The design field operates according to a fundamental conviction: that what we call design has an unambiguous existence. Back in the days, delimiting design was easy: whereas the mass-produced moka pot hissing on the stove was design, the handmade ceramic cups used to drink its coffee weren’t. Design began with the series and ended with it. Nowadays, things are more difficult: design escaped its industrial enclosure to become a mentality, which is to say that our mentality has become industrialized.¹ The few handmade objects still surrounding us owe their aura to design. Design haunts them.

Whatever we make or encounter–a thing, an arrangement of things, a procedure to arrange such things–is haunted by design. Even if design is not there, it is already there. Thus, the ontological status of design is a ghostly one. But design is a peculiar ghost, one that craves the tangible world of the living. Design is like Slimer, the gluttonous ghost from Ghostbusters: a specter that enjoys ingurgitating as much food as it can.

Slimer’s interactions with the material world are not seamless: they leave slime wherever they go. We can allegorically interpret such gelatinous secretion as design’s ability to reconceptualize things within its mode of comprehension: suddenly, a pebble starts having a form and a function, it gets liable to a process of improvement, a process that is itself subject to a method. What happened? Design has digested the thing: the pebble is now an artifact, a designed object. Design’s metabolism has left its muculent mark and spurred out what it couldn’t process, namely, the thing’s symbolic and ritual aura, its culture; substituted by design culture, with its own equalizing symbols and rituals. The thing is apparently the same, but it is in fact completely different.

In 1963, Italian design polymath Bruno Munari amused himself by describing an orange, peas and a rose as industrial objects. Whereas the orange is “an almost perfect object”, the rose is deemed completely useless and complicated. Munari’s innocent divertissement, a sort of lesson in design thinking and perhaps a subtle critique of mass production, exemplifies the actual way in which design comes to reinterpret and thus change reality. Once such reinterpretation has happened it is very hard to think reality otherwise, beyond functionality and efficiency.²

According to design curator Paola Antonelli, designers are “respectful, curious, generous, and hungry for other fields’ bodies of knowledge and expertise, designers invade without colonizing. Who can we trust more? They should run the world.”³ Ruha Benjamin might disagree. Asked, during a workshop, to offer a definition of design, the sociologist suggested that “design is a colonizing project”. By that she meant that design is used to describe everything.⁴ Description is indeed the form that design’s slimy digestion takes.

As Paul Rodgers and Craig Bremner denounce, “design is neither a product nor a service. Design occurs in relationship to everyone and everything – it describes and shapes relationships.”⁵ Design proceeds through formalization. Focusing on one of today’s most successful design currents, design thinking, Benjamin points out its capacity to encapsulate any form of activity, from the organization of a protests to the user journey of a banking app. The problem is that design thinking is forgetful, not unlike design in general: it neglects histories.⁶ Again Benjamin:

If one needs to “subvert” design, this implies that a dominant framework of design reigns–and I think one of the reasons why it reigns is that it has managed to fold any and everything under its agile wings.

According to the US scholar, there are risks associated with design thinking, an “umbrella philosophy” that diminishes broader forms of human activity, erasing the genealogies from which they emerged in the first place, canceling what Ezio Manzini calls tradition.⁷ It’s a matter of hegemony: “Whether design-speak sets out to colonize human activity, it is enacting a monopoly over creative thought and praxis.” Benjamin’s concerns are specifically related to racial issues. From this vantage point she is able to see the way in which design depletes empowerment: “Maybe what we must demand is not liberatory designs but just plain old liberation. Too retro, perhaps?”

A sense of disillusion partly derives from the realization that design can be, like money, a general equivalent: something that severs the links between things and thus estranges them. It can devour contexts. Practitioners suspect that the umbrella is too small, that design is lacking the conceptual and practical means of encompassing human activity, and that by attempting to do so it is actually making tabula rasa.⁸ Design might be the last successful avant-garde: a deliberate repudiation of histories. Designers who come to terms with such awareness logically develop an impostor syndrome, an urge to resist design assimilation. This is probably a concause of many personal exoduses, dreamed or practiced: ex-designers decide to engage with the fullness of a certain human activity within its specific and historically-rich domain: farming, writing, cooking… all activities that resist the reduction to “rural hacking”, “content design”, or “food design”. More rarely, however, the act of design description provides an enrichment: the selectivity of design allows for the inclusion of forgotten voices, for the lighthearted reshuffling of austere practices, for a novel bridging of contexts. In these rare cases, design “ignorance” truly becomes its bliss. At worst, design flattens a multiplicity of worlds into a one-dimensional, aseptic one, at best it nurtures them.⁹

[Download the “Design (Anti)Panism” zine based on the following chronology and produced, during a 2-day workshop, by the students of the Information Design department at Design Academy Eindhoven.]

1962

“Every human being is a designer. Many also earn their living by design – in every field that warrants pause, and careful consideration, between the conceiving of an action and a fashioning of the means to carry it out, and an estimation of its effects.” – Norman Potter

“Everyone is a designer, says Author Grillo in What is Design? Design is not the product of an intelligentsia.” – The Architectural Forum

1971

“All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity.” – Victor Papanek

“Many books on industrial design suggest that design began when man began making tools. While the difference between Australopithecus africanus and the modern designer may not be as great as one might think or hope, the idea of equating man the toolmaker with the start of the profession is just an attempt to gain status for the profession by evoking a specious historical precedent. ‘In the beginning was Design,’ obviously, but not industrial design.” – Victor Papanek

1994

“Contra the widely promoted belief that design is something all human beings do and have done throughout history, but now must do more consciously and thoroughly than ever before, design is something that has had a history. Its beginnings can be traced to the rise of modernity, and it will almost certainly come to an end with the modern project. Indeed, we have an obligation not so much to promote designing as to learn to live without it, to resist its seductions, and to turn away from its pervasive and corrupting influence.” – Ivan Illich & Carl Mitcham

“We are all designers. Designing is integral to every intentional action we take.” – Tony Fry

1996

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” – Herbert Simon

1999

“There is a risk of falling into the trap of vague generalizations like ‘everything is design.’ Not everything is design, and not everyone is a designer […] Every one can become a designer in his special field, but the field that is the object of design activity always has to be identified […] The inherent components of design are not solely concerned with material products, they also cover services. Design is a basic activity whose capillary ramifications penetrate every human activity. No occupation or profession can claim a monopoly on it.” – Guy Bonsiepe

2000

“Everyone is a designer!” – Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink

2002

“[Today] the aesthetic and the utilitarian are not only conflated but all but subsumed in the commercial, and everything – not only architectural projects and art exhibitions but everything from jeans to genes – seems to be regarded as so much design.” – Hal Foster

2003

“We are all designers. We manipulate the environment, the better to serve our needs. We select what items to own, which to have around us. We build, buy, arrange, and restructure: all this is a form of design.” – Don Norman

2004

“Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces. I has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected.” – Bruce Mau, 2004

2007

“That design is not only an activity that trendy metropolitan design ‘creatives’ engage in: it’s a universal human life skill, a way of ordering, interpreting and enhancing our artefacts, images and surroundings, in which all of us should have a stake.” – Rick Poynor

2009

“Over the course of their century-long history of creative problem solving, designers have acquired a set of tools to help them move through what I have called the “three spaces of innovation”: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. My argument is that these skills now need to be dispersed throughout organizations. In particular, design thinking needs to move “upstream,” closer to the executive suites where strategic decisions are made. Design is now too important to be left to designers.” – Tim Brown

2010

“Looking back at the first edition of Everyone Is a Designer in 2000, when we proposed the idea of democratization of design, a decade later this programmatic statement has become reality.” – Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink

2015

“We are a designing species” – Victor Margolin

“In a world in rapid and profound transformation, we are all designers. Here, ‘all’ obviously includes all of us, individuals but also organizations, businesses, public entities, voluntary associations, and cities, regions, and states. In short, the ‘all’ we are talking about includes every subject, whether individual or collective, who in a world in transformation must determine their own identity and their own life project.” – Ezio Manzini

2016

“Design has gone viral. The word design is everywhere. It pops up in every situation. It knows no limit.” – Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley

2018

“[…] design is literally everywhere; from the largest structures to the humblest aspects of everyday life, modern lives are thoroughly designed lives.” – Arturo Escobar

2019

“If one needs to ‘subvert’ design, this implies that a dominant framework of design reigns–and I think one of the reasons why it reigns is that it has managed to fold any and everything under its agile wings.” – Ruha Benjamin

2020

“Everyone can design, even designers” – Ernesto Oroza

2021

“Luckily, design is something anyone in any discipline already knows how to do.” – Keller Easterling

2022

“Design alone cannot (and certainly does not) replace politics or economics or culture. Yet design is everywhere, and everywhere it is, it represents and enacts politics, economics, and cultures.” – Matthew Wizinsky

I’m glad to announce that I’ve just published The User Condition, a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior. The essay concludes the blog post series on this subject.