UX Design: the (new?) Corporate-Name of Capitalism?
Like me, you, who also work in the field of design, probably spend a few hours of your day or week reading various articles that colleagues from the community tirelessly post, in an attempt to achieve more and more visibility, trust, prestige or just, “Humbly”, share knowledge to peers, whether they are new or experienced.
If you perform an argument analysis exercise, you will find that most texts address three themes (I’ll treat about them later) that, in general, guide the designer’s illusory role in solving problems.
Vilém Flusser, in his book “O mundo codificado” (which is a collection of essays written in german in 1970 and published by the german academic journal Merkur in 1978, and for a series of classes in Brazil in 1979), calls our attention to facts of us, designers, being responsible for creating “obstacles to remove obstacles”. This reflection is particularly provocative and, according to contemporary discourse, contradictory to what the design community says it does and intends to resolve.
The obstacle that removes the obstacle is a cyclical and intrinsically deep form of seeing the “designer as hero” discourse, which is applied to the fictitious premise that the designer’s role is a solution to real problems, for real people, in a real world.
The manipulation of matter, that is, the alteration of amorphous compositions in ideal forms from the theoretical point of view, shapes an idea of the real world. Therefore, the first distortion in the design community’s argument allows us to perceive the real world as being the physical, tangible, sensitive and perceptible world, ignoring, by estimates, a symbolic dimension in which the processes of use and identification of objects are.
Solving real-world problems, for real-ones people, means saying that designers are able to manipulate amorphous materials in contexts that cause the transformation of ideas into objects or, as you may prefer to call nowadays, “products”.
The creation of new products is the basis of the designer’s existential function. To create something it is necessary to have context. In order for the context, in turn, to allow a deformed material transformation in the object or product, a need is necessary. This need is, in general, people’s need. So far, everything seems to make sense.
It is now easy to see how the design field argument is aligned with that idea.
The problem, though, is when this argument is distorted or, in many cases, manipulated in order to create needs that are unessential to humans and are developed and stimulated to generate (or steal) people’s lives, money, and their humanity.
It is in this process of creating needs and obfuscating from humans being of their individual necessities and particularities that we address what Marx would call “reification” which is the process of objectifying humans into things. In the case of capitalism: turning people into numbers, calling them customers (or users) to put them in spreadsheets and finally present them in analytics boards.
“Designers work for people — they said”
It is not that simple! The main arguments found in Medium articles around are that; a good designer is the one who understands “the” product itself and not “the product” as a conceptual nature of abstract elements and premises that are out of the linear mindset of manipulating matter into artifacts.
This leads us to understand the world of design in a different way; the design field agent is more concerned with meeting the needs of capital production rather than building solutions for humans and their social needs.
The main activity of the contemporary designer is to find ways and contexts where the production of his solutions allows the accumulation of capital through the use of individuals in society, creating needs or finding opportunities to impose products or services that are not essential or indispensable.
To this end, it is necessary to appropriate certain skills, such as understanding “product” (which in general is the material form of capital), the ability to interpret statistics, aligning business strategies and understanding formulas and conversions. In short, the designer needs to understand and manipulate people to achieve the goal of accumulating wealth for companies that despise the existence of themselves.
The limit of its importance, however, is its ability to generate profit.
The product or commodity, that is, the result of the manipulation of amorphous matter is the social reason (or company-name) for capitalism. The designer, as a material handcrafter, is the main element of capitalist production; it is just another tool or an agent of production and capital accumulation.
To achieve that, he uses several techniques and methodologies to “remove obstacles with other obstacles” — as Vilém Flusser reminds us — feeding the cycle of generating surplus value and contributing to the social class division of the neoliberal world.
This leads us to a reflection: Isn’t it time for us, as designers, to rethink our mindset in order to measure the impact of our attitudes and decisions and how it affects the society in the world we live in?
Design is capitalism
The designer is a conditioning and conditioned agent; conditioned when it is in a larger structure that is business, where the logic of capital operates, where it is just another piece or tool.
Conditioning agent, on the other hand, because it “creates obstacles”. In practice, needs are not necessarily real. They can (and are) produced.
In this sense, the designer creates problems in laboratories and in them (re) produce a supposed solution.
The solution, on the other hand, is embodied in a product presented to the society that only knows it as a “solution” from the moment it is faced with the product.
At this point, the designer occupies the center of the problem. The center of the structure. He says what the problem is and also what the solution is. The capitalist, the holder of the means of production, in this sense, explores what is inherent in a professional class.
Have you, who got here and understand ROI, ever thought that the impact of your work generates a concentration of capital and that, in return, you do not receive at least 10% of what your workforce produces?
Have you ever thought that the impacts of your creations modify, manipulate and, in the worst case, destroy the social and affective relationships of thousands of people just to achieve the product’s objective, namely, the generation of wealth?
“Understand people”, “don’t get caught up in tools” and “master the product (and business) strategy”
The other day I read a post (in portuguese) that was the result of a personal project by a colleague from the field, where he sought inspiration and advice from more experienced professionals for the community of young aspiring designers.
What impresses me about the text is not the result of the work itself, which I particularly found a fantastic approach to focus on the message and not on the sender, thus reducing the risk of being influenced by people with spotlights pointed at them.
What strikes me is the fragile capacity for argumentation of professionals in their various levels of experience, which summarize the fundamental assumptions for building a successful career in Design to three specific skills; “Understand people”, “don’t get caught up in tools” and “master the product (and business) strategy”, without even bothering to think about “why” or “for what” they are producing what they produce.
And this does not mean thinking about the “why” of the objectives of the products, but rather, the final result of all actions and the fierce application of the workforce in the reproduction of a performance model that, in fact, does not solve the world’s problems, nor of people. At most, these solutions relieve (not solve) the negative impacts of not-attended needs.
In this sense, there is only one reflection I would leave you to think about: As you know that, in the end, your only role as a designer is to generate wealth for others, what motivates you or inspires you to continue being a designer?
