Image © Jose & MidJourney
I was listening to a podcast that I like but almost invariably depresses me, it’s called Capitalisn’t with Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean. It’s part of several podcasts and people not against capitalism, but questioning the way it’s working in our society, this particular episode is called “What Happened to the American Dream”. I am happy they don’t just explain how it can go wrong, they give good suggestions on how we can fix it, at our micro level. If you don’t know who Bethany McLean is, she is an America Journalist that dared to shine a light on Enron back in 2001, we all know what happened after.
At a certain point, she shared that she remembered a source saying that Jeff Skilling, the former CEO of Enron, had said that “he was the designer of ditches, not a maker of ditches”. The word designer stopped me on my tracks, I had to rewind and listen again. Apparently, he liked other people who are the designers of ditches, and Bethany added that Skilling and others like him “don’t have a lot of respect for the people who actually dig the ditch, the people who make the thing. And if that is part of the worldview that we find ourselves in today too, overwhelming appreciation for the idea, perhaps too much appreciation for the idea and a corresponding disrespect for how the idea actually gets executed.”
Seeing the term ‘designer’ used in this context really made me feel uncomfortable. I know the term is loosely used in many different contexts and some might argue this term here could easily be exchanged for another, like ‘engineer’, ‘architect’, but he used the term ‘designer’. I asked myself why uncomfortable, and I guess it is for several reasons. First, the implication that if you do one, you don’t do the other, with all the underlying assumptions and biases about people, process, role. Secondly and above all, because I ended up asking myself if designers are focused too much on the ‘designing’ and not enough on the ‘digging’.
I never fooled myself, as a designer, I always played a role in consumption and capitalism, and I have always been aware of the implications. I was always focused on how things were manufactured, where, by whom, I love manufacturing and always thought designing had to be tied at the hip with making. I lost projects because I didn’t want to design solutions that I was aware would have a bad impact on our global livelihood, somewhere in the hyperspace there is a TedXLisboa from more than 30 years ago where I was discussing our role in the renewal of our planet resources. But, honestly, did I do enough? Did we all do enough? Do we really care about those that “dig the ditches”, and how does that impact our work and our career choices? Can we still be designers in a capitalist society and care, really care, about how things we design get executed?
Bethany later brings two other components to her assessment of the failings of capitalism, both equally controversial, the lack of ‘shame” and ‘morality’, intimately impacted by a sense of community that existed and now doesn’t, allowing bad actors to do what they want independently of the impact, free from any community-based shame and morality.
Designers have traditionally stayed away from these concepts, there are exceptions and I believe this is changing in the last 10 to 20 years, designers are more and more designing with a strong understanding of who is “digging the ditches”, challenging themselves and others to act with morality towards the larger community and the planet we inhabit, sometimes at their peril and even when they realize, they too, have ‘glass ceilings’. This is not just the work of designers, but we are part of the problem, and of the solution.