AS SMALL A CRITICAL DESIGN AS POSSIBLE

Perhaps we have made critical practice something impossibly large. When the stakes are power structures, global economies, racial tension, social stratification— when they are macro level “wicked problems”, we have no choice but to speculate. To speculate and leave it at that, that is. Speculation is a way of maintaining proper politics while admitting defeat, a way to clear conscience on issues too big for design to tackle. It is solutions without the possibility of implementation, a criticality with built in safety from critique.



In Peter Sloterdijk’s The Art of Philosophy, he raises a similar issue with philosophy since Socrates by invoking the concept of the epoché, a state of existential reasoning where all action in the world is suspended. Sloterdijk’s critique of this practice is that is frees philosophers from being subjected to the same critique that public figures are subjected to. The philosopher is a person of thought, not action, and because of this is never placed in the position of potential ridicule that the government official is. In the same way, so called critical design exists within epoché, with goals too large to be realized by the current definitions of design. Speculative practice becomes a tower, a position from which (toothless) war can be waged but protected from the the roiling battles of the reality of the political, social and economic situations.



Marx famously critiqued the philosopher’s privileged position of epoché in his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, saying “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” This is a good starting point for us, but the scope is still too large. I propose we consider this: find one thing we are displeased with and change it. Can we refuse to let our client relationships be defined by commodification/the Spectacle? Can we fight isolation and discouragement by going out of our way to organize those around us and take back the commons of our decadent commercialized spaces? If we sell objects can we attempt to transition from buyer/seller relationships to relationships of mutual respect and dignity based on more than an exchange happening within capital? I propose that designing against capitalism may not be designing a fully formed replacement for it, but incrementally altering the relationships which design (as it now stands under capitalism) brings us into until they are no longer recognized as fetishized by commodity.