Design and Capitalism
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo
2015
Contemporary capital is understood here as a purely abstract value, an accretion of time and energy. It’s pretty much useless, it just sits there and stagnates. It weighs down heavy upon us.
This abstract value is only made useable through design, transforming it into an exchangeable commodity, that also carries symbolic value. This is an alchemical and concretizing process, turning (pretty much) nothing into something. This includes our stories, our songs and images, the reification of the structures of our social relations.
The feedback loop, with these commodities processed through our labour and consumption, generates (extracts) more value for capital, made abstract and intangible again, and added to the pile.
It’s important to realise that design operates on both sides of the production and consumption cycle. We often hear about the problems of conspicuous consumption, and design’s mediating role therein (ie. the evils of advertising), but we ignore design’s role in mediating how our labour is made abstract, made useless for us, but valuable for capital. Marx’s alienation is all the more relevant when we think of our current conditions of precarity, and how affective labour is now bought and sold.
Design’s role here can be thought of as “softening the edges of capitalism”. It’s the grease that keeps the motor running. The bevelled edges, the sheen on the surface, the stylish colour blocking, the chill room and casual Fridays, the critical distance that allows us to live, work, and consume under oppressive conditions.
This can easily be seen as a critique, but it’s probably a very useful and necessary social role for design, albeit an ideologically compromised one.
Removing the mediating role of design results in real violence. When design fails, communication breaks down, when the veil is lifted in moments of crisis, oppression resorts to its raw form in order to continue to extract value. This can perhaps be most clearly seen in the design of our democratic and civic systems, but is certainly not limited to them.
The flipside to this is that design in and of itself is therefore a form of structural violence. Delineating borders, ascribing hierarchies of value and worth, defining inclusion and exclusion.
If we ignore capital for a second (or a minute), we can imagine another model for design based on the lived experience of the communities we exist within.
Communities created through shared values/knowledge, based on lived experience, concretized through design into cultural objects/material culture (books, posters, websites, music, recipes), that then circulate back into an expanding community.
It’s important to qualify “created” here. We should avoid the fallacy of innovation. Struggles are happening all around, people are organizing and making art. How can we support them/us.
It’s also important to qualify the generic use of the word community, we should be speaking of specific communities, about real people, real experiences.
This circulation doesn’t exclude participation and value exchange within a market, but it is tied to communities and localities. Community is the container, not capital.
Material culture builds aggregate capacity and power within community.
Design can thus act as a symbolic counterpower to the hegemony of capital. It can create alternative space(s) and circulation beyond capital, and it can actually push back against it.
