Chris’ Corner: Design (and you’re going to like it)

Damning opening words from Edwin Heathcote in Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world.

Every single thing on Earth not produced by nature had been designed. That was the spiel. Design wanted it all. Now Earth is a mess, its climate warming rapidly, its seas full of waste. There are microplastics in the glaciers, the air is polluted and forests are being destroyed to make more stuff. If everything is design, then design is responsible for all of it.

The situation is, if you wanna make money doing design work, you’re probably going to be making it from some company hurting the world, making both you and them complicit. Kinda dark. But maybe it is course correction for designers thinking they are the world’s salvation, a swing too far in the other direction.

This pairs very nicely with Pavel Samsonov’s UX so bad that it’s illegal, again opening with a banger:

Once upon a time, there was a consensus about the design process: we would do research to understand user needs, and then we would do design to satisfy those needs. That consensus, it seems, is gone.  From Cory Doctorow’s thesis on enshittification to Ed Zitron’s Rot Economy to the no-consent culture of AI, the trend is clear. “Users should be thankful for what they get,” say our corporate overlords. “Any problems are their own fault, and nothing to do with us.”

Big companies products are so dominant that users are simply going to use them no matter what. Young designers will be hired to make the products more profitable no matter what, and they will like it, damn it.

Using design to make money is, well, often kind of the point. And I personally take no issue with that. I do take issue with using design for intentional harm. I take issue with using the power of design to influence users to make decisions against their own better judgement.

It makes me think of the toy catalog that showed up at my house from Amazon recently. It’s early October. Christmas is 3 months away, but the message is clear: get your wallets ready. This design artifact, for children, chockablock with every toy under the sun, to set their desire ablaze, to ensure temper tantrums for until the temporary soothing that only a parent clicking a Buy Now button gives. It isn’t asking kids to thoughtfully pick out a toy they might want, it’s says give me them all, I want every last thing. The pages are nicely designed with great photography. A designer make the argument: let’s set all the pages on white with product cutouts and plenty of white space, so kids can easily visibly circle all the things they want. Let their fingers bleed with capitalism. Making a list isn’t just implied though, the first page is a thicker-weight paper that is a literal 15-item wish list page designed to be filled out and torn out. More. Morrrreeeee. And just as a little cherry on top, it’s a sticker book too. It begs to travel with you, becoming an accessory to the season.

It’s cocaine for children with the same mandates as the Instagram algorithm is for older kids and adults.