How Design Delivers Paradoxical Answers To Capitalism

The triple crisis we are currently experiencing — financial, public health and climate — reveals the paradoxical character of the capitalist discourse and its original idea of “progress” and “growth”.

As the book Design, Method and Industrialism by Freddy van Camp et al. (1998) recalls, the union of Design with the business environment was a bet of the 1950s/60s, significantly marked by post-war developmental thinking. There was no guarantee that betting on this alliance was the ideal path to “progress”, nor was there a concern with the environment, since in the prevailing view of the time, nature would be an infinite and controllable resource.

Written by Isabel Elias

Edited by Mirna Wabi-Sabi

Read it at Abeautifulresistance.org