The Tenth Stage

There is a Buddhist meditational practice, the nine stages of decay, in which practitioners imagine a dead body as it rots. They contemplate the body’s distention, rupture, blood exudation, and putrefaction; its discoloration and desiccation; its eventual consumption by animals and birds; its dismemberment; its reduction to bones; and, finally, its parching to dust. What Design Can’t Do by Silvio Lorusso attempts a similar project, though after reading it, one doesn’t come away with a deeper feeling of our impermanence, only a spiritual torpor.

Human creativity, in the thematic scheme of What Design Can’t Do, is ignorant and ineffectual, subject to everything but possibility. To even attempt to upend our governing systems, which in this case are paradoxically overdescribed, is evidence of a collective naivete. Hope is the mark of someone who didn’t log onto X last week. The book is aesthetically striking, ironically enough, with type that’s so immaculately set it suggests loving worry. An abundance of memes—one appears every few pages—has a deflationary effect that characterizes the volume as a whole, which stresses that designers have not properly plumbed the depths of their own uselessness. Lorusso provides an exquisitely pedantic genealogy of this futility, told in part by explaining those memes. Limning a gag about the 2021 incident of a container ship run aground in Egypt, he writes, “Here, we see the Suez Canal blocked by a colossal container ship (representing Capital), while a small excavator (design) has been sent to unstuck it.” Pedantry has its place in a book like this one, and Lorusso doesn’t disappoint, suggesting, apropos another meme reproduced in its pages, “There is much to unpack in this low-resolution image.” There rarely is, of course; the memetic form is reliant on self-explanation, a usually pointed obviousness.

In a nod to the memetic template, the book is bifurcated. Part 1: Expectations, Part 2: Reality. Chapters open with epigraphs. Norman Potter. Paul Kardon. Walter Siti. References provide unnecessary ballast: Bruno Latour. Albrecht Dürer. Bruno Munari. Lewis Gordon. Gramsci makes a dozen appearances. The Spiderverse makes one—in the incipient chapter of “Expectations,” whose title riffs on that of the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Lorusso, attempting to reveal the symptomatology of the multiverse, details how designers are ineffectual in every conceivable reality. They don’t stand a chance here or anywhere, and don’t you dare forget it. It’s as if “The Generic City” section of S, M, L, XL (1995) has been rewritten by a despairing, millennial GPT.

The through line of “Expectations” is that they should be abandoned. The forces of “interdependence, complexity, and hierarchy” constitute a sphere of design to which human practitioners cannot hope to gain access. Those with designs on the world have tragically misread the situation. Or as Lorusso suggests, “A radical intervention is unlikely, and even more unlikely is the possibility that the designer alone or in a team would take such action.” He puts an optimistic spin on disillusionment when suggesting that “radical openness is our last resort: trust the person who calls themselves a designer to be one.” TikTokers included. (“Using pretty powerful editing apps, they’re creating compositions, correcting colors, tweaking typography, adding stickers and animations. In other words, they are designing.”) Everything becomes design; everyone is a designer; the center cannot hold. And thus does decredentialization short-circuit and stymie the reproduction of an elite class of tastemakers and policymakers! Who’s naive now?

In Lorusso’s hands, theoretical concepts are belabored, treated almost like competing commodities, expressions of brands of thinking or as products of historical forces and modern complexities beyond what their originators might have envisioned. While the latter is necessarily true, the humanity of those theories is rarely considered, except in defense of “labor,” an amorphous catchall term in Lorusso’s usage. Because the human context is absent, the book often reads like an abstracted argument between last names. An emblematic line: “Both Willis’s vertiginous conception of ontological designing and the apparently common-sense distinctions of Papanek and Margolin have their limits.”

By the time we reach “Reality,” we regret that we have done so, but that’s the idea. We, in Lorusso’s words, should wish to “ragequit.” “Our current masterplan,” he argues, “is not even run by a human entity, but dictated by the highly dynamic machinic assemblage we call capitalism.” This point is made, using various frameworks—their inherent contradictions glossed over or half-synthesized—on every page. The story of our disillusionment has been thrown overboard, lost in the detail, and broken into a thousand jargon-laden maxims. I admire Lorusso’s impulse to analyze and map our world-weariness; by studying the various causes of our pessimism, we might unmask them. But What Design Can’t Do only serves to ossify this pessimism, not just about an industry that can’t bear the weight of its promise, but about nearly all necessary human activity. Behind everything, we hear a defeatist chorus that through its polyphony might have us realize that refusing to send an email after work hours is a radical act. We capitulate to capital constantly—have we simply considered not doing so? There is little mention of accessible design, social housing, wayfinding, tactile materials, and those who spend their lives designing all manner of perceptible information for those who need that information. Why would there be? We have arrived at a terminus.

In the end, the notion of design doing anything at all is parched to dust, and so are we.