The tension between alienation and accessibility

An essay about the complexity of design work from a theoretical point of view.

Karl Marx said that modern work is alienated. Work has always been one of the sources of our greatest joys, but to feel true fulfillment, we need to see ourselves in the objects we create. Labour sometimes gives us the chance to externalize what is good in us. Elaborate arcades in architecture, drama, minimal clean perfectionist objects and so on could be reflections of who we are on the inside. This type of work is rare in the modern world, where the problem is that modern work is incredibly specialized. Specialized work leads to a more efficiency and therefore, more economic return. Marx believed that this way of working is what leads to alienation, in other words, a feeling of disconnection between what you do all day and a feeling of what you really are and what you think you’d ideally be able to contribute.

In the capitalist world that we live in, as product designers, we sometimes have the opportunity to see ourselves in our work and therefore feel a sense of fulfillment that may not be common in the general workforce of the world. The tension here exists between the need for personal fulfillment and the modern philosophy of design where form follows function in a very strict way and strips all designed objects of unnecessary personality. This minimalism may feel ironically alienating to the designer of modern day objects.

Which brings me to accessibility. Modern day designers tend to keep accessibility at the core of their design practice. User Experience Design as a profession focuses on how may we find the most intuitive and simple way of accessing specific information or actions and so on.

Walter Benjamin in Understanding Brecht writes -

Art should be considered a form of production,

not a mystery; the stage should appear like a factory with the

machinery fully exposed.

This feels consistent with our modern day philosophy of design which is extremely purposeful, easy to understand and design for consumption. With the Walter Benjamin’s arcades project I realized a different perspective to the process of creating. In class, we heard the words editorial phantasm while talking about Benjamin’s work. Where the meaning does not exist. Where we have to dream up whatever it is. We get to come up with arguments about what it could be and how successful it is or is not. We could read the arcades project but its not really what Benjamin intended. It is close and suggests things to us and so that is what is so compelling to so many people. That it requires us to draw our own inferences and construct an interactive web that will create the ultimate meaning in the object.

I tried to reflect on my work as a designer in context of this idea that a designed object can be compelling because it requires us to think and infer different things from it. I was surprised by how counter-intuitive it felt to the idea of form follows function on a fundamental level. Then I explored, maybe these philosophies can be stacked. Layers of meaning while retaining accessibility and functionality.

This lead me to alienation from Brecht’s point of view. The effect of estrangement that he is inspired by is used to create distance between the observer and the object itself (eg: Epic Theatre) This is done to create a certain critical consciousness in the observer and provoke them to think with an objective point of view. This is an admirable end goal. I tried to adopt this process in my work and found that there is a lot of tension in the process of creating an object that embodies alienation of this kind. The tension mainly exists between alienation and accessibility. Most of the work that is intended to provoke a critical consciousness was being misinterpreted as inaccessible. Avant-garde. In the strictly form follows function design world, avant-garde is secretly frowned upon. And this is the site of tension.

As far as design education goes, learning about processes that were very successfully adopted in history can be greatly empowering which is how Design in Context as a subject of study is. As an individual, I found myself frustrated at trying to fit the two different schools of design philosophy together and then realized maybe what I needed to do was dive deeper and study for myself how to build layers of meaning and complexity into objects in such a way that I find a way to marry the two spaces. This tension between alienation and accessibility could be my future site of exploration in design.