Name: What Design Can't Do
ISBN: 9789083350134

Silvio Lorusso

What Design Can't Do

taylor miles hopkins

…for it is in hopelessness that hope sprouts.

…identity formation combines consumption with professional production. Or even that profession is, at least in part, a form of consumption.

Chaos precedes design and operates inside it: it is the manifestation of the Real beyond the designerly illusion of a stable and durable order.

Design began with the factory and ended with it: it was industrial design. Nowadays, things are more difficult: design escaped the assembly line to become a mentality, which is to say that our mentality has become industrialised.

…the problem is that design thinking is forgetful, design in general: it neglects histories.

Here, we gather that design is the exclusively human capacity to prefigure, to imagine a structure before it is built.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."

‘Everything is design' doesn't only imply that everything in our environment is artificial, but also that our very gaze has been artificialised. 

Autopoiesis: an autonomous system is one that "finds its way into the next moment by acting appropriately out of its own resources.”

It would seem that the designer's authority is recognised and remunerated as long as it aligns with the goals of the company. Put otherwise, the high bonuses and perks, more than a manifestation of design power, are a proof of the acquiescence or even complicity of designers with the cause of the company.

When there is no chance to 'sin,’ the issue of responsibility can become an indirect form of self-congratulation.

if you use Comic Sans and you can still be taken seriously, it means that you operate in a cultural sphere.

As the shepherd doesnt call his sheep 'nature', in this case we cannot speak of vernacular, since there is no distance between the subject and the object.

“…When a language formalises, this is when it can begin to alienate people.” That being said, cannibalisation is not a destiny for [Clara] Balaguer, who believes in the ability to “write about the vernacular in the vernacular.”

The “human factor" in these decisions is the very reason we should not consider this decision-making process a linear, logical one, but one that is affected by temperament, irrationality and chance.

But the fact that design is powerful doesn’t necessarily imply that designers are.

On Indiana metropolitani—public protest using irony. “We demand to work harder and earn less!”

…irony is a frustrating “language that marks the space between our desires and the difficulty of their realization.”

Irony, then, was a way to inhabit the gap between expectations and reality. But our society is post-ironic, for it has learned to neutralise irony's subversive power by simply incorporating it…As David Foster Wallace pointed out, irony, especially in its postmodern breed, moved away from its antagonistic origins to evolve into a mere advertising technique that, while pleasing the audience, acts as a protective shield against criticisms, because how can you ironically criticise something that is already ironic about itself?

…one is urged to feign a more or less standardised expression of critical and socially concerned thinking within safe and somehow predefined ethical boundaries. A sort of humblebrag of good intentions that doesn't hurt or upset anybody. Against this backdrop, the notion of performance of politics is less a form of deep engagement than a garnish to apply one’s own projects and practice.

The arguments in this book are absolutely necessary when looking at our current state of design education and professional practice. There was a lot here that touched upon critiques and discomforts I had within design school, and Lorusso aptly verbalizes why I (and many other designers) have felt this way—particularly the performative aspects of many social design projects, the professionalization of the self, the idolization of the design hero and smart culture, and the extreme complexity, hyper-autonomy, and the aggrandizement encouraged in academic spaces that rarely reflects the practice and leads to quick disillusionment. Also, had such fantastic arguments surrounding designers in tech (wanting a seat at the table when the table quite truly should have been flipped).

My main qualm with this book can be easily explained by a quote in its final pages: “…designers and design theorists have an incentive to increase complexity in order to reduce it. This way, any attempt at simplification is portrayed as a trivialisation of the issue at hand.” I found this book to be indulgently academic and often talked in circles. While it’s a fantastic source of information and critique (particularly of looking at the detailed failings of the field within capitalism without giving the typical wave of the problem being just generally “capitalism”), this is not the most approachable read to the “everyday designer” that Lorusso carefully upholds in the early pages of the book. 

The arguments in this book are absolutely necessary when looking at our current state of design education and professional practice. There was a lot here that touched upon critiques and discomforts I had within design school, and Lorusso aptly verbalizes why I (and many other designers) have felt this way—particularly the performative aspects of many social design projects, the professionalization of the self, the idolization of the design hero and smart culture, and the extreme complexity, hyper-autonomy, and the aggrandizement encouraged in academic spaces that rarely reflects the practice and leads to quick disillusionment. Also, had such fantastic arguments surrounding designers in tech (wanting a seat at the table when the table quite truly should have been flipped).

My main qualm with this book can be easily explained by a quote in its final pages: “…designers and design theorists have an incentive to increase complexity in order to reduce it. This way, any attempt at simplification is portrayed as a trivialisation of the issue at hand.” I found this book to be indulgently academic and often talked in circles. While it’s a fantastic source of information and critique (particularly of looking at the detailed failings of the field within capitalism without giving the typical wave of the problem being just generally “capitalism”), this is not the most approachable read to the “everyday designer” that Lorusso carefully upholds in the early pages of the book. 

Sésame

I was waiting for this book for sooo long. Silvio Lorusso's never ending twitter thread on design desilusion was a major ressource for my master thesis (I even kind of borrow on of his meme for the cover) and a companion through the last years of my design studies.

I'm quite happy that this book exist. It offers a deep review of the main issues design and designers are facing, especially around power and relationship with politics. More important, it's a exigeant book who dare to face the fact that design won't solve the problems, those from he's responsible and others, that it's non-stop pretending to solve. I'm usually having a hard time to explain this point of view to my fellow designer, probably because I sound really cynical and a bit harsh. I think this book is a really good tools to do so, probably in a more subtil way than me. An other quality is, as the conclusion of the book explain it, being critical without having to give a new guide to doing-a-better-political-design. Also, I loved the numerous memes scattered through the book.

I still have a few critics or questions about it, but I first want to say that it's like the second or third book i'm reading in english, I may have misunderstood or not fully understood everything.

I really like the point Lorusso made about workers union in design field that those "unioninsing calls" have barely any effect because unionising would be aknowledging that designers are just basic worker and not intellectual one. But I feel it would have been really interesting to explore a bit more the question of unionizing in the design field. It's still for me the more interesting way for designer to face desilusion and in France or UK we have several union exemples. It made you think yourself as worker, and so connecting with other workers with common interest even if they're not designers, and give you a space to redirect your political ambition in usefull and impactfull struggle, instead of just being cynical and desilusional.
My second main "critic" is about the school chapitre (the 7th I think). I think it miss a bit of structural analyse of how art and design school we're built, what is their relationship with the other field in university (and why they think themselves so different from them) and how they're affected by the progressive liberalisation of universities, especially in Europe. It would have give a deeper understanding of how these school are rooted in a neo-liberal agenda. In the art and design student union that we launch in France it helps us a lot to explain our current situation. But maybe I'm too french and became too much of a communist.

Well, sorry for the english mistakes, and thanks a lot for this really important book, I hope it would reach at least a bit of the french design field.