Anti-Capitalist Design
More than once over the semester our debates have crescendoed to a declaration that we should
have let the banks burn in 2008. For many, it seems the last opportunity where we could have rolled the enormous weight off capitalism off our backs and had the freedom to design a new society. Although design is always constrained in some form, design for true radical social innovation seems trapped by capitalistic constraints. However, unlike many design constraints, which can fame solutions, the constraints of capitalism stand in opposition to design with integrity and design for sustainability.
A perfect example of allowing capitalism to frame the solution is Paul Hawken’s Natural Capitalism which “introduces four central strategies of natural capitalism that are a means to enable countries, companies, and communities to operate by behaving as if all forms of capital were valued. Ensuring a perpetual annuity of valuable social and natural processes to serve a growing population is not just a prudent investment but a critical need in the coming decades.” While charming, his book feels somewhat naive. The capitalist mindset, which he also outlines, has no desire to even entertain his ideas. It is like trying to affected the diet of a rabid animal.
Designers need to stop pretending we can have the impact we want by working within the current system we have. We pontificate about systems change and yet we ignore the glaring fact that capitalism is driving us into the apocalypse. It is time for design to takes its stand in the political arena. As Tony Fry says, “Designers subsuming their practice to redirective practice adopt a prefigurative, rather than reactive, position to the political. They become participants in the creation of politics rather than serving the needs of politicians, political movements and parties.” We have agency and design can be a revolutionary act.
If we are grounded in social innovation, empathy, and human centered design, as so many of my cohort claim, then anyone who uses design to propagate capitalism is an enemy of this program. For this reason I fundamentally disagree with Bruce Nussbaum views on infusing capitalism with creativity. His book Creative Intelligence outlines a valuable way to live a creative life but it is marketed as a way to bring the design attitude to business. I find it difficult to support this for many reasons.
As Ankita Roy aptly criticizes, Bruce’s example of great human centered design as recognizing that if they put a computer in better packaging they would sell more. In class he gave an example of competing computer companies in China. Alas, the winning company was the one that realized computers were mostly given as wedding gifts. Instead of making a better product, they simply put it in a bigger, shinier box. This was heralded as a triumph in human centered design when it is simply design as predatory action. It is not difficult to draw an analogy to the current presidential campaign of Donald Trump. We have a product of vitriol, racism, and utter stupidity wrapped in a big, loud, brash box. But, I guess we should exalt Donald Trump’s immense creative intelligence.
I find hope in articles like Erik Olin Wright’s “How to be an Anti-Capitalist Today”. Wright nicely outlines four types of anti-capitalist: smashing, taming, escaping, and eroding. I consider myself an anti-capitalist of the eroding type with aims “to build more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations in the spaces and cracks within this complex system wherever possible, and to struggle to expand and defend those spaces. The idea of eroding capitalism imagines that these alternatives have the potential, in the long run, of expanding to the point where capitalism is displaced from this dominant role.”
As Wright argues, to end capitalism we must both tame and erode capitalism. He gifts us with the idea of “Real utopias” which “can be found wherever emancipatory ideals are embodied in existing institutions and proposals for new institutional designs. They are both constitutive elements of a destination and a strategy.” He gives three examples, worker cooperatives, libraries, and Wikipedia. My favorite is libraries which harkens thoughts of the sharing economy but I believe it is much more complicated. Wright explains, “Libraries embody principles of access and distribution which are profoundly anticapitalist. Consider the sharp difference between the ways a person acquires access to a book in a bookstore and in a library. In a bookstore the distribution principle is “to each according to ability to pay”; in a public library, the principle of distribution is “to each according to need.” What is more, in the library, if there is an imbalance between supply and demand, the amount of time one has to wait for the book increases; books in scarce supply are rationed by time, not by price. A waiting list is a profoundly egalitarian device: a day in everyone’s life is treated as morally equivalent.” If we can look to this and others, such as the pen economy, we can see opportunities to explore with design in finding alternatives to capitalism.
The atrocities of capitalism have been so resounding that it sickens me to consider any new iteration of the system. It has bred such a predatory world of inequality that any potential success stories are greatly eclipsed. Nessbaum claims, “in the reconnecting of creativity to capitalism, we have something to look forward to.” Not if I have anything to do with it.