Designers’ Ego

by Brian on 12-12-2008

When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect. It started with a love of building forts — tree forts, snow forts, couch & blanket forts, cardboard box forts – and developed as I started to think about more ambitious fort plans that I didn’t actually have enough time and resources to build. I found the creative act of designing very enjoyable and fulfilling despite not being able to see my plans come to fruition.

Then I grew into designing houses, then skyscrapers and stadiums, and eventually whole cities. When I played SimCity I actually lost interest in the game because it just inspired me to pick up a pencil and paper and lay out city plans that weren’t bound by the rules and tools of the game.

Eventually, as I spent more time designing and thinking about cities, I found myself putting more thought into how people live (or ought to live), and my designs reflected various social, political, and ethical theories I was playing with.

And then, just as I when I was a kid I stopped building forts in favour of drawing them, in high school I stopped drawing cities in favour of thinking about them. I tried to conceive a perfectly functioning society: pleasant, peaceful, efficient, fruitful, and free of evil.

Naturally I went through the “communism works on paper” phase. I wondered whether the failure of the Soviet Union had something to do with size — “maybe it has to start small” — or whether American meddling inhibited the success of large-scale socialism. I had hopes for Cuba and even gave a class presentation damning the US for interfering with Castro’s attempts to make communism work.

One particular scheme I actually regret not going through with was my idea to have knock-off Tommy Hillfiger t-shirts printed (this was in 1996) with the word “Commie” or “Commy” instead of “Tommy” (inspired by the hat often worn by Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine). Pretty damn clever, and rife with irony — I believed.

Now I don’t remember exactly when my outlook changed — I think it was just as I graduated from high school to university. At some point I looked back at this progression from snowforts to ideologies and realized that every phase expressed the same basic love of designing things, regardless of what I specifically designed.

With that insight in mind, I could never again take planned societies and economies seriously. Although I didn’t yet know anything about Milton Friedman, or Friedrich Hayek, or Joseph Schumpeter, or Karl Popper; I appreciated that attempting to design or plan the world is alluring in itself, regardless of the real merits and outcomes we supposedly aim for by doing so — and that subjectivity is dangerous.

I called it, The Designer’s Ego: the constant desire to influence the shape of the world by conceiving the processes and structures we live in. The forms and structures could be physical, social, or ideological: they come from the same fundamental will to design.

So we need to be cautious that our plans and designs aren’t merely expressions of a will to design, without accomplishing anything else — or worse, that they express the drive to design while actually destroying processes and structures that are already working.

How can we really tell whether social designers and economic planners are as objective and impartial as they claim to be (even as they believe themselves to be), or whether they’re actually acting on deeper subjective impulses merely to make things? Considering that an absolutely objective person doesn’t really exist, it’s probably safer to assume anyone promoting any plan or design is doing so foremost for the sake of designing something — anything – and only secondarily motivated by their stated aims. And an even more practical concern (as I argued here) is that all people will make mistakes.

This is why I’m so worried when I read things like this, by James Galbraith in Harper’s:

What we do not have is the capacity to figure out, in advance, a coherent national strategy toward this goal, and for using our government to advance that strategy. We have no capacity to plan, and that is what we need now.

[...]

Markets do not design new systems—new patterns of transport and housing, new technologies for electric power, for vehicles, for heating and cooling. To design a system, to put the pieces together, to identify the most promising lines of attack and take steps to achieve them: that is the planner’s role.

I found this via Richard Florida at Creative Class, who admitted he was educated as an urban planner but tends to favour the views of Jane Jacobs that “planning is a poor second to complex, self-organizing processes.” My own discussion and endorsement of Jane Jacobs is here. A good capsulization of her economic theory is this toast given by one of the characters in The Nature of Economies (the book is a dialogue):

“To the unpredictable, uncommandable future in the making. And not forgetting that ‘in the making’ is always and forever now….” [p. 145]

I’m only going to touch on that for now. These ideas themselves are still “in the making.” In fact, I’ll even concede that I probably never outgrew my Designer’s Ego, and I haven’t actually overcome the subjective urge to conceive the processes and structures we live in. In fact I’m almost certain that’s the case. What I’m doing now is an expression of the same Designer’s Ego.

But what I did was continue to bootstrap myself up into more general fields of design — eventually to designing the processes of design itself. Just as I went from building to drawing, then from drawing to thinking, in my twenties I went from thinking to thinking-about-thinking.

What I’ve got so far is outlined here. The key is to integrate functions into the process that constantly try to identify and define the affect of the Designers’ Ego in that given context — much as I’m doing right now. It’s still a work in progress, which is the whole point.

Designers’ Ego

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