How to design for the post-growth world
Understanding how UX design can influence the creation of a post-growth economic model
The limits of growth
Growth as an economic concept is the North Star of both policy-making and private enterprise. No politician is campaigning on shrinking the economy just as no manager is hiring a candidate to produce less than the previous employee. To even suggest otherwise would seem nonsense.
Except that’s not how everyone sees it, even going back to the founding of economics as a discipline.
“There’s something distinctly odd about our contemporary refusal to question economic growth,” writes ecological economist Tim Jackson in the second edition of landmark Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow, “As early as 1848, John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of classical economics, reflected on the advantages of a ‘stationary state of population and capital’. He insisted that there would be ‘as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress’ within such a state.”
Jackson’s work concisely lays out the ways in which the pursuit of growth lies at the heart of unending crises in the world, from the The Great Recession in 2008 to the unfolding climate crisis we are now all subjected to, and the ways in which we are discovering, to our rage and horror, that “in a world of 10 billion people all aspiring to Western lifestyles” will exhaust the earth’s natural resources not in a distant future, but within our lifetimes — bringing us, ironically, to the kind of economic calamity that precludes the kind of growth that brought us to collapse in the first place.
Defining prosperity for the post-growth world
Where does this leave the world of design? It may seem odd to even consider the topic of “post-growth” in the context of a field that is — despite economic uncertainties — forecasted to grow quite substantially.
But that gets to the nuance of the argument of “post-growth” by Jackson and others: not that economic activity (including the hiring, training and flourishing of UX designers) must be banished, but that it must be redefined more sustainably not as growth but as prosperity.
Prosperity, defined by Jackson, is “our ability to flourish as human beings — within the ecological limits of a finite planet.” This ability to flourish requires that we have, in the words of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, the dignities of:
- life (being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length);
- bodily health;
- bodily integrity (to be secure against violent assault; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and choice in matters of reproduction);
- practical reason (being able to form a conception of the good life);
- affiliation (being able to live with and towards others);
- play; and
- control over one’s environment.
All of these taken together create the conditions under which we can be truly prosperous. Notably, few of these have anything to do with material accumulation. “It’s a perverse reflection on a society which claims to lionise ‘free choice’,” within the confines of capitalistic consumer culture, “but this expansion of choice has one key characteristic: the objects of desire are primarily materialistic in nature. The freedom not to consume is sometimes harder to come by than the freedom to consume.”
The design of the future economy
UX Design should welcome these necessary changes and the opportunity to import an understanding of quality user experience into this emerging world. “Essential for change is the construction of credible alternatives.” Who better to help create these credible alternatives?
But what alternatives will we need to design for?
Jackson himself breaks down the economy of tomorrow as one geared toward “enterprise as service”, where economic activity pivots toward a service-based model broken down largely into the three “C’s”:
- Care — industries such as healthcare, education and care for children, the elderly or infirm in any capacity.
- Craft — a move away from high-volume throughput manufacturing toward handiwork and crafts created by professionals and artisans that have the time to provide their works with “lasting value” and not planned obsolescence.
- Culture — an emphasis on forms of cultural expression such as local and regional theatre, musical performance, sculpture and other forms of culture which defy the volume logic of economic growth.
UX Design as a field fits comfortably within these distinctions, pulling liberally from “culture” and “craft” while also being heavily involved in the creation of better “care” services. Off the top of my head, here are a number of ways in which the user experience will need to be designed to create a post-growth economy:
Care
- Help to create platforms to effectively disburse Universal Basic Income to people — effectively compensating the amount of caregiving (over 75% of which is provided by women) that many people are forced to provide for free to children, family and neighbors;
- Augmented reality services for education that would allow educators to overlay historical realities on top of present conditions (for example, using an AR headset to depict Indigenous cultures and peoples who once inhabited the land now occupied the current State); or
- Design with environmental concerns in mind by incorporating nonhuman elements into our personas to design more ethical products and services that respect our environmental limits.
Craft
- Re-center locally-made objects by limiting search results in platforms like Etsy to those in the immediate area to reduce the environmental costs of transportation (or, better yet, breaking up large, centralized online marketplaces like Etsy or Facebook and replacing them with similar services operated and controlled by regional cooperatives or governments);
- Consider the environmental implications of the product’s life cycle rather than simply its performance metrics, helping people to understand where materials are sourced from and where they will go when the product is no longer used; or
- Refuse to implement employee-tracking features in software logging useless metrics like keystrokes, “always-online” webcams and any other corporate nanny state technologies that seek ways to disempower remote employees, allowing people to accomplish work at a reasonable pace that invests time, attention and effort at the expense of more.
Culture
- Work with urban planners to help rebuild the social sphere in our cities by emphasizing multi-purpose zoning and public transportation to help rid ourselves of the need to drive everywhere to do anything;
- Work with libraries to revitalize much needed local journalism through Public Media Centers and take back civic engagement from the destructive and homogenizing nature of social media giants that have wiped out much-needed reporting; or
- Create new methods of engaging with the media that we consume which respects and rewards small artists and moves against the extreme consolidation of world media under a handful of unaccountable companies.
Designing our credible alternatives
A post-growth economy is one in which what is taken is replaced — one which is no longer tied to a philosophy of extraction but sustainability. To do this, it will require an all-hands-on-deck attitude toward reworking the most foundational assumptions of how our economy and careers are expected to operate.
UX Designers are uniquely positioned to be at the forefront of these structural changes and have the tools already to approach these novel challenges in a way that fulfills our potential to avert the worst of the climate crisis and adapt to its new realities with solutions that center the needs and considerations of human beings in a way that is ethical and sustainable.
To close once again with the words of Tim Jackson, “Prosperity is a shared endeavor. The roots of this idea are broad and deep. And its foundations already exist. Inside each of us.”
Thanks for reading this post about design in a post-growth economy. If you’re interested in more, be sure to follow me and reach out to me on LinkedIn.
