"In the process of resisting social and environmental harm, has design become too inward facing?"

Design needs to shift its focus away from self-critique towards galvanising the public to resist the socio-political crises facing the US and the world, writes Susan Yelavich.

The dissonance between our political reality and the reality of the lush countryside outside my window in upstate New York raises a troubling question. It's one I'm sure people have asked for millennia: "how could the world be going to hell in a hand basket while the sun still shines?"

And when the sun does cloud over, another question follows: "what are we doing about it?" 'It' being the disappearances, the genocides, the rewriting of history, the withdrawal of care, the willful exploitation of the environment by AI tech bros and fossil fuel robber-barons, and the myriad of other poisonous erasures made in the name of power and money.

Design is shifting away from the production of goods and novelties toward research and methodologies

Before getting to specific actions, I think it might also be worth asking a more fundamental question vis a vis design. Namely: where is design energizing socio-political currents today?

Design virtually co-authored the hopeful visions of the future after world war two. Think of the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate in 1959, when design was integral to building post war economies.

True, corporate ambitions were more modest and designers were more in sync with their aims for what, in hindsight, was an inevitably compromised form of improvement – compromised, given its emphasis on consumption as a solution to all ills. Still, design seemed more relevant, more integrated into many of society's peacetime ambitions.

Decades of disenchantment later, the energy of design is shifting away from the production of goods and novelties toward research and methodologies. Not a surprise to anyone here, but still worth discussing.

In terms of research, I'm thinking of work like that of Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Italian practice Formafantasma – specifically Cambio, their 2020 exhibition about wood at the Serpentine in London. It looked at the uses and sources of wood globally by drawing on historic and contemporary cultural and technical perspectives. Here, design is invoked as a study of materials.

Paula Antonelli's R&D Salons also come to mind, with their emphasis on "R." Brilliant though they are, and I have attended many, they tend to eschew specificity for broad themes like "Cold", "Bullying", "Taboo", "Philanthropy", and so on. Design is not necessarily presented as a catalyst.

I see much of this work as a self-critique, which risks ignoring our immediate political crises

Fair enough, design is, in fact, relational, but the question remains: whither go designers? (To be fair, Antonelli's Design Emergency podcast with Alice Rawthorne does deal with social and environmental issues, though I haven't seen any specifically related to politics).

By methodologies, I mean methodologies of inclusion, often found in practices ranging from community governance to individual craftsmanship. These methodologies are often adopted and adapted from indigenous peoples, and more broadly from marginalized communities.

I welcome this kind of examination of conscience that explicitly integrates other kinds of experiences and values into design. But can these quiet challenges to capitalism and power structures affect hearts and minds on any kind of scale when their outlets are largely confined to academic forums? More publicly the Cooper Hewitt Museum's Triennial similarly questions assumptions about design, but has the unfortunate effect of reducing design's role to staging 'the other'.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's vital that designers are questioning their own hierarchies and values. But in the process of resisting complicity with forces behind social and environmental harm, has design become too inward facing?

I see much of this work as a self-critique, which risks ignoring our immediate political crises. I think it's time for design to go into triage mode, taking emergency patients, such as democracy, first.

So at the risk of sounding hopelessly nostalgic, I'm wondering where today's Sister Coritas are? Where are the Frank Cieciorkas, the man who in 1965 designed the fist that became a symbol for the Black Power movement? Where are the Gerald Holtoms, the British designer of the peace symbol? Or the Gilbert Bakers? (Baker designed the rainbow flag in 1978.)

For those who think that unifying symbols are a thing of the past, just look at the success of the MAGA cap

I'm pretty sure they're out there somewhere, though I see little evidence of it. This, despite the fact that I'm also pretty sure that most designers can empathize with Holtom's state of mind, when he described his design process: "I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it."

Since its earliest adoption by peace workers in Britain, Holtom's iconic symbol has weathered the vagaries of fashion and still retains legitimacy, albeit feeling a tad shopworn. Today there is no shortage of demonstrations where designers' work might be just as vividly present. For those who think that unifying symbols are a thing of the past, just look at the success of the MAGA cap.

In addition to searching for literal signs of hope from graphic designers, we also need gear to protect demonstrators' bodies. Could this be a job for product designers? At the risk of sounding naive, we need apps or something like the Life Alert necklace that can be pressed in an emergency. Wouldn't you want to trigger an ear-piercing siren if someone's trying to abduct you?

I realize that most of us are resisting in the best way we know how, whether by giving money to progressive causes and candidates, writing editorials, by showing up at protests, or by hanging Ukrainian flags from our homes, as my husband and I have done. Though I admit I'm a bit afraid to hang a Palestinian flag right now, as much as I'd like to.

As I write this, I am less interested in our individual actions than the possibility for a larger collective presence. In the words of Ras Baraka, the Mayor of Newark arrested for trying to inspect an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center: "We've seen a bunch of disparate, spur-of-the-moment acts by individuals and smaller groups, but there's no collective offensive strategy."

The advice that Baraka and others have given to Democrats holds for designers as well. Namely, there has to be an alternative vision.

Whatever emerges needs to be compelling enough to galvanize the public imagination

Vision may be only one dimension of design, but it's one that still has potential. Shepard Fairey's customizable "Hope" poster for Barack Obama comes to mind as an especially good example of an updated approach to protest signs.

We could also use some leadership from strategic designers. Decades ago, Ralph Caplan wrote about the sit-in as a form of design. Could that be expanded upon to widen non-violent resistance?

This short litany of visual, aural and spatial practices isn't offered to fracture responses yet again, but rather to suggest realms from which a strong signal might emerge. Whatever emerges needs to be compelling enough to galvanize the public imagination – be it in protest (e.g. the raised fist) and/or in hope (e.g. the rainbow flag). It needs to bring together the resistance bubbling up from town meetings, from the streets, from campuses and from the less-visible grumblings at the proverbial kitchen table.

These many streams of resistance must be brought together to make our interdependence palpable. We can't wait for messiahs to lead us out of this mess. We need to pave the way for their coming.

Susan Yelavich is professor emerita, design studies at Parsons School of Design, The New School. A fellow of the American Academy of Rome (2004) and the Bogliasco Foundation (2018), she is a member of the Scientific Committee for Design at Politecnico di Milano and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw's FAIR Design conferences. Her contributions to design scholarship span over four decades, including 15 years at Parsons and 25 years at Cooper Hewitt Museum. She is the author of Thinking Design through Literature (Routledge, 2019), Design as Future-Making (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Contemporary World Interiors (Phaidon, 2007).

The photo is via Shutterstock.

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