From Uncritical Design to Critical Examinations of its Systemic Consequences

Gregory Bateson Professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication Historically, designers cherished their aesthetic competencies. However, offering them to manufacturers improved the lives of consumers only when serving industrial interests. In our information society, technologies have changed radically, but not their designers’ concerns. Human-centred design, for example, develops interfaces with complex computer networks in their user’s terms, bypassing the need to understanding these technologies. The enthusiastic embrace of cybernetics was instrumental in automating manufacturing, commerce, communication, and everyday life. However, behind the façade of providing valuable access to users of vast databases, services, and numbers of people, contemporary design unintentionally supported the systematic algorithmisation of large segments of society. We are becoming cyborgs of ultimately oppressive socio-technological regimes. To regain social relevance, Dr Krippendorff suggests that designers become critical of what their work supports, cognizant of and accountable for the systemic consequences of their designs and move from uncritically embracing innovations to an emancipatory perspective on the systems they enable. He encourages the community of designers to combine large systems conceptions with critical and liberating efforts