The Path to Socialized Design Runs Through the University

Gains have been made in the professions, but they won’t go further without de-capitalizing design education

The Beggars Cathedral by Joaquim Mir - Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya

This week NYC began a new chapter with the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani. New Yorkers waved a long awaited farewell to the disastrous tenure of Eric Adams and gleefully ushered in Mamdani, with a massive crowd braving hangovers and cold weather to witness the historical moment.

Part of what makes Mamdani’s full-press approach so exciting is his embrace of not just a government that works for all, but a government that has an expanded role to play in people’s lives. It’s a stark change in political rhetoric from the decades of austerity language that has gripped both political parties in the United States since Regan.

At the core of this expansion is an embrace of the “new” values of collectivism and solidarity, values found in organizing and activism but dormant in major politics for some time. Calling on his fellow New Yorkers to shed identities given to them by toxic ideologies, Mamdani sounded like a politician of the past and future:

“And if for too long these communities have existed as distinct from one another, we will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from, the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.”

While Mamdani’s work is political, it’s a message that every part of this country desperately needs to hear, and no more so than my discipline, that of design.

Unrest in Design

If communities have existed “as distinct from one another,” then designers have somehow managed to survive as individuals in their own silos.

Survive is a generous term: unrest has been growing in many design disciplines as young workers face the realities of stagnating wages, long working hours, and crippling student loan debt, all bundled within ideology that sees them suffering alone attempting to make it through the path of rugged individualism. To the surprise of many, it’s not working. But a new generation is turning to an old collectivist political project to turn the tide, that of unionization.

In the video game industry, workers have successfully organized large studios that produce some of the biggest games. Apple workers, while not technically designers themselves, but are integral to the process of getting products into the hands of consumers, have also organized a store. And countless in adjacent “creative” fields like museum workers have come together to emphasize their role in shaping spaces for art.

In the architecture industry, I’ve been involved in the small but growing effort. We’ve unionized two offices and are organizing several others. This is all remarkable given the hostility (and illegality) the first effort faced. But across all these industries we still face stubborn resistance. While we need to continue to push to organize offices, we also need to address the root of this anathema to collectivism.

I’ve explored the class-based reasons for this in my book The Labor of Architecture, but the place where individualism is baked is within the university. If we want to build a significant spirit of collectivism within the profession, we have to build its foundations in the studio first.

Design and Individualism

Everything about design education is individualistic.

From their very first days, students are taught to discover their inner creativity. According to their professors, this is something unique to them and thus requires endless hours of exploration to discover and foster. While their peers are undergoing the same process, each one does it differently from the other. In other words, no two “creative processes” are alike.

Project assignments reinforce this notion. Though they might be designing a building that many others will inhabit, for example, or a chair that countless individuals will sit in, the design process that occurs over a semester is largely completed on their own. Yes, they will bounce ideas off their peers, and get feedback from Professors and critics in the form of jury critiques, but the majority of the student’s time is spent alone at the desk.

There is certainly something beautiful about this education. It is deeply humanistic and treats each student as an individual with something worth contributing to the world. In the words of Paulo Freire, it is a “dialogical” education, meaning it is a kind of learning built around the thinking and speaking of the student, not the teacher. There’s no doubt that more disciplines should borrow elements of this, as we cede more and more territory every year to deterministic technological thinking in the so-called STEM majors. But just like any other ideology, when the tenants of such thinking are overly emphasized, they become less inspirational and more rigid.

As I explore in LOA, these “ethics” become easily manipulated within the workplace. Taught that fostering creativity means working on as many iterations for as long as possible, students think of their jobs less as work and more as a vocation. Because what they do has “vision” and “creativity” behind it, these students are blind to the fact that they have left the world of free intellectual pursuit and have entered a world of exploitation. And while all wage-workers are exploited, since they must produce enough value for their boss in order to cover their cost as well as generate a profit, designers are additionally exploited in the sense that their creativity is seen as an endless resource.

While most designers, even principals that own firms, don’t make much money relative to other professions like tech, law, or finance, creativity becomes a form of capital that is utilized to gain coveted teaching positions, speaking gigs, and fellowships. Though the designs might be siphoned from their workforce, the notoriety of them is the exclusive domain of the owner. Countless designers will never receive any credit for the hours they contribute to a project; a meager paycheck and the joy of doing work you love has to be enough.

The ease at which creativity is exploited should give us serious pause. Interestingly, Historian Samuel W. Franklin goes so far as to say that the idea of creativity is completely invented. As I wrote in another post, Franklin shows that while the term “creative” has existed for a long time, the term “creativity” was a trait invented by psychologists and other industry types in reaction to the apparent conformism of the rising USSR in the 1950s. For these researchers, it was an ideological tool necessary to develop in individuals so that their entrepreneurial spirit could defeat the collectivism of communism.

It’s an American story through and through: the promises of humanistic education subverted by the ideological machinations of politicians and elites. But as Zohran Mamdani has shown, a new generation is ready to approach collective life a bit less cynically.

From Mamdani to Morris

Just like NYC has turned a new page, it’s time for design to do the same. Riding a long history of creative identity, built on a craft-guild system and an artistic use of drawing and model making, the realities of 21st century professional practice, and the broader political economy, necessitate a new vision for design.

The computer is at the center of the seismic shift within design industries. Erasing all of the qualities above within a span of a few decades, the deteriorating conditions that designers find themselves in are not just a product of capital, as Harry Braverman observed some decades before, but ever-evolving technology. Though they are still educated in an outdated form, designers should face reality. By accepting the degradation of their working conditions at the hands of capital and technology, they can reorient design education to not just meet, but challenge the ill-effects of these forces.

As Mamdani has reached into the past by referencing the words of FDR and Fiorello La Guardia, we have our own figures to draw from. Most notably, 19th century designer William Morris, an avowed Socialist like Mamdani, can give designers a precedent for collectivist principles within a notoriously individualistic pursuit. In a lecture given to the Hampstead Liberal Club in 1884, Morris spoke about the challenges and opportunities of reframing our aspirations from work based on exploitation to work based on pleasure, aspirations that are first developed in education:

Due education… concerns itself in finding out what different people are fit for, and helping them along the road which they are inclined to take… for the development of individual capacities would be of all things chiefly aimed at by education instead, as now, the subordination of all capacities to the great end of “money-making” for oneself - or one’s master.

Here Morris emphasizes the importance of a humanist education, while romanticizing the effects of individualization, and correctly calls-out the problem of identifying with “money-making” values. However, he goes so far as to claim that “the amount of talent, and even genius, which the present system crushes, and which would be drawn out by such a system, would make our daily work easy and interesting.” It’s understandable that Morris would seek to liberate the individual in a time of mass suffering at the hands of capital, but 150 years later he couldn’t have predicted capitalist ideology’s sneaky ability to absorb these humanistic goals into a form of blind individualism that heralds the genius while continuing the exploitation. In order for Morris’s prediction to come true, we need to pursue the merits of individuals but more strongly balanced with those of collectivism.

Rethinking Design Education through Socialism

Though much of his vision was attached to making handicraft practice more accessible, an unrealistic goal for designers today, Morris was equally concerned with democratizing design. In another lecture to the Trades Guild of Learning given in 1877, Morris criticizes bourgeois culture for lauding the figures who commissioned buildings while neglecting those who made them a reality:

Nor must you forget that when men say popes, kings, and empowers built such and such buildings, it is a mere way of speaking. You look in your history books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell you Henry III, Justinian the Emperor. Did they? Or, rather, men like you and me, handicrafts men, who have left no names behind them, nothing but their work?

Here we have a principle that could be directly translated into design education: in addition to teaching the “great men” who did not build, but funded and compelled our great architectural works, we might teach about the ordinary people who made such buildings a possibility. As Morris says we do not know their names, but we know a lot about the circumstances they lived in, particularly the brutal exploitation they faced while working on the great works. Teaching about the struggles of these individuals is key, in addition to the cause of them: physical and economic subjugation. A history that is expanded, coupled with collective design studios and building technology classes that require on-site construction work taught by laborers, would go a long way to push back against the ideology of capitalist-individualism.

Such a vision might finally get us to a place of socialized design and socialized design labor, where “worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.” Notice Morris does not use the noun “creativity,” but the adjective form; here our labor is something that carries us to more just and beautiful environments, and more enjoyable and plentiful lives.

What makes Morris such a profound thinker is his insightful critique of the working conditions of his time, but also his continual emphasis on human flourishing. Design education today has an extremely narrow view of human flourishing, namely producing future firm owners. For example, in architecture and interior design programs throughout the US, “professional practice” courses teach content exclusively around what it means to own an office. The same aspiration is can be found in countless design programs that give lecture spots and teaching position to owners, saving only scant adjunct positions for the occasional worker. This lack of imagination not only perpetuates an ideology that dominates every part of the education, but also produces future workers who don’t value their own labor in the way Morris challenges them to. Instead of asking what a successful career as a worker might mean, and the solidarity with other working class groups that might come with it, young designers are forced to become, in the words of John Steinbeck, “temporarily embarrassed” firm owners, waiting for a day that never comes for most of them.

If we continue down the same outdated mode of design education, our work risks being “worthless.. mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.” I’m instead hopeful that the new generation of designers, much like Mamdani and the millions that voted for him, are ready to embrace collectivism not just to better their own careers, but to bring flourishing to the built environment around them. The choice is clear: we can continue to toil as individuals, or flourish as a collective.

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Quotes from William Morris were taken from a collection of his essays and lectures, Useful Work versus Useless Toil. A full archive of his works can be found in the William Morris Archive.