Silvio Lorusso

What Design Can't Do

taylor miles hopkins

The art and design school, operating as a marketplace of differences, identifies and legitimises identity components and turns them into distinctive skills to be spent subsequently in the world of work, presenting some of them as authentic and therefore inalienable. 

…art and design schools are first and foremost laboratories for self-design, and only secondarily a context where things are designed.

We see smart culture in the celebration of design heroes, in the throwaway solutions to epochal problems, in the pervasiveness of personal branding, in the distinctive performance of kritikaoke. We see contribution culture in the online syllabi put together collaboratively and semianonymously, in free and open-source tools, in students' translation of texts they find important into their mother tongue, In artefacts designed for and with' specific communities.

Smart culture is uncompromising, intransigent and self-absorbed. Contribution culture is compromissory, tolerant, and indulgent. It is realistic, but it doesn't ignore the reality of ideas. Whereas smart culture creates, contributory culture maintains.

Design should be informal in nature, but it shouldn't fetishise informality: it should resist character normativity and protect its people from hurtful behaviour. It should be attentive to its flows of social, cultural and economic capital: generous with quoting, crediting and remunerating; mistrustful of impresarios and creative directors; rejectful of inner qualitative distinctions. All the work it needs is essential, interdependent work. Validation comes with effort, helpfulness and mutuality, more than with smartness, talent and bravado. It should believe in expertise, but not worship experts. It should provide an activity-based sense of belonging where people have roles and purposes, but these can be renegotiated. Here, biographical and cultural differences would be understood, but foregrounded only when necessary, so that a designer can blissfully forget themselves.

For, when it comes to actually realising things, designing is neither about synthesis nor autonomy, neither order nor reason, but about compromise. We could speak of interdependence, but while interdependence acknowledges the constrictive and generative relationships that exist beyond autonomy, its essence is passive. Compromise, on the other hand, is an active and political endeavour: it implies mediation, if not compromission, that is, the adulteration of pure vision, with hands getting dirty in the messiness of reality. 

"Design is only possible where confidence and hope are united. where there is resignation, that is, no belief in future prospects, there no design." 

Design compromise is the antithesis of critical autonomy. It is an admission of the fact that the designer is, after all, inevitably a bricoleur—a person who makes do with what they find, in the conditions in which they find themselves.

Joshua Citarella, a US artist, declares to his audience made up of students and emerging artists that "this education and career path is training you to become part of a professional class that, in reality, no longer exists. Institutions pay below market rates and no longer offer the protections that allowed artists to engage with complex ideas."

At this point, we can briefly list the features of kritikaoke: a critical disposition functioning as a tool of distinction; the deployment of ornamental politics; an abstract notion of public that is to be made aware; the adoption of a critical-theoretical jargon—vaguely anticapitalist—adjacent to International Art English; a performance of identity as a professional skill that fits the criteria of an identitarian bureaucracy. 

Holm invites us to have a realistic image of cultural environments: "No matter how much we might wish it to be otherwise, education—including that which we impart ourselves as teachers of cultural studies—is not simply a means to develop socially, politically and culturally productive awareness, but also a means of distinguishing Sanctioned from unsanctioned forms of knowledge.”

Design panism is here deployed according to a clear cultural strategy: by qualifying any form of activism as design activism, the cultural professional can write, curate and speak about anything.

According to artist Brad Troemel, “raising awareness is ultimately the process of making people aware that you are aware of the conversation that needs to be had.” …Similarly, Catherine Liu states that “[]iberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about people; but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them." Thus, the empowering act creates a distinction, at least symbolic, between the powerful and the powerless. It's important to consider the economic aspect of raising awareness, as it is not expensive in terms of means. Issuing a statement requires less time and energy than building a product, hence the privileged position of graphic designers as critical actors. According to Glenn Adamson, “Graphic design in particular lends itself to gestures of protest, from punk album covers to handmade banners. But architecture and product design, have always been service businesses.”

Or is this a fetishism of rebellion where expression matters more than design, and in which practitioners are urged to love the 'revolt' more than the world to which it might give rise?" Let's listen once again to Walter Benjamin, who “demanded that artists must not merely adopt political content; but must revolutionize the means through which their work is produced and distributed.”

…one is urged to feign a more or less standardised expression of critical and socially concerned thinking within safe and somehow predefined ethical boundaries. A sort of humblebrag of good intentions that doesn't hurt or upset anybody. Against this backdrop, the notion of performance of politics is less a form of deep engagement than a garnish to apply one’s own projects and practice.

Irony, then, was a way to inhabit the gap between expectations and reality. But our society is post-ironic, for it has learned to neutralise irony's subversive power by simply incorporating it…As David Foster Wallace pointed out, irony, especially in its postmodern breed, moved away from its antagonistic origins to evolve into a mere advertising technique that, while pleasing the audience, acts as a protective shield against criticisms, because how can you ironically criticise something that is already ironic about itself?

On Indiana metropolitani—public protest using irony. “We demand to work harder and earn less!”

…irony is a frustrating “language that marks the space between our desires and the difficulty of their realization.”

But the fact that design is powerful doesn’t necessarily imply that designers are.

The “human factor" in these decisions is the very reason we should not consider this decision-making process a linear, logical one, but one that is affected by temperament, irrationality and chance.

“…When a language formalises, this is when it can begin to alienate people.” That being said, cannibalisation is not a destiny for [Clara] Balaguer, who believes in the ability to “write about the vernacular in the vernacular.”

As the shepherd doesnt call his sheep 'nature', in this case we cannot speak of vernacular, since there is no distance between the subject and the object.

The arguments in this book are absolutely necessary when looking at our current state of design education and professional practice. There was a lot here that touched upon critiques and discomforts I had within design school, and Lorusso aptly verbalizes why I (and many other designers) have felt this way—particularly the performative aspects of many social design projects, the professionalization of the self, the idolization of the design hero and smart culture, and the extreme complexity, hyper-autonomy, and the aggrandizement encouraged in academic spaces that rarely reflects the practice and leads to quick disillusionment. Also, had such fantastic arguments surrounding designers in tech (wanting a seat at the table when the table quite truly should have been flipped).

My main qualm with this book can be easily explained by a quote in its final pages: “…designers and design theorists have an incentive to increase complexity in order to reduce it. This way, any attempt at simplification is portrayed as a trivialisation of the issue at hand.” I found this book to be indulgently academic and often talked in circles. While it’s a fantastic source of information and critique (particularly of looking at the detailed failings of the field within capitalism without giving the typical wave of the problem being just generally “capitalism”), this is not the most approachable read to the “everyday designer” that Lorusso carefully upholds in the early pages of the book. 

The arguments in this book are absolutely necessary when looking at our current state of design education and professional practice. There was a lot here that touched upon critiques and discomforts I had within design school, and Lorusso aptly verbalizes why I (and many other designers) have felt this way—particularly the performative aspects of many social design projects, the professionalization of the self, the idolization of the design hero and smart culture, and the extreme complexity, hyper-autonomy, and the aggrandizement encouraged in academic spaces that rarely reflects the practice and leads to quick disillusionment. Also, had such fantastic arguments surrounding designers in tech (wanting a seat at the table when the table quite truly should have been flipped).

My main qualm with this book can be easily explained by a quote in its final pages: “…designers and design theorists have an incentive to increase complexity in order to reduce it. This way, any attempt at simplification is portrayed as a trivialisation of the issue at hand.” I found this book to be indulgently academic and often talked in circles. While it’s a fantastic source of information and critique (particularly of looking at the detailed failings of the field within capitalism without giving the typical wave of the problem being just generally “capitalism”), this is not the most approachable read to the “everyday designer” that Lorusso carefully upholds in the early pages of the book. 

Sésame

I was waiting for this book for sooo long. Silvio Lorusso's never ending twitter thread on design desilusion was a major ressource for my master thesis (I even kind of borrow on of his meme for the cover) and a companion through the last years of my design studies.

I'm quite happy that this book exist. It offers a deep review of the main issues design and designers are facing, especially around power and relationship with politics. More important, it's a exigeant book who dare to face the fact that design won't solve the problems, those from he's responsible and others, that it's non-stop pretending to solve. I'm usually having a hard time to explain this point of view to my fellow designer, probably because I sound really cynical and a bit harsh. I think this book is a really good tools to do so, probably in a more subtil way than me. An other quality is, as the conclusion of the book explain it, being critical without having to give a new guide to doing-a-better-political-design. Also, I loved the numerous memes scattered through the book.

I still have a few critics or questions about it, but I first want to say that it's like the second or third book i'm reading in english, I may have misunderstood or not fully understood everything.

I really like the point Lorusso made about workers union in design field that those "unioninsing calls" have barely any effect because unionising would be aknowledging that designers are just basic worker and not intellectual one. But I feel it would have been really interesting to explore a bit more the question of unionizing in the design field. It's still for me the more interesting way for designer to face desilusion and in France or UK we have several union exemples. It made you think yourself as worker, and so connecting with other workers with common interest even if they're not designers, and give you a space to redirect your political ambition in usefull and impactfull struggle, instead of just being cynical and desilusional.
My second main "critic" is about the school chapitre (the 7th I think). I think it miss a bit of structural analyse of how art and design school we're built, what is their relationship with the other field in university (and why they think themselves so different from them) and how they're affected by the progressive liberalisation of universities, especially in Europe. It would have give a deeper understanding of how these school are rooted in a neo-liberal agenda. In the art and design student union that we launch in France it helps us a lot to explain our current situation. But maybe I'm too french and became too much of a communist.

Well, sorry for the english mistakes, and thanks a lot for this really important book, I hope it would reach at least a bit of the french design field.

What Design Can't Do

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