Design leadership in the public sphere — discourse, evolution, revolution, and rejecting capitalism
This essay was presented as a part of my work in the Design Leadership unit in the Master of Design Futures program at RMIT University.
Close your eyes, and imagine the typical leader of a design studio in your country. Especially if you’re someone who lives in the West.
I’ll be surprised if you don’t at least fleetingly imagine a white male in his late-40s. A well-educated man who founded his business and built the studio to whatever it is now.
Even if you imagined a woman — and there is no shortage of incredible female design leaders in Australia — I very much doubt you imagined a person of colour or someone whose gender identity isn’t typical.
In a nation as diverse as Australia, leadership in design is still very much dominated by people that are like me — white, well educated, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual men. To be honest, that’s a problem.
Now, I love my job, but I want to hear voices raised up, see faces on conference stages, in books, and on teams that I’m a part of that aren’t like me at all. I need and want those perspectives to be visible in the design community and working with the clients I work with so that the biases I carry are actively mitigated. Sure, I do my best to leave my baggage at the door, but I also know I’m far from perfect at doing so.
I recently spoke with Mike, a Sydney-based strategic designer. Every time I have a conversation with him, I feel like my brain grows a size… As a person of colour, and someone who is highly political, he brings a perspective to design leadership that is fundamentally different to my own, even if we share significant views on a range of matters.
Michael is an anthropologist and sociologist who works in strategic design in Sydney. He’s also the founder of the How Might We Do Good community on Slack, where deep discussions of design, ethics, shifting paradigms (in the actual Kuhnian sense) take place. In our recent conversation, Mike made the point that the conversation around design ethics and leadership is being driven by a framing that espouses minimalist action and a very white perspective:
“[it’s] really difficult to kind of grasp that idea of ethics because there is, as you’ve said, kind of conflating ethics with something being ethical, whereas ethics is kind of … probably it’s better to think about it as the manifestation of your values. So, it’s also corporations do currently have certain ethics, and it’s capitalist ethics, it’s white supremacist ethics. There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on there, but we don’t see that as ethics. We see certain spaces as devoid of ethics. And so out comes this conversation about design ethics, how can we do good things?”
Perhaps more than any other, this conversation has moved my thinking forward. As a white, cishet, middle-aged man, I’m well aware that I’m 100 per cent a part of the problem, even if I try to do my utmost to be a good ally.
I had imagined that our conversation would probe my emerging concept of a “politics of design leadership”. I was very wrong… Mike’s palpable anger at a matters related to design being a part of the problem in a capitalist society where power is vested in a system that favours structural inequality, marginalisation, systemic racism, and ignoring the needs of the real users of what we design to the benefit of incumbents took a front seat, and the conversation really requires some more framing.
The taking of power, the public sphere, and the need for difficult conversations
I think conversations with such a political focus deserve to be properly founded in understood scaffolding so that we can make our arguments without resorting to the kind of name-calling that’s so prevalent in modern political discourse.
There are arguments to be had around whether or not the re-emergence of widespread public conversation in various social media is a causal factor in the decline of mass-media-dominated conversation, and whether that re-emergence is good or bad for democracy. There can be no argument that ideas like Habermas’ public sphere have a new currency. I certainly believe it’s a good thing for democracy if all voices are able to be raised up, and given the means of being heard.
The taking of a leadership role, whether as a position of power, or as a leader within a community — like the people I’m interviewing for this series are — requires a level of public exposure, and a willingness to engage in the conversation. It’s also a political act in no small way; you’re declaring a position and defending it, making a statement of an ideology about what you see as the best way to participate in something, whether that be design, leadership, the formation of culture, or technical practice, for example.
Being a good ally
For those of us whose ancestry or circumstance places us in a position of privilege, it’s arguably time to step a little sideways. That’s not to say that we give up leading our organisations or teams, but that like Kara DeFrias suggests in one of my earlier conversations:
“I wanted to make sure that people’s voices, not only were in the conversation, which is a best practice of human-centred design. But also that, how are we going out to hear them? How are we giving them opportunities to participate…”
For me, I want to listen to designers and users from marginalised and structurally disadvantaged groups, and design for and especially with them. In a white-dominated, patriarchal, neoliberal, capitalist system we silence minority voices, ignoring them, gaslighting them, paying lip service to their presence and inclusion.
Only by being aware of that can those of us wanting to be good allies help voices to be raised up. We can still be design leaders, but we can also help raise up new, more diverse voices that need to be heard.
As a design leader, is it time you asked how you can be a good ally to your employees, peers, clients and users?
The imperative to act
As designers, we contribute to the problem as much as we try to solve it. Much of the design we do and in almost every case, the clients we do it for, are based in capitalism, and treat other humans as an extractive resource, to exploit either as customer or employee.
Michael Palmyre notes there is a tension between ethical capitalism and a desire to be more radical:
“… to take it back to the kind of ethical consumption of capitalism, we can refuse to purchase certain products as much as we like, but we don’t purchase weapons of mass destruction and missiles. So, how do we stop those industries? There needs to be much more radical approaches that … and, in order to be radical, that means compromising in some respects being pragmatic as well.”
Designers have the opportunity to do something about this, and drive change from within, designing from a bottom-up perspective and focusing on design goals that break down inequality. If we’re intent as designers on solving problems exclusively within a comfortably capitalist paradigm, the solutions we devise can only ever be a part of the wider problem of the exploitative nature of capitalism. I’m not sure there is a workable answer to this yet.
Too much of the current conversation around design ethics and design leadership is about an approach of not doing bad versus a more revolutionary approach of doing good and upending exploitation and suppression. Michael Palmyre certainly believes this is woefully inadequate, and I’m inclined to agree.
In thinking about how Mike’s revolutionary views around the dismantling of 21st Century neoliberal capitalism mesh with my own politics and my role as a designer, I have to be thinking about assessing capitalism harder. Personally, I’m in umair haque’s camp. He argues in The New Capitalist Manifesto and Betterness for a style of capitalism that is happy making a profit and being successful, but judges those measures from a place of actively doing good. This works for me both socially and emotionally.
I’m also listening for other views, especially from those who lack a voice. Increasingly, it’s those people that will take leadership roles in design, in society, and in advancing the conversation around what design leadership will look like in years to come.
