Forthcoming CHAPTER in Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism (Brill)
What Does It Mean to be Human? A Critique of Design Thinking
Harold P. Sjursen
These days we witness frequently the proclamations by world influencers of the inherent salutary and redemptive potential of modern technology to resolve the multivalent crisis clouding the world. For example, Steven Pinker in his recent and widely read The Better Angels of our Nature calls out ‘technological progress [which permits] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners,’ as contributing significantly to overcoming acts of ‘demonization and dehumanization’ (Pinker 2011). This assertion is supported, Pinker argues, by extensive longitudinal data that shows a global decline in violence coextensive with the rise of information technology. This kind of analysis is used to bestow the guise of moral legitimacy and political neutrality on the promotion of technology products as instruments of liberation and the improvement of human flourishing.
Current attempts to reconcile technology with something deeper and more enduring than the gratification of immediate desire, to produce value at once novel and reaffirming of traditional conceptions of human value, has led to what is called design thinking. This may be an approach to design insofar as it specifies steps and procedures to be followed when developing something, whether it be a consumer product, a building, or even a service or business. The intent of the term is to place more emphasis on how something is created rather than design in the sense of a drawing to show the look and function of an object. The design in design thinking is meant primarily in the second of the dictionary definitions below and not at all in the first:
1. an arrangement of lines or shapes created to form a pattern or decoration: pottery with a lovely blue and white design.
2. purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.
Design thinking is the process, its advocates argue, that best assures innovation. Innovation in this sense is different than invention, which may be spontaneous, and which may not have as one of its objectives the satisfaction of clients or customers. Whether or not we wish to call the enactment of the design thinking protocol an activity of designing, it surely should not be regarded as an example of thinking in an elevated sense of the concept. Design thinking is rather a kind of calculation in order to achieve a goal. But product design in the first sense of the term is the goal or intended outcome. Moreover, this kind of design is supposed to be pleasing, gratifying or satisfying, in a way that integrates with human purpose.
Understood in this way, several features of design thinking are noteworthy:
1.It portrays creativity, at least in relation to design, as a routine that can be easily mastered and performed by anyone (or actually teams) devoid of any hint of genius or passion.
2.The process bears a strong analogy to a computer's run-time.
3.It presumes that design is more than appearance and is more than just pleasing but the source of deep human satisfaction and value.
In other words, design thinking is a strategy for the manufacturing of human feeling with both aesthetic and ethical dimensions. In this this discussion I will reflect on some of the implications of this so called design thinking from the perspectives of human value and aesthetic value. I will take my clues from Heidegger and then Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, György Lukács and Louis Althusser. In general, I will try to show how the attitude of design thinking presents a highly reductionist view of humanity that in turn degrades the idea of the work of art. Coincidently, it will be clear that in virtually all respects design thinking is at odds with Marxist analyses.
Let us begin with a contemporary definition of design thinking: ‘Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing.’[1]
This definition is from the Interactive Design Foundation, a Danish non-profit organization that offers practical career training online. It collaborates with some universities and businesses under the moto ‘education wants to be free.’ IDF disseminates a widely held and increasingly popular view about how through technology we can design a better, peaceful and enduring world. The organization adheres to the view that because technology is widely distributed and relatively inexpensive it provides the platform for innovative solutions to local problems. This assumption overlooks many economic and social factors.
The definition conflates thinking with problem solving and states that problems can be solved through design. The five stages of this kind of design thinking as taught by IDF follow the principles developed at the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (d. school). The approach says little about the technical aspects of engineering design but rather emphasizes collaboration and sensitivity to human needs and desires. The five stages of Design Thinking, according to the d. school curriculum, are as follows: Empathize, Define (the problem), Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
Our questions are:
1. Whether these five activities together constitute original thinking, or will simply advance existing norms;
2. What kind of society and built environment would the application of these principles and methods lead to (would there be any difference?);
3. Do the claims that this process honors and develops the genuine desires and interests of the people (users) stand up?
As a kind of thought experiment we will pose these questions to several thinkers who, with the exception of Heidegger, represent a Marxist perspective. Heidegger makes a clear distinction between thinking on the one hand and the kind of calculative activity that is employed for problem solving on the other. Scientific reasoning is not thinking; rather thinking is what pursues Being, i.e., the source of what we are and what we can become. We can call it openness to what is and what is possible. It is a kind of gift, Heidegger asserts, and thus thinking is a kind of thanking. One might see what we ordinarily mean by creativity as an aspect of thinking. When Heidegger questions technology and poses the question concerning technology, he is asking if technology leads us to pursue this way of openness to Being, or on the contrary occludes it. For Heidegger modern technology is not merely a matter of efficient action, it changes our relationship to Being and possibly compels our choices both in respect to the environment and to our own work. In a sense modern technology alienates the craftsman from his own work. Thus Heidegger questions technology with one goal being to understand the possibility of a free relation to technology. Thus from a Heideggerian perspective unless design thinking were actually a mode of thinking it would not be the path to the creative and non-alienating satisfaction suggested by its proponents.
Design thinking seems to begin from an assumption that we can discover a free relationship to the products of our labor through technology by the relatively simple process of assessing the interests (actually desires and needs) of one’s clientele. These needs and desires are taken to be the pure expression of uncoerced human interest (suggesting that the clientele represent a suitable surrogate for the people). The argument of design thinking is that through a reiterative consultative process, entities – including devices, systems, buildings, playgrounds, and so on, that meet consumer expectations and standards, can be developed in a manner that is truly responsive to what people want; in this sense technology will not determine what we think we want but will enable us to control technology for our own free purposes. This is an implied criticism of both centrally planned economies and market driven capitalism dominated by large corporations. The dispiriting need to accept and conform to the commodities of mass production can be avoided through the application of design thinking principles to the use of personal technology. This is a lot to claim but the proponents of design thinking go further in their assessment of the putative benefits of this process. The products of design thinking will be aesthetically pleasing and our response to this quality will be satisfying. This claim would seem to concur with the kind of satisfaction that inheres in the work of art according to Heidegger. In The Origin of the Work of Art he argues that
‘Art … is a way in which truth comes to "happen" and "be" in the "real" world, a way in which "that which is" is revealed and clearly preserved in a work. In the art work, he said, the creator discloses the truth-of-all-being within a design and illumines a new, unfamiliar world beyond the existing realm’ (Stulberg 1973, 257-265).
The IDF/Stanford version of design thinking appeals to the freedom and independence of the tech designer such that both producer and consumer participate in this free relation to technology. In this approach a step beyond the constraints and alienation characterized as the culture industry? Is this kind of freedom and independence achieved, indeed even surpassed through design thinking, bringing an opening to the clearing of Being as Heidegger would have it? According to Heidegger, the answer is no.
Next we turn to Adorno. As critic of both Heidegger and Popper, his view at once addresses both the enlightenment project of western modernity and its antecedents in the Greek and Hebrew traditions. In The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Adorno and Horkheimer declare that: ‘Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system’ (Adorno et al. 1944).
Clearly design thinking seeks to refute the notion that technology reproduces identical goods to service identical needs, although Horkheimer and Adorno already anticipate this by pointing out that an appeal to consumer’s needs only establishes a ‘circle of manipulation’ manufacturing as it were ‘retroactive needs.’ The more serious challenge to Horkheimer and Adorno presented by design thinking’s advocates is whether nowadays, because technology is so widely distributed and the price relatively low, it is no longer purely the instrument of the economic power elite. Here perhaps we see signs pointing both ways. In favor of the design thinking hypothesis is the growing influence of open source software that can be modified freely by any competent user, the simplification of the prerequisite skill set needed to join the ranks of those with access to those opportunities, and the availability of equipment in public spaces such as libraries, as well as schools and universities and the growing number of incubator maker spaces in communities around the world. Pointing in the other direction, of course, is the fact that the hardware and basic software necessary (especially) for networked, collaborative computing is made by only a very few extremely wealthy and powerful corporations. In some parts of the world tight control in the form of censorship limits and prohibits some activities. Still one cannot deny that technology has changed in ways that could hardly be imagined in Adorno and Horkheimer’s day. The multi-functionality and ease of use of today’s smartphone combining, as it does, modes of instant communication, high order calculating capabilities, photography, music, gaming, health-monitoring, shopping, planning, the list continues to grow, in a portable device is genuinely breathtaking. Everyone has a library, studio, laboratory and dedicated assistant and faithful companion in their pocket: the tools to unleash our creative selves ready to hand. Doesn’t this fact alone substantiate the design thinking paradigm?
Yet the very success of devices such as the smartphone suggest another kind of concern that brings together two distinct topics: ubiquity and reproducibility. Both attack the idea of the unique. When something is ubiquitous, i.e., is there everywhere, it is no longer surprising, delighting, inspirational or provocative. It becomes, simply and obstinately, ready to hand. It, however beautiful or powerful or ingenious in itself, is degraded to something for the sake of something else but not valued for its own sake. The something else is not disclosed and the powerful presence of the mediating technology dampens our imagination.
It is not only that technology exists in multifold forms and representations, it is that its primary function is to replicate. One no longer travels to the world’s great libraries to discover information hidden within, it is there instantly in our smartphone; this does not surprise us, it is just simply and unceremoniously there for us, present at hand but ready to recede into the background.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin adumbrates this issue.
‘One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction
detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many
reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in
permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own
particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes
lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the
contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately
connected with the contemporary mass movements’ (Benjamin 1969, 4).
The premise of design thinking does not include reference to ‘the domain of tradition.’ The unexamined assumption is that potential consumers know what they desire and need on their own, uncontaminated by either the omnipresent forces of socio-economic utility or their own cultural heritage. The claim is, if someone who is culturally, historically, linguistically and politically French desires a product different than someone who is in all those ways Chinese it is because of their rational response to the design thinker’s inquiry. The product is to be contemporary and immediate and in this way fulfill the desires that flow beyond the need for an efficient solution to a particular problem.
In the case of a work of art, its nucleus of authenticity, its originality, its uniqueness may be its most prized trait. Going beyond the age of mechanical reproduction to the age of automated creativity this quality is lost. In an interesting discussion of the concept of Shanzai (Han 2017), Han Byung-chul argues that this factor of authenticity of the work of art began only in the Renaissance in the West, and has never been much of a factor in China. However, this difference rather than obliterating the significance of the domain of tradition only serves to reinforce it. Han recounts conflicts between curators of Western museums of art and their Chinese counterparts over the question of authenticity of works of art on loan for exhibition in Europe and the United States. In the world of instantaneous mechanical/digital reproduction/creativity this dispute would not even come up. One notes as well that the term shanzhaiism has been coined to denote the process of tinkering leading to the adaptation of genuine brands into counterfeit. This tinkering resembles engineering and to an extent resembles the five stages of design thinking. The impulse to counterfeit products is driven by the need/desires of consumers who want something that strongly resembles (ideally without any discernible difference) and is as good as that which it reproduces.
To put the question into more classical Marxist terms we should consider again how the needs and desires of what design thinking sees as its target clientele are developed. According to Lukács, ‘it is not men's consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness’ (Lukács 1923, 5). This concept is contrary to the premises of design thinking wherein people are supposed to possess autonomous consciousness capable of rising above whatever limitations social existence may impose. Lukács is, like Marx, highly critical of the individualist (bourgeois) philosophy of the subject which is precisely the starting point of design thinking. The Marxist view of consciousness is dialectically opposed to that of design thinking, and opens a consideration, where the contrast between Lukács and design thinking is most evident. In short design thinking exhibits a kind of commodity fetishism that reifies what it claims to dissolve.
Finally, the issue is further problematized by a consideration of consciousness itself. In Louis Althusser’s revisionist or neo-Marxist reading, ‘ideology is profoundly unconscious – it is structure imposed involuntarily on the majority of men.’[2] That is, from a structuralist standpoint the actual lived relationship between people and the world – between potential clientele and the presentations of design thinking – is one determined by the economic structure. The claims of design thinking that it allows for free determination of priorities and goals that are an expression of autonomous rational choice seems entirely unfounded.
The reasons why design thinking cannot achieve it promised objective has been suggested by several thinkers from diverse, although not inconsistent perspectives:
1.Heidegger: Narrow, shallow, limited to ontic entities and events, not thinking but scientistic calculation.
2.Adorno/Horkheimer: Another example of the functioning of the culture industry.
3.Benjamin: Acceleration and broadening of mechanical reproduction.
4.Lukács: Social existence determines consciousness.
5.Althusser: The ideology is determined by the structure of the relationship, not by the proclaimed purpose of the conscious transaction.
Conclusion: Design thinking is not an advance in thinking about our relationship to technology nor does it revise the dynamics of capitalist society.
References
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer.1944. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In: Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay. New York: Schocken Books, p. 4.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2017. Shanzhai: deconstruction in Chinese. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Viking Books. Grand Haven, MI: Brilliance Audio.
Stulberg, Robert B. 1973. Heidegger and the Origin of the Work of Art: An Explication. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 32(2): 257-65.
Lukács, György. 1923. History and Class Consciousness. Bexar County, Texas: Bibliotech Press.
[1] Interactive Design Foundation: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
[2] Brewster, Ben. Althusser Glossary 1969 [with Althusser’s interpolations] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/glossary.htm