Design: The “Next” 30 Years
A brief for a new golden age.
There seems to be a lot of reflection going on these days about the evolution of design, the role it plays in shaping the way we live, and, perhaps most importantly, the potential futures for the discipline. This type of historical reflection always comes, either explicitly or implicitly, with a certain timeframe.
For example, a few months ago, the studio Tellart launched Design Nonfiction: a documentary series exploring “transformations in design practice between the Dotcom Crash and the rise of machine intelligence.” And so, in that case, we are looking at the fairly recent evolution of the field over the last couple of decades, from the turn of the century onwards. This is a period in which the influence of emerging digital technologies on design is the most salient feature.
We can also take a longer view, say, a century. This is the perfect year to do that as it marks the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus—arguably, the school in which design, as a professional field, was born. In this vein, the Deutsche Welle has released bauhausWORLD, a three-part documentary series that explores the question: “Do the Bauhaus’s social ideals and design principles still shape how we live today?”
In this article, I will argue that a fruitful approach to understanding the evolution of design, the role it has played in shaping our lives, and some interesting paths for future development, is to look at the wider technical, economic and political context while choosing a very particular historical periodization. This argument will be based on the ideas developed by the British-Venezuelan scholar Carlota Pérez. Moreover, following her ideas, I will take the risk to argue not only that we might be on the verge of a new golden age but, most importantly, that design—an expanded notion of design, that is—would have to play a key role in turning that possibility into a reality.
A new golden age. Such a ludicrous idea to be entertained if we consider the state of the world, right? Let’s try to do just that. I think Leah Zaidi is correct when she argues there are only three trends that really matter today: a climate emergency, the battle for equality and democracy, and the risks associated with the development of artificial intelligence. And things simply don’t look good on any of those fronts:
- According to the IPCC, our planet is already 1 degree Celsius warmer on average and we have only about 12 years to cut fossil-fuel use in half —and then completely by 2050—if we want to stabilize the Earth’s climate at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
- At the same time, the world is witnessing a rise in populist politics, fueled by digital platforms, that threaten the survival of democratic institutions. This rise, moreover, can be reasonably traced back to the huge levels of inequality that characterize the world today.
- Finally, the fact that those levels of inequality may continue to grow due to a new wave of automation-driven unemployment is only one of the potential consequences of the development and diffusion of new forms of machine intelligence.
Carlota Pérez roughly agrees with this bleak assessment. As she writes:
Unemployment and inequality are increasing due to globalisation, new technologies and the decoupling of finance from the economy during the prosperous bubble period. Critically, the ‘American Way of Life’ of the last paradigm brought patterns of consumerism, disposability and profligate use of energy and materials that now confront the world with major environmental challenges, not least that of climate change. Up until now the ICT revolution has done little to change this: mass use of computing technologies has indeed added to global energy and materials demand. [1]
Yet, according to her theory, this is not the first time the world has been in such a terrible shape. In fact, she argues that we may be now in a period that closely resembles the 1930s.
The Four and a Half Revolutions of Capitalism
In order to understand why we’re in the equivalent of that period, it is necessary to take a quick look at Perez’s theory of techno-economic change in capitalism.
Proposed first in her seminal book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (2002) and recently updated in her research project Beyond the Technological Revolution, the theory is an attempt to explain the history of capitalism over the last 240 years as a series of technological revolutions followed—and shaped by—a set of economic, social and political responses. In this sense, it is a continuation of the work of economists like Joseph Schumpeter, Nikolái Kondrátieff and, most directly, Perez’s mentor Christopher Freeman, all of whom studied the cyclical movements of the capitalist economy.
Pérez’s theory can be summed up in two key ideas. The first is that capitalism has evolved through four complete cycles or “great surges of development” since the outset of the Industrial Revolution in England in 1771. Each of those surges has been spurred by a ‘technological revolution’: a concept that denotes much more than just a particular invention or discovery. “Each technological revolution”, Pérez writes,
is based on an interrelated set of new technologies, industries and infrastructure networks that develop in intense ‘feedback loops’, providing markets and suppliers for each other, lowering production costs and increasing profitability.
As the image shows, we’re only halfway through the fifth surge of development, namely the “Age of Information Technology and Telecommunications”, whose birth Pérez traces back to 1971, the year when Intel announced the first commercially available microprocessor.
The second key idea is that we can find, within each of those four and a half revolutions, a pattern of propagation that follows the typical S-curve of technological life-cycles producing two distinct periods of economic, social and political development.
Following the so-called “big bang” of each technological revolution, there comes a period of ‘installation’, lasting roughly 20 to 30 years, in which the economy, as it were, explores the new space of possibilities. This is a period of ‘creative destruction’ marked by an increasing concentration of wealth and rising levels of inequality, i.e. a ‘Gilded Age.’ All the capital flowing into the new technologies eventually cause a bubble that bursts into a crisis and recession in the middle of the cycle. This variable period is characterized by high levels of financial speculation. After this turning point, there comes a period of ‘deployment’ in which capital finds its way back into production thus leading to a widespread application of the new techno-economic paradigm in society at large. This is a period of ‘creative construction’: a ‘Golden Age’ characterized not only by sustained growth but also, most importantly, a more equal spreading of the benefits across society.
The two key ideas, combined, give us a very succinct and coherent view of the history of industrial capitalism, which looks like this:
Interestingly, from the perspective of this theory, we could find a certain relation between the two pieces of design history mentioned above: they both explore changes in design practice associated with installation periods. On the one hand, it makes sense to understand the rise of the Bauhaus — particularly after 1923 when the school adopted the slogan ‘Art into Industry’ — as coinciding and dealing with the ‘installation’ period of the fourth surge of development, i.e. the Age of the Automobile, Oil, Plastics and Mass Production. On the other hand, Tellart’s Design Nonfiction—particularly the first compilation entitled ‘The Digital Revolution’—can be seen as exploring the consequences on design brought about by the installation period of the current Age of Information Technologies and Telecommunications.
The Turning Point
According to Pérez, we are in a period equivalent to the 1930s. Moreover, this is a strange and extended version because it includes a “double bubble”: the ‘dot-com bubble’ around 2000 and the financial crisis of 2007-2008. It’s almost as if we’re stuck on repeat in the recession period. In fact, Pérez believes that it may be possible to have a third consecutive crisis. 😭
Today, as in previous similar periods, there are concerns about secular stagnation, namely, a long-term or chronic slowdown of the economy as a whole. Moreover, we are witnessing a wider set of socio-economic and political problems associated with feeble growth: structural unemployment, inequality, economic migrations, social unrest, xenophobia, populism, etc. These latter two are perhaps the most poignant. In a recent article, umair haque writes:
… why does it feel a whole lot like the 1930s are repeating themselves? After all, here we are. Repeating just the same sequence of ruin that led up to that war. Fascism on the march in nation after nation, from America to Britain to Poland. Nationalism and extremism surging. Hate and violence growing, growing, growing by the day. Trade wars spiralling out of control. Nations that used to be friends becoming enemies, hurling insults at one another. Maybe the bad guys have changed names and faces — but the script they’re playing out certainly hasn’t.
Pérez’s theory can be read as an attempt to show a way out of this crisis using learnings from previous techno-economic cycles. According to her, the economic, social and political problems we’re facing today, along with the attendant pessimism, are a recurring phenomenon during the recessions that follow major bubble collapses. These are the result of a decoupling of the financial sector from the production economy. What this means is that, despite all the technological possibilities discovered during the installation period, investors are reluctant to take risks in the real economy preferring, instead, to profit from the casino economy. Such ‘financialization’ of the economy stalls innovation, produces low rates of growth and increases unemployment thus feeding social tensions.
Most importantly, Pérez shows how, in previous cycles, the ‘recoupling’ of finance to the production economy has required a paradigm shift in the direction of the economy and society as a whole. As she writes:
the innovation potential of each major technological revolution has been shaped and steered by government, society, and business in periods that are very similar to the present.
The Previous Golden Age
Economists speak of a ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ when referring to the period of dramatic and sustained economic growth, high rates of employment and lower levels of inequality that the United States, Western Europe, some countries in East Asia and even the Soviet Union enjoyed from the end of World War II until around 1973–75. In this sense, to speak of a “golden age” is not meant to obscure the pressing problems that existed in the world during those decades—such as war and conflict in and between developed and developing nations, or tensions along class, gender and racial lines, to name just two—but merely to highlight that it was during those years when the capitalist system functioned better for most people in those countries.
In Pérez’s theory, this time coincides with the deployment period of the fourth surge of development (the Age of the Automobile, Oil, Plastics and Mass Production). The key argument, though, is that deployment periods have never unfolded as a natural outcome of the technological revolution or the workings of the market economy in and on themselves. On the contrary, they have required—in each of the surges, and with increasing levels of sophistication—the intentional action of the state. As she explains:
The second period in the diffusion of each revolution is ‘context dependent’ deployment. The new set of possibilities is disparate and often unconnected. It is referred to as ‘potential’ precisely because it can be used and shaped in different ways and because profitability depends on relative costs, dynamic demand and the availability of synergies in terms of suppliers, skills, distribution networks and customer learning. Hence the potential inherent in each revolution requires the choice of a direction in order to come to fruition: in other words, an orientation for innovation is necessary, applicable across multiple and disparate industries, which can generate synergies advantageous to all of them.
In the case of the fourth revolution, this choice of direction and orientation of innovation can be exemplified by the set of initiatives that we associate with the development of the welfare state—such as the New Deal in the USA, the Beveridge Report in the UK, and the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. All of those political programs had the objective of solving the social, economic and political problems of the epoch and, to the extent that they succeeded, it was by directing, orienting, shaping or steering the possibilities offered by the new techno-economic paradigm. Again, Pérez writes:
It was the measures of the welfare state, such as free (or subsidised) education and healthcare, labour union-secured salaries, and a progressive tax structure, along with complementary institutional innovations such as the credit system, unemployment insurance and mortgage guarantees, which made it possible for the growing numbers of the population — including blue collar workers — to aspire to a suburban home and the new lifestyle.
That last word is key. One of the most important developments in Pérez’s most recent work is the emphasis she puts on the issue of lifestyle. Each technological revolution, but specifically each period of deployment or ‘golden age’, brings with it a redefinition of what it means to live ‘the good life’ and thus, if it is successful, a transformation of everyday life for millions of people. In this way, the direction of innovation can be seen to take place at two levels: the ‘macro’ level of state policies, programs and initiatives which shape and steer the direction of the economy as a whole, and the ‘micro’ level of new products, services, values and aspirations associated with a new form of everyday life.
For example, the second surge of development — associated with steam, coal, iron, and railways — brought with it urban living during the Victorian Boom. Then, during the third surge, the Belle Époque was (at least retrospectively) associated with a new aspirational form of life or joie de vivre. Most importantly, the post-World War II period brought with it the radically new set of values and aspirations around suburban living and mass consumption that we associate with the American Way of Life. “Each technological revolution,” Pérez writes
makes feasible a wide range of new inter-related infrastructures, production equipment and life-shaping goods and services. Yet it is in a process of socio-political choice that the specific set that will flourish from the new range of the possible is fully defined. Historically, that choice — particularly in the Western market societies — has not required coercion, but rather is driven by aspirations for the lifestyle that the new goods and services provide. The rich and educated tend to be the pioneering adopters, with increasing layers of society copying their example.
At this point, we are ready to recognize the importance of design in this process. At the ‘macro’ level, the main vehicles for shaping and steering the technological revolution are the state and public policy—which, by the way, are also forms of design, as I will argue below. At the ‘micro’ level, though, the main vehicle for shaping and steering the revolution is, of course, design stricto sensu—the activity associated with the creation of “life-shaping goods and services.” In this way, the post-World War II period of development can also be seen as a ‘golden age’ of design, in particular as it refers to visual and product design.
Unfortunately, as Pérez writes in a previously quoted passage, “the ‘American Way of Life’ of the last paradigm brought patterns of consumerism, disposability and profligate use of energy and materials that now confront the world with major environmental challenges.” We can say that we’re living through and dealing with the intended and unintended consequences of the new vision of ‘the good life’ that emerged during the deployment period in the United States and Europe and was exported slowly but steadily throughout the world.
Not surprisingly, at the end of the period, precisely around the year that Pérez associates with the big bang of the fifth revolution, the design profession started to recognize its responsibility—that is, its success as much as its failure—in bringing about this new world. And thus, Victor Papanek, in the famous opening paragraph of Design for the Real World (1972), would argue:
There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people.
What Happens Now?
Every year, Benedict Evans, of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm a16z, gives a presentation at his company’s tech conference. Last November, his talk ‘The End of the Beginning’ put forward an argument that makes perfect sense from the point of view of Carlota Pérez’s theory: the first part of the story of the internet, “the access story”, has finished but we are only at the beginning of the second part: “the use story.” As he explains: “Ecommerce is still only a small fraction of retail spending, and many other areas that will be transformed by software and the internet in the next decade or two have barely been touched.”
This argument seems consistent with the idea that we are in the middle of the current S-curve, that is, at the turning point between the installation period and the full deployment of the Age of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Evans’ assessment of the technological potential for the next two decades seems spot on—you can feel his excitement about the investment opportunities that will become available as the digital revolution achieves maturity. Nonetheless, from the point of view of the theory we’ve been exploring, his excitement sounds tone-deaf—considering the huge ecological, political and social challenges we’re facing—and excessively confident in the power of technology and the market to bring about the unfolding of the second part of the story.
At the same time, for the last decade or more, there have been increasingly stronger calls for an ambitious, state-driven direction of the economy as a way to solve the pressing issues the planet is facing. The most important of these have made an explicit connection with exactly those programs and initiatives that were deployed in the previous turning point.
Already in 2007, Thomas Friedman published an opinion piece for The New York Times Magazine calling for a “Green New Deal”:
Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward.
A year later, the New Economics Foundation published an extensive report, focused on the UK, calling for a Green New Deal to address a “triple crunch” composed of a “credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and soaring energy prices.”
Other economists, most notably Mariana Mazzucato, have been calling for a stronger role of the state in orienting the economy. As she writes:
The 2008 global financial crisis shook the foundation of economies around the world. Nine years later, the aftershocks are still being felt. As governments worry about secular stagnation, instability and inequality the old approaches to economic policy-making seem inadequate to the task.
How can governments get economies growing again, and in ways that serve society? What can they do to get firms investing again? What can they do about big societal problems, from managing chronic health conditions to tackling climate change? With renewed interest in the role of government in stimulating private sector growth, what should modern industrial strategy look like in this this context?
The response she gives to these questions is “mission-oriented innovation policy”: an approach to use strategic public sector investment to “catalyse economic activity, spark innovation, solve public problems, and lay the foundations for future economic growth.” In 2016, Mazzucato along with Michael Jacobs edited the compilation Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, a collection of recent articles by leading economists (including Carlota Pérez) calling for a rethinking of economics and economic policy. A year later, she launched the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP, where Carlota Pérez holds the position of Honorary Professor), an institution focused on rethinking public value and the ways in which the state and public innovation should be working today in order to solve global challenges. The basis for these projects can be summed like this:
The role of the state cannot just be to only fix market failures as the orthodox model would prescribe. It must also be to actively shape and create markets to drive stronger more sustainable and more inclusive forms of economic growth.[2]
During the last few years, as the issue of climate emergency has risen to the top of the agenda, more individuals and institutions have arrived at similar conclusions. For example, in 2018, the Finish think tank BIOS Research Unit published a report on the economic transformations required to tackle climate change as part of the UN Global Sustainable Development Report 2019. Following Mazzucato, they argue
Market-based action will not suffice — even with a high carbon price. There must be a comprehensive vision and closely coordinated plans. Otherwise, a rapid system-level transformation toward global sustainability goals is inconceivable.
Of course, most importantly, the same spirit has been carried over to two of the most important recent political projects. In the United States, the Green New Deal resolution, submitted by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called for “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal” in order to address the challenge of climate change while creating “unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States.” In Europe, a group of organizations led by DiEM25 recently launched A New Deal for Europe focused on fighting poverty, strengthening democracy, deepening solidarity and achieving green prosperity.
Since 2016, Carlota Pérez’s research has been focused on a vision — perhaps almost a program—for a new golden age that she calls smart green growth. The core of this vision is to “change the aspirational way of living while making it possible by modernizing the welfare state.” In this way, it aims to operate in the same two levels that, as I previously argued, the post-War recovery operated: namely, the macro or state level where, in this new cycle, public policies would have to “tilt the playing field strongly towards green growth and green innovation as the new direction for our age” thereby making possible a new sustainable way of life at the micro level.
How would it be possible to spur a new stage of economic growth considering that we have reached the limits of our planet’s ecosystems in terms of resources and waste allocation? “In essence,” Pérez writes, “this is about achieving growth and wellbeing across society by increasing the proportion of services and intangibles, both in GDP and in the individual satisfaction of needs.” The contours of this new type of growth, both at the level of lifestyle and at the level of state policies, can already be recognized. At the level of everyday life, Pérez recognizes the following trends :
- Accent on preventive health, exercise, caring, creativity, learning and experiences
- Favouring renewable energy vs. fossil fuel
- Favouring services rather than products
- Favouring organic and fresh food over canning and freezing (tending to local production)
- Circular economy for tangible products with biodegradable materials
- Drastic reduction of waste, massive increase in reuse and recycling
- Making durable products truly durable and shifting to a rental model
- Seriously reintroducing maintenance (with 3D printing of parts)
- And so on… [3]
These types of choices and practices, as it should be clear, are already visible and, to some extent, well established—at least, as she argues, in “the lifestyles of the wealthy and the educated younger generation.” However, it must be clear that the individual choices of a select few won’t be enough to bring about the systemic transformation that is required. Such change needs to be made possible at the level of a renewed, “mission-oriented” welfare state that uses industrial strategy and public policy to “tilt the playing field” as to make possible the widespread diffusion of the new lifestyle. Some of the actions that Pérez recommends are:
- Change tax on capital gains to favour long-term investment (high for short-term)
- Tax energy, materials and transport (not labour)
- Regulate for durability and maintenance
- Tax products and purchasing, not services and rental
- Facilitate the sharing and collaborative economy
- Set up flexicurity and basic income
- Set up a “new-new deal” aimed at education, skilling and life-long reskilling
- Invest in the new infrastructures (charging for electric cars, smart grids, FTTH, etc.)
- New ‘Marshall Plan’ for the lagging countries
- Supranational arrangements for global taxes (including financial transactions tax
- And so on… [3]
When umair haque writes that we are repeating the 1930s, he argues that we have failed to learn the lesson that allowed Europe, a poor and devastated region at the end of the Second World War, to become the most prosperous continent in the world. His argument fits well with Pérez’s program and the other movements mentioned above — which can be read as calls for doing away with austerity and market fundamentalism. He writes:
What was really happening here? What was the secret Europe had discovered, in hard, simple, plain spoken English? Europe had discovered that if it reinvested about fifty percent of its economy in…its very own people, in their betterment, in genuinely good lives for them, in their education, their health, their sanity…then that investment, over time, was to yield staggering returns. Returns far greater than anything else in human history.
The Evolution of Design
In a much-quoted passage from The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert A. Simon wrote: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Immediately after that, he continued:
The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.
From this perspective, design is not just the activity we normally associate with the creation of material artifacts but the more universal capacity to understand the world, identify the gaps that always already exist between what there is and what could be, and then using our creativity and resourcefulness to close those gaps. As such, design has always existed in many more aspects of life than those associated with the professional field. Interestingly, though, an explicit expansion of professional design (from within a proper design culture) has been happening over the last few decades.
Already in the 1990s, Richard Buchanan argued that:
To gain some idea of how extensively design affects contemporary life, consider the four broad areas in which design is explored throughout the world by professional designers and by many others who may not regard themselves as designers.
Arguably, design has always existed in those four broad areas or ‘orders’. However, as only recently have professional designers explicitly extended their practices and culture to those areas, these can be seen as “evolutionary strata” of the professional design field. So, let’s take a look now at how these strata have evolved along with the most recent techno-economic cycles.
“A century ago,” writes Ezio Manzini in Design When Everybody Designs,
a new culture and new practice appeared to deal with technological innovation and industrial development, making them part of everyday life and, more importantly, building a shared vision able to give them meaning. This new culture and practice was industrial design.
From this perspective, as I argued above, the Bauhaus can be seen as emerging along with the installation period of the age of mass production. Moreover, we can easily recognize that, during that period, design as a professional field coincided mainly with Buchannan’s first and second orders: symbolic and visual communications, and material objects.
Consequently, the deployment period or Post-War golden age was the result not only, as we have seen, of the revolution of the welfare state but, on an equal footing, of an explosion of “life-shaping goods and services” made possible and desirable by design of the first and second orders: graphic design and advertising, industrial design, furniture design, etc.
If, during the previous techno-economic paradigm, the most important developments in professional design happened in graphic and industrial design, what has been the equivalent development during the current technological revolution?
At the beginning of this article, I referred to Tellart’s Design Nonfiction as a timely exploration of the transformations in design brought about by the digital revolution (i.e. the Age of Information Technology and Telecommunications). The territory covered by that project could be well captured by paraphrasing Manzini in this way: at the turn of the 21st century, a new culture and new practice appeared to deal with computational innovation and digital transformation, making them part of everyday life and, more importantly, building a shared vision able to give them meaning. This new culture and practice is digital design.
The documentary provides an important analysis of the technical developments of the last couple of decades, their implications for the craft of design, the emerging challenges and opportunities brought about by the evolution of machine intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology, and, finally, some of the potential paths that design may follow as it grapples with the consequences of those technologies in the context of social and environmental challenges.
It could be possible to lay out a number of lines in multiple directions to complement and further explore the territory covered by Design Nonfiction. Here, I would like to follow two or three that may be most useful to expand the appraisal of design at the current stage of our techno-economic cycle.
First of all, standing as we are in the middle of the crisis, it is necessary to recognize the role that digital design (or, computational design, as John Maeda calls it) has played in creating or exacerbating some of the worst problems that we’re facing. Again, in a quite timely manner, we’re already starting to see the emergence of a critique of contemporary design that, so to speak, updates Papanek for the digital age. Most notably, in Ruined by Design, Mike Monteiro writes:
We designed shitty interfaces to protect our private information. … We designed social networks without any way of dealing with abuse or harassment. We designed a financial incentives system that would lead Mark Zuckerberg to assert what’s good for the world isn’t necessarily good for Facebook; and lead Jack Dorsey to believe engagement was a more important metric than safety.
The second line that I would like to lay out is closely related but not reducible to the digital transformation of design. Arguably, one of the key developments in the design field over the last three decades has been the formal expansion of the professional field to explicitly include the third and fourth areas mapped by Buchannan, namely: the realm of “activities and organized services” and, beyond that, the realm of “complex systems and environments.”
Since at least 1982, when G. Lynn Shostack proposed the idea of designing services, some of the key emerging design practices have shifted their focus from messages and objects (including digital ones) to activities, relationships, and interactions that exist between people, between people and objects, and between people and organizations. Along with service design—which, arguably, is poised to overtake industrial or product design as the core design activity for organizations—we could mention a constellation of established and emerging fields that exemplify this shift: interaction design (IxD), user experience design (UX), and customer experience (CX). Beyond those, other fields such as social design or, most clearly, design for social innovation and sustainability — articulated around the global network of DESIS labs—are explicitly reclaiming for designers the opportunity and responsibility to address problems related to social and political participation, inequality, sustainability, etc.
From this perspective, the professional field of design seems to be arriving well-equipped to rise to the challenges that might be involved in escaping the current crisis and ushering in the deployment period of the current revolution—and perhaps, even, a new golden age. Arguably, the field is not just theoretically and methodologically equipped but, to a certain extent, also materially, ethically and politically oriented towards a redefinition of ‘the good life’ along the lines of what Pérez calls smart green growth: i.e. increasing the proportion of services and intangibles, both in GDP and in the individual satisfaction of needs.
Design, Everyday Life and the State
As explained above, for Pérez, one of the main challenges at the turning point and then during the deployment period is “changing the aspirational way of life.” From my perspective, the notion of “way of life” — and other close concepts such as “the good life”, “lifestyle”, and “everyday life” — seem perfect for denoting the proper ‘object’ of design. Like Raymond Williams’ famous definition of culture as “a whole way of life”, it wouldn’t be wrong to define design simply as the activity that introduces intentionality in our ways of living. Pérez’s work, I argued above, has been focusing increasingly on the issue of lifestyle. Interestingly, some of the most important ideas emerging out of the field of design are drawing our attention to everyday life as a matter of concern.
In his most recent book, Politics of the Everyday, Ezio Manzini writes:
I believe that the choices each of us makes in everyday life constitute the starting point on which to build a fairer society, one whose existence will not jeopardize the planetary ecosystem and indeed our very humanity.
From that basis, Manzini explores the ways in which regular people, through their everyday decisions, act as designers, and how those decisions have political consequences.
From a different perspective, the strategic designer Dan Hill has recently explored how design can better serve the collective needs of people, specifically in urban contexts, by articulating multiple practices (interaction design, service design, strategic design, speculative design, etc.) in order to deal with the “everyday-complex” in cities. Quoting architect Ralph Erskine, Hill argues that “it is the everyday situations that are important and that shape the major part of our lives and our cities.”
A third example can be found in the emerging approach of transition design. Starting from the nexus of crises that characterize our world today, transition design (like other recent design movements) recognizes the responsibility that designers have in addressing those issues.
However, transition design proposes a specific diagnosis and, thus, a specific treatment for those problems: to apply a holistic paradigm (that is, a paradigm derived from holistic science) to how we live. As Gideon Kossoff explains:
The context within which problems arise and solutions are to be developed is everyday life: it is the foundational level for all human experience, and we are unavoidably immersed in it. A framework for transition, therefore, needs to be embedded in everyday life. [4]
Based on this recognition, transition design draws from a multiplicity of sources—such as Manfred Max-Neef’s theory of fundamental human needs and social practice theory as developed by contemporary sociologists such as Elizabeth Shove—to argue for the need to reconstitute what Kossoff calls: “the domains of everyday life.”
A final example of this increased attention to everyday life has been the emergence of the figure of the living lab as a site and approach to developing solutions for new ways of living. The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) defines them as “user-centred, open innovation ecosystems based on systematic user co-creation approach, integrating research and innovation processes in real life communities and settings.” While not necessarily remaining within the boundaries of that definition, perhaps the most well-known example of a living lab is SPACE10: a research and design lab, funded by IKEA, “on a mission to create better and more sustainable ways of living.”
The types of projects undertaken by SPACE10 are an excellent example of the challenges involved in “changing the aspirational way of life.” How will we eat in more sustainable ways? How might we live together in new arrangements beyond the nuclear family? How may we provide affordable and sustainable housing for everyone?
In one of the quotes above, Carlota Pérez makes an important argument. In each technological revolution, there is a wide range of possibilities from which the specific set that will come to constitute the new way of living depends on a socio-political choice. At the level of everyday life, that choice cannot be driven by coercion or, should we add, by sacrifice. It can only be driven by aspirations for a new lifestyle. Considering the huge ecological, social and political challenges we’re facing, that is a design brief if there ever was one: How might we imagine and realize the most desirable and convenient forms of everyday life appropriate for a fully digital, yet sustainable and equitable civilization?
What happens at the level of state and public policy? As argued above, the choices of individuals (or, even, whole communities), even while considering a set of supporting services, will probably not suffice to bring about a systemic transformation. In the current context, there needs to be a modernization of the welfare state capable of deploying public policy and services in order to “tilt the playing field” towards new forms of sustainable and inclusive growth. The final line that I would like to lay out in terms of the evolution of design has to do precisely with the increasing relevance and participation of designers at the level of the state and public policy.
The emerging design practices and discourses mentioned above can be seen as cutting across Buchannan’s four orders. They operate at the level of activities and organized services (third order), through the deployment of images and objects (respectively, first and second order), while aiming at driving systemic change. It is precisely that fourth area or order, the realm of complex systems and environments, what represents, so to speak, the last frontier for design.
Along with design for social innovation, strategic design (particularly as construed by Dan Hill [5]) and transition design, other emerging design practices like systemic design and DesignX are calling for applying design methods to the challenges posed by multi-stakeholder, large-scale socio-technical systems such as food, transportation, and health services. Interestingly, these types of challenges are so complex and socially relevant that they are traditionally addressed from the point of view of the state through public policy. Accordingly, the emergence of these movements should be read alongside the development of a whole vibrant field exploring the value that design can bring into the public sector. Organizations such as the Design Council in the UK, to give one example, run programs to equip government agencies with the necessary design skills to deliver innovative and human-centered services. Likewise, UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose has incorporated strategic designers such as Dan Hill and Hilary Cottam working hand in hand with economists like Mazzucato and Pérez to develop “strategic design skills and techniques for creating policy innovation cultures, processes, environments and organisations.”
If, as argued above, the transition to the deployment stage of the current technological revolution—and thus, to a possible new golden age of smart green growth—requires orientation at the two levels of public policy and everyday life, it seems that design and its culture are now ideally positioned to participate in (and perhaps, even, articulate) both levels. From this perspective, it will make more sense than ever to say, with Herbert A. Simon, that the activity of crafting “a social welfare policy for a state” is a design practice tout court. In fact, we may go further to argue that statecraft (or governance), as an expression of intentionality, is the most ambitious form of design.
Finally, we may be able to recognize now an interesting relationship between technology and the market, on the one hand, and design and the state, on the other, as they pertain to the different stages of the techno-economic cycle. The installation period, driven particularly by technology and market forces, was a stage of exploration and creative destruction—“move fast and break things.” The deployment period should be a stage of orientation, intentionality and creative construction, thus, a period in which design and the state must be in the driver’s seat. This is our professional and political challenge for the “next” 30 years.
A Recap and Some Caveats by Way of Conclusion
In this article, I’ve followed Carlota Pérez to argue that we are living through a period similar to the 1930s: economic stagnation, unemployment, social tensions, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, etc. Moreover, this time around those challenges are further complicated by new trends and emerging issues such as machine intelligence and, most importantly, an unprecedented climate emergency. From the point of view of a theory of techno-economic cycles, we might be at a turning point: between the “installation period” (lasting from around 1971 to 2001) of our current technological revolution, namely the Age of Information Technology and Telecommunications, and a “deployment period” that could take the form of a new “golden age.”
As in previous cycles, the unfolding of the deployment period will require a direction or orientation of the economy aimed at solving our current crisis. Such orientation (again, as in previous cycles) will need to happen at the level of state or public policy—through a modernization of the welfare state—and at the level of everyday life through a reinvention of our notions of ‘the good life’ around sustainability. I’ve argued, as well, that design—as an expanded professional field—will have to play a key role in both levels. Finally, I’ve explored the evolution of the field to find that it may be well-suited to rise to this challenge.
Given the wide scope of this argument—and perhaps also due to its optimistic spin—I feel obliged to articulate a few caveats.
First of all, I’ve situated this future deployment period or golden age during the “next” 30 years. Why the scare quotes? Unfortunately, I don’t expect the radical swing in the political spectrum that is required for this to happen to take place literally next year. There are, fortunately, some positive signals but they are yet too weak in comparison with the huge forces that are currently pulling in the other direction. Moreover, as Pérez has warned, there is a chance for a third financial crash to happen which would only extend the crisis even further. In this sense, the “next” 30 years—meaning, the next stage of this techno-economic cycle—may not even be close.
This last point is an excellent segue for the second caveat. As someone that is philosophically and professionally involved in the field of futures studies, I stand by James Dator’s first “law”: “‘The future’ cannot be ‘predicted’ because ‘the future’ does not exist.” And so, the whole argument of this article should definitely not be taken as a prediction (and, thus, as an excuse for passivity) but, on the contrary, as a suggestion for action. As Dator, in the same article, proposed: “the identification and analysis of long wave, cyclical forces… [is] useful in forecasting, envisioning, and creating the futures.”
The third caveat follows from the plural “futures.” A deployment period or new golden age is merely one scenario or alternative future among many. Despite how long this article has become, I certainly don’t intend to produce here a whole scenario analysis for the future of capitalism. But even if we take a “ready-made” framework such as Dator’s own “four generic images of the future”—growth, collapse, discipline and transformation—we can productively situate this scenario in relation to other possibilities.
The first thing to note is how the vision of a new golden age and, specifically, a future of “smart green growth” stands as a rare image of growth (or, as Dator also calls it: continuation) amidst so many images of more radical change (both positive and negative). It seems that, from the point of view of the current crisis, we are finding it increasingly harder to imagine futures of continuous improvement.
As for collapse, well, popular culture is full of images for that right now. But a more serious and certainly dramatic image of the collapse of capitalism can be found in Wolfgang Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End? There, he imagines a long, slow disintegration of capitalism and all its attendant structures. The picture he portrays is not encouraging:
Life in a society of this kind demands constant improvisation, forcing individuals to substitute strategy for structure, and offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age.
Regarding discipline (or constraint), we find images and calls for that type of future in the recent movements focused on degrowth or post-growth. The concerns expressed by these movements are entirely consistent with those that, according to Dator, are usually behind this alternative future. As he explains:
It often arises when people feel that “continued economic growth” is either undesirable or unsustainable. Some people feel that precious places, processes, and values are threatened or destroyed by allowing continuous economic growth.
For Pérez, the economics of de-growth or post-growth are based on an incorrect assumption: “that the only possible patterns of growth available are those of the resource-based forms of mass production which shaped most of the twentieth century.” In this way, she intends to open up space for images of future living that are sustainable but perhaps more aspirational than “disciplinary” calls for zero growth.
How about transformation? Again, popular culture and the worst forms of “futurism” offer plenty of images—most of them based on radical new technologies like artificial intelligence. An interesting issue to address, from the perspective of a transformative future, is whether we’ll get to witness the transformation of capitalism into something else. For example, the critical theorist McKenzie Wark, in their forthcoming book Capital is Dead, is posing the most interesting question about our current economic system: “It’s not capitalism, it’s not neoliberalism — what if it’s something worse?” Other voices from the left are more optimistic. For example, a series of works coming from the UK—namely, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future and, most recently, Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism—take some of the same technological and political possibilities of our current cycle and push them even farther: not a new golden age of capitalism but a proper post-capitalist utopia.
It would be so interesting to explore the potential futures of design—and thus, of our everyday way of life—in all those alternative futures. As I said above, a challenge like that is well beyond the scope of this article—and probably, for that matter, beyond the current reach of my imagination. In any case, though, it seems important to reflect on why I felt attracted to write about the future of design and its potential role in a new golden age of capitalism.
The answer, I believe, lies in the particular combination of desirability and plausibility that such an image of the future provides. Pérez’s theory is, arguably, very coherent in its reconstruction of the past and thus quite useful for producing a believable story about the future. Most importantly, this “production-ready” story about the future, while far from utopian, stands in stark contrast to the barrage of dystopian and apocalyptic images of the future that surround us today. From this perspective, Pérez’s smart green growth may be read as a plausible economic theory of change consistent with other attempts to produce positive images of the future such as Jonathon Porrit’s The World We Made or the solarpunk movement.
What is true for me may be true for more people. In this sense, the image of a new golden age based on the design of a new welfare state and a new way of life may have the power to go “hyperstitional”, that is, to become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: it may have the capacity to gather enough people in the belief—or, rather, the belief-action cycle—that a sustainable and equitable world is within reach.
[1] Perhaps the easiest introduction to Pérez’s work is her recent talk at the 2018 Summit of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. After her book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (2002), her most important work is the set of three working papers that have come out of her project ‘Beyond the Technological Revolution’. All quotes in this article come from the first of those working papers: ‘Capitalism, Technology and a Green Global Golden Age: The Role of History in Helping to Shape the Future’, published on April 2016. Another key set of ideas is captured in the series of articles that she recently published as a response to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s book The Second Machine Age.
[2] Mazzucato, Mariana. ‘Innovation, the State and Patient Capital’ in Jacobs, Michael and Mariana Mazzucato. (2016) Rethinking Capitalism. Wiley-Blackwell, p.97.
[3] See Pérez’s lecture at the Rethinking Capitalism undergraduate module taught at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose as well as her talk with economist Kate Raworth as part of the series ‘Innovation and the Welfare State’.
[4] Kossoff, Gideon (2011) ‘Holism and the Reconstitution of Everyday Life: A Framework for Transition to a Sustainable Society’ in Stephan Harding, ed. Grow Small, Think Beautiful: Ideas for a Sustainable World. Schumacher College. Floris Books. Available here.
[5] See Hill, Dan. Dark Matter and Trojan Horses. A Strategic Design Vocabulary. See also the work and ideas of Helsinki Design Lab. More recently, Hill has been exploring the role of strategic design in explicit relation to public purpose.
