The application of design has been shaped into a global culture in which our human capacity for creative action has been directed almost solely on the production of value in the commodities and services markets — the consumer market. Design cultures or disciplines like User Experience (UX Design) and Service Design are molded in such a way as to ensure that the focus of the practitioner be limited to designing for the other. Rarely in my own 15+ years working in the creative industry has a leader or organization made an explicit claim to engage myself or colleagues in turning our agency as designers into a scope that included internal interventions which would impact the site of our own experience. Of those rare occasions, a small number of instances were authentic, supported, followed-through upon and adopted with an institutionalization of the outcomes of the design process. Despite the proliferation of the languages of design’s cultural productions within the boardrooms across the globe — design thinking, empathy, human- or user-centeredness — the full range of the potential futures or outcomes that might come from such applications of design agency seem to be fenced in. There appears to be rather consistent limitations which allow for the ubiquitous structures of organizational power and inequity to largely go un-challenged and unchanged.

Or, have the examples of productive institutional diversity which evidence the potential value of alternative models of coordinating human collaboration and governance been in clear site all along while simply going unnoticed or diminished somehow? In the last 50 years the visibility of labor/worker movements of political struggle has thinned while the infrastructures and entities which supported the struggles for equitable and just environments and livelihoods in the professional realm. Unions are on the decline, some cite the strategic dismantling of such institutions by industrial forces with seemingly unrestrained economic and political power. Juridical persons which grow to international entities accountable to sometimes hundreds of thousands of employee-employer relationships. In exceptional cases these entities are designed in such a way that a handful of individuals can extract billions of dollars of profit from the coordinated efforts of those owner-to-worker relationships in organizational constructs which can be rather stable systems, but defy the order of other types of systems. Variance in power and profit rights exists within these systems in configurations that would likely lead to collapse in natural systems. Despite the absurdity of these qualities, other system designs for the coordination of person-production which facilitate more equitable and conscious production invite dismissal and disdain.

Around one tenth of the global market of banked working persons is coordinated under another system which historically observed higher values which appear to be of high importance to much of the national cultural contexts of the global north. Democracy extends to the management of state-led governance, but fails to flourish in the location of most of our lived experience — the workplace remains as a feudalistic landscape stuck in a groundhog’s day-like Sisyphusian glass ceiling of restricted imagination and innovation. At this scale, the 99% of persons in the scenario who pursue lives of fulfillment and gratitude in a Orwellian shadow, only temporarily interrupted by sprinkled moments of consumer-oriented bliss called vacation. The worker is too burdened with their work to stand in the face of the 1% to demand a restructuring of the game. Living from one finite game to the next until the day that old age, declining health, or an outlying unexpected incident clears us of our capacity to experience the world.

Each time that I have found an organization in the past in which they invited my critical design mind I found myself running into a clear boundary. You can have brilliant critical insights about systems outside of the one in which you are employed. You can improve processes in the company you work as long as you do not ask for permission before implementing the improvement. Once you start to ask for permission to target your designerly skills toward the organizational environment from which you eat, get ready for a quick dismissal. In every case that I have sought to shift the organization, culture, or critique leadership I have been swiftly invited to depart. Several companies which dismissed me also eventually did make the changes that I called forth. It is a thankless job to bring problems to leadership unless you have a digestible solution paired with the bad news.

As we continue to normalize open innovation and feedback cultures it is perhaps important for the motivated creative worker to remember that there are other organizational models in which you can organize to deliver your skills to market which also stand to benefit you better over time. Do not forget that cooperative businesses allow for collectivization of creative economy actors to share costs but still maintain a high level of self-determination. A cooperativist economy may actually stand as a promising transition phase towards a commons economy. Imagine a world in which your working life was a democratic environment where you could coordinate with your coworkers to ensure that sustainable practices were institutionalized; where you could advocate for equitable pay; where you would be part of the process of responding to external economic forces in cases of crisis instead of just being powerlessly let go of in an act of downsizing. A worker-centered design future is not far away, let’s see though how far such a trend will be coopted by corporate interests — they are not likely to give up their high-paying and high-powered positions without a fight.

Let’s design our own boardroom table and invite capital on our own terms.