→ Design as Collective Love

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity.”

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

“The experience of the society in which modern conditions of information transfer prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of entropy”

-Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1

-Guy DeBord, Society of the Spectacle (A detournement of Marx’s Capital

-Myself, this manifesto

I’m not sure how I feel about this short manifesto I wrote for a design history course. I’m keeping it here as a secret easter egg if it interests you. Maybe one day I will rewrite it. (this note was written by erin secosky in april, 2025)

The experience of the society in which modern conditions of information transfer prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of entropy. We are descending into randomness, disorder, and chaos, as the search for truth and meaning feels increasingly disorienting. In a world that can only be described with a chain of suffixes and add-ons (post-post-modern, late stage capitalism, etc), design feels spoken for. Everything that needs to exist has already been ideated, tested, created, re-designed, and thrown away. We have a desire to produce difference out of sameness, to provide enough novelty in our ideas to have them recognized as intellectual property. Yet this desire has resulted in a million xerox copies of copies- until all that is left is an ink smudge on a paper.

The antidote to entropy is love.

Love is shared, love is equitable, love is empathetic. Love is not self-righteous. It does not search and plead for novelty, but rather exists as a capacity to emancipate and break down systems of oppression.

Design is that simple. Design is a collective love.

Down with the “user”

There is no term more alienating than that of “user”. It implies a separation between the designer and the designed-for, a hierarchy of power that at worst suggests the designer is the prison guard of a panopticon, wielding knowledge against the oblivious people they design products, buildings, advertisements for. Instead of “user”, why not say “people”? We design with people to create grassroots, community movements that are self-sustaining and don’t rely on the “superior” knowledge of the designer.

Farewell to the ego

One of the foundational myths of the design world is the Designer as Genius. Design is centered around the myth that every once in a blue moon, our world is graced by a spark of ingenuity, a Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller, Dieter Rams, and for a brief moment, novelty is created again and lives are changed for the better. We must unwind this narrative and reverse priorities towards action and away from the ego. The superstar designer is exceptional, but to be exceptional implies that these designers are superior. What has happened is a concentration of energy towards being lovable rather than being loving. Love wants to be active and through loving we share compassion and a capacity to care.

Respect for our interdependent world

Design as love calls for an end to human exceptionalism. One could argue that “human centered design” is why we have found ourselves in the midst of a climate crisis. Rather than designing for humans, why don't we design systems for the web of which we are a part? Perhaps the most well designed systems are those that exist around us in nature.

Open source, always

Intellectual property seeks to fulfill the ego I’ve spoken so clearly against. As designers, our strength comes from our collective network of tools and tutorials. Open source is loving. It breaks down accessibility barriers, forges community, and frees information from the confines of ownership that have created a false sense of scarcity. Information is the new capital, it is abundant- we cannot forget this, and we must let information be free as it desires to be.

Embrace the power of Negative Capability

Coined by poet John Keats, negative capability is the ability to have a free search for meaning while embracing ambiguity and the lack of any given “truth”. Love can be found in acknowledging uncertainty and having the courage to use design to question this uncertainty that is the base condition of the world of entropy we live within. This approach uses design to provoke thought, which enables a greater class consciousness by revealing the ways in which ideology divides us.

Design against oppression

1. Design as a collective love, at its core, is about using design to break systematic oppression. It is a revolution of radical care. It’s no secret that design is a side effect of oppression through capitalism, industrialization, and colonization. Instead of aiding in the minutia of capitalism and our information age (branding, UX/UI, industrial design), loving design creates revolutionary new systems to reroute capital and information to create a more equitable world. Loving design brings attention to the systems that burden us while taking action against them.

La Fleur Qu’on Appelle Souci