January 21, 2021

Hoping

(Despairing)

“Design is hope made visible.” Brian Collins

“Fear is an appropriate response to crisis- it matters what we do with it. Fear may be inevitable but despair is a choice” William Nordhaus

  When I use the word “post-cynical” in the classroom, an infectious collective grin spreads around the room. Daring to position one’s creative practice in a way that takes a stance (agile) for things rather than a stand (fixed) against things leaves us more agile. Defining oneself in terms of what one is against is energy- intensive because the locus of power is outside of ourselves. Rather than channeling our anger and frustration onto a “something out there” we can close the gross-subtle energy loop by being willing to offer alternative propositions. Our society is saturated with cynicism. Our precarious world offers good reasons to armor our hearts in an effort to avoid feeling despair at the suffering of the world. Refusing to follow the often cynical fashion of the design industry by daring to be hopeful is to risk being accused of naïveté. Only a naïvely optimistic dreamer would think that they could transform society with a 3-D rendering program or a Second Life simulation. Yet there are distinctions between naïveté, hope and optimism. Hope and optimism are dismissively conflated with naïveté when they don’t take reality into consideration. Hope, in contrast to optimism, according to John Ehrenfeld, insists on an aspirational stance — after first having been thoroughly grounded in contextual factors and superordinate values (Ehrenfeld).

Because we cannot bring forth what we cannot imagine, aspirational designing restlessly seeks The Good. Aspirational design navigates this tricky territory between realistic hope and naive hope. Being realistic and being aspiring are not contradictory or mutually exclusive - in fact they are mutually supporting stances true hope is founded in critical realism. Being realistic involves putting media and organizational messages into perspective such that our lives are oriented to deeper, more enduring personal values. Being realistically hopeful involves courageously facing the volatility and uncertainty of our world while studiously avoiding the collective trance of cynical resignation. Being aspirational is a tough sometimes lonely place to be. Aspirational designers may find themselves in dysfunctional design roles and yet remain hopeful knowing that their opportunities for creative agency extend well beyond their immediate job description. Designers just out of school may feel compelled to give firms what they want — namely, to demonstrate competency in the conventional design skills such as research, visualization, rendering, and prototyping. Aspiring to more requires contributing and performing at a high professional level but without mistaking industry standards for one’s own personal standards.

The capacity for grounded, realistic hope and optimism are markers of developmental achievement. Being aspirational requires being willing to be powerful even if one’s attitudes or actions are perceived as politically incorrect. To aspire is to dare to be agentic in a world where power is suspect. Living and working from an aspirational stance requires the willingness and the courage to be an outlier —remembering that innovation emerges from the periphery, from alternative perspectives on outmoded systems, methods, and norms. Being aspirational involves creating mutual respect and win-win designed outcomes. Being aspirational involves coming back to each client with outrageous return briefs that meet and exceed expectations for impact and product lifecycle. Being aspirational requires being always actively scanning the environment for opportunities to generate what is needed whether that be more disruption or more mutuality.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker, the Harvard-based psychologist offers a thoroughly researched transdisciplinary case for his counterintuitive assertion that evolutionarily speaking, on balance humanity is becoming less violent and barbaric. Although it’s true that we’ve never faced planetary threats on the scale of hyper-objects (Morton) such as global warming, intergenerational planetary stewardship of nuclear waste, nor the instantaneous social media acceleration of our collective consciousness of these threats, it appears that humanity taken as a whole, exhibits more tolerance and less aggression.on balance becoming less violent over time. He gathers a great deal of research demonstrating that not only has violence declined statistically but that on balance, life conditions are better than they have ever been - contrary to what the media and popular opinion may suggest. It’s easy to be deterred by the pervasive negativity bias that disparages aspirational design as an ego trip or youthful frolic. This is the kind of thing folks will say when they’re hoping you will be cowed into conforming to the consensus trance of negativity bias. Notice the ways that conventional design shows up as less than hope, as the production of nothing, or the production of negative value in the form of frivolity and waste. There will always be critiques that label socially engaged design as self-righteous. See this as an example of being against rather than for. Expand your own personal parameters and possibilities and release your concern for the opinions of others. All human beings are motivated to a certain degree by ego. And healthy ego development is crucial to creativity. Creative innovators always face backlash and ridicule. Recognize the values you aspire to as the true urgings of your authentic being yearning to be actualized in design of benefit.

What does it take to retain this resilient hopeful outlook and to avoid the temptation to default to boilerplate design agendas? According to World Social Forum “another world is possible” or as new economy author Charles Eisenstein elaborates, it takes a constancy of holding in mind “…that better world that our hearts know is possible.” Being aspirational requires a depth of self-knowledge that can allow us to remain fluid in our identity at times when we are tempted to go into resistance, old stories, or combative postures. In sharing this with you I hope to convey my view that neither design thinking nor hope are magic. Although design thinking and a realistic yet hopeful stance can allow us to arrive at the “simplicity on the other side of complexity” (Holmes), they are always adjuncts to core knowledge sets, skills and capacities. Designers are some of the most optimistic people I know. They understand the power of creativity to change what appears to be fixed, to disrupt what appears to be edifice, and to reconfigure what appears to be obstacle. And that’s a good thing because aspirational resilience is an essential post-postmodern developmental capacity for meeting the complex design challenges of our times.

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