Design is dead – long live Design!

I have been observing developments in design for 40 years. That may sound strange, as I’m only forty myself, but my father founded a design agency the year I was born, which developed very successfully, especially in the 1990s – at the turn of the millennium, my father was responsible for three offices and dozens of employees. His career began without a computer – in 1985 he started a freelance life with glue sticks, pens, scissors and lots of paintbrushes. His specialty at first was illustration – but soon he was working primarily as an art director. The office got its first Apple computer in the early nineties (or was it still the eighties?), then the internet appeared, there was e-mail and websites, the local printing industries faced a deep crisis. In the early 2000s, digital photography arrived and caused an incredible drop in the value of well-made photos. Web 2.0 was on the rise, first with dynamic websites and very soon with increasingly powerful social networks. In short, we have been living through a storm of innovation for at least forty years and the design industry has constantly adapted, reinvented itself, old professions have died out and new professions have emerged.

It is striking that despite this chaos, we still work with inappropriate preconceptions when it comes to design. We talk about the demise of graphic design (because of AI) and see our very existence threatened, yet it has been an inherent characteristic of design for at least 40 years that the entire industry is in a state of constant change.

Design requires enormous flexibility, agility and resilience. And yes, this is incredibly stressful for designers, who not only have to constantly chase after the new, but also because their work is divided into ever smaller parts within large systems and basically feels increasingly pointless. In a competitive economy based on maximum competitive pressure and subject to the rules of the really big companies, working as a designer feels pretty empty for many.

And yet, at design and art conferences that the design industry produces, AI is repeatedly presented as a blessing that will make designers’ work even more efficient and faster. I understand very well that it is existentially necessary for a designer to familiarize themselves with these technical innovations, but what surprises me is that very few people actively question this game of rapid growth.

Instead, techno-prophets are dancing up and down the big stages, praising generative AI and the associated acceleration mode as a blessing for the winners, as if the industry hadn’t already been moving far too fast for a long time.

They preach the potential of generative design with an outstretched elbow, completely ignoring the fact that this is about much more than an acceleration in the design industry. It’s a fight for survival for a number of creatives who are expected to be permanently excited and hyped by the whole shit.

Just a few more metres of altitude show that monopolized artificial intelligence from America and China has become the new normal through the process of hypernormalization described by Adam Curtis. As long as it’s fun and surprises us, we think it’s cool. How did it happen that, with such technological blindness in Europe, we ended up in a situation in which companies of unprecedented size, entangled in lies, scandalous opportunism and fascist attitudes, have accumulated infinite power?

I’m so annoyed by this deterministic thinking that makes it seem as if everything is already too late anyway, as if we’re left behind anyway. Every day I ask myself where the people are who are rolling up their sleeves and catching up on their homework. We as designers could push for so many valuable things!

The technologies of the Sillicon Valley have long since ceased to be interesting or useful; it’s all about power and money. Fuck off!

Technology is the driver of our economy and that’s why we have to deal with technology. Period! Not just with the sugar coating that we can pour over it to cover up the technology and make it look appetizing.

Design, Engineering and Philosophy must become one!

Friends, let’s set off and completely rethink technology in Europe. Let’s finally build our own networks, our own software, our own infrastructure. We in Europe have an extremely valuable tradition of healthy skepticism, of weighing things up. This is not a weakness, as it is often seen in the USA, but our strength! We can no longer afford to be pessimistic. Let’s look to the future with hope. Even if it is not yet within our grasp.