I’m gladly surprised to find out that What Design Can’t Do, often in pair with my friend Afonso Matos’s Who Can Afford to Be Critical?, happens to be frequently discussed in the latest issue of the Chilean journal Diseña – one of my favorite design journals. This issue is about decolonization, a subject I closely follow, though not one I directly address in my own work.
What I’m less surprised of is how easily these scholars move beyond the “attitudinal” reading of our work, as probably they were asked, times and again, such questions as “why are you so negative?”. This brings me to an important note on mood. Both Matos’s publication and mine are usually characterized as “moody”, that is, publications that express a particular sentiment – a negative one, ça va sans dire. But this doesn’t mean that the rest of design literature is devoid of an “emotional atmosphere”; it’s just that this atmosphere is taken for granted and, therefore, concealed. I’d describe it as either a hazy optimism or a kind of professional-scientific (over)confidence.
By acknowledging and manifesting our own prevalent sentiment, we show that there is no such thing as a lack of mood, even – if not especially – in academic publications. In light of this, an author must ask themselves: what passion drives my writing?