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Letter, 2022
RE: Troubles with Design-Thinking & The Choice-Economy
About
Polemic addressed to a friend in response to a paper from a management (pejorative) journal. Essay-length letter.
Author: Vương Cẩm Vy
Paper in question: Whitney, Patrick. “Design and the Economy of Choice.” She Ji, vol. 1, no. 1, Oct. 2015, pp. 58-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2015.09.001.
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Doubts Over Design as a Written-About Concept Postscript ExtraA Few Words
Hi ████ , ready for an honest-to-God essay? Because I’ll need an essay to tell you what I’m unclear about design. I’ll need another essay to rant about matters of the economy, but I’ve broken it down to shorter, self-contained mini-rants. I hope you find the headings somewhat helpful in navigating and organizing the tirade.
My trouble with design is quite complicated. I will try to describe it, but I don’t really know enough to engage with the entirety of the literature (though I will speak in generalizations as though I know it well), and I’m not articulate enough to explain myself (though you will find me excessively wordy). At the very least I’ll explain my trouble with what design means to me, my criticisms of the Whitney paper published in shi ji , as well as some other weird abstract questions beyond the scope of design frameworks. I also ask for your patience with my profuse italicization (denoting dramatic emphasis ) and emboldening (denoting the theme of a given paragraph); these are simply the stylistic formatting that I use for readability and skimming and not me SHOUTING things. Bear with me. This might be a bit long-winded (even more than usual).
This rant is far from an academic essay or even a well thought-out argument for that matter. I’m very much still in the middle of figuring things out, and my experience is quite limited, albeit grating enough to warrant these words. I hope you do not take the following as any empirical argument, simply a description of the maze in which I am very much still finding my way out of. These are the maze’s walls that I can remember and describe.
As a preface, I want to say that I do not oppose design-thinking as a concept. Quite the opposite, I am an ardent practitioner. But I’m frequently the critic and contrarian to “camps” that I belong in (i.e. a psychologist who have a lot of issues with the therapy industry; queer activist who is critical of American-style rainbow activism; liberal who is frequently suspicious of anyone saying they are “liberal”; etc.). I’m just lost.
It should be noted that I find design’s connection to the “economy of choice” to be tenuous. I have read the explanation. I have attended the training. But design’s capacity to somehow anticipate or engineer in an economy of choice is doubtful (as the following diatribe will explain design’s limitations in my view). Also, the idea of an “economy of choice” is another thing that can be critiqued for not only its scope but also its purpose. But that’s a different story from design, which will be discussed in the postscript.
I had originally wanted to send the response via Messenger, but Google Docs’s formatting capabilities as well as the ability to place comments and notes (if a reader so wishes) won out in the end, especially for a document as wordy as this one. Leave comments as you are willing. It will help me learn.
Doubts Over Design as a Written-About Concept
Doubts Over Design as a Written-About Concept
The Problem
Design has been something that I’ve been interested in practical applications for many years, being in education and all. There’s something about design’s procedural nature and also its fluid tolerance of ambiguity that really appeals to me. I’ve read various books on frameworks, processes, and practices of design as applied to education (specifically curriculum design and management—my main focus right now). I have also extensively applied it into my own work, and I’ve made it the underlying logic behind how I organize others’ activities in large projects that I lead. There are hundreds of adults and tens of thousands of students who can be considered ''stakeholders”, so I take my application of design very seriously. Thus, the principles professed in the Whitney paper are really up my alley.
However, the Whitney paper itself isn’t really different from a lot of the literature out there in terms of approach and style. This means that whatever problem I’ve had with design crops up again while reading the paper. I will describe the problem(s) in detail, but I’ll boil it down to this:
Design presents itself as an update and critique of past practices, but it is not substantially different and therefore runs afoul of the same problems that it says it is solving . While inspiring, design literature offers little in the way of a new and coherent framework. It retreads old grounds in obfuscating language. (Not a quote, just a nice formatting)
The first problem is a general, philosophical one—that design as a method implicitly assumes an outside perspective, but the practitioner is always an insider.
What does this mean? In order to fulfill the promises of the design method, the designer must access observations and insights about a system (e.g. clients, the economy, etc.). Frequently, there is a call to “know what people need before they can articulate it themselves”. A designer must imagine market segments that are not apparent in demographical data, stratums outside of the common categories, implicit truths other than those commonly held. The literature frequently presents this as a way to get out of the old, optimized rut that organizations run into. However, designers themselves always find themselves a member of the same optimization-minded environment that they are so frequently called to overcome, and thus, designers inherit not only the biases but the entirety of the cognitive, ontological framework of organizations that employ them, of societies that birth them.
Why is this a problem? The sentiment presented by design is useful; I agree that in order to create new value, one must access truly new ways of seeing things. In this respect, design is a useful checklist. But it is only a checklist. In practice, the designer herself cannot make observations from a perspective outside of the system because she is already-always inside the system. If she “reads between the lines” of market data in order to innovate, she must draw from her experience of being a member of that market (really, the bedrock of “empathy” is the self). If she is making inferences about communities which she does not belong to, she must draw from second-hand accounts (the paper mentions ethnography, but in reality, stereotypes are much more frequently employed). In short, I can’t find a designer who can fill the “outsider” role that the method of design requires. There are only those who aspire to that role, and aspirants are no different from the thousands of pre-choice-economy industry leaders and workers. Who’s to say that some ancient merchant or inventor or statesman hadn’t thought about their problems abstractly, in a way that was oriented towards value creation to their stakeholder (à la design-thinking)? What makes our current notions of that “value” and “stake” any more accurate or valid than theirs that we must direct our industry leaders towards these newly coined notions? Did they not have any idea of “value” before stumbling upon the concept of design? Did they not want innovation? Who’s to say that optimization of known processes is not innovation? If we want something outside of “optimization of known processes”, why not abolish the need to generate profit? Why must most design literature consign itself to innovating within a stale status quo?
If we accept “innovation” insofar as it does not question the need for profit generation for private shareholders, then there is still the question of why “design”? Is design-thinking uniquely capable of producing innovation, let alone profitable innovations ? Or is design a rebranding of the same innovation-producing cognitive processes that traditional executives, politicians, engineers, and everyday people already possess and employ? If that is the case, then where is the meaningful distinction between past industrial, scale-economy thinking and the purported stakeholder-based thinking necessary for choice-economy? It seems to me that design is useful insofar as it describes common things that are already useful and already used. The thought-industry of design seems to be a capitalization of things that rightfully belongs to the public domain. Reminders and checklists are useful, but the pedestal upon which design is placed ( fetishized , in many circles) appears to be an over-enthusiasm. What then is the need for design as a separate and unique concept? Why not go straight to the source (e.g. centering purpose, stakeholder, creative problem-solving, etc.) instead of going through the academically-burdened, consultancy-infested gate that is “design”?
I would make the claim that the status quo that design aspires to fix or transcend was produced precisely through a design-like process, by those with their own understanding of design’s constituent parts. (Of course, no single entity could have engineered the entire history of societies; the status quo as we know it emerges from a thousand, a million design-like projects, all blindly colliding against one another, but that is no different from the conditions in which modern design is advocated).
Why pretend that if only design thinking was employed, past industry leaders would have taken into consideration sustainability and climate change (as the Whitney paper suggests)? Was industrialization not the logical byproduct of the god-fearing protestant ethics fed through design-like thinking? (i.e. If the sole stakeholder to them was God, and God valued acquisitiveness, then why wouldn’t I pursue my acquisitiveness through the natural, God-given gift that is fossil fuel? After all, the environment was the God-given gift to man). That example might seem perverse, but it fits neatly into all kinds of frameworks that the Whitney paper and similar literature promotes. The difference is that the person making these design-like decisions was living in different times. Keyword: “in”. Similarly, pupils of design, like myself, are living *in* times that shape their value. The modern designer is often secular, but she is no more free from her careerism and her political leanings than the Christian industrialists of the past. As such, we might infer that there is nothing substantial that differentiate my application of design from that of God-fearing industrialists of the past. The difference is the times, the zeitgeist. What then is design’s unique offering as a method if the differences appear only to be replaceable variables?
I have presented many questions which undermines the necessity for “design” as a unique concept. But even if we do accept “design” as a unique concept, let me present an alternative framework that casts doubt on design’s ability to accomplish what the literature promises (and after that, present a far more modest claim of design’s use). Basically, as a process, design is a pawn (albeit a somewhat useful one) in a larger game. Design is far from a meaningfully determinant or impactful process as advertised. It is not much more than an industrial technic for middle-managers (which is fine, but perhaps it should be kept in its practical confines).
Doubts Over Design as a Written-About Concept
An Alternative Framework in Which Design Might Belong
In my practice, I have slowly synthesized that design cannot meaningfully cover the verticality of a big process, and big, vertical processes (involving many separate systems, often chronologically)—namely sustainable economic growth, stakeholder-oriented institutions, or even sound curriculum design—are what promoters of design promise design would tackle. Design appears to have a very specific and limited role (and therefore cannot do what the literature advertises it to be capable of). We must zoom out to see what else is there that produces results, be it a certain healthcare quality, educational outcome, or business returns. I propose 3 different processes (roughly in order from specific to abstract, though they might successively alternate to-and-fro):
- Blackboxes;
- Design (itself, as a task);
- Inhuman complex systems.
Consider the following example: As a member of the Ministry of Education, you want to teach 6th graders how to write an essay.
The most familiar and human process that you will personally engage with is #2: design. You examine average 6th grade literacy; you examine potential educational and training needs; you lay out the concrete goals of what being able to write an essay might entail; you draft the curriculum frameworks that would accomplish such goals; you order the drafting of instructional materials per your framework; you plan out professional training; you draft implementation policies; you oversee implementation and monitor impact; etc.—Assuming that previously, students could not write essays as well as you intend them to, does the act of design alone address what is needed in order to create new value?
No. While all the sub-tasks in design are a lot, and they are much more than what an average educator does in reality, those steps are merely due process reasonably expected of a responsible educator/designer. They are what you do while sitting down in an office. The task of design does not describe the general phenomenon of teaching students something like the skill to write a new essay.
That is because design is not the same thing as process #1, the near-unknowable stuff goes on the frontline, in the classroom itself. This is the so-called “blackbox”, upon which all design work relies on to produce actual value.
Black boxes are devices in which the exact mechanisms are unknown or not examinable ; only the input can be controlled, and the output can be measured. In our example, the classroom is a black box because classrooms are largely inaccessible to a member of the Ministry of Education. You might manage many classrooms through a chain of middle management, but you cannot directly know or influence any single classroom. You might even visit and observe a specific classroom, but how many periods can you attend? How much direct interference can you have before you replace the teacher? The dirty secret of education is that as much as admins and consultants like to pretend that high-level commands matter, the reality is that what goes on in the classroom is outside of management’s control, not only because it is difficult to control but also because it is philosophically impossible (i.e. If you had that much control, then you are already the teacher, the black box itself; then, your activities become inaccessible to other managers and bureaucrats, not without your self-report).
Reports, observations, and accountability/transparency practices are only pretenses at observation and control. They do not overcome the practical distinction, let alone the philosophical barrier. Thus, classrooms are black boxes to designers and are substantially different from the design process. Forgive the cliche, but cliches might be a cure for overpromises: Planning is not the same as implementation. Sure, you can plan and implement your own plans, but that would mean you are playing 2 different roles. While playing the role of the designer (e.g. drafting a lesson plan), you are not directly controlling your other role (who knows what would happen when you implement your plan?). Thus, blackbox.
So far, we have established that design by itself is incapable of bringing about innovation because the “bringing about” is performed by an inaccessible blackbox. This blackbox can be the process of implementation itself, as my example describes. This blackbox can exist within the process of innovating itself (what mysterious process gives any innovator their ideas? And how would others reliably reproduce this process without dealing with vague language like “underlying opportunity” or “stakeholder”?). We rely on black boxes more than we are comfortable with admitting.
Similarly, we are also uncomfortable with confronting the extent in which our external conditions determine our innovations and our decision-making therein (or even the extent to which such conditions determine whether we are the decision-makers in the first place!). But I don’t call this “environmental conditions”. I call this “inhuman complex systems”.
Aspect #3 in a vertical process, such as trying to make students capable of writing essays, is “inhuman complex systems”. This is the hardest to describe, and I will dedicate most of this essay trying to explain it. Not only is it very broad, it is also the most radical. As the name implies, it reorients the ontological center towards that which is not recognizably humane. In complex systems, human agency and commonly-held values take the backseat. No, these systems are not evil ; they are simply indifferent to human norms, desires, and ethics. Though such systems might be populated by humans, our presence is only incidental. The net result of such systems might be alien to any given human that inhabits it. Thus, it is “inhuman”.
Such systems are also “complex” because they defy reductive science. For most of natural science’s history, reductionism has been the core logic. Any phenomenon can be reduced to its smallest responsible unit/factor. Stimuli to that one unit is supposed to produce a predictable, correspondent change in the entire system. For example, increasing the amount of force to an object further increases its speed if such force is the sole determinant of that object’s velocity. This is the bedrock of empirical experimentation.
However, complex, dynamical, or “chaotic” systems do not yield reductively predictable results, i.e. based on knowing and manipulating a singularly responsible factor. For example, having a sickle cell anemia gene is not determinant of overall health; it depends on the climate and biosphere that you are living in. Another example: the state of a 3-body gravitational system is substantially more difficult to predict than that of a 2-body system.
The trouble with traditional, reductionist science is that it is always “correct” given that the researcher narrows her scope enough until she finds the reductionistic, linearly-behaving unit. We see this happen whenever a researcher attempts to eliminate confounding variables or selectively omit outliers in the data set. But if everything can be said to be causally linked (e.g. flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil, tornado in Texas), then how much sway does a causal relationship established in a lab be extrapolated into real-world predictability? Narrow everything down enough, and you will find the smallest responsible unit, but it doesn’t mean that such experimentally confirmed linear causality can be extrapolated into practical, real-life scenarios, where things are much more chaotic and involved than a lab technician would like it to be.
This isn’t to say that I dismiss science. Quite the opposite—we’ve learned of complexity and chaos thanks to scientific research. If anything, complexity and chaos is a much needed addition to the scientific method . This is nothing new or radical, as any scientist worth their salt knows of and respects chaotic complexity. That’s why all respectable scientific papers these days end with a recommendation for field-testing and a widening of scope. It is a tacit acknowledgement that no matter how valid the correlation or causality found in any one paper is, such dynamics must interact with every other dynamics in order to produce coherent and human-oriented insights. The challenge to an aspiring designer is how to design within a reality where chaos and linearity must co-exist. How does human engineering (design) confront complex inhuman systems?
We need to look at the examples of ants, neurons, and “cellular automatons”. These examples demonstrate the principle that linearly predictable units can collectively give rise to emergent properties that aren't present in any single unit. Complex systems often contain simple and predictable units —that’s why reductionist science almost always finds its hypothesized “smallest unit”, which it will find, but it more often than not has trouble extrapolating into anything recognizable in the larger, observed system.
Ants are by all accounts dumb creatures. But as a collective, they exhibit immense intelligence and problem-solving. Each ant has no awareness, no mental representation of its environment and situations. Most of its behavior and decision-making is based on the chemicals it senses in the air, which it will respond to by adjusting its movement path and chemical emission. Its sense receptors are extremely localized, with no spatial or temporal “memory” appreciable to us humans. And yet, the swarm will find food and optimize its collective behavior to minimize caloric expenditure. Here, we see a sort of global intelligence emerge out of dumb, blind localized decision-making. How, then, can a designer or a social engineer see herself as outside of the swarm, when the intelligence that she was given was only possible because of the collectivity of the swarm ? This kind of emergent intelligence from units obeying simple, local rules is studied under the term “cellular automaton”.
A mathematical and IT concept, “cellular automaton’s” most well-known example is John Conway’s “Game of Life”. In this “game”, squares in a grid “observe” its immediate neighbor and use very simple IF-THEN rules to determine whether it “lives” or “dies” in the next generation. With the same rules, certain patterns on the grid can go extinct within a few steps, collapse into inert patterns, self-sustain a “life-like” existence, or even proliferate across the grid. Nowhere in the rules for each square is the blueprint for self-sustaining life, but there it is. If we look at the history of biological life’s emergence on Earth from “dead” chemical molecules, we see the same cellular automaton phenomenon—only, the rules are that of physics and chemistry.
Much in the same way, research into the neuron’s role in cognition (thinking, remembering, etc.) reveals the same dynamics—simple unit, complex system. Personally, this is the turning point in my thinking regarding the role of human agency (i.e. the capacity to design and engineer) in a complex system (i.e. design in a way that would result in the desired change in the larger system). Back then, through reductionism, scientists hypothesized that if memory is stored within the brain, then there must be the smallest unit (perhaps a singular neuron) that “coded” for that exact memory. They called this an “engram”. The search for the engram is a story for the ages! In their attempt to map out which neuron was solely responsible for a specific memory, they have found things like a “grandmother neuron” (a neuron that responds to the face of one’s grandmother). They even found a neuron in chimps that responded to the image of Jebnifer Aniston and Brad Pitt! Though interesting, such findings were ridiculous, because the same neurons responded to a number of other conceptually unrelated things. Coupled with that, research into neural plasticity (different parts of the brain taking on double-duty and performing relatively well in the case of brain damage) has shown that the concept of a physical location being solely responsible for one cognitive activity is not as fixed and essential as it first appears. I can go on about research into memory loss and therapy for Alzheimer’s, but this part is already too long. Thus, the conclusion that memory was not coded in any singular cell, but rather, memory was an emergent phenomena born out of a neural activation pattern. These days, we call it the theory of “neural networks”. (It’s the same “neural network” that serves as conceptual architecture for machine-learning AI.)
These examples demonstrate that if a scientist sets out to find that smallest, irreducible unit, she will find it. But what she finds has little to no bearing to the big, vertical phenomenon that is the subject of her research. Predictability, causal or correlational, gets wonky the larger the scope is. And real life is almost exclusively composed of complex systems, not simple and linear ones. Traditional science has taken us very far, and scientists understand this very well. However, the management gurus, the business professors, and the innovation consultants have yet to catch up to the fact of chaos (they tend to chalk it up to inherent unpredictability and risk, not something to seriously respect as part of the system in which they operate). Worse still, I have seen seminar speakers borrow language from scientific chaos to excuse for their professional shortcomings (“yeah, my advice doesn’t work because of fancy-smancy ‘chaos’, but pay me nonetheless for my advice”) instead of truly letting chaos humble their confidence and steel their resolve for a more critical, more rigorous intellectual pursuit.
A scientist will always find her smallest responsible unit, and a designer will always be able to justify her design decision as effective in the large schemes of things. But at its core, design is not much more than local rules for one unit to abide by (after all, the designer is never not a member of the system that she seeks to engineer). Not only must a designer contend with black boxes that will carry out her designs, she is helplessly a cog in the inhuman complex system which births her profession and supplies her with the condition with which to carry out her task. The social system is archetypically complex.
All design literature deals with social systems, which are complex as a rule , such as markets, healthcare, education, etc. (really, if it weren’t social, it would have been called “technical literature”, and all social systems are complex, chaotic. The same goes for trying to teach students how to write an essay. That means design happens within systems that are not easily reduced down to singularly responsible components (i.e. How would you know transmission of knowledge would necessarily result in the development of the desired capabilities?). Design decisions are no more reliable or even useful at nailing the right thing, at the right time, at the right place that would produce a desirable result. (That’s why all design literature appeals to the exploratory and experimental nature of the design process, keeping the language imprecise and unfalsifiable all the while). But the shortcoming of design literature is that it doesn’t take the complexity to its logical conclusion and be honest about it —that design is an inherently necessary but tragic endeavor. Design is a probabilistic numbers game that only succeeds due to the sheer amount of failures, of bodies piled on high that one success may stand on the dead stack.
This tragedy isn’t a risk to be minimized. The tragedy of the design effort is the very part of how a (social) system exists and progresses. Like natural selection, success must come from a heap of failures. Teaching students how to write an essay means to stand on the shoulders of a history of human culture, literacy, and pedagogy, all of which seems like amusing failures to us modern humans. And “success” isn’t even absolute. Evolution isn’t “survival of the best”; it is “survival of whichever happens to be the fittest at that particular time ”. Modern humans, being the currently dominant lifeform on Earth, will not survive back then when oxygen was not so abundant. Similarly, in other times, the literate student or the cunning teacher would be stoned to death on charges of witchcraft.
So what are these inhuman conditions that undergird and precede design? The foremost example of the overarching context of design is self-selecting financial (read: existential) incentives : How would one come into the position of a designer if one did not represent or at least align oneself with the interest of capital or politics, whose power enables one’s designs to be more than mere daydreams? Such interest is inhuman not because it is inhumane or immoral, but because such forces operate outside of recognizably “human” agency and values , with net effects crossing generations and nations, far more than any human community might recognize as their own. After all, Ford did not plan or design to invent “Fordism”. He simply wanted to make cars cheaply and efficiently in order to make it in the market economy. (One of the life-long theses that I aim to articulate is that if there ever were to be a technologically advanced enough alien civilization to visit Earth, it will talk to capitalism or the Internet—the currently highest forms of terrestrial intelligence, though blind and unconscious—rather than to any individual meat-sack human, such as a “world leader”).
Design has a part in innovation, but its part is that of a “automaton” in “cellular automaton”. Designers are mere cells abiding by their blind localized rules, while the larger emergent organism of capital operates on inhuman logic, far from the reach of human’s engineering ambitions. Thus, the hope that design can help us surpass our current conditions is not much more than mistaking correlation for causation. In other words, what we “do” as designers might tenuously relate to a larger change in the system, but we would be mistaken to state in our academic literature that design has such potential for change. Design thinking might be an important and necessary part in adapting to new conditions, be it global warming or the choice-economy, but design is far from the sufficient condition that the literature would have us believe. A single engineer or a firm might “design”, but an entire market economy—the thing that will enable (complex system) and enact (blackbox) such design—does no such thing. Alas, no firm exists independently of such a grand and inhuman system as the market. In fact, whether design is even necessary is in question. Design might be “necessary” in the sense that it is the natural, human thing to do when given our current conditions, but it is not “necessary” in the large, normative sense that it is a guiding principle in deciding what to do (or even in deciding whether to design or not).
In other words, if you don’t design, you perish, and we will hear nothing of you. As such, design is necessary in the most mundane sense of the word. The design-like steps and ways of thinking might be important, but is it anything more than what a laborer/craftsman/foreman is already doing but repackaged for the out-of-touch managerial classes?
Doubts Over Design as a Written-About Concept
The Proper Place and Value of Design
What, then, is the value of design? Caught in between un-engineer-able blackboxes and uncontrollable complex systems, design has its undeniable limits. So what resides in the interim? As a practitioner of design, I would be a fool to totally miss the obvious value of “design” as a unique/distinct concept, even if it might seem like a repackaging of already-existing practices. The unique value of design lies in the current practical context in which it is employed—that design is a not-so-provocative pushback against blind industrial/managerial maximization.
A core feature of a “system” is the ability to self-correct in a way that maintains the system’s existence, even in changed form—thus serving continuity is one function of design. In this way, design in the institutional sense (as in, “institutions and professionals must do design”) is not functionally dissimilar to that of attaining revenue, balancing checkbooks, or securing market share. More specifically, design is a check-and-balance mechanism against scaled-up efficiency (i.e. economy of scale) that ensures a firm’s or an institution’s continued competitiveness and thus existence in a market economy. A just-so story: First, an act of (primordial, unintentional) design gives birth to technics ( how to do things—the technique and the technology involved). Said technics are shown to be effective, so people scale it up (I don’t mean to say that this is necessarily in our human nature, but scaling up is certainly a desirable thing in consumer capitalism). Larger scale means better competitiveness, greater profits, more power, getting closer to monopoly power (monopolies being a logical conclusion to capitalistic competition, as even Adam Smith—the patron saint of capitalism—has cautioned). The market changes, as markets do, and the profitable scale suddenly becomes a liability. 2 things can happen: (1) Either the firm dies because some other, more agile firm can innovate/design better, (2) or that firm must internally innovate through a design-like process and adapt to the new market. Thus, design is brought back into the equation via those who survive long enough to remain in the equation in the first place.
But if design-in-practice is as simple as this just-so story, then every firm would survive. But no, some firms must die, even if the steps and ideas of design are as obvious as the literature presents it (really, intelligent executives are not ignorant of questions like “what is the offering?” and “who is it for?”—these are collegiate-level inquiries that are only valuable insofar as they are occasional refreshers for the jaded businessperson).
That is not to go too deep into the quality of the paper’s final recommendations, which are not much more than, again, thinking-hat-style checkboxes rather than any real analytical framework that could lead to a real decision. We have the “strategy pyramid”, the “insight matrix”, the various acronyms, the map-this, web-that. The usage of all of these things rely on the designer’s or the executive’s preconceived notions of what “risks” are, what “value” is, or who qualifies as a “stakeholder”. Every firm has its own notion of these items, and every firm already knows what they know. But this kind of shallow thinking-hat-style lists are really the typical end-user conclusions. I must ask: how is design-in-practice not simply a checklist ? A reminder on a post-it note? The firm’s capacity to act upon these so-called “frameworks” are only as extensive as the collective cognition of that firm’s key personnel. Garbage in, garbage out (and we definitely see a lot of garbage-addled firms doing fine on a lot of fronts). I won’t critique any specific “model” or “framework”, but to borrow the consultancy’s language: What is the offering here? And how is that creating new value?”
The fate of any single firm rests little on its ability or awareness of the design process. Doing it intuitively/common-sensically is how they have become a firm in the first place. Sure, many small startup projects start with very intentional design, but firms of various scales have come into existence far before the formal, academic concept of design was coined in the engineering world, let alone its bleeding into business and more social spheres. And yet, some firms must die, so that others may cannibalize their former assets and grow larger—such is the acquisitiveness crucial to capitalism. That means dead, dying, or doomed to die firms and projects have and will be doing design.
What is the importance of design, then, if everyone does it? Quite simply, design as a check-and-balance mechanism against runaway upscaling is something that market societies do, not individual people, departments, firms, or institutions do. You don’t “design”; it’s the market that “designs”. Individual units might call what they do “design”, but all units do it, and some will still die. Design is a feature of the system absent in its units. I understand that this is an odd and contradicting claim, especially when I have been talking about design as something that a firm or a singular person decides to do. But what I’m claiming here is that the difference between the market’s “design” and the individual’s “design” comes down to the difference between the “survival mechanism” of the species and the “survival decision” of the individual. Individuals do what they must, and when some survives, the success is counted on a mass, macro scale, promising very little realistic chance for the individual. We (humans, participants in market economies, members of society facing multiple existential crises) must do design because the net result is the continuation of our way of life, not the survival or success of the individual, Thus, the individualistic promises that design-thinking’s promoters, its academic literature, its professional seminar-givers will likely not come to pass.
The Whitney paper echoes similar individual sentiments as other innovation writers and speakers—that in order to tap into potential markets and unrealized profits (and ”win” as an individual), one must look at contexts larger than solely what’s selling right now , such as through the design process. But since the designer is never outside of her complex system and almost totally reliant on black boxes to realize her design (and to be honest, I believe most innovation happens inside black boxes, outside of the current purview of managerial techniques espoused by innovation/design literature), then how much can a designer do outside of the role of a matter-of-course cog ? That’s hardly the innovation-oriented ideal purported by design-thinking advocates. In my practical experience, I have come to terms with how limited design could be, even when a great amount of training, power, and resources is given. What, then, is the value of design?
Design is valuable insofar as it functions as a checklist in the hands of those who already know what they want and should do. Read any literature on design and innovation, one ought to find very vague language that rightfully belongs on a post-it note one writes to one’s self—as in, the instruction is vague enough that it only serves as a reminder to one already knowing what “stakeholder” and “offering” means in the first place, to one particular reader, to one particular context. Design as a methodology offers little new insight to those who cannot already intuitively interpret design’s constituent parts in her design scenario . Sure, there will be those who “haven’t thought of this before” and are “seeing the problems in a whole new light”, but in order to tap into such “novel” insights, one must do 99% percent of the mental work , work which the literature is incapable of alleviating the mental burden. If unversed in the language and courses of management technics, one would have as much problem with identifying “stakeholder” and “offering” as one would have problems learning an obscure foreign language, of which one has no prior experience (and paradoxically, relatively pedestrian small business owners and craftsmen tend to start off with a better grasp of these concepts than professional computer-typers, but these intuitors tend be blunted and confused after reading managerial literature). At best, design is a mental checklist for those who have one way or another already been doing design. At worst, it is a holdover from the Fordist instinct to maximize what is already there (this time, not the physical production technic but rather the managerial technic behind such productive activities).
In some sense, this kind of literature runs afoul of some of the classical pitfalls of management literature— survivorship bias —something that social researchers in general try their best to avoid. There is an overeagerness to conclude what kinds of orgs, people, and practices we can see populate the market today to be exemplary and worthy of extracting from their stories. This is quintessentially Fordism applied to the realm of managerial thinking. The treatment of the GM vs. Toyota story in the Whitney paper is really a typical example of how whatever that survives in the marketplace (at least at the moment of recording) will be extracted for all the lessons that it’s worth, even if such lesson is nothing more than pattern recognition. But the traits or decisions we synthesize from surviving orgs are usually the exact same things that kill other similarly-sized orgs . Risk-taking is one of those otherwise fatal things (the Whitney paper is correct in presenting that not taking risks is a potential loss in and of itself, but that doesn’t mean that risk-taking deserves the pedestal it has in the current business discourse). I won’t prolong this rant much longer, so I won’t go into what I have to say about management/business literature (the book “Good to Great” by James Collins is a prime and unfortunate example of the survivorship bias making it to very, very popular print). Shame, the bias isn’t confined to the business world. Its language and technics have seeped deep into more welfare-oriented fields as well, such as yours and mine. I don’t imagine pure STEM kids (theoretical physicists?) having to endure this as much as we do. Design is undoubtedly useful, but I feel like some of its advocates have overshot design’s usefulness and landed onto the territory of managerial obscurantism .
To sum up the value of design: In a larger context (contexts which advocates aspires towards), design is not a personal decision but a locally-enforced rule in a complex system ; espousing design to university students is to espouse breathing to a living being; those who won’t will not live long to hear the entire lecture. In a more individual context, design is little more than a thinking-hats-like checklist ; without knowing of design, a serious person would probably write something like “who are the stakeholders?” and “what is the added value being offered? as well as a list of the org’s ”core capabilities” somewhere in their notebook. And it’s really not like these kinds of checklists weren't already taught in business and management schools for decades way back in the 20th century. Middle and high school students are being taught thinking-hats frameworks; will we pay a premium for an obscurantist version of the same drivel ?
Doubts Over Design as a Written-About Concept
Again, Why Design?
Design is definitely something I subscribe to and practice everyday (literally!), but only because it is common sense that a cog or unit like me must naturally follow (and not get distracted by the arcane illusions in which middle managers like myself are constantly subjected to by the organization). Acknowledging my role in the vast complex system (the org, the industry, the society, etc.), as well as my dependence on blackboxes to do better than me, to think better than me, I’ve grown very wary of design literature catering to managers, executives, and aspiring future leaders.
The idea that we can extrapolate a viable future from the current state of a complex system through asking unscientific executives and office clerks simple questions about what stakeholders “might” need is absurd. But as many fantastical scenarios of virtuoso planners as the literature suggests we might become, there is little in the way of actionable rigorous frameworks. The impression I am left with after 5 years of taking design seriously (both practically and academically) is that “whoever knows, knows”. That’s not sufficient enough of a justification out of which to found an entire academic and professional field. To be hyperbolic, design-as-written-about is not much more of a profitable avenue linguistic game (shuffling, displacing, coining, repackaging terms) with little consequence on the actual complex fields (welfare, business, education, tech, healthcare, etc.) that it promises to make ripples in. If anything, I am thankful that the design literature is “making sexy again” at what ought to be the barest standards for those who call themselves professionals in those aforementioned fields. My gripe is that since what should be common sense is made “sexy”, the “common” suddenly becomes yet another arcane specialization—a common sense which one has to earn credentials, jump through hoops, and pay out of their pockets just to prove that they know what a village’s craftsman knew several centuries ago (he knew exactly what Bob a few houses down needed, how that could be achieved, and how it could be achieved better). That’s inventing a new gate to keep.
It is the re-centering of the community’s responsibility to the individual wage-earner (shareholders don’t give a damn about design; it is wage-earning office workers who have to compete against one another to come up with the most profitable design). The truly substantive net effect of this is the birth of a new consulting profession in a market that has to contend with shrinking profit margins (due to global improvements in living standards and weirdly enough, automation—but that’s a story for another day) and decreasing opportunities for the university-educated. This is regression, not progress.
To me, this formalized idea of design is as mundane as an instruction manual on how to operate the machinery of the last century (but after all, there is no machinery without at least a few decade’s work). If the machinery exists and is deserving of formal instructions, such instructions should be specific to that machine, instead of being a nebulous attempt at a general theory of innovation. As for the machinery of today, that is the work of serious theorists who belong to a truly outsider system, whose outsider positions can adequately empower them to make the most rigorous of observations regarding the machine’s operations (but academic managerialism, and in-practice managerialism are already using the same language and consensus, so there is no agonism from which to synthesize new lessons; i.e. where can we find these outsiders?). As for the machinery of tomorrow, that is for the chaotic system to decide; that is for the mad woman to theorize; that is for God-Almighty to design. This endnote is not nihilism nor an appeal to Her divinity. It is a modest acknowledgement of my role as a designer. It is the final indictment of my money-earning career so far. Amen .
Postscript
Postscript on the Choice-Economy
Hi again. It was in the middle of my very long thing previously that I realized that I did not adequately address your questions of what it is that I am confused about the choice-economy. I’ve made several minor edits to make explicit how design relates to the choice-economy, but in the end, I feel like it’s not enough. So here’s several unorganized notes about the choice-economy. Though I do try to keep a consistent theme, I fear my gripes with this one are even larger and more nebulous than mine with design. Because of that, please expect this postscript to be even more of a vague rant than a coherent argument (even worse than the last one!). But I swear the two are related.
1. Design in a So-Called “Choice-Economy”
First, I will attempt to summarize my understanding of the connection between design and choice-economy, as described by the Whiney paper as well as the literature around it.
Design is usually viewed as the necessary response to the economic situation in which we find ourselves in. In other words: We are making too much stuff that we think will be profitable but people don’t actually need, so we need design-thinking to orient ourselves to the stuff that would actually realize a much greater profit margin (or at least make us more competitive than those who haven’t realized those new markets), at least in the foreseeable future. Design as a formal process seeks to reorient the business/institutional strategist toward more fundamental questions of “who” and “why“ and “how”, thus freeing the practitioner from the confines of what is considered “industry best practices”. Stop blindly doing what you were told to do and really critically think about the reasons behind those practices, and how you might do better. This reorientation is a valuable purpose of which I am supportive, wholeheartedly.
Postscript
2. The Limited Scope of “Choice-Economy” Literature
Which brings me to my second point: This relationship between design and the choice-economy doesn’t go far enough into the “economy” side of things. Like I said, design seeks to reorient the fundamentals back to…you know, the fundamentals, such as who’s benefiting from a productive endeavor? Why? Is this what they truly want, outside of their purchasing habit, their focus-group result, and the market data? These are great questions. But for some reasons, these questions always stop short of certain intellectual boundaries. The questions brought up in design shy away from the political-economy side of things and never want to do anything innovative that might lie outside of the market dynamics. In other words, a design process, if permitted to run its course, will start to come up with things that should rightfully be published in political manifestos or even science fiction. (But we don’t call these genres design-literature. This is, again, one of the reasons why I struggle to see “design” deserves a formal, academic spotlight instead of just a universal thought process already employed by most people centuries prior to the advent of design gurus, consultants, professional training, etc.—as in, imminent in our efficacy as human beings).
In other words, whenever we talk about the economy, we’re talking about at least politics or even greater things. The petty thought patterns of an executive, org directors, bureaucrats, or middle manager (which we ceremoniously call “strategic thinking”) are hardly within the scope in which design aspires to in its grandiose examples. (Yes, GM vs. Toyota, or Microsoft vs. IBM, or fascism vs. communism are all grandiose stories from which we can derive very few if any universal principles—not any more than what we can derive of your overall biography from your breakfast this morning.). Design seeks to be strategic. What it is in practice is a shot in the dark based on very recent, very localized information (how can an executive have any insight into the lives of her wage-earning employees, let alone the larger public?). Strategic thinking maybe necessary, but it is only a very small player in the great game being played at the larger scale, of which the literature only alludes to as a boogeyman but never an object of careful and specific study, namely the introductions of new technologies, new cultural trends, old tensions between the consuming public and the productive industries, the exhaustion of the Earth’s capacity, etc. The literature isn’t engaging with larger, more systemic critiques of the contexts and dynamics in which firms belong. Do electric/hybrid cars solve the climate crisis? That’s a posteriori concern; it’s the unrealized profits that’s really at stake here, chum.
Postscript
3. Is Design-Thinking Just Another Tool in the “Scale-Economy”?
Thirdly, if we take for granted the context and incentives in which firms must innovate (the economy, choice-based or otherwise), we must also question the purported ambition of design— is design not a holdover of Fordism into the modern age? As in, is it not also a standardization and maximization of the steps that has worked? Is it not a kind of mental factory conveyor belt for how the manager should think? (Again, I am a practitioner of design; I just think that presenting design as on the camp opposite to 20th-Century Fordism is dishonest).
The Whitney paper and other literature like it all critique a blind upscaling of previous productive methodology and espouse a “smarter”, “more aware”, and “leaner” approach to responding to consumer needs. The paper even acknowledges that most firms are already doing design-like things informally (to the paper’s own standards), and that the paper seeks to crystalize these informal patterns into neat little frameworks. This optimization-by-way-of-reorientation just sounds like more Fordism to me (which is fine, but again, don’t try to think that all this is anything new or better). Again, would a designer dare to threaten the profit incentive, be it long-term or short-term?
As established in the main essay, design-in-practice is little more than an upscaling of what the designer, the firm, the market already suspects to be true. Would a designer who is completely ignorant of climate change be able to care about the future need for a hybrid car? What does or can this designer know about unsaid consumer needs? Since the one designing is never one who is outside, she must rely on her practical, experiential knowledge (all acquired from within the system) to infer the needs that lie outside of the current system’s purview. This is both her weakness and her strength, but it is not why she will start a revolution. (Upon reflection: This outsider perspective is precisely why diversity is so important—“better grab ‘em while they still remember what it means to be ‘outside’”— but such diversity is only useful insofar as it fuels the profit-seeking system).
It seems to me that if the economy is indeed transforming into something substantially different (that would require the strategic decision-maker to go back to fundamentals like “value-offering” and “stakeholder”), then the designer should have to have loftier goals in mind, goals greater than that of the competitiveness of her firm. GM might be brought forth as an example of a firm failing to capture upon the unseen need for an electric-hybrid car (or an example outside of the paper: Kodak suppressing its own internal invention of a viable digital camera in order to protect its film photography revenues, despite the theoretical need being obvious). However, all of such examples serve to reinforce that the survival of the firm, the brand, and its territories remain the foremost objects of analysis and protection. Not innovation. Not the value-offering to the consuming public. They don’t care about the consuming public. If the public ate shit, they would sell organically-produced feces. That’s “choice” for you.
(My side note to the aspiring designer: If you’re thinking in terms of systems larger than your employers, then you have no intellectual duty to protect your employers and their interests. You have already transcended them, so stop mucking about with BS “frameworks” and “pyramids” and “matrices” that would help your company. You’re wasting your brain cells trying to resuscitate things that have already been dead for several years. You must be ready to write off your own employers as a casualty in the grand chess of the market. Do not attend corporate leadership or self-improvement training. Do not attend anything organized by corporate that does not contribute to your specialized, employable skill (niche stuff). Recognize when they’re just trying to boost morale in financially desperate times—design workshops stand next to leadership seminars as the dirge of the dying. If they were an ounce of capitalists that they said they were, they would accept their fates and lay down and die like the failures that they are. If they don’t (and try to do propaganda on you about how everything is really fine, if only we did design—i.e if only their wage-earners worked harder than is required of them), then they are actually feudalists, not capitalists. And you are long past the age of lords, mandarins, and monarchs. Don’t design for failed projects. Failure is judged on material and financial grounds.)
Postscript
4. Design-Thinking vs. “Being Political”
Fourthly, innovation and design is already boxed inside the contexts, the givens of this “economy of choice”, and that any innovation-seeking inquiries outside of those financially-given confines are very quickly reduced to “politics”, thus putting a large chunk of the potential of design outside of the designer’s hands. The paper doesn’t say this, but try to design outside of the framework of capitalism (yes, even if we work in the so-called “third sector”, it is still within the framework of national and global capitalism) and see how quickly you are accused of “being political”.
What is the purpose of the Whitney paper? It seems to me that it is less of a design-based approach to the problems and excesses of 20th-century industrial capitalism and more like gentle but vague money-making advice for the managers hungry for new ideas to put in their slideshows. Though Patrick Whitney has built a career out of being a professional “design-thinker”, I won’t pick on his biography or career. The criticisms here are plain in the paper’s text and the related literature. It is a collection, a meta-model of models that by themselves cannot lead to meaningful change (because they are, again, checklists for those who already know what they are doing).
The Whitney paper is informative about design only insofar as it is an example, a reminder of how design authors too eagerly align themselves with the very boundaries that design is supposed to innovate away. Taken in this context, design is far from being the new thing that so urgently needs adoption. Take as evidence for this overeager self-alignment: The paper universalizes the experience of consumers into neat little steps, regardless of the person’s context and motivation, regardless of what service is being used. You know, they used to call this “customer service”. It’s the same old stuff but repacked. It’s not a new thing, and it’s definitely not a new science.
Whitney cites Doblin’s “5 stages of experience”, which looks more like something from marketing/customer service 101 than something that actually respects the scope and impact of a social undertaking. Overall, the actionable recommendations really play into the theme of “economy of choice”, as in there being a whole new field of making people feel good about their sunk-cost purchases. In Whitney's design paradigm, the focus on the “user” and her “experience” down to the cognitive and emotional level is troubling in that it de-centers the concrete and material benefits that the central stakeholder stands to gain from all this design work. In the paper’s own words: What is the offering here?
It seems that a very familiar sentiment in business is being implied in this paper: In a choice-economy, who cares if you get what you need; the only thing that matters is that you get what you THINK you want. I understand that the paper is trying to be holistic—in that the “user” not only be the beneficiary but also recognize experientially that she is the beneficiary at the end of this design process. In the economy of choice, what’s important isn’t if a consumer would make a certain choice; what really matters is that she does.
However, I think that if we were to adopt the “user-oriented” interpretation for what the paper and its ilks are saying, we would be a tad too generous. The Whitney paper, after all, is advocating for a consumer culture that centers the “cultural” part (does the client recognize this offering to be a “good” within her cultural frame of reference?) while not questioning the “consumer” part as an important part of the problems that had plagued scale-economy. These frameworks do not question the value and necessity of privately-own and profit-oriented firms. Though design might be innovation oriented, they have foreclosed on being critical of base conditions that are causing them problems (e.g. that environmentalism will not be recognized until some innovative people see a market niche in selling hybrid cars, but what is the carbon footprint of the hybrid/electric car industry?). I question how innovative can we really get if the literature tiptoes around the deep roots of the problems that a serious designer would otherwise address.
If we wish to innovate outside of the business framework, we most likely find ourselves in so-called politics, as in, “I can’t be too ambitious because that’s up to our leaders to decide”. Such an arbitrary boundary-making of the potential for innovation cannot be serious. The feel-good GM vs. Toyota story about the “wise Oriental” and “their weird ways of doing business” (such orientalist attitude is not actually said but implied in the paper) is really a mask for a restatement of what Western businessmen already know to be true—that in order to make a profit in the future, we must think outside of the box, but we can’t think outside of the profit box ; the fact that the Toyota executives said, “We do now know if [the factory machines] save money or not, [but what we care about] is that they make detailed parts at higher level of quality…”. How quaint, these Japanese men! But would such a story be told if the firm did not make a profit? No, of course not. This is the survivorship bias in management literature. They pick the little incidental details and blow them out of proportion, while ignoring the huge number of businesses that have attempted the same projects, taken the same risk, and did not survive. It’s dishonest. Even non-profit directors are answerable to donors in terms of the org’s revenue, let alone executives of a private conglomerate. Everyone, everywhere is taking both risks in higher quality products while trying to manage expenditure (cut corners) all the time, not just exotic little Asian people. Such a balancing act is universal in the world of business. Let us not pretend that if only we were more stakeholder-oriented, we would be better off as businesses and societies. It is more sensical to position design literature squarely as a competitive technic within the confines of a capitalism that is scraping the bottom of the barrel to salvage their shrinking rate of profit and increased cannibalism (e.g. a reinstatement of monopolies through increasingly insane mergers and acquisitions, as well as the rise of tech platforms). But that’s too political , which is a no-go zone for designers and design literature.
This invisible restriction around design and innovation has the effect of saying, “Make me a car, but keep the horse in your design, and it has to look like a horse carriage, too”. It is true that all design operated within given limitations (a part of “design specifications”), the confines of a so-called “economy of choice” cannot be valid and immutable if the paper aspires to such large scale problems as the “unseen, unheard of needs for an environmentally-conscious product (or just a smaller car)”.
Postscript
5. “Choice-Economy” Is Not a Good Description of What’s Going On
Which brings me to my fifth and final note: The concept of an “economy of choice” by itself is a very inadequate description of the state of production and consumption, certainly inadequate enough to not warrant a whole new category of thought called “design-thinking”.
So far, we have accepted the economic context to design is presumed by its literature as given, true, and immutable. Thus, innovation must happen within this given territory, as engineering happens within the laws of physics. But per my previous point, while design and innovation must have and respect limitations, those limitations must be reasonable and actual, not a mere myth or narrative.
The “economy of choice” is a myth. “Myth” not because it’s untrue, but it is a story that people tell each other so often that it has ascended to being a truism, replacing any awareness that there is anything other than this narrative.
In essence, this narrative goes: In an age of overabundance, people actually want (even if they haven’t realized it) certain things that are not yet on the market; therefore, businesses must anticipate these needs beyond current market data and strive to meet those needs (i.e. create new markets). My myth purports, “ Stop making more of the same thing and start making “smarter” things, in a “smarter” way”.
This narrative has been present, especially in the American public, back in the post-war 50s and 60s (who better to face the problems than those who spearhead overabundance and consumerism?). Every decade, the myth repeats in new forms, shaping itself to different audiences. For example, to the Christian conservatives, overproduction and overabundance can be seen as a leading cause for moral degeneration, and therefore, business leaders are morally obligated to right their wrongs and self-regulate the kinds of products they put on the market for children to consume. To the social theorists in academia, the narrative appears as the transition between Fordism to post-Fordism. To the layman commentator struggling to find a job, they might bemoan that America is transitioning from an industrial economy to a so-called “service economy”, with knowledge work being the new bedrock for the middle class life (in the mid-20th-century, “middle class” used to mean a stable factory job!); this is a conflation of the consequences of changing conditions of production, of capitalism with merely “what people want” Whoever’s telling it, the story remains that modernity is producing too much, and that’s not good.
It might seem that I am critical of this idea of overproduction-as-crisis, but I am actually in agreement with its basic principle that the spike in productivity that we’ve seen in the last few decades (thanks to automation and communication technology) hasn’t really fulfilled its utopian promise (back then, people fantasized that we in the 21st century would have a 14-hour work week with full benefits; what the 21st-century world had instead was faster business cycles, more dramatic recessions and booms, the decay of labor rights into the gig economy, and permanent precarity for a large swathe of the population). There’s something not right here. But I don’t agree with the framing that the problems that we are facing is a recent transition. (Yes, even if I were to solely consider it from a business and not social perspective, the story is very different from simply “scale-economy” vs. “choice-economy”.)
My trouble with the scale vs. choice distinction is that such distinction is not useful; there has always been both, all the time. If we take the business perspective, which is how to stay relevant and profitable, then this distinction seems to be a misrepresentation of how businesses and economies operate. The mythical scale vs. choice distinction pretends as if sole scale-economy (without consideration of “why” and blindly following market data) has worked before, but we have had enough of that, and it’s time for innovation. But innovation and design-thinking has always existed (how does Whitney think businesses became businesses in the first place?). And the principle of scale is still as operational and as powerful as ever. As an example: Think about how Amazon has intentionally stayed unprofitable for years just to get a larger market segment and horizontal control, just so that they could finally turn a profit because of their massive scale; they sold books, but now they sold everything else too. Such a transition between scale vs. choice does not exist . Another example: Decidedly Fordist Cold War America prided itself (as reflected in its propaganda) over the fact that it gave its citizens more choices of canned tomatoes, in contrast with communist Cuba’s rows and rows of identically-packaged, state-produced canned tomatoes; the propaganda ignores the fact that the vaccination rate and healthcare coverage in Cuba was vastly superior; “choice” did not address any fundamental need. This isn’t to say that communism is better (20th-century-style communism was hell). But the story demonstrates that even in the heights of what is now considered Fordism, consumer choice (or the illusion thereof) has almost always been the cornerstone of how the developed world thought of its own economy. To pretend that today, we are somehow not presented with enough choices is just wrong.
Sure, there are unmet needs, but these unmet needs are not because executives haven’t “designed” enough, or haven't asked themselves fundamental questions about core offerings. Society’s unmet needs are there because we are a society that has business executives in the first place. How is the world’s current food production enough to feed 10 billion people and yet huge areas of the world live below the poverty line and are subjected to practically slave labor? What is food waste in developed countries? Where does that excess productivity go if not contributing directly to the widening gap between the top-earners and the median-earners? But CEOs and the 1% are not the problem but the symptoms. Centering them is like saying we’ll condemn and ban pusles and blisters as response to a smallpox outbreak. No serious designer would think that. But no employed designer would, through her design work, question the very sources of these unmet needs. And as we know, a gainfully-employed designer cannot talk about taxation without being branded as “too political”.
The core business question is this: Would firms willingly design away their wealth for the public good? (Keyword: “design”, as opposed to the occasional, voluntary philanthropy). Of course not. Firms only design if and what it feels like it needs to become even more competitive. But the primary mechanism for (large firms) to stay competitive is an arcane game of financial contortionism and aggressive acquisitions of potential threats (not even direct rivals). The design work done in boardroom meetings appears as the most cosmetic of window-dressing compared to what truly gives businesses security. Design consultancy is really made for small-to-medium firms who are struggling for new ideas, who will likely be swallowed in some buyout-spree by the larger guys. In this context, scale vs. choice seems irrelevant. Choice-oriented strategy doesn’t make a firm more survivable. It makes a buyout more likely (because your innovation makes you appealing to an acquisitive larger firm). If you are a large firm, there’s no reason to pay attention to choice. You have enough money to throw at whichever hot new thing is doing well this quarter. We see the most retroactively successful M&A get written about, but we rarely see reports on unprofitable ones, where good ideas flounder and die—all a sign that true innovation isn’t what counts. Most likely, large firms are hedging their bets on a bunch of hot up-and-coming businesses in order to minimize risk (read: threat to their market share). Whichever one succeeds gets to be bought out. The rest of the other “experiments” get to go bankrupt. As a large firm, your expenditure on design seminars is more for morale than anything (and the budget report just chalks it up to the vast “OD” or more infrequently the “R&D” section).
Looking through the business lens, scale vs. choice seems like a funny distinction, and that’s already taking an “insider” perspective. So what then, are the problematizing bits of the story that’s left out? The problem is the centering of “choice” as the foremost obstacle to development itself.
Extra: “Choice” vs. Necessities
Having a “choice” is a middle class concern; having anything at all is the concern of the vast general public, even in developed countries. The discourse of choice-economy presupposes that people could already buy the hypothetical product if such a product existed. It proposes that in order to compete with the old guard (or not be the old guard), a firm has to discover (or more often, invent) new market segments. However, if you are homeless, would you give a damn about a “smart house”? Can the yuppies delay having a “smart house” in order to make sure the homelessness rate in their city drops? The facts are: They can, but they wouldn’t. That’s not an awareness problem. It’s an economic one. And if we abide strictly by what the market would buy, be it today or tomorrow, why would we ever see the needs (not “wants”, but “needs”) of those who are invisible to markets?
The choice-economy as a written-about-concept describes nothing but the lifestyle and habits of the professional middle class who writes design literature (hello, myself!), as well as the lifestyle and habits of the executives who would employ these professionals. These people are not intentionally boot-licking or lying. They are doing what feels true to them. In their overabundant lives, they constantly fantasize about the ideal product, their unmet niche needs, the various ways their daily activities could be optimized, their media-informed concerns, their various anxieties over being downwardly mobile, etc. Really, this is a rebranding of “consumer culture” instead of any categorically distinct “economy”. There is no economy on Earth that is afloat stably enough to start to view “choice” as the driving force for innovation (instead of “need” and “disparity”). People buy things that are not good for them all the time, even if alternatives exist. “Choice” is the word of a shopper, a shopper who either has enough or can go into debt enough to shop.
This solipsistic perspective is not their fault. Everyone does it. It’s just that they are the writing, typing, and speaking classes. It is their voice that gets to define what is real. It is their economically stable everyday-experience that gets generalized into vast narratives such as the transition from scale-economy to choice-economy, as well as the role of design, therein.
How novel! They have discovered the fact that if the only thing on the market is a big car, then the only sales data is that of big cars, and the presupposed “other” might want smaller cars. Who knew to ask people what they wanted? What is this, a semantical Mad Libs? Seriously though, does this really require an academic framework and professionalized consultancy? Do we need to invent fictitious terms like “choice-economy” to describe a fundamental problem since day one—that there is always a gap between the consumer and producer? How did the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt ever figure out that his/her citizens would choose to grow grains by the banks of the Nile? Ancient Egypt probably collapsed because they didn’t think enough about “choice”. Instead of building the Pyramids, they should have filled out the Strategy Pyramid instead.
(I’m sounding very harsh here, but please understand that I’m hyperbolizing, and that when I’m talking about things like this, I am sharply aware that I am really critiquing myself and the work that I do. I don’t know enough, but I’ve experienced enough to be suspicious of big promises about my field. I’ve had the same experience before while studying psychology, being exposed to this kind of rhetorical style. But it is just that—a style.)
If the premise of design is the myth of “economy of choice”, then any design work done under its fictive shadow would only serve to make the fiction reality. “Choice” is not the current zeitgeist, in the same vein as how “scale” has ever been the exclusively operant logic behind anything in the past. Both have always been co-operational. The past’s productive technics may seem outdated to modern eyes, but to call one “scale-economy” and the other “choice-economy” is to grossly misrepresent the extent to which contemporary business practices give a damn about the “core offering”. What is a “core offering” of WeWork that justified its overinflated valuations and investments? What is the “unmet need” of Zoom when there has always been popular video conferencing software long before COVID lockdowns? Why are we pretending that Amazon is a market prophet when it requires years of massive labor exploitation and anti-union practices in order to keep itself afloat?
There is no “economy of choice”. All the old powers are still working as intended, only in slightly different forms. Finance has moved towards hyper-abstract indexes and pump-and-dump schemes instead of the localized banking/loaning system of yore. Startups have abandoned their long-term dream for independent success, instead making themselves as appealing as possible in the short term for potential buyouts (begging to be eaten). Small investors do not loan to friends and neighbors but would readily put their savings into unregulated, bigger-fool financial instruments instead (see: MLM, crypto, NFT). Consumers are making purchasing decisions based on marketing and less on an understanding of need vs. feature vs. price. Native advertising has collapsed the divide between content and shilling. The base sustenance implied by “economy of choice” (you have to have enough reliably in order to have the luxury of identifying, let alone purchasing according to one’s “particular needs”) cannot exist when the workforce is increasingly entering the gig economy. Foreseeing and designing for a true alternative takes nothing less than a demotion of a status quo to that of a temporary and contingent pitstop, instead of being the norm to which everyone has to adopt. “Choice-economy” isn’t even the status quo anyways. For many, the choice is “work or die” . As privileged as you and I are, we are far free from that fatal paradigm.
Design in the restrictive context that the Whitney paper presupposes (which, in reality, such restrictions are likely where any designer would find themselves) is really a retroactive validation for what the top executives have already decided or believed prior to the design work’s beginning. Design-in-practice’s purpose is to validate one class’s solipsistic myth! Design is valuable as a tool, but the hammer was not exclusively made to smash skulls. Any story that aspires to universal ends but insists on such an exclusive context must be false.
Professional email-senders and computer-starers like myself like to pretend that our “knowledge work” matters a damn. It doesn’t. But most of the time, we don’t notice it because we were hired precisely because of our ability to use linguistic flourishes as a kind of reflection of what the executives already want. It’s grunt work, only with more pretension. Some places are better than others, but if you are building a system that relies on how “enlightened” the individual chief-of-something is, then you’ve got yourself a ticking time bomb jenga thing on your hands. Once again, one should never make excuses on behalf of one’s employers, unless one was hired as their lawyers.
Vy
Saigon, 2022
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