We Designed Ourselves Into a Corner

We thought the world was clean and bold and, well, material. Then November 9th came. And the world proved itself to be made up of enough angry people who‘s concept of design is making enough room in the fridge for another six pack of beer.

I was actually intrigued by what you said about finding out what people really think and how they want things to be. But I think we have enough to deal with right now and its too soon to tell where this is going to go. The people that directly caused this are not yet ready to admit they were lied to and scammed but that is the content and design challenge we really face. How do we make determining truth attractive? How do we counter years of increasing bullshit that met a significant part of the population’s need to hear something that they could understand? How do we show them a reality that they can desire with some hope of attainment? We need to make truth beautiful and exciting. We need to make racism and misogyny ugly. We did a good job of that for the “coastal elites” and educated but forgot the folks in flyover country and the rust belt because we were inventing a new language and forgot to include them in the process. We took away their certainties and didn’t replace their big trucks, women as hood ornaments, and northern European Jesus paintings with anything new they could learn to want. They followed those things to a world of lies and then wanted to make the lies real. So they did . . .