Modern design is care-less.

Not in the sense that we don’t care for what we do, but rather that we’re willing to sacrifice culture for efficiency. Contrary to the idea that designers ‘create’ culture, we must ask ourselves to what extent we standardize it. There’s evidence of this standardization in that everything looks the same now, from brands to cars, and Airbnb’s to architecture.

Efficiency is excellent for reducing friction—to do more, better, faster—but that ignores friction being a necessary, depth-giving part of life. When efficiency wipes out the chance of future abundance, it becomes a curse rather than a blessing. We don’t need to fear the AGI paperclip maximizer theory—we’re already subject to it daily in capitalism. But it increasingly seems like the extremes we’ve reached could cause a shift in the system.

People are reawakening their awareness of capitalism’s shortcomings in health, labor rights, community, and general life satisfaction. They’re questioning, speaking up, and searching for new ways to live, work, communicate, and organize.

Even science is beginning to understand what Indigenous cultures have known for a long time: that spending time around plants is essential for health, that trees communicate to share food and medicine, and the necessity of not taking more than required. That we didn’t understand this before comes from empirical science being a language of boundaries; what scientists don't know isn't named, and what can't be named isn't worthy of science.

We have to be aware of our worldview so we understand its bounds, how it shapes our reality, and how it affects our actions due to the blind spots it creates. The mechanistic worldview, which, if you live in the West, is the prevalent ideology, says that hierarchy comes from the top down: reason rules emotion. Jason Hickel writes in Less is More,

‘I am not my body,’ Descartes insisted. Rather, it is disembodied thought, or mind, or reason, that constitutes the person. Thus the phrase by which we all know him: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes succeeded in not only separating mind from body, but also establishing a hierarchical relationship between the two. … Any inclination towards joy, play, spontaneity – the pleasures of bodily experience – was regarded as potentially immoral. In the 1700s, these ideas coalesced into a system of explicit values: idleness is sin; productivity is virtue.

This worldview, which focuses on productivity and efficiency—and of which Modernism is a descendant—also birthed the climate crisis, among other crises. We need to deconstruct this mentality and create a new one if we want to have any positive effect on the climate. I think the concept of care can help us get there.

Care as a signpost

What if the barometer for successful design in the 21st century was care instead of efficiency? Care, not just for our craft and the beauty of the final product, but also after the fact, concerning our designs’ social and environmental effects, as well as designing for the ‘acquired knowledge’ that objects pick up with use over time.

This change can start with language, affecting how we see and interact with the world. For example, in Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer says

A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the [Potawatomi] verb “wiikwegamaa”—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.

Or take Tuvan, a South Central Siberian language, in which

the preferred way to say “go” in Tuvan refers to the direction of the current in the nearest river and your trajectory relative to the current. They keep track of that information as they’re moving around the landscape.

Language profoundly changes how we show respect and who we imagine deserves it. In languages like English, this respect is limited mainly to people and maybe animals. However, in various Indigenous languages, people understand that everything has a spirit and, thus, deserves respect and care: rocks, water, fire, and hills become active, animate beings with whom people have relationships.

New words that describe new feelings—like solastalgia, as I talked about a couple of weeks ago—can create new relationships between people and the world we inhabit. What new relationships could ‘care’ create or strengthen in design?

When we devalue care, we, as a society, avoid intimacy, and relationships become transactional. If we were to embrace care and the emotional connections it creates, we might view the system’s exploitation in a different, more consistently critical light. Ignoring what binds us together breeds ignorance and disconnects us from our humanity.

However, the blame does not solely lie with us. Capitalism, by its very nature, encourages emotional disregard. It fosters an individualistic mindset that prioritizes personal gain over communal well-being because if there's always something we can improve as individuals, then there's always something to produce, look forward to, accomplish, or pine for. To truly foster a sense of community, we must move off the capitalist plantation.

This is becoming ever-more clear. Social media, which ostensibly creates “community” and which many creatives use to make a name for themselves, overrides our sense of validation. Social validation used to be more or less predictable: if you did something good, you got praised, and vice versa. This kept our identities in line with society. But social media has overridden this by aligning our identities with an algorithm. We change our identities to get more likes, shares, and followers—based on what the algorithm determines is "engaging” (read: sellable), not what brings people together.

However, the issue of social media is downstream from our unending faith in market value. Like a cultural Ouija board, our collective pushing and pulling has created the false notion that everything comes from the market, and the market is our only choice. The success of this idea relies on our missing the forest for the trees, a skill we’re encouraged to abandon. Again, Kimmerer says that

We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa’s sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.

However, a more communal, socially driven system could change the purpose of production, design, and branding. Addressing needs (i.e., care) instead of increasing consumption (i.e., efficiency) naturally creates different types of products, designs, identities, and aesthetic goals.

Fulfilling design

Maybe care can allow us to fulfill the promises we sell in design. It could move us toward a 21st-century idea of design that shifts gears: from expert to facilitator, from salesperson to social actor, and from object-oriented to earth-oriented.

A few specific ways come to mind:

Collaboration

When we value care, we also start to value our now-unnamed collaborators—the trees converted into paper and the cows who supply casein for adhesives. But nature isn’t the only uncredited collaborator. Care might also extend value and visibility to the many designers, illustrators, 3D artists, and project managers (and more) who routinely go unnamed on projects so studios can keep a unified facade of coolness—and, undoubtedly, protect their ‘intellectual property.’

Being more thoughtful about how we design, produce, and consume reconnects us with the reality of interconnection with nature and each other, even in an industry as ‘modern’ as design. No person, designer, studio, or industry is an island, so we’d do well to honor the collaborators with whom we engage every day.

While taking life to live is part of being human, what's changed is the connection to the things we consume. While (some of us) are materially much better off compared to just a few centuries ago, we're disconnected from the origin of our belongings and the critical connections we, as a society, must sever to obtain them.

Not only that, our understanding of sharing—an integral part of collaboration—is often viewed as a zero-sum game; if you have something, I lack it, and vice versa, so we each guard what we have and take what we don’t. I think this is a relic of a care-less society that increasingly seems like it’s in its death throes. Care could shift us from seeing sharing and cooperation as acts that reduce value to ones that increase it. Instead of value degrading over time, it becomes increasingly distilled.

Creativity

How we approach care (or avoid it) changes how we express our creativity; depending on this, we ask different questions during the design process. In a way, a lack of care is why an Apple product will never look better than the moment you open the box and ever-so-delicately remove the paper wrapping. Meanwhile, a De Buyer carbon steel skillet gets more beautiful over time because of its patina, as does a Rimowa suitcase with the dings, dents, and scratches it picks up over its lifetime. While Apple front-loads all of its care during the design process, De Buyer and Rimowa understand that products must incorporate care throughout their lifespan.

I’ve started to see this short-sightedness in design a little how Kimmerer sees land restoration:

How we approach restoration of land depends, of course, on what we believe that “land” means. If land is just real estate, then restoration looks very different than if land is the source of a subsistence economy and a spiritual home. Restoring land for production of natural resources is not the same as renewal of land as cultural identity. We have to think about what land means.

In the same way, we need to consider what design means. Do we want to continue with the current throwaway culture that has led us to find microplastics in our blood, breast milk, and testicles, or do we want to use design more deliberately, more mindfully?

When we respect how a product or brand is used over its life, we can embed sentimental growth into the design, encouraging care and deterring disposal. The resilience of a skillet that still looks great after 50 years creates a ‘safety net’ for the product, person, and planet. Likewise, designing that resilience can be a springboard for creativity.

Reduction to the simplest forms doesn’t have to be the holy grail of design. In the 21st century and beyond, striving for simplicity without considering longevity must be considered negligent.

Systems thinking

Lastly, because of its relational nature—it needs at least two parties—care can push us to see the bigger picture and think in systems beyond brand and UI. While designers are used to leveraging systems thinking in our work to recognize the relationship between things—brand elements or product proportions, for example—that doesn’t often carry over to our relationships between people, industry, and society.

Deprived of these connections and without a social context, the focus of our work hovers around what we do instead of why we do it, often making us, for lack of a better term, “useful idiots” instead of mindful participants. We end up shunning care and solidarity as people for efficiency as designers.

Care can make us think of how a design affects the community it lives in. How does a studio’s structure affect its employees’ health or self-confidence? How might sourcing local producers affect our city’s economy (and people)? While we might think about these individually, we must understand and act on them systematically.