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Matthew Kiem
The University of Sydney
essay
On the Limits
Sydney, Australia
[Link]@[Link]
[Link]
of Design
Abstract
Several recent publications in design theory have drawn
into question the hope and idealism that often underlie
dominant ways of thinking and talking about design.
These arguments can be drawn into connection with
earlier discussions about how the structural constraints
of professional practice limit the ability of designers to
enact change. ‘Design civil society’ and ‘infrastructural
politics’ are suggested as ideas for helping designers to
think through action beyond the limits of professional
identity.
Keywords
design
politics
coloniality
civil society
infrastructure
Diseña 25 Matthew Kiem On the Limits of Design
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I
t is easy to feel dejected by the state of political discourse within design. Not
because there isn’t anything of interest being said but, rather, because there
is a feeling of an ever-widening gap between the seriousness of the challenges
we face and the ideas and capacities that we have to work with. While not stated in
these terms, it is a mood of this kind that seems to motivate the deflationary tone
of some recent publications (Lorusso, 2024; Matos, 2023). These texts contrib-
ute to an existing line of thought that suggests not simply that ‘ethical’ or ‘polit-
ical’ design has failed to deliver on its ideals, but that such failure is a structural
feature of design itself.
Pessimism about design reflects as much the scale of our prob-
lems as the state of design discourse. In the month of writing this, July 2024, the
record for the Earth’s hottest daily temperature has been broken twice. Earlier
this year, a survey of 380 scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change found that almost 80 percent believe that we will see average tempera-
tures rise to 2.5°C above pre-industrial levels before the year 2100 (Carrington,
2024). Almost half believe we will exceed 3°C. These expert assessments stand
in depressing contrast to the stated goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement: hold any
temperature increase ‘well below 2°C’.
These numbers reflect a condition of failure: a failure of politics
and design, but also one of justice. Western states that accumulated their wealth
and power by means of conquest, exploitation, and sabotage continue to play an
active role in deepening the climate crisis. According to the International Insti-
tute for Sustainable Development, for instance, the UK, the US, Canada, Norway,
and Australia are together responsible for more than two-thirds of new oil and
gas licenses issued since 2020 (Milman et al., 2024). Theorists of de/coloniality
argue that coloniality is a structure of power that endures despite the end of formal
colonial rule (Mignolo, 2011). Western support for the ongoing genocide of Pales-
tinians underscores the horror of this power, both for what it is capable of now
as well as how it is likely to treat growing numbers of displaced and dispensable
Others on an increasingly unsettled planet.
Designers are often called upon to view our practice in hopeful
terms. Our practice is dedicated to shaping the material and symbolic contexts of
everyday existence, and we are explicitly trained in methods of imagining new and
previously unthought possibilities. Carleton B. Christensen is correct, however,
to observe that this idealistic image overlooks the limits that are imposed upon
designers by the commercial realities of professional practice (Christensen, 2006).
Whether as employees, contractors, or business owners, designers are everywhere
subject to the direct and indirect discipline of market pressures. We may design,
but only ever so under conditions of limit and constraint.
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These limits of professionalism are political: powerful people and
institutions are not going to pay for or approve designs that threaten their power,
or at least not in the absence of an even greater countervailing threat. In the face
of these limits, our options for action surely require some version of what Chris-
tensen suggests—that is, ideas for influencing the contexts and conditions of
designing rather than the act of design alone.
Christensen proposes a ‘design civil society’. By this, he means
the fostering of public discussion and debate about design, in which the objective
is to determine a public rather than individual interest. His model for this is the
coffee house culture of eighteenth-century Europe. The informal character of the
coffee house mattered for the way it provided a generative kind of infrastructure
between and beyond the more regulated realms of economics and politics. The
critical point for Christensen is not to replicate this model exactly but, rather, to
think about the conditions for a specifically public—rather than private (or profes-
sional)—discourse on design.
Christensen’s argument calls for critical evaluation in light of
decolonial theory. The coffee house was the effect of a bourgeois class formation
in the metropoles of European imperial states. The image of the ‘public’ that it
supported was based on Eurocentric and patriarchal concepts of human difference
and civil virtue. Christensen correctly identifies the limits of professional practice
as a problem for designers, as well as the need for politics beyond this form of iden-
tification. However, evaluating his argument from the perspective of decolonial
politics would require consideration of how the concept of ‘civil society’ assumes
or reproduces colonial concepts of citizenship and legitimacy.
The concept of infrastructure may offer more possibilities for
designers to think and act through. Without suggesting that it is ever one thing,
for Angela Mitropoulos (2012) infrastructure is what supports the kinds of move-
ment and relation that can challenge dominant categories and assumptions. As
she puts it:
The infra-political builds toilets in homeless encampments in Sacramen-
to; bypasses pre-paid water meters, tickler systems and privatised water
piping in Durban; formulates vocabularies of reconfiguration rather than
foreclosure and standardisation; delivers health care to no-border protests
and undocumented migrants; creates phone apps for evading kettling by
police in London; digs tunnels under national boundaries; and more―the
infra-political, in other words, revisions activism not as representation but
as the provisioning of infrastructure for movement, generating nomadic
inventiveness rather than a royal expertise. (Mitropoulos, 2012, p. 117)
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As brief as the sketch is, it points us towards a politics of designing beyond the iden-
tity of both the designer and the citizen. While Christensen speaks of civil society
as a sphere premised on the recognition of rationality, Mitropoulos’ infrastructural
politics emphasizes mobile and creative responses to questions of provisioning.
If Christensen describes how the idealism of design is invariably
undercut by the constraints of commercial practice—a dynamic that not surpris-
ingly gives rise to cynicism and despair—then Mitropoulos helps us to reflect on
what it might mean to act beyond a professional identity without, at the same time,
falling back onto political concepts that assume much of what we are trying to undo.
None of these arguments provide us with any guarantees for overcoming our grim
circumstances, but they do provide some avenues of reflection that take seriously
the question of structural limits. -d
References
Carrington, D. (2024, May 8). World’s Top Climate Scientists Expect Global Heating to
Blast Past 1.5C Target. The Guardian. [Link]
article/2024/may/08/world-scientists-climate-failure-survey-global-temperature
Christensen, C. B. (2006). Popping the Bubble: The Ethical Responsibility for Design:
Review of John Thackara’s In the Bubble. Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), 133–158.
[Link]
Lorusso, S. (2024). What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion. Set Margins’.
Matos, A. (Ed.). (2023). Who Can Afford to Be Critical?: An Inquiry into What We Can’t Do
Alone, as Designers, and into What We Might Be Able to Do Together, as People. Set
Margins’.
Mignolo, W. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial
Options. Duke University Press.
Milman, O., Lakhani, N., & Witherspoon, A. (2024, July 24). Revealed: Wealthy
Western Countries Lead in Global Oil and Gas Expansion. The Guardian. https://
[Link]/environment/article/2024/jul/24/new-oil-gas-emission-
data-us-uk
Mitropoulos, A. (2012). Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia. Minor
Compositions.