Spectres: Outlining the fragments of a future to come

George Panicker

This piece presents the voice of a design graduate many years since the Eames Report was published. It raises questions about why design means what it does today. The most important question here is the question of the future. What it holds and how design will respond to it. As we paint a picture for design to enter schools, the piece creates awareness about the mutating nature of the discipline and how we need to be wary of it. The piece creates an urgency to equip ourselves with the changing definitions of design especially as technology is evolving and the value that design has to offer is evolving with it.

With this piece we hope our readers will begin to question why design needs to be brought into education at all. And if it is to enter their classroom, they can take agency over deciding what form this will take and why.

“But, on the new plane, it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task…..“

– Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?

Twilight of the idols

Design has been a cultural force since its origins in the industrial economy post the second world war, taking roots in the fresh soil of the powerful American economy. Beginning as practice reaching to synthesize the arts and crafts into a new whole, it transformed itself into a vocation, one that promises a future with the hammer called “design thinking”. With a vanguard of practitioners, from the world famous modern design studio conglomerate IDEO¹ to the Apple Human Interfaces group² (responsible for the clean and neat UI of every Iphone since 2008), a new method to the madness was built from scratch, one that promised an easy, step by step method to solve some of the world’s greatest problems. With a variety of high profile proponents, design thinking entered the boardrooms, announcing from the rooftops its revolutionary potential for change.

Yet, while classical design originating in the Bauhaus Design school of Germany made manufactured goods accessible, and the emerging field of User Experience Design (a discipline aimed at making sure technology is designed according to the user’s needs for a pleasurable experience) made computers socially ubiquitous, it seems quite clear that beyond petty gimmicks masquerading as innovation, the buck clearly has decided to stop here. The Design Industry’s favourite child of Design Thinking and its large promises to transform the world and change our lives forever has fallen flat, from IDEO’s failure to transform the town of Gainesville³ via their celebratory patented method “Design Thinking”⁴ that they introduced to the world in the early 2000s, to their eventual shutting down of three of their global offices in 2021 (as a result of financial troubles), it seems to show us that design thinking’s insistence on the ability of anyone to solve any problem no matter how difficult via their signature process is starting to crack in the face of cold harsh reality.

Design and its dogma can create objects of delight, whether they be cute coffee tables, or posters for your favourite band, or the next addictive fintech platform that allows people to spend money they don’t have. Design academics will digress, pointing out the many amazing things being showcased at contests, conferences, and exhibitions around the world that apparently have solved our greatest problems. Yet despite this, we barely see any of these solutions being implemented in the real world, and even when in the rare case they are, they simply do not make the sustained social change or ripple in the pond that designers say they do. Design has made our lives delightful and has made things usable. But the emphasis on the individual (“user”) has made the design discipline the origin of some truly evil problems, such as the product designers at Facebook inadvertently creating a political crisis and undermining democratic processes in the 2016 cambridge analytica scandal⁵, to the design founders of Airbnb being directly responsible for gentrification in many major cities leaving little to no room for affordable housing for the shrinking middle class. And we haven’t even really gotten started yet.

Climate change, political polarisation, social alienation and growing economic instability are all examples of some of humanity’s greatest problems concerning general systems collapse, one for which Design’s most celebrated titans, design theorist Horst Rittel anointed a term: Wicked problems.

Wicked Problems are the multi-headed hydra that corrodes every tenet of design thinking to nothing. As described by Rittel, wicked problems have 10 important characteristics:

1. They do not have a definitive formulation.
2. They do not have a “stopping rule.” In other words, these problems lack an inherent logic that signals when they are solved.
3. Their solutions are not true or false, only good or bad.
4. There is no way to test the solution to a wicked problem.
5. They cannot be studied through trial and error. Their solutions are irreversible, so as Rittel and Webber put it, “every trial counts.”
6. There is no end to the number of solutions or approaches to a wicked problem.
7. All wicked problems are essentially unique, undermining the value of previous research.
8. Wicked problems can always be described as the symptom of other problems. They are knotted in their nature, their causes reducible to many complex highly interrelated factors.
9. The way a wicked problem is described determines its possible solutions.
10. Planners, that is those who present solutions to these problems, have no right to be wrong. Unlike mathematicians, “planners are liable for the consequences of the solutions they generate; the effects can matter a great deal to the people who are touched by those actions.”

Rittel’s text was meant to showcase that the inherent complexity of Wicked Problems simply meant that linear processes were not only insufficient, they were functionally useless at solving them. The “wickedness” of wicked problems refers not to any moral judgement, but instead to how brutally they push back, persist, and reform. To sprinkle salt on tired wounds, these characteristics directly dissolve the entire design thinking process until it is nothing more than mere platitude. Even empathy as a tenet of the design process is something that titans such as Don Norman (author of the design classic “The Design of Everyday things”) have a bone to pick with, effectively making it hollow. Robert Sutton, the cofounder of Stanford D.School has said, “design thinking” is often treated “more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity”⁶

And yet the design world persists in delusion, living in a world gone by. Design veterans believe that merely integrating some meagre principles of systems thinking and mere acknowledgement of the interdependence of problems can help make up for Design’s obvious lack. It does not. Packaging design thinking with new words such as “transition design”, “planet centric design” and “humanity centred design” does showcase purity of intent, but is still far from a viable solution, especially with the silence that accompanies the answer as to what tools will help us bring about this ambitious vision. Design, as it remains, is still insufficient.

We also see the rise of new tools, trends and problems that academics in their ivory towers are willfully ignorant of. The world is now a very fast changing place, and it has no time for long drawn out research phases predicated on the basis of short term myopia (hence the integration into the industry standard Agile process, a methodology rampant in software engineering where digital products are made in fast cycles and prototyping takes primacy). New trends, tools and technologies have emerged, shredding and shaking up established industries like they were nothing. The rise of interconnected sensor environments, immersive media technologies, new instruments of affordances, realtime network systems and a globalized connected culture intersecting with unique differences require that design must let go of blind arrogance that it knows and return to a place where it simply does not know, and in doing so take a chance in its ultimate leap of faith into the abyss.

Design, as it is, largely came from a western, now largely American dialectic, one that preaches the dominion of mankind over nature, the Baconian universe being something to exploit and extract, the dogma of determinism despite evidence to the contrary, that Descartian notion that mind is above matter and the neoliberal enlightenment fixation that individuals come above communities. Yet, the problems that the world faces today simply does NOT afford us, the generation that will be required to step up and tackle it, the convenience of listening to demagogues who insist on the efficacy of their stone age wheelbarrows. Design is the monstrous offspring of a sickness of mind, one steeped in paradoxical vice and virtue, one that is mostly bark and little bite.

What we perceive as design today is simply an evolution of the practice from Industrial, Bauhasian, and European roots to something akin to the American Neoliberal attitude in its fixation of “User centeredness” all the while finding new ways to produce and exploit human subjectivity as cogs in service of the “industrial megamachine” as the American Sociologist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford would put it. As long as design remains a child of neoliberal capitalism, it will not only inherit its absurd contradictions, but will exacerbate them, since design is very evidently peak bourgeoisie. To be design’s agent and customer is a privilege of society’s most privileged, and that requires that only a certain type of subject be considered human.

When we consider the social, economical, and historical forces that have shaped design, one will start to understand that it’s a changing idea, and we must begin to witness the spectre of something to come, a ghost on the horizon who we may ignore for the time being, but cannot neglect completely. Design, now faced with the problems of capitalism and neoliberalism, and faced with new affordances such as AI, big data, networks, spatial computing and even a biocomputing future where organic substrates stand to be the next mode of production, will then undergo its own change, from the moral posturing of hollow classist virtue to being worthy of the task of being a truly important force in shaping the story of the human species.

Thus, the time has come to invert the hammer as all great figures of history have done: Against the ivory tower of design itself.

Design is not dead, it’s in the process of moulting. Like how a butterfly sheds its ugly cocoon to spread its wings and fly, we now see design transition from naive teenage insecurities into mature, adult-like pragmatism: One grounded in truth, spirit and a reason to believe in this world, as well as the people who live in it. Thus, we are not witnessing design’s death, but its true beginning as a discipline both by and for the people, escaping the confines of luxury for 1%. Transversal connections leap between the disciplines of art, science, design, and engineering, smoothening out into a single continuous plateau, where murmurs start to coalesce into a glacial hurricane of revolutionary force. It’s in the inversion of the ideal, the decentering of the image of contemporary human-centered thought and the rejection of a myopic style of one dimensional representation where the seeds of something to come are birthed: a vision of hopes and dreams that burst forth via spirit of novelty which is still gestating within our praxis today. It’s in that encounter with hallowed spectres of a future that is to come where the critical difference we all need so badly in this world today is born anew.

The conceptual colours and laborious sounds of art, design, science, and engineering bleed to form an iridescent audiovisual spectra where ideas refract into one another, operating at scales from the cosmically large to exceedingly small as well as in substrates as varied as the fluttering frames of digital video to the moist wetware of living organisms, via interfaces that have the potential to displace the body from the sensory hegemony of the eye. In doing so, a student and pedagogue both, in the practice of such learning, escape the confines of disciplinary myopia and attain the hallowed buddhist citta (mental crystal) of becoming: Life as a non-linear journey of eternal learning beyond the confines of the classroom and the job. That’s why the philosopher Gilles Deleuze framed the question of process as a series of encounters, where knowledge is a static institution (one that posits the stagnation of exams) as opposed to the dynamism of learning being one that constantly overcomes the questions of the unknown, a critical mission of active confrontation.⁷

We will create a new future with our own hands, building new processes, habits, concepts, workflows and systems in order to truly create a future owed to all entities of planet Earth, both human and nonhuman. As the saying goes, vasudhaivam kutumbakam: The world is one, so we owe it both our integrity as well as indomitability.

The spectre on the horizon can no longer be ignored, so let’s embrace this future with open arms, open minds, and open hearts. This spectre, however, is something we must actively work for, a practice we must flesh out in earnest immediacy, for the future of all living things depends on this, a future that is well within our reach if we amass a collective desire for it.

All of this is from the perspective of an amateur, who may be recognized by certain elements as “overstepping his bounds.” To them, I will quote a line from one of my favourite essays by the semiotician and eco-philosopher, Felix Guattari:

“To follow so many speakers on the theme of society, the responsibility of individuals, militants, groups and so on creates a certain inhibition. It is a minefield, with questioners hidden in fortified dugouts waiting to attack you:

What right has he to speak? What business is it of his? What is he getting at?

And professional academics are there too, to recall you to modesty, and systematically to restrict any approach to these problems that is remotely ambitious”

Many a time, I’ve picked the wrong fight and wrong hill to die on, but this time, with a wiser, calmer understanding of my place in the world, I believe that though I’m still stumbling in my path of the pursuit of knowledge, I’m finally starting to ask the right questions.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEO
2. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/279044.279175
3. https://rbefored.com/was-design-thinking-designed-to-not-work-791a08bf32bd
4. https://designthinking.ideo.com/
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html
6. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/reviews/on-design-thinking/
7. Deleuze, Gilles, “Difference and Repetition”, page 254 in “The Image of Thought”.

George Panicker is a resident of Bangalore, India and a recent graduate of Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Coming from a middle class immigrant family, he is fascinated by the potential of new media and its intersections with disciplines such as art, science, design, and technology via a variety of scales and interfaces. He hopes that in the lifelong pursuit of important questions afforded by new media, he can contribute to a better future for mankind and in doing so, equally fulfil the hopes and dreams of the many people he has encountered along the way.