Walt Disney, the most dangerous American of all time.

Elias Ruiz MonserratBlockedUnblockFollowFollowing

Mar 19, 2018

These are not my words, but Theodor Adorno’s words. Theodor, a German philosopher and member of the Frankfurt School, was a believer that we should study not what the working class does at work, but what what they do with their free time. He was fascinated by how consumerism and capitalism had changed how we spend our free time and how, according to him, the culture industry is keeping us unhappy, unmotivated and with a lack of desire and motivation to see that things can always change for the better. He thought leasure should not be spent relaxing and keeping our mind off things, instead we should be learning, getting informed about the world and improving ourselves. Marvel films, commercial music, Netflix ’n chill, social networks, fast cars, the latest iPhone and in general objects we have been made to believe we need to be happy, they all fall into the culture industry, an industry that would be very, VERY different if it wasn’t for the birth of industrial design. He was against entertainment for the sake of entertainment and buying for the sake of buying to get the short term happiness it may produce . To him, entertainment was a way to keep our brains away from stuff that really matters. Hence why he believed Walt Disney, who gave birth to an industry of pure entertainment was the most dangerous American. On a side note but still related to this, if you’re a designer go and read about the work of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew.

This made me question the design industry, why do we design and who we design for? Have you ever stopped to think what is the ultimate aim of design? And why do you even do it? In my opinion, most people who chose design as a career is because it’s more than a job, it’s a very vocational and passion driven career, but what is the ultimate aim?

I have been told many times how wonderful it is that we get to solve real problems and improve people’s quality of life. This is great! Who wouldn’t want such a noble job? But then we get out of our comfy university bubble and realise this is not how the real world works. We are not free to design whatever we want to help others, the altruistic approach we get taught doesn’t work anymore, our designs need to make money if we want any chance of making a difference. What is it that we try to accomplish when we start any design project? Self gratification?

Do we do it just because our client has asked us to do so? Because we really are working towards a better world? And in such case, when can we say we’ve been successful? It seems that the amount of money people are willing to spend on a product could be a good way to measure the impact, if so, are we just designing to make money?

The ethics of design is something that has been in my mind for the passed few months. Shortly after I started my internship I was assigned to work on a project for a chemistry company, more specifically on the design of a website to promote the chemical products they sell for fracking. And we all know what the public concencus is on fracking. Until that point I had never thought about the social and moral implciations of our design choices. As a studnet and intern I took the project as part of my learning process and to pay for my rent in Munich. But when and where are we ready to draw a line? When is it ok to go against our moral code?

What is the point of design anyway?

Might seem like a pretty trivial question, but if you go deep enough it can cause many headaches. Some might design to help as many people as possible, others simply as a way to make a living, or to become powerful, to make a social impact or just because they love the process. Designing for the sake of designing.

Design could be described as the harmony of aesthetics and functionality, two things that are already really powerful by themselves but when mixed together they have the ability to shape society and human behaviour in ways we cannot fathom.Aesthetics touches us on an emotional level and when this happens we become really susceptible and much easier to manipulate, something designers have become masters at. But if we manipulate and trick people into buying our products, is it fair to say that they needed them and we’ve improved their lifes? Or have we just implanted the illusion that they needed them into their brains? If so, did we just take advantage of them?

Design is an extremely powerful tool to control how we behave and being aware of the responsibility we have, where to draw the line and the ethics of this discipline is something not spoken enough about. Maybe because it gets in the way of building stuff, or maybe because we fail to see our responsibility as individuals or just because we find it boring, but regardless of the reason, I’d like to encourage you to read more about this topic, try to think more critically and where you’d put the line when it came to designing ethically and what is the core reason you chose design as a career.

This isn’t and will not be the last article on the ethics of design and my ambiguous relationship with it, check out my last post on my design identity crisis: https://medium.com/@elrumo/my-design-identity-crisis-2447e86e7ecc