"[Y]our burnout, your lack of influence, your sense that the discipline has lost its way are not evidence of your individual shortcomings but symptoms of a system working exactly as it is designed to work."
In this poignant essay (linked below), Angelos Arnis describes the state of design in the age of AI. But it didn't start with AI...
"[T]he institutional arrangements within which design operates are configured to extract design's value while withholding design's autonomy and authority..."
Folks like Mike Monteiro, Erika Hall, Aral Balkan, and Laura Kalbag opened my eyes to this dynamic around 2014/2015. It started as a call to action for us designers to own the ethics of what we do, challenge expoitative business models, and 'do no harm.'
But I've long felt that the game is rigged against us on this. Angelos says this:
"The more I look at the state of tech, the more I recognize a specific structure operating in two distinct ways: the way business absorbs design's attempts at strategic influence, and the way AI tools absorb designers' labor while promising to liberate it."
Still, some designers manage to ake meaningful change, despite the obstacles:
"The designer who can navigate an organization that does not grant them autonomy and still produces meaningful work is doing something admirable. But the skill being developed is the skill of operating within someone else's terms."
I agree. And I realize that it's not easy to resist pressure from your boss, manager, or PM to just design the thing and not ask too many questions. We need to earn a living, right?
So we get beautifully designed products that effectively encourage behavior change that ultimately exploits the product's users to benefit the company that makes it. We get surveillance capitalism, predatory social media platforms, and tech products that enable fascist governments.
But I don't blame designers. I don't even blame the decision-makers who got us here. They are, indeed we all are, just humans doing our best. And most of us are too busy, burned out, or stuck in survival mode to feel the proverbial water heating up around us.
Also, people AI make very seductive promises about AI while convincing us that it's inevitable. Angelos says this:
"The technology generates a feeling of individual empowerment while producing deeper informal dependence. You feel more capable, yet you are truly more depending than ever."
So in Angelos' words, "How might we design the structures that would make design's autonomy a material reality rather than a perpetual aspiration?"
🤷🏼♂️ What do you think?
Thanks for reading, dear one! And thank you Matthijs for sharing this with me!
Here's the essay:
👉🏼 https://d3e.co/y5
With love and light,
Brian
#design #designers #business #AI #ethics #EthicalDesign #HumanConnection #DesignCommunity #MeaningfulDesign #ChangeManagement #SurveillanceCapitalism #fascism
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