The reduction of the role of designer as service provider has taken away the agency that the designer has over form and content. 

When struck with an ethical question, one way is to walk away from the work, but the other way is to take up the mantle and push for change from within. Can messages be rewritten to reshape their intent towards a more holistic direction? Can influence be leveraged to resolve ethical dilemmas through meaningful interventions? The role of the designer as author thus goes beyond self-initiated projects and design-art, and extends to the client-facilitator relationship as well!

How can designers meaningfully commit to acts of authorship?

Balance is a key Gestalt principle when it comes to visual design, but can we apply it on a metaphorical, even metaphysical level into the ethical aspects of our practice? 

Does our work disproportinately magnify harmful messages, ecological disbalance, or power-dynamics?

Can we take a balanced and more nuanced look at what goes into this work?

Nike introduces Circularity in their Circular Design Guide:

Design has the opportunity to take on a powerful role in making the world a better place. Circularity puts us on a journey that focuses on achieving progress hour by hour, day by day, week by week, year by year.

Circularity involves taking decisions on material use, processing, assembly, usage, repair, refurbishment and repurposing, to extend the product’s life cycle, and avoid wastage, by maximising use, re-use, and sharing. 



How can circularity become the normative mandate for design?

Is your design merely dictating, or is it engaging the audience / user / human interactors meaningfully, through two-way communication?

As designers, it is important to not place ourselves and our creations outside of the systems they operate within, but to understand that to fully address something, one needs to be of it and with it.

Design could be dialogic, and consider that the person’s (and not the consumer or user’s) interpretation of what the design is saying/doing could vary, build up on research and plurality of prior experiences, and respond accordingly.

Should all design be dialogic?

Egalitarianism is defined as the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

Now doctrine makes it sound almost dogmatic, but as designers, it is imperative for us to understand, that while it is practically impossible to design solutions that are universal, it should also be kept in mind that whatever we design does not purposefully exclude people based on their (largely marginalised) identities. 

How do we design for a future that is egalitarian in every possible sense?

As designers, we often centre our practice around giving form to functionality, or in the case of communication design, form to content. Criticism and critiques often focus on form, foregoing context, and this makes contemporary discourse a little shallow.



Can we critically examine our obsession with the purity of form, and find  other ways of meaning-making?

Across disciplines, canons of design have historically been dominated by cis-gendered European men, actively sidelining the practice and presence of women and queer folks.



How can contemporary design practice take a step back and recognise this gap and actively work on making reparations?

Does design in the fields of advertising and marketing sometimes gloss over the truth, to make the product or service more palatable? Does design have to cover up for systemic flaws?

How can we avoid enabling misinformation and disinformation through design?

Problem solving as an act is not limited to practitioners of design, engineering, technology and medicine- it extends to beyond the idea of what we consider professional. Especially in India, on the ground, people find solutions for day-to-day problems within the drudgery of everyday existence.


Can we look at jugaad to find methodologies which challenge conventional design processes to come up with frugal yet efficient solutions? Can this become an act of co-designing with people?

Design relies heavily on research in many forms. What makes certain epistemic sources more valid than others? How can we be mindful of practices of knowledge production which go beyond what is prescribed to us?

Can design be informed by indegenous knowledge practices?

Design practice today is bound by constraints, largely enforced by the capitalistic structures it upholds. The modes of production, dissemination, and even education, are gatekept by barriers which need to be questioned. Knowledge and modes of practice need to be made accessible, and unreachable standards need to be torn down- through using open-source tools as our modes of production, sharing knowledge across the commons, and placing community and collaboration over competition.

Can we liberate design from the shackles that bind it? Can design take up an emancipatory mode of practice?

An often discussed question is whether we design for the classes or the masses. If we were to unpack this, it creates a duality between luxury goods- perceived with superior quality of production, attention to detail, and “mass-produced” goods- a label that comes with its baggage of perceived inferiority.

With the very origin of design as a profession being rooted in induatrial-age mass-production, we need to ponder over what it really mean to design for the masses?

Who are the masses we design for? 

From the 3rd Issue of Design Criticism Journal, Modes of Criticism-

The drive to gleefully whitewash complex issues with absurdly simple (but graphically stunning!) ‘solutions’ is permanently received by design with open arms. It focuses on the individual, in a carefully packaged universal formula that can be marketed and thrive on a superficial layer of promise and deception. Promise and deception.

Public discourse around design on social media is dominated by instances of “looks nice”. This is perpetuated by countless digital publications, aggregators, and social media accounts.

Can we propose a less superficial form of discourse which goes beyond looking nice, and also focuses on feeling nice and being nice?

Open Sourcing of software, books, and educational content is one pathway for removing barriers to access for design education and practice. With inaccessible, expensive, and closed-source entities being the norm and standard for design practice, it becomes hard for people without certain privileges to design for and with themselves.

Can we consider open-source alternatives to modes of production, dissemination and education?

Positionality is the social and political context that creates your identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status. Positionality also describes how your identity influences, and potentially biases, your understanding of and outlook on the world. Thus, whatever we design, despite our attempts at being objective, is inevitably informed by our own positionality. 

How can our work be more mindful of our positionality, and that of those we work for?

This project started with one simple question- what is good design?

What should we question, and who do we ask these questions to? How can questioning become a mode of practice?

Can design repair what it has been complicit in damaging? Environments, social structures, cultural heritage- all of these have been damaged because of various reasons, and in some ways, design was also party to that. 

Can we design regenerative practices and systems to replace the old methods of taking away and not giving back?

Whenever we design, we design for a point in the future- near or distant. And with our perception of the future being shaken up badly by the pandemic, even designing for the near future feels like an act of speculation.

What implications does this have on the normative ‘Design Process’? 

Does this mean all design is speculative?

Building up from the questions on honesty and niceness, we need to be mindful of the role design may play in acts of deception- in service of capital, policy, or technocracy. 

Is there a way to work around the deception of the powers that be?

How can design enable communication and dissemination of information around production, consumption, and policy in a fair and transparent way?

When we say Universal Design, are we:

_proposing solutions that are universally applicable?

_improving access to existing systems for people with disabilities and other marginalised folks?

_emphasising on how design should work for everyone, everywhere?

We often design for averages- consolidated quantitative statistics derived from research and A︎︎︎B testing.

What makes universal design truly universal?

One of the most fundamental beliefs instilled by modernist philosophy and ultimately design was this concept of uniformity and austerity which became the ideal of good design (enforced almost everywhere).

Systems like grids, icons, symbols etc. originated inside design schools and ateliers in Europe, and were universalised to the point that it became a design crime to work outside of them.



Can we come up with a pedagogies that embrace the diversity and variety possible in design, which can challenge these uncontested ideals of our profession?
 

Visual Artist Ian Cheng writes on World-building:

Worlding [is] a vital practice to help us navigate darkness, maintain agency despite indeterminacy, and appreciate the multitude of Worlds we can choose to live in and create. Whether you are creating art, games, institutions, religions, or life itself: LIVE TO WORLD AND WORLD TO LIVE!”

Worlding can be a powerful tool for creating scenarios to situate our speculations (on design and otherwise) in, and allow us to ideate, design, and think beyond the constraints that bind normative design practices.

How can speculation become a tool for empowering design beyond its constraints? 

Helen Hester defines Xenofeminism as the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular. From how we see it, it looks like a movement to address how we often speak for people whom we do not represent, and abolish labels which generalise and ultimately oppress- acknowledging factors of nature, technology, and society which went into the creation of these labels, and making conscious attempts at aboloshing them.



Can we design ideologies? How do ideologies inform design, and design inform ideologies?

It all comes down to you as a designer. Design is a relatively small world, and individual actions can make a huge contribution to systemic change.

How are YOU going to shake up design practice today?

And while we’re making big changes, let us not forget that a discarding something ruthlessly means a lot of wastage. Let us be mindful of avoiding waste- in the ideation, conception, production, and consumption of whatever we design.