Design Manifesto Script
The Earth has been changing and evolving for over 4.5 Billion years. Everything you see around you has been designed by life to perfectly complete its goals and work symbiotically to survive. Leaves are designed with the perfect shape and waxy-ness so that the rainwater dripping down them falls on their roots, butterfly’s wings are designed to visually trick their prey into thinking they are looking right at them. Life perfectly designed humans to have 5 fingers to draw and consciousness to be aware of themselves and the needs of others. Life designed designers, life designed you!
With consciousness comes responsibility. Designers simultaneously have the most and least responsibility to direct the world in the way we want. They are the creators of all new things but also the users of all things and systems that have been designed. This brings about two simultaneous paradigms that guide designers. The first - if design is everything, then you are design, therefore designers have the capability to design the world and the people within it. Second, the opposite, if design is everything, then everything has already been designed by nature and if it has not been designed already it will happen naturally by the course and plan of nature itself.
Designers have the capability to design everything. They are the skilled mediators between the user and the endorser, the brief and the design outcome. Most of our created world has been designed by design professionals who are expert in reading and understanding what is required and creatively forming a solution. They have the potential to design human beings, and no this is not a distant fantasy, it is an upcoming reality where human genomes are perfectly designed. And who will be designing these super babies? Designers. Your own children may be designed by some of the design students of today. The world does not give enough credit to designers and instead destines them to mundane corporate jobs, struggling to pay their rent. If you want a more sustainable future - look to designers. If you want a solution to the systemic patriarchal beliefs of society - look to designers. If you want a super adorable baby - look to designers. Through designed systems and artefacts, designers can cause systemic change initialising societal change in a positive direction. But only if you trust them to do so.
The latter of these paradigms has its roots in many Indigenous cultures, wiped out of course by the homogenising, extractivist actions of colonists. Indigenous cultures do not separate themselves and nature, they are one. Western culture gives this the name pluriversal design, more specifically - more-than-human design - the principle that humans are part of nature and also depend on nature to survive. With this principle, we can realise that the Earth is the greatest designer there is. Evolution and natural selection form the iteration and prototype phase of life, constantly allowing organisms to improve and survive longer and healthier lives. Extending this further, nature has already designed everything there ever is and will design everything there ever will be. It has designed us, and we design artefacts and systems, formed from and inspired by the materials and organisms that nature already designed. In this respect the Earth should be more respected as the designer that it is. And you should acknowledge that you are just a small part of a pluriversal system designed by 'Mother Nature'. In this view designers are irrelevant.
As a designer, I don’t have the authority to tell you which of these two perspectives to embody yourself. Rather I will tell you that I plan to use both and none of these to inform my design practices and create the future that I envision. I will take the values of ontological design to encourage the recognition of graphic designers as real designers with ethics and responsibility. As Mike Montiero says “A designer is responsible for the work they put into the world”, and because of this they are trained to make sure that the work they do affects people in a positive way. This is why they deserve more recognition and trust from the world. Conversely, I will enable the values of pluriversal design to instill within me a recognition for the world as the best designer there is. I will strive to protect and prolong our world and the many ways of living, being and believing that it creates.
Together these opposing paradigms reflect my position as a designer with much responsibility, and also a designer as the slave of a world already designed.
