Design & Capital

There exists a kind of artistic purity concept around money for the average creative person. We believe that the purest form of expression is free, not monetized, not tied to capital or ownership, and definitely not sold or distributed or marketed. The problem with this is that in design, the #1 way that people interface with design is through products created through business that they purchase in one way or another. Whether physical, digital, or environmental, the structures of human-accommodated experiences with design are through the vessel of purchases and commerce. Take for example the range of designed experiences most people interact with like Apple products, IKEA furniture, or a Target storeroom floor. These are considered and designed experiences for human beings that only exist because there is a market demand for them. Because they’ve been capitalized, they are able to exist and be distributed. Design only exists in non-equal power structures, but before common market capitalism design only existed for royalty. And in those days, only a few people in the royal and elite classes could enjoy the works of dedicated craftsmen and designers. Now that mass manufacturing and common-man capitalism has proliferated, the average person can enjoy Scandinavian furniture aesthetics. The billionaire and the Uber driver use the same iPhone. It’s ironic that in the common criticisms of market capitalism, we’re clearly criticizing the very vehicle of increased access to luxury goods, to considered experiences, our own livelihoods, and at least as far as design is concerned, increase egalitarianism.

I think the tension we feel is that being sponsored by a project that has market capital, we feel also a desire towards freedom. The thing that gives us a project is also the thing that gives us constraints. We desire freedom and imagine projects without constraints or boundaries. Without capitalization, we imagine, surely our best work will be created. But it’s precisely through capitlization that the works exist in the first place because they can find an audience who rewards the project and allows it to continue. Money is the echo of life blood between the audience and the business that creates the products. They reward the business when they feel it’s worth their money, and then projects can continue. Ironically the snobby defiance of the necessity of money comes from the most moneyed elite of society in total. Because of their established and unassailable multi-generational elite positions, the landed gentry can pursue completely non-capital, obscure projects, seeking instead an in-speak hidden capital in the value systems of those freed from survival concerns. This value system, seeking clout from elite cultures instead of work, is repeated by the masses below who aspire to such an unassailable socio-economic position. By aping their obscure unmarketable interests and passions, we reaffirm their value selections and deny the fundamental power inequality between us. We perform freedom from money in order to get money from the elites who hold the wallet of capital.

Ironically it is with our consumers, and not with snobbish anti-capitalist intellectual culture, that egalitarianism and opportunity for the common person, as well as ourselves since we are also common people, lies. Perhaps because of our cultural proxemity to elites freed from money concerns, that we’ve voiced the same values and the airs of freedom so much, that we forgot that we also are common people who live off the same market system as those we serve. I think the tension in cultural-elite-capital domains such as design is inheriting a sort of elitist position around values, such as valuing cultural impact over financial rewards, while simultaneously existing only because of the increased access to design through industrialization, digitization, and market access.