Transmission #71: Design as superstition, human adjustments, and it's ok to eat marshallows.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
Hello and welcome.
Back in the swing of things in Melbourne, Australia after a few weeks off in Japan visiting family and dreaming of owning a shack in Okinawa, serving coffees to tourists for 4 hours a day in between swims in the ocean and cultivating a leathery brown exterior. So here I am, gears meshing, teeth grinding as I gear up for a final push of being productive in 2025.
Here’s some reading material that is worth sharing.
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Marty
I’m building Ciclo Strategy, a platform to help busy organisational leaders create successful strategies and seamlessly operationalise them within their orgs.
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Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world
Edwin Heathcote • Financial Times
Trigger warning: this is a brutal, brutal take on the state of design in 2025.
Between 2010-2017 I worked at IDEO, a stunningly optimistic company, in what now appears to have been a period of peak optimism, more generally, for design’s ability to change the world for the better. I rode a wave upon a wave.
There was during that time a long line of Fortune 500 clients who believed, as we did, that there was a beautiful and serendipitous overlap between desirability (what people want), and viability (how to make money), if only you could figure out the feasibility (how to do it). Apple had figured this out, so it was just up to the rest of us now. That was the general thrust of things back then.
And so from the Dept of Ooof, Edwin Heathcote in the Financial Times eloquently summarises how far things have come since then, and how so many of the contradictions within the field have splintered it.
Design has always been a servant of a capitalist system, but perhaps we could pretend that was more like art? I mean, it worked for Peter Saville didn’t it? When I started my career, I was designing Flash websites that felt more like a visual form of free jazz than an actual tool for marketing or information retrieval. But it was new and exciting and it worked. Kind of.
Now we’re somewhere else.
The realisation that the field has been so fully co-opted by capital as a mechanism for making more useless stuff has hit hard. The burden sitting on the shoulders of design has become overwhelming: the climate crisis, the huge overproduction of things, the proliferation of plastics, the waste of resources, the extraction, fast fashion and the throwaway culture of consumption. No matter its good intentions, design is deeply complicit.
So, according to Heathcote, design has split between hyper-capitalistic, highly instagrammable designers who are embracing their personal designerly flair as a brand in itself, and another seperate, set of highly movitated, young (mostly), designers who are trying to user design to buck the system.
Heathcote offers this withering take on the latter:
The most prestigious design schools now concentrate on narrative, on storytelling — the product (that word too would be frowned upon) is less important than the process. The result is a strange situation in which young designers are situated between activism, performative gesture and a residual urge to create which is sublimated into something between journalism, installation, anthropology, sociology and superstition.
Ooooooooooooof.
And so, where are we then?
Along the way design lost its ethical intent. Channelling its frustrations with the world as it is and its compromising entanglements of toxicities, it has retreated into protest and insularity rather than attempting to seriously address the big issues. All the algae and fungi, the recycled water bottles and seaborne-plastics have made not a blind bit of difference to the planetary crisis, and design as a profession and an industry knows it.
This is a very harsh take, but certainly not an entirely inaccurate one. Yet outside of the binary world Heathcote presents, there are plenty of designers making positive contributions. Bringing care and quality and craft to the things they work on.
But it’s fair to acknowledge that indeed the world is not as simple as a Desirability/Viability/Feasibility Venn diagram. Design is a function of mass production ergo a capitalist system and all the trappings come with that.
Perhaps now in 2025 there’s an overdue humility due for design as a profession. Perhaps we have woken up and are aware that yes, we are perpetually in the service of our masters - the whim of our users, and the whims of our employers. Perhaps that’s ok? Perhaps we can focus on the little things that smooth out the jagged edges of an indifferent system. Perhaps we can be smaller in ambition. More focused. But still strive for beauty and elegance and general consideration for the user in the things we create.
Is that still possible?
Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments that Failed to Replicate
Marco Giancotti • Aethermug
Speaking of things that haven’t quite worked out. Psychology, as we now know, as been having a replication crisis - and a lot of ‘facts’ that sold a lot of books and launched a lot of careers are turning out to be not quite the new discoveries we thought they were. In fact, they’re not really ‘facts’, but rather ‘things that happened, but don’t happen all the time’.
Here are some highlights of studies that don’t replicate from the longer list in this article:
Power Posing Effect
Claimed result: Adopting expansive body postures for 2 minutes (like standing with hands on hips or arms raised) increases testosterone, decreases cortisol, and makes people feel more powerful and take more risks.
[Not surprising – Ed.]
ESP Precognition Effect
Claimed result: In some cases, people can predict future events “that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process”.
[Surprising in that this was a claimed effect at all – Ed.]
Marshmallow Test & Long-Term Success Effect
Claimed result: Children’s ability to resist eating a marshmallow when left alone in a room at age 4-5 strongly predicts adolescent achievement, with those who waited longer showing better life outcomes.
[I really did believe this was a thing. Surprising! – Ed.]
We are different from all other humans in history
Brian Klaas • Substack
Change is happening really quickly. ‘Unprecedented’ is getting worn out as an adjective. But it’s worth taking a step back and thinking about how much human experience has changed in the last 100 or so years, and how much we are still trying to tune our monkeybrains into.
Some examples:
The Whole Planet View (ie what it means to see Earth from space, and in reaching out hide the entire human existence behind your thumb)
Jetlag (incredibly it does not kill us)
Adjusting from “Few to Few” to “Few to Many” to “Many to Many” Communication (ie the rise of broadcast and then social media)
Chart of the Week
That’s it for now, thanks for reading!