See, I will reiterate Mark Fisher again and again. Capitalist realism is a condition that shapes design in its core, and often imagination in the field is framed through business logics, maximizing profit etc. Very interesting how business-as-usual has swallowed design's imagination, huh?

There are two antinomies that structure design work today: The first is AI promising to 'eliminate repetitive labor' and 'enable strategic focus', yet actually intensifies extraction while compressing timelines and degrading working conditions.

This contrasts with the slow nature of design, which requires time to understand, contextualize, and question before it acts. To question and actually build arguments against certain business logics that make sense for a company but doesn't make sense for the society or the planet.

The second involves business-as-usual, where teams accept growth orientation and extractive logic. This is versus a transformation that is needed in order to build alternative structures and address the polycrisis...

This, however inevitably faces systematic disadvantage within markets structured purely around extraction. Any prefigurative business, that cannot get patient capital, or no capital at all is bound to fail because growth feels so innate in our lives that it feels foolish to pursue otherwise

Now on to the 4 design responses, or ontologies if you will, to make them sound more cool: #1: Default design or naturalizing extraction #2: Hype design or acceleration as a solution #3: Adaptive design or survival without transformation #4: Schismogenetic design or prefiguring alternatives

Default design: Treats extractive capitalism and growth imperatives as natural conditions requiring optimization rather than political arrangements requiring challenge. This is the default business as usual, probably asking designers to be more business savvy and show their ROI

Hype design: Accelerates dominant logics through technological solutionism, deploying AI and automation to reproduce existing power structures under the guise of innovation. This is likely design that is let's vibe-code everything and see what sticks. At least we will have fun in the meantime!

Adaptive design: Prioritizes designer survival through marginal improvements within destructive systems, accepting structural constraints as unchangeable facts. I understand and empathize a lot with this design response. It's about survival. Making due till conditions become better. If they will..

Schismogenetic design: Creates alternative organizational structures that encode cooperative principles and sustenance orientation, demonstrating viable practices outside growth-oriented capitalism. Sounds too good to be true. AND it's the only alternative..

Professional design choices encode political positions through organizational structures and tool adoption. And so in order to do that we need to change the material conditions of how design operates through prefiguration. This might be the only solution and the most difficult solution to escape BAU

Converging crises create the conditions where mutualist infrastructure (knowledge commons, peer networks, federation) enables collective action by designing the arrangements that support alternative organizational forms. In a way the organization form becomes the design artifact.

CC: @spavel.bsky.social @fasterandworse.com @ronbronson.com @karenmcgrane.bsky.social who are often thinking and writing toward similar conditions.