As a certified and super cool capitalism-hater, who makes things for capitalists’ money so I can keep a roof over my head and ensure that my dog does not miss out on this year’s special festivity of copious and frankly irredeemable amounts of Turkey Jerky treats, I often find myself lost in various states of miasmic quandary. I find myself in these states anyway, because my brain is an exploded baked potato, but at least for this post I can blame it all on a system propped up by wage theft, unpaid internships, and venture capitalists who spunk even richer people’s money up the wall in the name of systematically dictating what can or should be created using rectangles, zeroes and ones.
Come with me on a little journey as I try to reconcile the idea of being a staunch anarcho-syndicalist while simultaneously making graphs go up and to the right for people who only exist because the tech industry is propped up by a very special and very self-fulfilling cycle of psuedo-innovation.
Is there any ethical design under capitalism?
No. Don’t be fucking silly. The only thing approaching ethical design under capitalism is design that eschews and subverts it. But even then, you’re working in an industry that is so entrenched in a sham interpretation of meritocracy and so beholden to people who can waft money in the face of bed-wetting execs to get what they want, that you’re going to struggle to be seen. Subversion is inherently a thankless task, only noticeable by those not already hypnotised by crooked and oppressive systems, and rarely accepted or legitimised by the ‘real’ doers in our industry. That is to say, the ones who are good at making their bosses richer.
I want to look at some of the common practices we see, apply, and oftentimes decry, and explore their role in the perpetuation of the concentrated power of capitalism. Because that’s a fun read.
UX has User in the name, that’s good right?
UX stands for ‘User Experience’ which apparently leaves us beholden to the humans who might encounter the things we have over-engineered on their behalf. That ‘user’ bit makes it sound somewhat humanitarian, and it let’s people who wear shirts with too-tight collars tell us that the only way to empathise with people is to turn them into post-its and advocate for the Sims version of them they’ve created to appease the psychedelic mindfuck that is the traditional UX process.
After a frankly grandiose preamble with some Donald Norman quotes about affordances and doors or some shit, the next thing you’ll likely encounter in the UX field is the idea that we do these things in a way that not only (supposedly) centres users, but that makes businesses profitable. Because people only matter when we can take their money or convert their attention into revenue.
User Experience design exists as a field because of the valiant, humanitarian notion that we don’t care about how well the world works for people until they enter the sphere of potentially profitable individuals. Go fuck yourself, unless we can judge some KPIs against you, in which case welcome, have we told you how much we empathise with you lately?
Because I’m a fucking masochist, I’m on LinkedIn quite a bit. There’s this frankly fucking weird movement there amongst old school UX people that claim the industry has forgotten them, has left them behind as the pursuit of design leans more towards drawing the sickest fucking rectangles imaginable. This is quite ironic and sanctimonious to me, given that their entire practice revolves around disregarding populations until they can be fed into some kind of leading indicator-based profit equation. Maybe the design world left you behind because you’re just not profitable any more? As they fade away, the faint screams of ‘have you read the Design of Everyday things’ become more and more desperate, a cacophony of sentient diplomas floating aimlessly in the ether, never to brainstorm again. Won’t somebody think of the practitioners?
Anyway. Shut the fuck up about UX.
Design Thinking is just white saviour complex
Next on our list of supposedly empathetic, supposedly humanitarian practices and frameworks is Design Thinking. A fundamentally unserious notion divined by fundamentally unserious humans at the fundamentally unserious institution that is IDEO.
Design Thinking is poverty tourism for the Balsamiq generation. It is a horrendous, demeaning, imperialist minefield of racism, exceptionalism, saviour complexes and martyrdom. Design Thinking essentially asks ‘what if we take western white privilege to somewhere that doesn’t have it and then tell them what they need to do to live a better life?’ It’s techno-colonialism, and the only positive it’s ever had lies in revealing to Stanford graduates that brown people exist. A revelation many of which would prefer not to have deigned to reckon with in the first place.
The numerous failings of Design Thinking involve plonking deluded rich people into poor spaces, plonking deluded white people into Black spaces, plonking serial good-at-schoolers into neurodiverse spaces, and asking them to workshop cutesy ways to gentrify, colonise, or homogenise in the name of solving problems that don’t really exist. Deluded and clueless individuals are parachuted into areas that face complex, systemic problems rooted in oppression, capitalism, systemic negligence, corrupt governments, generational trauma, propaganda and colonialism. Then they get to workshop surface level ideas that have fuck all to do with any of the systemic issues that plague marginalised communities. This achieves absolutely fucking nothing beyond allowing them to get a heartwarming photoshoot with Black kids while they tell them how they’re going to UX their way into clean water. Absolute masterpiece in branding. Kinda fucked in every other sense.
Shut the fuck up about Design Thinking.
Design Justice
A notable and lamentable common thread that runs through many, if not all, of our industries’ approaches to early stage design is the centring of practitioners in the practice. UCD, UX, Design Thinking, and the gaggle of bastardised frameworks they spawned might be branded as human-centric, but in practice are all-but unified in their Othering.
These processes treat practitioners as the occident. The people who know how to solve problems, who know how to think systematically (spoiler alert: they fucking don’t), who are uniquely capable of bringing sense and structure to a world apparently devoid of such must take it upon themselves to fix the world. Through fucking wireframes apparently. I don’t know it’s quite absurd. Thus the non-practitioners are presented as the Other. They’re seen to be aimlessly meandering through undesigned environments (spoiler alert: they’re fucking not), longing for the grace of a plucky design saviour to bring meaning to their world.
Ruling class practitioners and the voiceless subaltern
Just as capitalism and colonialism go hand-in-hand, so too do their counterpoints. When discussing decolonisation of design, we must inherently acknowledge the prerequisite of anticapitalist thinking. One unifying concept that tends to dance between Marxism and postcolonialism is Gramsci’s notion of the Subaltern. Later explored by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (real ones know) and culminating in a broad catch-all for those outside the working class, subalterns are the voiceless (Spivak’s own ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ is basically required reading for anyone who gives a fuck about this) and uninitiated masses. Those confined to the margins of history while the inventions and achievements of ‘good actor’ colonial capitalists are celebrated and revered.
As an industry we struggle to fathom that marginalised communities can succeed, often thrive, without our intervention. Our thinking is rooted in exceptionalism, and propped up by so-called industry leaders entrenched in coloniser rhetoric. If our practices and industry standards are a reflection of capitalism as a whole, they also reflect capitalistic societal misgivings in microcosm. In this sense, marginalised communities within our design considerations are a reflection of the subaltern, and our industry leaders and practitioners reflect the attitudes of the ruling class.
At a fundamental level I believe that this is what our industry wants. A continuation of the subalterns’ voicelessness; of the ruling classes’ ability to parameterise success, to dictate the problems we solve, to direct impact and funding towards whatever perpetuates the system that allows for their success. There is no place for the marginalised in our work, and we’ve designed it that way. How very fucking human-centred of us.
Here’s the hard truth: trying to solve a complex, systemic problem you haven’t lived through is fucking impossible. If you haven’t reckoned with poverty, you can, at best, build up a parameterised notion of empathy with those of us who have. If you haven’t tried to navigate the world as a trans person, you cannot magically interroceptively grasp the complexities of having your identity erased by the mainstream public, if you don’t live with a disability that defines everything from your ability to make breakfast to the things society deems you capable of, you can’t just fucking cosplay as a wheelchair user and suddenly understand their issues.
If you’re at all perturbed about this, I heartily recommend Sasha Costanza-Chock’s incredible book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need.
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.
Nothing about us without us
A theme throughout much of the literature and discourse that can broadly (and perhaps generously) be seen as ‘un-othering’ is the idea of marginalised communities’ deep and meaningful participation in governance, innovation and problem-solving. This phrase has been around for centuries, but was popularised in recent history when James Charlton applied the phrase to the disability rights movement in the early 1990s.
Fundamentally, ‘nothing about us without us’, or ‘nihil de nobis, sine nobis’ if you want to be a smarmy cunt, is a mantra for truly inclusive and collaborative practices. Whether it’s the practice of governance, urban planning, architecture, or indeed design, the notion that communities most affected by an action, plan, product, or law should be welcomed as collaborators should be a universally accepted truth. But here we are. Capitalism Design Life. And we have fucking none of that.
Here’s the thing, though. Capitalism is sustained by the concentration of power. A small number of money-hoarding lizard people who want to live forever have this power. Industry is a reflection of capitalism, and individual industries within are distilled, contextual reflections of capitalism as a whole. This continues and careens into a capitalistic shit-filled cascade, where everything from our processes through to our team structures eventually serve the broad goal of maintaining and reflecting power structures. The more billionaires are able to hoard wealth, the purer the reflection of these attitudes and mindsets are in investors, shareholders, and executives. It’s the same for our practices, too. Thought Leadership; ‘good actors’ who perpetuate heavily parameterised, biased notions of success; ‘efficient workers’; AI; fuck it even Design Systems as an entire concept; these are all inherently capitalistic. They serve to either further industrialise our processes, increase the efficiency of exclusionary practices, or further perpetuate othering and the notion of the voiceless subaltern.
What the fuck now?
So where does that leave us? As the world becomes more entrenched in neoliberalism, where basic shit like climate justice and affordable transport are seen as radical leftist diatribe, as our industry grows to further and further perpetuate and reflect capitalism, and where a business case needs to be made for every fucking minor idea we might have to involve marginalised communities and view our work through a different lens, just where the fuck do we even make space for impact should we wish to even begin exploring the decolonisation of our work?
Firstly, we need to question why our industry standards are standards at all. For things like accessibility and semantics, it’s easy to argue that there’s a broad, humanitarian need for them. For things like processes, or organisation structures, it’s almost always the opposite. Are you defaulting into capitalistic jizzlobbing purely through virtue of your processes and frameworks? Does your research serve as nothing more than a placating act of othering to get stakeholder buy-in? Do you design in isolation, with people who look like you, think like you, and speak like you? Maybe don’t fucking do that?
Secondly, act. Boycott tech that perpetuates this status quo. Figma is great example. Cute on the surface, but with an irredeemable need to monopolise an industry and control what it’s possible to create. Stop using React (thx Heydon) and perform the radical and rebellious act of programming in HTML and CSS. No Hooks No Masters lads. Refuse to work on products that profit from human fucking misery.
All that shit is hard though, and for every socially conscious humanitarian designer, there’s a dozen capable individuals ready to step in and fuel the machine without asking questions. There is no ethical design under capitalism, but we can at least try to subvert it.
