The Pervert's Guide to Design

"Cinema is the ultimate pervert art, it doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire" Slavov Zizek, The Perverts Guide to Cinema.

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Zizek's 2006 documentary film, starts with a reference to 1988 John Carpenter's film "They Live", a movie that describes the story of a homeless man that accidentally finds a box full of sunglasses hidden behind the wall of an old church. When "Nada", the homeless man, saw through the pair of glasses, he could suddenly see the hidden reality behind the media and advertisement messages that surrounded him, to finally discover a plot by aliens to control the minds of humans and take over the world. By performing an analysis of media and cinema, Zizek's video essay tries, in a very entertaining way, to do the same, to unveil the dark ideological biases beyond the seamlessly innocent appearance of our everyday cultural and media reality.

As Zizek shows in his essay, we live immersed inside a ubiquitous and invisible ideological framework, one that seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable (Fisher). Our current unescapable horizons are defined by an ideology that celebrates the inventive nature of the marriage of neoliberal capitalism and technology. Everything that happens to us, our jobs, education, personal relationships, ways of living, even the shape of our future as a society is perceived through the lenses of the reigning techno-capitalist ideology. An ideology so ubiquitous and persuasive that makes us happily accept our fate without even grasping the possibility of an alternative.

But the myths that support this ideological dome are starting to display some structural failures. The year 2018 seems to set the beginning of the end of the age of Digital Innocence. The myth of the digital economy as a people empowering force capable of softening the face of capitalism has been finally proved as fake as the news that it propagates. Digitalism managed to hide its direct consequences and externalities for a long time under the thick promise of a liberating and democratic techno-utopia. But the reverse side is starting to emerge to the open, to show that behind the surface of the technological revolution there's no a revolution at all, just a more efficient and radical mutant evolution of the neoliberal principles that defined the late XXth century.

And for many, the dystopia seems to be arriving sooner than the future.

The innocence of Design

Creativity is a distinctly neoliberal trait because it feeds the notion that the world and everything in it can be monetized. The language of creativity has been subsumed by capitalism. Oli Mould, Against Creativity.

For the last 20 years Design has been at the core of the development of the Digital Economy. As Tom Goodman pointed out, whoever controls the interface controls the business. The monopolistic success of the big platforms cannot be explained without the role that Design played in their conception. Design, as main responsible of the definition of the interface layer, cannot be seen as an innocent separate entity, it's a key factor of the digital economy, for good or bad.

Design promises to take into account the human factor. We, designers, become the representatives of people's needs and desires within the realm of innovation and corporations. We seem to take on the epic mission of making the world slightly better, more useful and efficient by building solutions that are human-centric.

But seeing through the cracks caused by the excesses of the Digital Economy, we are starting to perceive that this very definition of human-centricity is also written in relation to the same invisible ideological axioms that drives the political, social and economic reality. The human in human-centric is not human at all, it's nothing but an abstract projection of an individual defined by its relation with the power structures, the human is only relevant when is linked to business as a "customer" or to technology as a "user".

The success of Design as a strategic business driver depends mostly on the designer's capacity of reducing the human factor into measurable KPIs. The paradoxical original sin of Design is that in order to succeed it has to remove the subtleties of the human nature from its own human-centric promise. Taking this logic a bit further, we can even think that the current two main roles of Design in the Digital Age are: 1. to soften as much as possible the friction caused by the human factor, oiling the transactional nature of the capitalist reality without the inconvenient unpredictability of people's imperfections. And 2. to create and enhance data extraction devices to feed the mechanics of the incoming surveillance capitalism.

Unescapable Biases

Design Thinking, as the paradigm of what Design is in contemporary terms, lives within an apparently neutral playground that is defined by a set of logic boundaries: what is viable in business terms, what is feasible in relation to technology and what is desirable for us, humans. A framework that is stirred with fast, collaborative and iterative creative processes, perfectly suited for a time of uncertainty. Processes that are based on the objective understanding of people's needs and behaviors and the objective synthesis of this insights into well-tested objective solutions that will provide objective and measurable value both for businesses and for people.

But when looking at the apparent neutrality of the Design process through the glasses of "Nada", just by adding a tiny bit of critical perspective, we can easily unveil some hidden truths behind the objective good intentions of our beloved process:

What “Viability” ultimately means is that, as far as Design is embedded in a business framework, the main -and only- role of Design is to contribute to maximize the return of investment for shareholders. A definition of ROI based, of course, on the triumphant principle of short term profitability, a principle that overrules any other consideration.

It doesn't come as a surprise that profitability is the bottom-line of all Design process, that's fine, but within the context of a highly speculative, financially-driven economy, any other factor beyond optimizing profit is immediately excluded from the business, and design, decision-making.

Design principles such simplicity, efficiency, scale, automation, data-driven personalisation, are not human-centric but "VC-centric". The very idea of "user empowerment", one of the most important and liberating ideas initially offered by digital technologies, is from an economic perspective no more than a nice trick to pass the means of production of business value to the hands of the users. And this is getting even trickier, the likes of Facebook or Google managed to build thanks to good design, what Shoshana Zuboff defines as an extreme structural dependency from people..., ...we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational by-products of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.

The ideological frame of reference defines every aspect of the reality within and distorts the understanding of each of the elements.

To talk about "designing for viability", as business designers claim, is redundant, everything that happens within the framework of design is business design. Design is allowed to exist as far as it supports the thirst for profitability. Business is not a constrain, but the whole medium in which design happens. Despite of what we make people believe, Design Thinking is not set to be a human-centric activity, it's just a business-centric one that includes the human factor as a working variable.

The “feasibility” aspect of the Design process tends to be biased towards the utilitarian techno-optimisms of Silicon Valley, a philosophy that lives on the promise that every problem in this world can be solved with the right technology. Feasibility is not so much about what can be done in order to solve a human challenge, but about how can we use a predefined technology solution to get closer to solve a given problem. Designers are the best, and cheaper, selling force for technology companies, we are the ones making tech products understandable and seductive to people and to the market, we are the ones that experiment, find and create new applications and usages to existent technology, we are the enthusiast and fetishist advocates of new tech. Without even realizing it, we designers are the smiley avant-garde of techno-centric capitalism.

Tech and business go hand by hand, they are one and the same. Feasibility and viability are codependent and self reinforcing, pushing the human aspects of the equation to the very bottom of the priority list.

“Desirability”, the space reserved for human empathy, is also affected by the invisible ubiquity of the ideological bias. It's a principle that emerges form the neoliberal idea of the “individual” as the only source of legitimacy. We work for an archetypical individual shaped in techo-neoliberal terms, this is, driven by self-interest and incentivized mostly by economic rationality and utilitarian efficiency and convenience. "Desirability" is defined as a reactive response to the “user needs” and its only success criteria is the satisfaction of the individual as a user -it worked- or as consumer -it sold-. Design enhances this process of hyper-individualization, and as a consequence, it doesn't necessarily takes into consideration any other type of cultural, social, ecological or even economic outcomes outside the reductionist KPI of "satisfaction".

In its current configuration the design process is biased by definition, its mission is to protect the existing status quo. Design is human-centric as far as it helps to put humans in the center of the target.

The human factor

There's a great episode of Phillip K. Dick's Electric Dreams series, titled Autofac, based on Dick's 1955 homonymous short story. (Warning! spoilers ahead) In a post-apocalyptic future, Autofac is a fully automated tech conglomerate the size of a whole city that keeps producing stuff and sending Amazon-like packages to the remaining groups of humans on Earth, including a bunch of rebels that resist opening the packages and love shooting the delivery drones. At the end of the show we come to find out that Humanity was in fact fully destroyed and those remaining humans were artificially created by the automated tech company in order for its business to have consumers. The episode shows a perfectly working techno-capitalist society without humans. In fact, the human factor is at the end what puts the system in danger.

In a context in which is becoming easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Jameson), the human factor is no more than the weakest subset of our primary identity as consumers.

The show can be seen an extreme take on Peter Ducker's classic quote claiming that "the purpose of a business is to create a customer". It help us to imagine a future in which technology is able to quantify our deepest needs and desires, producing the data that feeds the algorithms in charge of transforming every aspect of our remaining humanity into variables that drive our predictable behaviors as consumers. (did I say"future"?).

The ultimate goal of this sentient techno-capitalist ideology is to transform us in neatly adjusted nodes of the Platform, removing the chance of error, difference, care, divergence or choice. A Platform that, at the end, would be more efficient without humans.

Reframing Design

The previous rant intends to underline a simple idea: As far as it is embedded in the technology and business framework, Design is not a human-centric discipline, it's a way of enhancing the nature of a system that cares more about users and consumers than cares about people.

We are living critical times in which we are starting to understand the big price that we, and the whole planet, have to pay for the success of our economic and social system. And I wonder if Design can play a role within corporations and institutions beyond its current role as accelerator of certain dynamics.

What is desirable, beyond utilitarian or consumption desires?

How can we understand and work for the human behind the user or the consumer?

How do we design for systemic outcomes, not just for short term results?

How a design-driven perspective can really transform businesses, embedding empathy at their core?

What's the role of Design?

How do we design a future worth loving?

(some answers in a following post, thanks to @Stef Silva)