Design vs Capitalism
date
Aug 24, 2024
type
Post
year
slug
design-vs-capitalism
status
Published
tags
Rant
Design
Capitalism
summary
Don’t you see we’re doing it all wrong!
I started reading a book called “Designing Products People Love” and it starts out like this:
Product design is not just about shipping It’s not just about being original. It’s not just about making things beautiful or stylish And it’s not just about making something easy to use. Product design is about creating something that’s right for your customer by completely understanding what they feel, what they think, and what they want. But, ultimately, designing a product means designing something that sells. Because that’s why a product exists in the first place.
Oh f*** off.
On some days I hate capitalism so much.
I want to make things that people love because they are original, beautiful and easy to use.
I do NOT want to work backwards from the money and tack on those points as hollow promises in marketing-speak.
And no, I don’t think products should exist “because they sell”. I want products to exist because they serve a meaningful purpose and improve our lives. Don’t you see we’ve got it all wrong?
A few pages later it mentions how we will use “the latest psychological research […] to create habit-forming and emotionally engaging experiences.” - So instead of making something good, we’re going to try and manipulate our users into forming potentially unhealthy habits to make them use it more than they would otherwise?
Try and imagine how different the world would be if the main driving reason in our society was not money, but the goal to make our lives better.
Imagine if…
What would facebook look like if they actually wanted to make it easy for us to connect with our friends and share pictures and stories, rather than earn as much money as possible by collecting and selling as much data about us as they can get, plastering everything with ads and trying to get people addicted to doom-scrolling?
What if Adobe was putting all its effort into creating and improving the best possible software for creative projects, rather than buying up all competition so they can lock you into software subscriptions for products that have essentially stayed the same for 10+ years.
What if Apple didn’t charge you $300 more to go from an - essentially unusable - 128GB of storage to 512GB - a hardware upgrade that definitely does not cost them more than a few dollars?
What if I wanted to buy digital movies/books/music and they just gave me the files and I owned those files instead of being locked into a region-restricted, non-transferable license to view the content for as long as they have the rights stream it to me - or until they simply change their minds about?
You can continue this exercise with pretty much every product and service you use…
Is there no way to escape this? How many good products fail because their design and marketing wasn’t manipulative enough?
Is there no way to make a good product and then just leave it at that?