Unjust Design
Posted on December 16, 2017
Delicate Tension, Kandinsky, 1923
Over the course of this semester, we’ve had several discussions around the current and future responsibilities of design, yet most of the theoretical framework so far constructed is very much rooted on western notions that evolved from and within urban environments.
For this reason, I lately find myself thinking a lot about how space, place and culture shape design(ers), and furthermore, the implications of urban educated designers in a world that is a victim of our constructed environment and the notions of social progress that urbanization promotes.
In Plato’s Republic, an argument is made that justice cannot be examined independently of the individual and the city¹;
I believe the same applies to Design.
If we examine design in relation to the individual and the city, it becomes clear that the urban environment, more often than not, shapes designers pre-disposed to advancing the systemic behaviors that define [this] urban lifestyle.
In cities that lay closer to Aristotle’s ideas of justice, design informed by the city tends to be a positive thing. Scandinavian design might be a good example of this. But most cities are not just, and therefore as the unjust city informs the individual [designer] the result as expected tends to be unjust design. An argument can be made that injustice sparks justice, but that holds true only to those perceptive to the injustice or invested in equality. But the moral compass of design has long now been pointing to a corrupted north.
If you can define justice, by extension you are defining good design.
Good design then, should be an embodiment of justice, but much of today’s design though isn’t. Today’s so-called good design is an embodiment of capitalism disguised through sustainability labels, because in today’s notions of fulfillment through the accumulation of goods, so embedded in our social culture, all things can be made sustainable yet perpetuate unsustainable practices².
Can we hold design schools and design educators accountable for the repercussions of our urban-centralized education system as it shapes tomorrow’s designers in a world that needs just* design now more than ever? What are the responsibilities of design schools and design educators over the hundreds of designers that graduate each year only to promote the industry of consumption, depletion of resources and the manufacture of the irrelevant?
Imagine removing all design schools from the urban context of unjust cities; What would the final presentations of the student at a Parsons school located in a remote village somewhere in Africa, where student are challenged daily and over the course of two years to solve some of the worlds biggest problems, look like?
Because even in a program like TransD, where like-minded students aim to bring a more just approach to design, the influence of the city still manages to ground ideas into addressing first world problems of the urban. And I’m not saying there aren’t problems need of fixing in the urban landscape, after all, cities are unjust for a reason; I am saying that not all problems should be aimed to be solved, and we should be looking beyond the urban.
On Lefebre’s “Right to the City,” David Harvey reflects that “…The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is…one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights³.”
I believe to reclaim that right, we need to move all design practice beyond the city.