Budding
What should we work on?
I’m a designer. I have spent the most time doing digital design. I went to school for graphic design, but during my Bachelor’s project I realized that I was more interested in design in general, than graphic design specifically. (As I define it, a designer is quite literally a person who has studied making. We study the process of making, but also how to decide what to make. We study attitudes to have when making, and ways to make together.) For everyone except designers, this is a frustrating definition. One day I might write about this more, but for now I want to elaborate on what I think should be thought of when making things.
Briefly put: We should never do negative things, we should at the very least do neutral things, and we should mostly do positive things. I would add that we should strive towards doing high-impact positive things.
To understand what we should spend time doing, we need to learn about what problems exist (we also need to understand the nature of problems.). There are countless, which in a way is good news, as there is always something we should spend time doing (We will never run out of meaning).
Crucially, we need to recognize that problems should be prioritized. It is when you start prioritizing, that your values become apparent to you. To me, solving brand-awareness problems for Klarna is far less important than increasing financial literacy among lower and middle class. Even more important, is ensuring that we still exist on this planet for generations to come, for example by focusing on the climate crisis.
After getting an understanding of the most important problems, we should ask ourselves what problems we have the faculties to put a dent in. While I am at the edge of my seat invested in the outcome of the US presidential election, or the continuing research into pandemic prevention, I don’t have enough interest, as much as I’d like to, to spend the time required to end up in a position to contribute meaningfully in any of these fields (besides voting of course).
Other areas, however, I can contribute meaningfully with my interests and skills — like ensuring the inclusive and accessible design of digital platforms that are considered important for normal societal participation, such as media apps and websites, or the digital presence of public institutions.
What I would like to make
Throughout human history, we have been preoccupied with certain questions. Some seem to lack answers, or at least lack tools for determining answers as of now. With time, we developed tools and technologies (both physical instruments, as well as abstract methods and methodologies), that were fit to answer specific questions. Questions would fit into categories, and individuals would specialize in some categories, forgoing others, because it was more effective to have people think about a few things at once, rather than each individual philosopher thinking their way to their own unifying Theory of Everything. This division of philosophy into discrete domains preoccupied with discovering truths about different things, roughly outlines the divisions of the sciences of today.
Spread across these sciences are lessons that help answer what I consider the most important question of all; what sort of future should we want?
This question precedes “how to we make the ideal future?” , and they constitute something I think everyone should have some idea of.
Some would say “you’re basically saying that people should have political opinions”, and in a sense, yes, that is what I am saying. But I would extend it to not only take the shape of what you vote, but also the shape of which career you take, the things you purchase (or more importantly, which ones you don’t), and the ideas you propogate to others.
Designing for ecology
The making of things is often the remaking of things. As we advance as a species, our capacity to make things has increased immensely, to the point where making new things comes at the direct expense of the stability of our current ecosystems. The making of things should account for this, by limiting the amount of things we do make, and ensuring that they as resource efficient as possible.