Saviour Mode Activated
This year’s theme for Melbourne Design Week is “Design the world you want” [^1] which offers the slightest shift in gears from previous themes such as “How can design shape life?”, “How design can shape the future?”, “How design delivers change?” and “What does design value and how do we value design?” (For value see commodification, late stage capitalism, precarity etc etc). These themes are issued as incentives for participating in the programme and are posed with commercial design practitioners, and studios, in mind. This year’s theme makes a direct appeal to a designer or design studio’s stance as ‘creators’. It is an appeal harpooned directly into the designer godhead. It says you are part of a select cache with the privilege of designing the world you want.
For many, this ‘world shaping’ is simply not available. Sometimes we might get a sense of autonomy in shaping our surrounding environs through a form of extended collaboration, or self curation, occurring between us and designed material that collects around us. But mostly our worlds are shaped by tools that are jealously guarded by a coalition of councillors, consultants and their chosen suppliers.
General opinion is solicited—mostly off the back of white label applications such as The Hive’s suite of participatory tools [^2] which have been pitched to and adopted by councils such as the City of Melbourne. These tools have allowed constituents to exercise some influence over basic decisions (according to predefined guidance), but as a councils’ enthusiasm for these types of online tools wanes, so does the city’s urge to seek out advice from—what is seen as—an amorphic blob of ‘publics’ that often prove meddlesome to the ambitions of said councillors and the wealthy development industry they frequently favour.
The term also ignores design that has already occurred. It invites designers to ignore the past and keep creating, keep propelling the ‘economy of ideas’ forward. This fosters the attitude that ‘the churn’—the avid pursuit of ‘the new’— is all. Here is a vision of the past as perpetually disappointing. A litany of wrong turns, ill-made decisions, mistakes and damaged goods proliferating in it’s wake. Keep facing forward—don’t look behind. Take up the motto, ‘No time to look back’. The design rhetoric of the commodified world will support you. It’s okay—ignore the errors of the past… and their continuing repercussions. It’s okay to repeat the mistakes of the past by failing to properly acknowledge them. Focus on what’s next, what’s new.
“What Design Can Do!” [^3]—a conference series started in Amsterdam in 2011—has laboured under similar criticism since a number of commenters started suggesting ‘What design should do’ [^4] may be a better title. We like to proffer the title ‘What design has done”—with the follower of ‘And how can we un-do it’ as a prelude to any designer’s conference offering a similar ‘Saviour stance’ to its participants.
Design Emergency [^5] is an Instagram based project devised and propelled by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli—both behemoths within the field of design writing and curation—and both easily ignored by design practitioners and design ‘industry event’[^6] attendees who may easily disregard design criticism as an attached field. Design Emergency professes its role to “explore design’s role in building a better future” although there are dalliances with a type of generalised criticism of design practices and their impacts most topics and posts fall back on expected tropes around avid solution-ism and problem solving as key to design and designers practices.
That ‘saviour mode’ and avid ‘solution-ism’ is key to design and design practice is simply untrue. We only need to run a cursory glance over the supermarket aisle to see that packaging designers continue to play a huge part in the production and proliferation of material waste. Look to the periphery of current narrowly defined depictions of what constitutes a ‘design practices’ and there are the ‘product designers’ within labs producing all manner of toxic substances for reproduction, there are designers of heavily gender-encoded tools and uniforms for the construction industry that uphold the kind of toxic masculinity that has lead to mental health issues on construction sites and the exclusion of those that no not adhere to gender ‘norms’ from participating in the construction economy. There are the hoards of ‘designers’ employed to produce memes and similar campaign material in support (and sometimes to distract) from political policy and adverse decision making. The lists of examples of the activities that build our human-designed realm, and are continually excluded from design events, runs and runs.
Even when commercially and/or state-supported design events managed to acknowledge that design comes from many sources outside of recognised caches, they will often ignore the fact that any design instigates a multitude of results and effects and that not all of them are positive. In fact, there are many repercussions to putting a design into the world are detrimental to humans, nonhumans and the planet in general.
They also continue to promote—in their pursuit of shaping a monocultural agenda for design—an echelon of studios and practitioners, those that may be anonymous and unable to afford the privilege of a platform through which to share stories of design that might be less conformable for cosy urbanised audiences to hear, but are no less valid for inclusion. If you are in the position to design the world you want (as a designer or as something else), please remember there are others also in it.
Notes:
[^1]: https://designweek.melbourne/about/
[^2]: https://the-hive.com.au/—Currently in use by City of Melbourne amongst others. See ‘Participate Melbourne’.
[^3]: See @whatdesigncando where a quote by Bruce Mau was recently posted ‘Design got us into this mess. Now it needs to get us out of it.’ which both acknowledges the designers role in issue of the over production of waste, while simultaneously exalting ‘design’ as the sole saviour to provide the solution-ism required in tackling these issues.
[^4]: A term originally uttered by Daisy Ginsberg and recorded by Elvia Wilk as part of her critical review of the 2011 conference for Uncube.
[^6]: Design Weeks have coagulated into an industry in themselves in recent times with the formation of World Design Weeks as a cache of events scattered all over the world https://www.worlddesignweeks.org/
alt.designweek is a series of anonymised posts produced to coincide with #MelbourneDesignWeek. Contributions are open. If you’d like to contribute a critical and/or under represented perspective on design send us a DM.