DesignShifts: a better future for and through design
Shifting our practices, mindsets, and the focus of design.
From the products we make, the messages we put out there, and the spaces we craft, design has the power to affect change. Our profession and practices can either harm or help, and a lot of design today is causing harm to people and our planet.
The way we design our buildings is creating inhabitable cities. The applications we build are contributing to an expanding mental health crisis. The messages we craft are making people buy more while feeling less and less satisfied.
Design is contributing to harm, and we need to find ways to shift our profession from harm to healing.
In the article: The Power of Lo-TEK: A Design Movement to Rebuild Understanding of Indigenous Philosophy and Vernacular Architecture the author writes:
“With environmental and societal collapse imminent in the coming decades, design at the intersection of anthropology, ecology, and innovation is the most pressing discussion of our time.”
DesignShifts: what can we collectively imagine and create?
The idea for DesignShifts was born out of the current reality and a wish for something better. Through a series of questions and provocations, DesignShifts explores a better future for and through design.
With a focus on collective learning, I will be sharing potential shifts that invite us to look at our current practices, mindsets, and focuses. The aim is to move beyond the border of capitalism and envision new, non-exploitative ways to design and live on this planet. I hope to examine design using a political, cultural, and societal lens — something that is often lost as we try to fit design neatly into the world of business.
The vision is to shift design from a tool that serves company growth to a practice that serves community and planetary flourishing.
Ruha Benjamin said: “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” This quote inspires me to think about what design we need to leave behind in order to imagine and craft something better for the future. And isn’t that what design is all about — to make sense of what was and what is, and create something better moving forward?
Examples of DesignShifts:
- How can we shift design from being a tool we use to persuade, to a practice we use to create space for dialogue?
- What would it mean to move from designing for/from the intellectual mind to designing for/from the living body?
- What if, instead of designing for conveniences and independence, we started designing for connection and interdependence?
Through exploring intentional shifts, we can move design from a tool that contributes to division, destruction, and isolation, to a practice that unites, rebuilds, and reconnects us to our inner selves, each other, and nature.
Starting where we’re standing
The American writer and professor Audre Lorde once said: “At the same time as we’re surviving in the mouth of the dragon, we also need to be feeding our vision.” (interview by Judy Simmons, WBAI, New York 1979
This is my attempt to feed a collective vision while surviving in the mouth of the capitalistic dragon. I dream of a future where design is used to help, heal, and harmonize, and I think to get there, we need to create intentional DesignShifts as a collective.
As we shift our mindsets, practices and focus of design, we also shift who we are as designers. I hope that these shifts will inspire a world where designers “walk hand in hand with those who are protecting and redefining well-being, life projects, territories, local economies, and communities worldwide”. (Design for the Pluriverse)
As we imagine design shifting from a focus on company growth to focus on community and planetary flourishing, we’re also imagining this reality for our own lives. Letting go of our endless focus on growth. Shifting from doing to being. Flourishing as human being.
What’s next?
I will be publishing the first DesignShift soon. Before then, I would love to know what you’ve been thinking about when it comes to the future of design. What shifts are you dreaming of? What do you want design to be in service of?
