Our perception of well-being, or what it takes to make a person feel comfortable and secure, has changed dramatically over the past century. There was a time when an ideal state of well-being involved owning the roof over your head, having a steady job, raising a family, saving a little for the kids' college, and going fishing with a few friends over the weekend. Today, this perception of well-being has been greatly skewed to support an economic philosophy that operates more like an arms race than a marketplace: new problems are created to justify new product categories in a never-ending game of competitive one-upmanship. Marketing strategies position products to appeal to prospects' fear of social exclusion and abandonment, then target a variety of price-points to give every tier of society a chance to amend their social displacement for the fiscal quarter. It's as if the pharmaceutical companies were in the business of writing prescriptions.

What's worse is that these behavior patterns are grossly unsustainable. "If all the Third World countries were to reach the consumption level of the United States by the year 2060, the annual environmental damage from the resulting economic activities would be 220 times what it is today, which is not even remotely conceivable" (Edward Goldsmith, cited in Capra, 148). Basically, it would take five more planets to support this sort of demand (Boylston).

Hans Küng believes the lack of concern for our modern means of production and growth is due in large part to a philosophical gap in our reasoning. In his book Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic, Hans outlines an "ethics of responsibility" that addresses the consequential impact of action and creates balance with our existing appreciation of "idealistic virtues" (Margolin, 87).

Without a dispositional ethics, the ethics of responsibility would decline into an ethics of success regardless of disposition, for which the end justifies the means. Without an ethics of responsibility, dispositional ethics would decline into the fostering of self-righteous inwardness. (Küng)

As we have seen before, however, you cannot control a living organism's behavior; you can only influence it. In 1994, Ezio Manzini proposed that the design profession begin taking a hard line on consumer consumption, namely by developing products that "could survive as technical and cultural artifacts for a longer period of time than that demonstrated by the lifespan of previous products," encouraging consumers to "develop a different relationship to his or her products, foregoing novelty and change for attachment and care," shifting from product ownership to service-based business models, and encouraging "the engagement with fewer objects through decreased consumption" (Margolin, 83).

No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own. We praise a vine if it loads its branches with fruit and bends its very props to the ground with the weight it carries: would any one prefer the famous vine that had gold grapes and leaves hanging on it? Fruitfulness is the vine's peculiar virtue. So, too, in a man praise is due only to what is his very own. Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him - they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man's.

You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit. For man is a rational animal. Man's ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy - that he live in accordance with his own nature. Yet this is turned into something difficult by the madness that is universal among men; we push one another into vices. And how can people be called back to spiritual well-being when no one is trying to hold them back and the crowd is urging them on? (Seneca, 88-89)

These words were written nearly 2000 years ago by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, iconic stoic philosopher and accomplished senator and political advisor in the Roman Empire, in one of one hundred twenty-four letters to his close friend Lucilius. Stoicism held that all people are united in a single community subject to the laws of their own nature or creative reason, and that it is man's purpose to live in sync with nature's laws and accept unconditionally, good or bad, whatever fortune may come his way (Seneca, 15)

Seneca, a master of rhetoric and remarked as the founder of the essay (Seneca, 20), was noted for spending extensive time crafting and refining his words so that they might last to aid future generations, however I doubt very much that he could have ever anticipated his teachings being directly applied to the environmental movement of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The stoic ideal of living in agreement with one's own nature requires "shaking off" the inessential luxuries and conventions of modern life and discovering true freedom from want and suffering through self-reliance. More importantly this ideal is realized by pursuing the perfection of one's own reason, which is the key to defeating inhibiting perceptions such as fear or pain (Seneca, 15). While the stoics believed that our gift of reason is precisely what sets us apart from the animal world, this ability is in fact a fundamental component of cognition in all forms of life (Capra 61).

Recognizing the great minds of the Roman Empire did the best they could with what knowledge and means of discovery they had, and in keeping with the stoic ideal, this convention should simply be "shook off." I think it is acceptable to extend this concept of living in accordance with one's own nature by pursuing the development of reason for sake of being more completely interconnected with nature.

Realigning society-at-large with a new ideal or ethic of reduced consumption is no small task. In fact, it's not unreasonable to suggest a feat this massive would require educating and deploying an army of highly skilled, highly committed professionals trained in the ways of influencing consumer behavior through advanced methods of communication. Specifically, we would need a method of thinking that involves deconstructing problems of communication and reassembling systemic solutions to enable more effective strategies. Hmm... Well, we do have a relatively large and multifaceted design industry employing a significant number of creatives, but they're a little preoccupied at the moment.

As we discovered earlier, labor as a whole has become highly fragmented, as more companies are staffed with outsourced or independent contractors who have very little stake in shaping the guiding values of their clients' efforts (Capra, 142-143). The creative industry is no stranger to this scenario, as many independent creatives provide their services on a freelance or contracted basis. As Victor Margolin describes in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies, "designers have been locked into the aims and arguments of their business clients, believing themselves unable to take any initiatives of their own (96)." Similarly unhitched, employees can easily be enticed to commit long periods of their careers to a company through various hooks such as stock options and 401(k) vestments, allowing their employers to retain and preserve the working knowledge they contribute within the organization (Capra, 143). It's easy to see that, as a whole, "designers have not been able to imagine a professional practice outside mainstream consumer culture" (Margolin, 96).

Design gives the impression of being in a state of stagnation in terms of both ideology and activities. One gets the impression that design has drawn apart to simply keep watch while the world grapples with numerous serious problems including the environment, welfare, natural disasters and traffic. ... In order to make a commitment to the main flow of the times and succeed in playing an important role, it appears that the necessity has arisen for design to redefine its purposes and devise a new organizational structure for itself. (Kenji Ekuan, cited in Margolin, 97)

Some criticism for our current global calamity has been directed at the entire design profession as an enabling agent. Victor Papanek, renowned architect and designer during the mid-20th century and author of Design for the Real World in 1972, was extremely vocal in criticizing the failings of the industrial design profession:

Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis ... by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed. (Margolin, 93)

While I understand the animosity some hold towards the design profession as a whole, I think it's important to distinguish the fact that a profession is far too general and disconnected to be considered a community of practice, and therefore cannot be expected to take action with the same degree of cohesive creativity and collective intelligence that true communities of practice exhibit. However, that creativity is exactly what this situation calls for.

I believe the major challenge of our time is to realize new methods for engaging and coordinating decentralized, scattered communities of practice within the design industry to formulate and execute initiatives aimed at promoting new ideals and values within the current framework of our networked society. From a facilitative standpoint, this will require embedding designers within active projects of many different professions, such as the natural and social sciences, environmental justice initiatives, business and community development forums, and educational institutions; not as decorative-service providers, but as strategic partners who can apply a method of thinking that involves deconstructing problems of communication and reassembling systemic solutions to enable more effective strategies. In essence, if we want to effectuate change on a global scale, we must enable the enablers within our own ranks.

Continue to Part 5: Back to the Basics

References

1. Boylston, Scott. "Industrial Ecology." Sustainable Practices in Design. Savannah College of Art & Design, July. 2009.
2. Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections. New York: First Anchor Books Edition, January 2002.
3. Margolin, Victor. "Design for a Sustainable World." The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Ed. Victor Margolin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 93-105.
4. ---. "Expansion or Sustainability: Two Models of Development." The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Ed. Victor Margolin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 79-91.