Schwarz
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Politics, the political and design
Design, mostly, is a service industry, serving the status quo. It serves to replicate the given reality of our existence in which a ‘politics of the same’ — the only formal politics we have — is enacted. Obviously, this doesn’t happen in consciously overt ways, but rather through the inherent ontologically designing nature of design’s politically unexamined practices and the directional consequences of all that design brings into being. Or, put another way, ‘everything we design goes on designing’. What we are saying here then is that this designing is ever ideological, and this understanding of design, i.e., revealing the designed as continual process rather than just as realised product, is ever political.
It follows that if we want another kind of future than the one offered by the unsustainable status quo, then we all have to change direction, redirect our practices and all that they bring into being — this so we may become another way. Such change can only happen if design is not just acknowledged as political but also becomes politically engaged as an ethically redirective domain of human endeavour.
We cannot go back. While the overt political ideologies of the past have good and bad lessons to teach, they lack the conceptual and intellectual means to deliver sustainable futures. Likewise, democracy as we now know it — as just another marketed commodity choice based upon appeals to self interest rather than the collective good — is not going to deliver such futures. The massive changes needed to secure sustainable futures — such as major reductions in the negative impacts of economic activity, limits on resource utilisation and the initiation of socially just levels of equity — are not the kind of things that politicians are going to put in front of voters.