is in the dumps, but does growth-oriented business at least have a strong value proposition? What pains or gains is it claiming to solve?

Progress

Its value is all in the name: “growth.” And who doesn’t love growth? It allows us to reach new places. It pushes us to “think different.” We make ever-longer strides in an ever-shorter time.

But when it comes to economics, growth means something else entirely. Infinite growth demands infinite exploitation—endless ways to squeeze more money out of the same, or worse offering—which is why Uber now costs more than taxis, Amazon has introduced ads into its streaming services while raising prices, and GrubHub makes “mafia margins.” This quest for growth eventually forces everyone to follow the same playbook or be left behind. It’s a hedonic treadmill—a staircase whose top we never reach.

Even Adam Smith—the inventor of the “invisible hand of the market” theory, sometimes called the father of capitalism—knew that growth-oriented economics would eventually become inviable. He thought that “economic progress would eventually come to an end when the wealth of nations had been pushed to the natural limits of soil and climate,” but, according to him, that time was so far off in the future that it was irrelevant.

But that time has come, and it’s very relevant to us.

If you think about it, growth is silly unless it’s a means to another end. As an end in itself, it becomes ridiculous. What exactly are we progressing toward? Forgive me for the cliché, but what other thing in nature grows indiscriminately, except cancer? Everything else reaches a point where stasis is more advantageous than growth, but understanding when that time has come requires a connection to the earth, the self, and others. One that, for us, has atrophied.

Competition

The other half of the value proposition is that a competitive atmosphere provides prosperity, an allegedly organic part of nature that permits us to act on our long-held instincts. But even here, we go against the norm.

I was surprised to learn that nature doesn’t compete unless there’s plenty of surplus. Competition, high resource use, growth, and sprawl are all present in natural systems, but only for a specific time—once scarcity is present, nature switches from competition to cooperation. Society overlooks this transition and twists the basic idea of cooperation in nature.

Take Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.” His original statement says the species that successfully fits into the environment survives—not the strongest or most domineering species. Yet this second reading is what sticks today. The true meaning has been so misrepresented that even in nature documentaries like Planet Earth, the main attraction is the apparent dog-eat-dog nature of the world rather than any collaborative instinct.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi biologist, expands on this in her book Braiding Sweetgrass:

The key to success is to get more of everything than your neighbor, and to get it faster. That life strategy works when resources seem to be infinite. But pioneer species, not unlike pioneer humans, require cleared land, hard work, individual initiative, and numerous children. In other words, the window of opportunity for opportunistic species is short. …



Industrial forestry, resource extraction, and other aspects of human sprawl are like salmonberry thickets—swallowing up land, reducing biodiversity, and simplifying ecosystems at the demand of societies always bent on having more. In five hundred years we exterminated old-growth cultures and old-growth ecosystems, replacing them with opportunistic culture. Pioneer human communities, just like pioneer plant communities, have an important role in regeneration, but they are not sustainable in the long run. When they reach the edge of easy energy, balance and renewal are the only way forward, wherein there is a reciprocal cycle between early and late successional systems, each opening the door for the other. …



Under conditions of scarcity, there can be no frenzy of uncontrolled growth or waste of resources. The “green architecture” of the forest structure itself is a model of efficiency, with layers of foliage in a multilayered canopy that optimizes capture of solar energy. If we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest. Or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them.

Trees’ root-bound communication is another example of this “green architecture.” If one is affected by a disease, it can use the root system to alert others nearby, who can then create antibiotics. “Far from being inanimate, [trees] communicate with each other and even share food and medicine through invisible mycelial networks in the soil,” says Jason Hickel in Less is More. Contrary to the norm in modern economics, resources aren’t privatized unless necessary; if they can be shared, they will be.

We understand this on a micro level; a design system works because of its balance, not the supremacy of one element. Somehow, this notion is lost on a social level.

Repatriating business to nature

A life-centered perspective shows the absurdity of a “business case” for sustainability: using it as a business strategy to generate a competitive edge will never create the effect we need. As we see in nature, while competition brings incredible prosperity to some, cooperation generates more abundance by first focusing on sufficiency for all.

How can we build ‘enough’ into business?

The more I learn, the more I feel that the individualism we’ve all integrated can be an inflection point. If the machine was built and survives off weed-like growth, a way out may be to actively reject that growth by organizing differently and finding alternative forms of value. It’s hard to make an exhaustive list of ways to do that in this already-too-long (🥲) newsletter, but I want to talk about one example: “commoning.”

Most of us are familiar with this organizational structure because of the “tragedy of the commons” trope, but it could be a key way to say ’enough.’ Far from being a free-for-all, as is often portrayed, commons are a highly controlled way of organizing that incorporates checks and balances to avoid commodification. A successful modern example of this is Wikipedia.

In contrast to capitalism’s antisocial attitude, where decisions can be made unilaterally, commoning is a consent-based social act where decisions are made by ‘minimum objectionable proposal’ rather than vying for a minimum viable product. Specific methods like sociocracy can help codify this value.

By finding the proposal with the fewest objections, commons define a floor to work from instead of a ceiling to reach. Winner-takes-all decision-making can cause factions to form because it forces those who vote ‘yes’ to fully agree. Consent—leaving room to say that commoners don’t have overwhelming objections and agree enough to move forward—can keep the group on the same page while acknowledging the nuances of disagreement.

It’s a pro-social approach that neatly ties in with the solidarity I wrote about last time. Case in point: Post Office, an explicitly commons-focused business started by designers, intends to transfer ownership of its property to its members as soon as possible. This tactic of decommodifying property is common among commons. In essence, commoning centers on care rather than commerce to create prosperity—a stark contrast with capitalism.

Silke Helfrich & David Bollier write in Free, Fair, and Alive,

The point is not simply to develop economic or government policies that are more “sustainable.” The point is for people to have opportunities to deepen their relationships to natural systems, and in so doing, come to know them, love them, and protect them. ...



“We are of the same stuff” as the world, writes Weber, which is why a walk through a meadow or the arrival of spring causes such delight. Deepening our communion with nature is an indispensable path toward responsible care of the teeming, living world that lies beyond humanity. ... 



At its most ambitious, commoning begins a process of re-imagining the terms of modern human civilization at a time when its idealized notion of human aspiration, homo economicus, is revealing itself to be profoundly antisocial, indifferent to democratic norms, and ecologically irresponsible.

If we focus on ticking a box next to “sustainability” instead of creating a deeper bond with nature and each other, we’ll always be at least one step behind where we need to be. Sustainability is a way station in transit from exploitation to regeneration, not the final destination.

This is part two of a two-part series on how the design industry sees the future. You can find part one here.

At last, we’ve reached the headset-wearing, virtual-assistant-commanding future we've imagined for 90 years or more. But arriving at The Future™ forces us to grasp its actual contours instead of daydreaming about a promised utopia perpetually out of reach.

Do we still like what we see?

I ask this because, for as many people who accept Vision Pro at face value, I see an equal number actively rejecting the world proposed by it and similar headsets. Likewise, I see a well-substantiated, labor-conscious backlash from illustrators, writers, and actors to AI appropriating their work. Ironically, the response from the design industry largely trends in the opposite direction: we gladly ‘research’ this new technology to see what it can do while assuming our industry won’t be negatively impacted.

In the last several decades, designers’ working styles have largely become hyper-individualized (maybe even “anti-social.”) A focus on efficiency—working faster, improving workflow, streamlining collaboration—rather than considering the social context of our designs is combined with a neutral, instrumentalist, almost anti-intellectual "I just want to design" attitude that often ignores the politics inherent in our actions. Mirroring modernism’s coping mechanism of emotional disconnection, is the blind optimism of simply “making cool shit" letting us avoid the cognitive dissonance of outsourcing the creative process and ownership we claim is so precious to us? What are the long-term effects of rushing headfirst into the newest tools without affording space for criticality?

While I’ll admit the amount of technology packed in these devices and software is incredible, lessons learned from the past twenty years of tech culture—addiction, depression, misinformation, exploitation, etc.—give me pause about putting my whole visual field or creative output in the hands of these companies. The quickly nauseating effect of binocular screens plastered between me and the real world—or of an algorithm wedging itself between me and my imagination—prompts the question, “Is this really the future? What’s outside my peripheral vision?”

To reframe that as a more concrete, affirmative question: “What does the future of design look like when it’s driven by people instead of Designers?”

Recovering our vision: human and more-than-human

Making that transition is a cyclical process: Social narratives create social actions, which further inform social narratives. So, how can we switch tracks from the individual to social?

Aligning ourselves with wholeness instead of progress could help. I’ve been thinking about two routes to get there: labor and nature.

Social Working

What’s best for the whole?

This question has been beaten out of us—especially in America—to the point that it seems off-putting. Apart from a stretch between 1930 and 1960, when the country encouraged collective stability for some, it has mostly enforced individualist progress for all. At least in the Global North, it seems this mindset has emigrated and been naturalized worldwide.

I wonder if this lack of collectivity forces our hand in design. Do we default to seeing the world through tech progress and instrumentalism because those are the only social stories we see—or, more accurately, are allowed to see? How different would the future look if we regained the ability to act as social creatures first and designers second?

That path could balance the intuition, tradition, and community of being people with the intellect, innovation, and individualism of being designers. It would be a path of mutuality and resilience. Of solidarity.

Even for average workers, these ideas are essentially absent from our vocabulary. We’re often encouraged to define our design abilities in hyper-marketable ways and continually manifest new competitive advantages. Market forces guide our actions even if we’re not entrepreneurs or C-suite officers.

So what does solidarity, in contrast, offer us? Why is it necessary?

In their book, Solidarity, Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor say it can be “a rallying cry for the exploited and a way for more privileged reformers to think about how to solve the problems created by unfettered capitalism.“ In other words, solidarity is the salve that protects society from an otherwise all-consuming blaze of market economics. It gives us another lens to view the world and another barometer to measure our actions; instead of innovation for innovation's sake, we innovate for our sake. In contrast to individualism, the shared responsibility of solidarity creates space for creativity and ownership. It acknowledges our survival depends on others, whether we like it or not.

This idea isn't new by any means. Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor explain: Building on the Roman idea of ‘obligatio in solidum,’ and,

Arguing against the economic liberalism that doomed millions to pauperism in the name of free markets and individualism, a political movement in France took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. The solidarists, as they were called, saw interdependence as a fact of human life and the natural world and believed it should be the basis of law and policy.

Solidarity is also not new to design. In fact, the International Typographers Union was the oldest in America when it disbanded in 1989. DCW is trying to revive this working-class sentiment in the design industry, and professors at The New School in Manhattan used union tactics to secure better working conditions in 2022.

Since inequality is now more extreme than during the Gilded Age, I would argue that solidarity has regained new importance today.

Small ingresses have been made to explore this idea on a broader scale, such as a 2018 workshop series sponsored by AIGA, the biggest graphic design organization in the US, which looked at how we can create modern design unions. Sadly, that project—apparently meant to be ongoing—seems to have died less than two years after it was birthed.

There's a rising tide of designers taking a more immediate—if less collectively organized—route to solidarity by creating worker-owned studios, sharing their insights and financials, opening flexible community spaces, and thinking up yet-to-be-invented structures. That all these businesses were started by people 40 and under might indicate a generational shift in the idea of labor rights and competitive secrecy. It signals that the exploitation the design industry perpetuates, even within studios’ walls, is no longer being taken as a given or a rite of passage.

PORTO ROCHA, another under-40s agency, recently implored the design industry to collectively stop doing free pitches. At the time of writing, 6131 people, including myself, have signed the letter. This gives me hope—although solidarity, like creativity, is a process, not an event. It needs ongoing care and attention. It requires an identity. (No, not a brand identity.)

What kind of identity can we tie to solidarity? There are myriad, but one in particular seems like a good fit.

Holistic Feeling

Although solidarity offers a more positive vision of society, society doesn't exist in isolation; it’s a microcosm of the wider world. To create a more sustainable vision of the future, we must remember that we're a part of nature, not apart from it. Sadly, this detail is often forgotten, even in climate messaging.

Could this partly explain why the sustainability movement hasn’t made a dent in the decades it’s been around? Movements require emotion, not just knowledge, to survive. And emotion requires a story and a cast of characters that imagine what could be, not just reject what currently is.

I wonder if, along with the strategy of solidarity, animism could be that identity for design. This belief that there’s living energy in everything from rivers to rocks to wind could help us develop respect for the world around us rather than look at it as a storehouse to ransack. It could help us realize we need to be stewards of nature, rather than its nepo baby, pillaging and profiting off the gifts it has given us without giving anything in return. This compassion—this solidarity with the broader world—helps build the story and cast of characters we’ve been missing. It moves us closer to wholeness.

In Solastaglia, Ken Hada writes that an obstacle to creating this narrative is our refusal to “emotionally accept the fact that we can’t benefit from some of nature without protecting all of it.” Acknowledging this dichotomy would mean admitting fault, ignorance, the necessity for drastic change, and de-centering humanity as the highest form of life. But the timing is ripe for this reckoning. The climate crisis is asking us to reconnect with the planet’s future, not just society’s; with care for the earth, not just ourselves. Until we fully believe this, we’ll be treading water, looking at people as ‘consumers’ and natural wonders as ‘resources.’

We had this animist connection many centuries ago, and indigenous nations like the Potawatomi still have it. However, modern society has largely abandoned it to follow the hypnotic hymn of ‘progress,’ which ignores nearly all metrics except material and economic growth.

In a roundabout way, animism could help address multiple problems that pursuing progress has brought us: overproduction, biodiversity loss, or inequality. It creates an economy of need instead of desire. But then, that also begs the question: in an economy of need, what is the need for designers?

A divergent view of the future

I want to wrap up by noting how important we say the exploratory phase is to the design process; often, the coherence of the final product depends on a swath of investigation. I wonder if we miss that when thinking about the future. Propelled by millennia of momentum, we feel like we’re in the ‘refinement phase’ of society—however, the reality is we’re in a continual exploratory phase—and it only takes a small percentage of people to spur a new approach.

This newsletter is part of that new approach. It’s an attempt to think out loud, communally, and try to push something new into the world. Since it’s a work in progress, I haven’t touched on all the possibilities outside of a tech-focused lens. However, I think other possibilities will use an affirmative approach that asks what world we want to build instead of what problem we want to solve. Maybe that’s why we find ourselves here: problem-solving is short-term; world-building is long-term.

To think long-term, tech has to become just another tool that helps us construct the future, not the future itself.

This is part one of a two-part series on how the design industry sees the future. You can find part two here.

For me, the future doesn't exist anymore.

At least not in The Future™ that has been sold to us—that manufactured, trademarked, advertised idea of how great life will be just a few short years from now.

Until recently, I was lost in the sauce, planning what would happen in my life (under unreasonably perfect conditions), visualizing the possibilities of future tech and the promises it would bring—high-speed transportation with hyperloops, faster digital interactions with computer-brain interfaces, and life-extension technologies—the stuff of sci-fi.

So what happened?

Nearly five years ago, I started thinking about the future of the planet rather than just The Future™ of society. I reckon this was due to my love of the outdoors, reignited in 2017 when learning to rock climb allowed me to have close conversations with nature and my self-doubt. I'm sure the trauma of not continuing that conversation for the entirety of Spring 2020 also helped.

Somehow, thinking about the future of an aged thing makes you look at its past and, consequently, your own; learning more about our collective climate trajectory made me think about my personal path and that of society. I learned to look like a child does.

"Why x instead of y?" "Why does this work like that?"

Eventually, I realized that my profession had often co-opted my imagination: Design became my all-encompassing reality, not just something I did, and I took many of its central teachings (ahem, Modernism) as gospel instead of guesswork. Along with rock climbing, my transition to freelancing a couple of years after COVID helped spur this epiphany.

Having days filled not with design but with a multitude of things—invoicing, business planning, reading, designing, breathing (correctly), project managing, lunch with my wife, writing, looking for work, looking out the window—helped to separate "Me, the Designer," from "me, the person."

So, in this two-part issue, I want to look at the future from two perspectives: first, deconstructing it as a Designer and then reconstructing it as a person who designs.

Intravenous technology

The contemporary design industry implicitly values tech progress and ultimately sees it as social progress. The two ideas are nearly inseparable. Better tech means we've developed more as a society and are better people for that. Here, "tech" refers to a specific type of technology: proprietary, refined, and sellable rather than open-source, natural, or sharable. These refined technologies turn social value, held by society as a whole, into business value, held by companies and their shareholders.

This "enclosure" happens surprisingly often. Now, in fact. Tech companies are co-opting AI models developed by public research institutes, vacuuming up all of the information on the internet—copyrighted or not—to train said AI models, and then re-selling us an informational slop in some tech version of The Human Centipede.

To quote Matthew Wizinsky in Design after Capitalism,

Developments like [...] the internet, computing, [...] voice-recognition software, nanotechnology, touch screens, and clean energy have all been nurtured and guided by states, not corporations.

We often see tech giants as inventors of these technologies, which builds up the lore of these companies as indispensable. It reinforces the idea that the tech culture that spits out these products is a cornerstone of our industry. Because of this, not only do we use them to shape our designs, but they also shape us; more specifically, we're shaped by the business strategies that drive their creation and commercialization. Like any other consumer, we buy into the story that we need the Apple Pro Display XDR or Vitsœ shelves—or at least good knockoffs—to show we're "real" designers.

How can we not see tech progress as inherently good if much of our identity is wrapped up in buying tech products? What adverse effects—environmental, for example—do we disregard so we can continue to be wrapped in the mystique of Design and The Future™? Again, the social value of making design is caught up in the business value of being a Designer. Before this "come to Jesus" moment, any criticism of tech likely produces a swell of cognitive dissonance.

Totally rational

This idea that tech progress === social progress largely relies on the notion of "rationalism above all," a totalizing mindset that eliminates alternate ways of seeing problems. Emotions and intuition aren't valuable; only empirical data and quarterly returns are. We rarely consider that design solutions could come from different ways of organizing society or giving importance to different values beyond efficiency or frictionlessness.

But where does this rationalism come from?

It might seem like a stretch, but the base of this worldview comes from the Enlightenment period when we began to see separation: between reason and emotion, the mind and body, men and women, upper and lower classes, "civilized" and "uncivilized," humanity and nature. Hierarchies formed or were greatly exaggerated in each case, not passively but through subjugation.

Descartes, one of the fathers of modern science, said the "natural" things—emotions, the body, women, nature—were literally machines and beasts meant to be used and exploited for humanity's betterment. That was their only purpose. Conveniently, this lets those who exploit them, usually men of a particular class or creed, off the hook for damages done. Any bodily or environmental harm is filed under "collateral damage."

The tech industry uses a similar alibi. Is social media producing misinformation that causes genocides? Are infinite scrolling and short-form video creating an attention crisis? Is AI usage producing massive energy costs? These are fine as long as we create shareholder value. Design is caught in the web of responsibility since we develop tech's brand narrative, visual identity, and interfaces. Is this what we want to be known for?

This viewpoint has other shortcomings.

The idea of "rational" thinking assumes that reason and emotion are separable, but are they? You can't separate them unless you're somehow optimistic or confident about what you can do without them, so even the decision to remove emotions is somehow emotional.

Rationalism survives because we're disassociated from our critical, questioning emotions, because we lack community, and because we don't have time to sit and feel. When these yawning gaps are created, the only option left is rationalism. Systems survive because of their connections, so is it any surprise that more systems are breaking down the longer we've been disconnected?

Rationalism also ignores that technology is a small part of the system of social change. "Democratization" is often a word thrown around, but left to their own devices, refined tech like social media, AI, crypto, and NFTs generally create conditions more akin to the Wild West than any 'democracy.'

Sure, ChatGPT can make your life easier, but OpenAI and its investors are the ones striking gold. The user—and because it scrapes all media on the internet, your creative work—is the gold itself, just like our questions for Alexa, thoughts for social media, and cookies for the internet.

Sandboxed design

The design industry doesn't get far when it takes a shot at imagining the future outside of tech, and when we do, it's usually for a specific class of society. Speculative design projects and the companies that commission them are often obsessed with luxury; there's little to no speculation about resource overuse, inequality, or the need to repair the damage past designs have caused. Like Enlightenment thinkers and neoliberalists, it's easy to speculate when you're discounting and externalizing all the harm.

Actual speculative design would consider these things while imagining thriving societies; until then, speculative design is just a luxury daydream. It's a distraction from reality's dystopian aspects, creating a pleasant image for a company and building hype for a 'product' that may never exist—in turn, making the company seem valuable and innovative. Like many other aspects of life, capitalists have co-opted the future to draw eyes away from their current exploitation.

Design's aiding and abetting has been the norm since (at least) the Industrial Age: commercial artists helped forge the "signature" of high-quality artisan craftspeople to make low-quality, mass-produced products, and Modernist designers beautified corporate messaging that focused on the consumer's emotional shortcomings rather than their practical ones.

Even when we make or consume "disruptive" work, it's also within capitalism's purview, which makes us value inconsequential but visible activism more than consequential but invisible questioning. That's why (PRODUCT)RED exists instead of understanding structural adjustment and its effects. Or why designers create activist posters and websites instead of engaging in activism itself. Or why much of the newest sustainable branding appears to be for VC-backed carbon offset companies. Visibility trumps effect.

Focusing on the symbolic part of systems change helps us ignore the structural part—that is, we make incremental adjustments to the current system instead of creating a new one. We play in the sandbox instead of engaging with the world.

So, how do we engage? How else can we see the future? We'll explore that next time. In the meantime, if you haven't already, consider how the tech industry might be appropriating your vision of design and what you do with it.

Love it or hate it, you have to admit Modernism has staying power. It has been more or less ubiquitous since the mid-20th century, aside from some backlash in the 1970s-1990s. Most contemporary branding is still a permutation of Modernism; it may be more flamboyant, but the core concepts remain the same:

Less is More.

The design is complete when there's nothing else to take away.

According to Dieter Rams, "good design"—in other words, Modernism—is sustainable; with its minimal style, that seems natural. Less "unnecessary" flourishes should mean less material used. But how true is this in reality?

Does a Modernist mindset and aesthetic help us move toward a more sustainable future? Or does it sell us a bridge to nowhere?

Credit where credit is due

I have to start by acknowledging the problems that Modernism solves well.

Because of its utilitarian focus, it shines in mass production, where physical margins and efficiency are perpetually refined and improved. Cars have become more aerodynamic, technology more miniaturized, and packaging less bulky. The full-court press on technological progress has led to incredible improvements in material well-being; similarly, the ability to connect with customers about their needs has become much more sophisticated.

Another area in which Modernism excels is "universality." It creates clarity, legibility, and reproducibility. Much like assembly-line production, it's based on continuous refining until a design is sculpted to the essential—for example, Massimo Vignelli with his six typefaces, structured grids, and fundamentalist design.

If used skillfully, this essentialism creates shared understanding, potentially leading to more sustainable outcomes: more evident designs need their functions communicated less frequently, so fewer resources are used. People can move through their day more efficiently, using their energy to concentrate on what matters.

A tail-eating snake

Production efficiencies favor linearity and consumption

While Modernism allows us to design and produce goods efficiently, the definition of "efficient" is constrained. For example, streamlining production theoretically reduces emissions, but in practice, those reductions happen because of government intervention or public pressure. Corporations rarely volunteer to internalize the costs of environmental harm because externalizing it is a prime source of profitability.

When emissions reductions do happen, they last only briefly due to the Jevons Paradox, as we discussed last week. Less is More, indeed.

The quest for miniaturization has led to unopenable and unserviceable products. Often, warranties are voided if the user even thinks about repairing what they bought, or, even worse, the products are nearly impossible for users to repair without hiring—or being—an expert repair technician. This irreparability has gotten a lot of press recently, and the EU has pushed consumers to have more rights to repair.

But even when products are reparable, minimalism highlights their flaws. Scratches draw scour, dents provoke pity, and laptops de-ionized by palm grease signal obsolescence. Our devices are best when they come off the production line, and their perceived value drops rapidly once they're used. The marks of life become a detractor more than a note of distinction, and products become passé before their time has passed.

This works in a vicious cycle with our broader cultural imperative to have the newest and best version of everything. Far from being a sustainable aesthetic, Modernism implores us to consume more. Newness gives us that oh-so-satisfying dopamine hit, but it also prevents us from feeling the complex emotions of prolonged usage. Would living longer with our products make us more aware of the lives we—and they—have lived? How would that change our relationship with the world and each other?

Universality creates monoculture

There's also a glaring problem that Western designers often overlook: Whose culture becomes the standard? With universality, culture becomes an all-or-nothing game to whom the winner goes the spoils. But what is lost when culture becomes homogenized?

Different ways of thinking go extinct, and once resilient societies become brittle. A myopic culture, so obsessed with its solutions, might even see alternative methods of designing and building as extraterrestrial. Now more than ever, we need those different ways of thinking and seeing the world.

We're reaching a singularity as culture homogenizes, especially over the past 15–20 years. Many things look the same across various industries and continents—branding, fashion, architecture, technology, automobiles. Cultural "biodiversity" is dwindling. This abolition of local vernacular may be comforting if you want to feel at home wherever you go and whatever you do, but it's terrible if you want to be surprised, delighted, challenged, comforted, intrigued, or a million other nuanced emotions.

This singularity is a symptom of Modernism pushed to its extreme. A preoccupation with efficiency creates an ever-expanding search for avenues to cut costs and increase adoption. Eventually, there's no other choice. It's hard not to sell out. There's a reason "they don't make 'em like they used to."

Can Modernism, in turn, be seen as a symptom of the nearly universally loathed capitalist growth imperative? And is our compulsion with that aesthetic caught up in the idea that, as Mark Fisher says, "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"?

Back to the future, not a return to forever

Seeing the Modernist forest for the trees doesn't necessarily lead us to a way out.

Likewise, an exit won't manifest by simply reverting to the past; we have to combine lessons from history with critiques of the present to create a new narrative that carries us forward. This change will first come from each of us individually, then collectively. It will demand new vocabularies: social, business, and, of course, visual.

We can design objects for their "growth value" rather than exchange value, welcoming the luster of extended use—which was the norm from the beginning of humanity until the 1950s, before the arrival of mass production. In a way, the quest for efficiency and reproducibility squeezes the last bits of humanity out of our products. The fingerprints we used to recognize as those of a craftsperson became those of a machine and, more recently, of software.

In Design for Resilience, Stuart Walker sums this up nicely:

Design should certainly learn from and reference the past and build on earlier contributions to the discipline. Moreover, this does not have to be done in ways that are always novel and original; such contemporary preoccupations can themselves be criticized as being part of a system that constantly promotes newness and innovation in the name of progress and economic growth; a system that is clearly highly damaging and grossly unsustainable. ... [T]hink of the provenance-revealing features of a building that has been repaired, added to, and repurposed over time, or the patina of a well-used wooden chair, kitchen table, or hand tool. These aesthetic qualities emerge from context and culture, and consequently such artifacts often have a unique and satisfying “fit” with place, an “at-homeness” that is a function of time, chance, tradition, and enduring use.

These qualities of "fit" and "at-homeness" emerge with time and respect for the design's original concept. The idea of improvement over time contrasts starkly with newness, which, as we've seen, generally breaks down or gets worse over time.

How can we create future-oriented designs that embrace this concept, reduce waste, and change cultural stories of need, desire, and sufficiency?

Maintenance can be a point of resistance that creates personal independence and physical connection because it leans into what Ruben Pater calls the "Hacker Mentality." In CAPS LOCK, he quotes Anja Groten, who says it "is a way to emancipate users of technology from being passive consumers to becoming critical makers."

Some brands are beginning to make repair-only stores. This is a good start, but it still generates proprietary, producer-consumer relationships—much like utility companies trying to own the solar grid instead of allowing personal, distributed solar installations that would enable us to sell our excess energy back to them.

How can we design products, brands, businesses, and services that restore or augment the user's autonomy instead of co-opting it?

We can also design to minimize scars rather than highlight them. I don't mean creating a medium-tone world where you don't know if something is dirty or just a perfect shade of PANTONE® Ultimate Gray. Somehow, our cultural singularity has already brought us that. Instead of working against time, we could work with it by investing in different materials, patterns, and textures that let us embrace faults, glitches, and imperfections as signs of individuality rather than character defects.

This requires a different outlook on what design is and who it serves. It would be a design informed by transcultural understanding and longevity, not mood boards and short-termism. One built on a library of feelings instead of already-produced references and reinforced by a political perspective that our industry has abdicated for decades. These concepts could help us understand the implications of our designs beyond their market value and quarterly earnings.

How can we incorporate the passage of time into our designs rather than suck it out of them?

We can continue with ‘design as usual’ if it’s ✨green✨ … right?

Mycelium cardboard. “Bio”-plastics. Algae-based inks. We’re developing myriad tech advancements and methodologies to help reduce the emissions and waste our industry produces. But I can’t help asking if we’re taking steps forward without thinking about the direction we’re heading.

I’m not saying these innovations aren’t worthwhile. They are, and we should continue making them. But for as much material progress I see, it seems there’s an inverse amount of cultural progress. Put another way, we’re pushing strategy aside and making a beeline toward execution. This is dangerous for a few reasons:

Economic growth dampers sustainable efforts

Regardless of sustainable materials or technology, reducing emissions is hard if GDP is growing. Higher GDP generally indicates more production and consumption, and within our current system, GDP always has to grow. This means that although we’re using more sustainable materials, their effects are quickly nullified by the increasing amount we use. Especially in a world where sharing is not encouraged. This is known as Jevons Paradox.

The recyclable materials we’re using aren’t being recycled

What happens to those materials in their next life stage? The pace of economic growth also nullifies the benefits of reuse. We’ll never recycle enough and it’s a challenge to even recycle correctly. A new study shows that, at most, 10% of all post-consumer plastic waste has been recycled since 1980; the rest ended up in landfills.

When resource use grows exponentially—again, because of exponential economic growth—recycling loses even more effect. Physical limits exist for one process (recycling) but not the other (economic growth*).

Innovations like biodegradable plastics come with big asterisks

While this is a big theoretical leap forward, it may realistically be a small step. The hype around this technology is that it’s compostable, but that’s only under particular conditions. Biodegradable plastic can’t biodegrade in the open air; often, it won’t even degrade in your home compost.

How you’re able to dispose of it depends on the labeling: ”industrial” or “home” compostable. The former means you need to send it off to be processed; if there is no specification, it likely needs to be processed industrially. The big catch is in many countries, the infrastructure necessary to treat these plastics doesn’t even exist yet, so much of it will end up incinerated or in a landfill, just like regular plastic.

Just from these examples, of which there are many more, we can see that focusing on how something is made—rather than why it needs to be made—nerfs the effectiveness of our industry in combating climate change. We end up throwing mountains of cash, time, and energy at a problem better solved if we took a step back and thought about the system as a whole. Changing only the materials we use while letting our industry continue as usual is almost as bad as changing nothing at all.

My optimistic side wants to think this short-sightedness is simply a result of us, as an industry, being uninformed. My pessimistic side feels much differently. Whatever the cause, if we want to be useful, we need to open our aperture.

*Mainstream economic theory claims there are no limits to economic growth, but many ecological economists have pointed out that unlimited growth (and, therefore, resource use) on a finite planet is impossible. The latter makes sense to me.

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Our myopic view of the climate crisis

Despite their heavy focus, the climate crisis goes deeper than cutting CO2 emissions or using less plastic. But those issues are marketable and easily visualized, like recycling schemes and carbon footprints. They let society continue along the same general trajectory, and that’s one of the main benefits for the status quo.

So, what else is there if it’s not just about emissions and plastic? With a bit of digging, you can probably guess the big ones: plant and animal biodiversity, water scarcity, soil fertility, et cetera. Mandatory economic growth, as we’ve seen.

But just below the topsoil lay many intersecting issues that may at first glance seem unrelated: individualism, labor rights, attention, social separation, colonialism, commons enclosure, loneliness, the devaluing of indigenous knowledge, the dualist worldview, and more. These issues all tie into the climate crisis by driving different types of consumption, degradation, and waste. And they hint at a more deeply entrenched problem.

As a society, something that stops us from widening our field of vision and making progress on the climate crisis is a crisis of imagination. We’re told that it’s one particular, specific thing. That it depends on us, individually. That tech advancements will solve it. And we stop there. We don’t investigate further. We don’t connect the dots. The paradigm stays the same.

Our worldview needs to change, not just our pragmatic, energy-producing and waste-generating activities. The first route can be thoughtful and strategic, backed by research and long-term vision. The second lets us give in to the hype of easy technical solutions and avoid the hard work of self-reflection, understanding, and context-building.

But it’s easy to get caught up. It happens all the time with technology. NFTs, AI, VR. Direct air carbon capture, “green” hydrogen, autonomous electric cars. What does the hype around these products exist for? Driving consumption and stock prices, mainly, but it also drives a narrative of systemic problems being fixed, at last, by some technical solution—a proprietary one, mind you.

However, discrete tech solutions are rarely up to the task of fixing system-level problems. Case in point: all of the tech that has made our job faster, easier, and more efficient has never given us back even a minute of personal time. That decision is reserved for the people in charge of the system (your boss—or you if you’re lucky).

My general hope with this newsletter is to help you avoid the hype cycle and see relationally. To fast track to a new mindset and substantive learning rather than stagnate in a slightly different version of the current system. To build a healthy social imagination that challenges power, challenges reality, and creates self-confidence, just like the imagination we exercise daily in our design work.‍

Opening our mental aperture

That previous line is why designers play a bigger role in climate action than we imagine. Every day, our work forces us to birth new ideas into the world. We’re trained to have the foresight to see the potential in ideas not fully formed. Ideas that make you look at the world sideways.

Because of that, and in contrast to the materials myopia, I would argue that our skills are well-suited to influence how climate stories are told, to help people see society differently, and to reimagine their relationship to nature (that is, to themselves). That’s what we need to affect. If not, the practical solutions will always follow the momentum of the current system.

That’s not to say we’re going to save the world. That’s already been tried with Design Thinking—at times with disastrous results, like when IDEO tried to improve the lives of Gainesville, NC residents by rebranding the city instead of helping the government solve tangible problems like affordable housing, food prices, and education. Design Thinking generally looks to simplify complex issues instead of appreciating and leaning into their complexity. As a result, it instinctually tried to squeeze all problems under the umbrella of design instead of using design as a tool within multidisciplinary teams to facilitate progress.

I want to end by restating that before we take any action, we should sit with the problem in a few different ways:

We need to unlearn the modernist simplification obsession of the last 75 years. In branding, this simplification often serves to create broad appeal, reduce costs, and increase sales. But society isn’t a corporation any more than corporations are people. In the 21st Century, the effect of this reductionism is a flattening of possibilities; what was once, debatably, a search for stability is now a compulsion that has caused our ideas to become increasingly fragile.

We need to learn about the problem intellectually; this is obvious but important nonetheless. You’ll never know everything about the climate crisis—there’s simply too much to know—but developing context is necessary. Understanding how the issues mentioned above interrelate and how we arrived at the present moment will make your storytelling much more nuanced. It might also make you incredibly upset, among other things. Which leads me to my last point.

We need to consciously feel how the crisis affects us emotionally. It’s common to feel conflicting emotions the deeper you look into the topic. Grief. Connection. Rage. Hope. These emotions are valuable, as is their incongruence. For one, to understand how the crisis affects us—something I think many of us repress. And two, to internalize the complexity of the problem. This embodiment helps create shared understanding rather than the cold individualization of strict reasoning.