I had always enjoyed being a designer and similarly enjoyed the multifaceted creativity that came along with the process of designing. I liked the idea of making, of creating, of problem solving. I began my career creating spaces, and moved into creating graphics, and for years, I became obsessed with branding—what makes us want to buy (or not buy) objects. Why are some brands “cool” and others not? I became obsessed with glossy magazines like Wallpaper and Monocle, because Tyler Brule seemed to have figured out how to decode what is cool by zeroing in on the most hard-to-find and hard-to-get design items that would somehow make my life magazine quality.
Slowly, over time, my relationship to design began to sour. Graphic designers worked hard but most of their work was ephemeral, disposable, and too much of it was at the service of industry: driving clicks and persuading through manipulation. Specifically, as I examined branding closely, I came to recognize that the act of branding was sociopathic, a harmful manipulation of our emotional fragility in the service of consumerism and profit. I slowly backed away from creating and endorsing the creation of brands.
During that time, and in my earlier years, craft to me, was something that I always “did” and enjoyed, but was quietly shameful. I felt that it was somehow, tacky, time consuming, labor intensive, and ultimately undervalued. Despite the obvious shortcomings of Design, I committed my career to being a designer and teaching generations of others to Design. Fashioning others to arbitrate “cool” from boring or mundane but also to examine and try to use design to tackle the problems of society. Somehow, Design, as an academic discipline seemed to have crystalized in the period of hyper-industrialization just following World War II, and it never really changed all that much.
Increasingly, I felt disgusted that no matter the discipline—architecture, interiors, fashion, graphics, digital—the ultimate goal was to make more, sell more, to feed the beast faster and cheaper. The entire enterprise was (and is) careening out of control. Looking back, it was my own willful blindness or sheer ignorance that led me astray and my own timidity that prevented me from speaking up or speaking out against my colleagues who were, perhaps, well intentioned, but also, perhaps, equally ignorant, but certainly more indoctrinated by the corporate machine, endlessly feeing the Design Industrial Complex, which held that no matter the problem, throwing money and stuff at it would yield a solution.
I regret not questioning my colleagues more directly and not speaking up sooner, because many, hopelessly out of touch with how the world has changed (and seemingly unaware that the world has moved on from the 1950s), are still teaching the same thing now that they were twenty or thirty years ago. That is a disservice to our students and a dangerous outcome for our world. I regret not questioning my students more directly, because so many, pumped with optimistic idealism felt they could change the world through Design. They didn’t. They couldn’t, because the entire industry was, like the products they were creating, designed to chew them up and spit them out. Rather than preaching the gospel of Design, what I should have been doing for all those years was to question whether these young people wanted to become designers or creative thinkers. Though most would have chose the former because of its familiarity, ultimately the majority became the latter moving on to creative endeavors tied to the fast-moving train wreck that is the Design industry by a hair-thin thread.
My critical examination of design piqued when detachedly viewing an Amy Meissner exhibit at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. The exhibit collected pieces that had been knitted, mended, stitched, and made over the years. Meissner’s philosophy is observational and clear: “Hand stitching isn’t fast work. It’s a quiet skill that feels tenuous, nearly lost when placed in a contemporary context; it slips away like childhood, like domesticity, like safety beneath the weight of something handmade. I sew because I don’t know what it is to not sew. It’s this expectation of what the hand-sewn form is — protective, warm, decorative — so much like the definition of the domestic role, which compels me to heave against it. I take the traditional, beautiful handwork I was taught as a girl, then later as a professional seamstress and couch it within the painful, uncomfortable or frightening. My intent is to create thoughtful, arresting work, reliant on layers of narrative within the pieces themselves and within the history each viewer brings.This is time-based work, using old skills. An act of cutting apart, then piecing oneself back together.”
Until Meissner’s exhibit, I hadn’t thought of all the women doing what had been traditionally labeled as women’s work, and I had certainly never questioned why their loving and painstaking efforts were not frequently exhibited in museums, but often the work of bawdy or charlatan men was. Why were Robert Rauschenberg or Ava Hesse, or Clifford Still celebrated artists, but my afghan-making grandmother not? My grandma’s crochet was made from a place of love and care. I am not sure I can say the same for Rauschenberg or legions of others like him. Why did I spend years in graduate school studying the work of modernist men—artists and designers—that now, we know was fraudulent or fraught with mistakes and misjudgment? Meanwhile, many of the female observers like Jane Jacobs—left out of the party by the boys—turned out, largely, to be correct and far more in tune with what humanity actually needs, as opposed to what we think we need but actually only desire.
A few years later, I was excited to stop into the Dyson store in San Francisco to see what they were showing, to lust over the products that I wanted to buy, but that were too expensive for me to actually acquire. Walking around the store, I proudly thought… I have that fan! And, I have that fan! And, I have that exact same vacuum cleaner! And that one too! And, oh. I own everything that is on display in the Dyson store. And in fact, in a few instance, I own multiples of the items on display. It was a shock and a wake up call.
Slowly, I took note that my obsession with Design (capital D) changed. I was increasingly disturbed, and later disgusted by Monocle magazine and its relentless message that whatever I was doing was inferior, outmoded, outdated. Monocle just wanted me to buy more stuff. Junk I didn’t need. In her book, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarchek makes reference to magazines… “[I can’t find the exact quote, but I will…]” She punctuated the slipperiness of my vague sentiment, exactly.
The following year, I went to a conference and one of the sponsoring firms gave me a backpack. It is a Hershel backpack and very well made, but it was completely free. It ended my life-long obsession/quest to find the right bag. The plastic bins in my attic are testament to my failed attempts to find the right bag. The rationalization, as I was buying the bags was familiar: this bag will change my life! I would envision myself using the bag, being ultra-organized, and toting it around with every possible item tucked into it’s own little pocket, prepared for every eventuality. Headache? I could fish out Advil and aspirin. Hungry? I have a power bar in it’s own little compartment. Chapped lips? I have Burt’s Bees tucked away right here, next to my favorite fountain pen… that just leaked. I can now say, no bag, no pen, no piece of clothing is ever going to change my life or prepare me for every eventuality that might occur.
I came home from that conference ashamed of my secret bag collection and further ashamed of the sheer amount of “stuff” that I owned. Why did I have so many pieces of clothing? I have enough to stock a small store, in a range of colors, sizes, styles, and price points. Doubtful that I will ever wear it all in my remaining days on this earth.
Over the years, i have realized that we can pretty much buy anything we want, whenever we want, from wherever we went. I read an essay by Joan Westenberg about capitalism that touched on a number of thoughtful points and that captured my own observations more saliently than I ever could; this endless cycle of buying is “a behemoth that thrives on relentless growth, often at a devastating cost. under its reign, we witness the widening chasm of inequality, where the affluent soar on the wings of wealth while the less fortunate are left to the whims of an unforgiving market.” I would add that the endless cycle of consumption and buying has made us lazy, sustainably out of touch with our immediate environment, and in constant need and danger of needing a company or its products to help us to merely survive, while pumping us full of garbage and chemicals and dismantling our social structure all in the quest of greater profit and influence. We see this in nearly every corner of our lives through fast fashion creating the illusion that cheap clothes are the answer, through medicine and pharmaceuticals convincing us that any number of human ailments are eminently treatable by a tablet or cream (that may cause any number of new ailments), through the planned obsolesce of consumer goods, and even through the endless march toward sustainability that moves us ever further away from a sustainable world. It seems, no one notices that the push toward electric vehicles and the conversion from natural gas appliances to electric equivalents leaves behind an immeasurable mountain of trash. If indeed automobile manufacturers and governments were truly concerned about energy independence and converting our cars and appliances from fossil to more sustainable fuels, why have they not created a conversion kit for existing products? Why have conversions not become a cottage industry? Because the march toward sustainability writ by corporate sponsors is just planned obsolesce packaged in a more sophisticated way to sell us more stuff we don’t really need or want. Again, it is sociopathic and cleptopathic.
This all comes at a cost and that cost is significant. Westenberg goes on to write, “our planet, the cradle of life itself, is treated as a commodity, its resources extracted with reckless abandon, its delicate ecosystems pushed to the brink for profit. in its unbridled form, capitalism has ushered in an era where consumerism is king, and possessions are the yardstick of success. in this relentless pursuit of more, we have lost sight of what truly matters — our connection to each other, our harmony with nature, and our sense of purpose beyond material gains.” this, as a result, leads to that we are “trapped in a cycle that glorif ies wealth and power, ignoring the human cost it entails — a cost paid in the currency of social injustice, environmental degradation, and a deep sense of existential void.”
Similarly, Orsola de Castro’s outstanding book, Loved Clothes Last helped me to understand that design and consumption are choices we make. Like Westenberg, de Castro underscores that people are behind the items that are made for us, even when they are mass produced. I recalled, after reading the book, that for years, I would question my students “Who made your shirt?” They would look at the label and respond “Calvin Klein!” Or “DKNY” or some other corporate behemoth. I would then rephrase the question and ask, “I didn’t ask what company made your shirt, I asked “who,” and reminded them that years of branding, subversive marketing, and dangerous advertising had—inside of a generation—made us disregard the person behind “who” and think of “who” in terms of corporations and brands. This is disturbing especially when coupled with a learned inability to create. That is, in my grandparents and parents generation, every individual would be capable of sustainable repair or creativity: sewing a dress from an old table cloth, gerryrigging the engine of a car to get it to work. Now, if there’s not an app on a smartphone that does it for us or a company that can sell it to us, we are out of luck. Too many people have lost the basic skill sets that allow us to advance as society. We have become helpless and captive hostages of corporate design. When you think of all the things we buy directly: goods, services, food… and the things we buy indirectly through selling our data online and to marketers, the behemoth is, indeed, consuming us and the “design” industry that works in the service of capitalism is killing us.
True designers, ultimately, are problem seekers and problem solvers not problem creators. It’s high time that we re-examine and re-visit the reason d’être that fuels design. It is time for us as designers, as educators, and as humans to flush our design schools of the hustle mentality that has been subversively seeded by corporations and businesses, to tackle some of the biggest problems in our world. It is time for us, as designers, to stop the endless cycle of consumption that is, indeed, consuming us, our creativity, our lives, and our planet.
I would argue that over the last 100 years, design has democratized to the degree that design ensures conformity, not the freedom of individuality.
With that, instead of simply “designing" something, we should endeavor to be a re-volutionary: to sustain, to re-make, to repair, to re-use, to re-envision, to re-fresh with our ingenuity and by our own hands in a way that takes care and time… with an individual, specifically, in mind. The idea isn’t to create what can be endlessly replicated, but to capture and appreciate the qualities that make every object, environment, and experience unique, such that there is not another like it in the world. Each is unique, like you. A celebration of humanity and its triumph over hyper-industrialization, rabid capitalism, and ceaseless consumption. It’s time for design to change the world again, but this time, for the better.
