37. “A philosopher of all things digital design”
On skepticism, corporation-centered design, and ambient music.
Earlier this month, Fast Company published a new interview I did with Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter about their new book Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future. Here’s how I introduced the interview:
“In an environment that is screwed up visually, physically, and chemically, the best and simplest thing that architects, industrial designers, planners, etc., could do for humanity would be to stop working entirely,” wrote Victor Papanek in his class 1971 book, Design for The Real World. Fifty years later, there’s still a truth in his critique that rings true to me. In this moment when it seems every system is collapsing in on itself from pressures—the rise of artificial intelligence, the instability of democracies, the ever-present climate crisis—the role of the designer can feel uncertain.
I was thinking about Papanek’s line while reading the new book, Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future by Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter, out now from TenSpeed Press. Carter and Doorley, the academic director and creative director, respectively, at Stanford’s d.school, are much more optimistic about the role of design in creating a future that looks better than the present. Divided into two parts, “Intangibles” and “Actionables,” Doorley and Carter write about what they call “runaway design,” or the feeling that the systems we’ve made are out of our control and what we can do to reshape them. Interspersed throughout are a series of short fictional stories—dispatches from the future—that bring the often abstract ideas back down to reality.
I’m on the record of being a skeptic of overly-optimistic views of design and am leary of what I think of as the designer-savior complex, an idea that the d.school and, to a larger extent, firms like IDEO have inadvertently promoted. I’ve been a critic of Design Thinking for years. I say all this to say I went into this book with skepticism and I brought this skepticism to this conversation. While I admit to being lured into the authors’ optimism about the future, I couldn’t help wondering if it was all oversimplified — there’s no mention in the book of capitalism, for example, or profit or markets or economic power structures. So many of the big “problems” of the present are beyond the scope of any one discipline. What was this book communicating then? Who was it for? How do they maintain their optimism?
These are the questions I brought to this conversation, an admittedly different sort of interview that I usually do. I tried to ask challenging questions, probe at the blindspots I noticed, and dig into the areas where I thought they were on to something. We got to some interesting places, I think. I’m happy with how it turned out: it was a generative, exploratory conversation that goes beyond the book itself.
You can read the interview over on Fast Company’s site.
Speaking of profit, I was pleased to speak with New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka for his recent essay on why the Spotify interface seems to be getting worse. I am grateful for the platform to talk about this idea of “corporation centered” design that I’ve been talking about the last few years:
Jarrett Fuller, a designer and professor at North Carolina State University, told me, "Whatever the designer decides is the default for the majority of users; that is how they will use it." Fuller is something of a philosopher of digital design; his podcast "Scratching the Surface" canvasses experts in the field. In the past decade, he argues, a "user-centered" approach to design has been replaced by what he has taken to calling a "corporation-centered" approach. Rather than optimizing for the user's experience, it optimizes for the extraction of profit. If Spotify succeeds at turning us all into passive listeners, then it doesn't really matter which content the platform licenses. As Fuller put it, "It's about 'How do you get through as much music as you can so you keep paying for it?'"
This idea of “corporation-centered design” is something I’ve been talking about with increased frequency over the last few years. It’s a subtle shift, I think, from the goals of human-centered design. With corporation-centered design, all the tools and processes from the past are used but the evaluation is different: no longer is it about giving you the best experience but rather giving you an experience that will make a profit for the corporation. Think about algorithmic newsfeeds or auto-play video ads or one-click checkout. In some cases, sure, these might make for a better experience but they were designed, first and foremost, to keep you browsing, consuming, using.
This, to me, feels like something inherently digital. A bad physical product would just be returned or forgotten but in a system where subscriptions and ads are the real driver of profit, our continued use becomes much more important. Like I said, I’m grateful to Kyle for the opportunity to talk about these ideas for an audience outside of the design world and hope that these ideas resonate with people.
(On another note: when The New Yorker fact checker called me, they asked if I’d refer to myself as a “philosopher of all things digital design”. I said no but if The New Yorker wants to call me that, I’ll take it!)
Over on Scratching the Surface, we’ve been releasing reruns of old favorite episodes through the summer months. I’ve just started prepping for the upcoming season and am excited about the slate of episodes in the pipeline. Until then, I hope you enjoy listening (or relistening) to some older conversations with designer and activist Chris Rudd, director of design at The Met Alicia Cheng, artist and writer James Bridle, designer and educator Lorraine Wild, and my conversation with Kyle Chayka from 2020.
On Scratch, we published an excerpt from Lucy Johnston’s recent monograph of industrial designer and Pentagram co-founder Kenneth Grange, who recently died at 95; interviews with Jessica Helfand about her new body of paintings and James Biber about his book of designer birthdays; and we asked designer Kevin Yuen Kit Lo to recommend his favorite books.
On my blog, I posted some garden updates, shared a few recent favorite podcast episodes, and a bunch of links about Wim Wenders’s latest film Perfect Days. I’m continually trying to find time to get outside and make photographs, many of which I’m posting at jarrettfuller.photo (and are interspersed through this issue).
Otherwise, I’ve been (as always, it seems) reading widely. A few recently finished books include Miranda July’s All Fours, R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit, and Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. That was not my favorite Murakami (is it still Wind-Up Bird Chronicle? I haven’t read that in 12ish years at this point.) and I think I liked Kwon’s first book, The Incendiaries more than Exhibit, which started with a bang but seemed to lose the momentum as it went on. I adored, however, All Fours. I’m a longtime July fan and this book felt more confident, more layered, more complex than her other work. It’s weird and funny and moving and thoughtful.
On the non-fiction side, I finally read this biography of George Nelson which I’ve had on my shelf for years. Nelson has always been a touchstone for me: a multidisciplinary (ugh) designer who also wrote, organized, taught, curated. This passage resonated with me:
In comparison with the careers of other designers, Nelson's seems not only interestingly unconventional and appealingly uncommercial but also, at times, perversely negative, even self-destructive: it is the career of an architect who advocated the end of architecture, a furniture designer who imagined rooms without furniture, an urban designer who contemplated the hidden city, an industrial designer who questioned the future of the object and hated the obsession with products…He tried, often successfully, to provoke a profoundly critical examination of artistic conventions, established design professions, and accepted practices. What George Nelson spent his most creative talents designing was nothing less than design itself.
At the risk of comparing myself to Nelson, I like this idea of the designer’s designer. For better and for worse, this seems to be the direction my own work is increasingly taking.
Apropos of nothing, I watched a string of documentaries about creative recently projects: D.A. Pennebakers’s classic 1970 The Original Cast Recording: Company, Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune, and playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. In a way, these are all about the struggles, and often failures that come with, doing ambitious creative work. In Company, you see this cast slowly breakdown, unable to replicate the feeling of the stage in the recording studio. In Jodorowsky’s Dune, you see a mercurial, ambitious director run up against the limits of a studio system. And while Slave Play was largely a success, this meta-documentary examines Harris’s own influences and his and the cast’s struggles to meet the cultural moment. I don’t know if I have a big insight to draw from this other than to note how much I enjoyed all of them and want to recommend them to you.
The new KMRU album got me going back to listen to his catalog again and I was struck by how central his music has been in my life the last few years. I recommend this profile of KMRU by Philip Sherberne for Pitchfork from a few years back. For more ambient music, I’ve also enjoyed the new albums from Loula Yorke, Actress, and Richard Skelton’s 2023 album that I missed when it came out. I’m also playing the new records from Childish Gambino, Los Camposenos!, and Font a lot these days.
I love Olivia Laing’s writing so I’m very excited to read her new book on gardens. (She wrote about Derek Jarman’s gardens, a bit, in her book of collected essays, Funny Weather.)
Here’s pilot and writer Mark Vanhoenacker on the joys of learning a new language.
I really enjoyed this interview with illustrator Richard McGuire on KoozArch about his stunning book Here, which I loved when it came out, and the upcoming film adaptation of it.
As a longtime journal-keeper and notebook user, this conversation about the history of notebooks between John Dickerson and Roland Allen was inspiring and fascinating.
The garden’s harvest is in full-swing at the moment: we can’t keep up with the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. I’ve pickled a bunch of peppers, made a few batches of hot sauce, and eaten tomato sandwiches all week. It looks like the cucumbers and beans will be ready for harvest soon, too. It’s been a good season but my focus is turning to back-to-school. Time to prep syllabi, write some new lectures, and get ready for Fall!
I hope you are enjoying the end of summer. Thanks, always, for reading.
From Raleigh,
Jarrett
How to see it in a good way:
User-centered design and corporation-centered design share similarities, but their approaches differ significantly. In user-centered design, the primary focus is on ensuring that users have a positive and successful experience, with revenue being a secondary consideration. On the other hand, corporation-centered design prioritizes profit generation while simultaneously striving to keep users satisfied. Both approaches aim for user happiness, but their underlying motivations and methods set them apart.