I’ve decided to post my recent grad school paper in chunks since it is much longer than an average blog post. Below is the introduction.

…

Introduction

Design is many things, but if we reflect on design as a trade or practice or vocation for a short time one might envision the people working as designers today as trend setters, or the vanguard, whose job it is to help usher in a new world by always being on the cutting edge of innovation. In that spirit, then, this paper begins by harkening back to something I have written before:  “The story we tell through design matters. It can either continue the cycle of overconsumption and environmental harm or guide us toward a future where use-value, social responsibility, and sustainability take precedence.”¹ If designers dare to tell a new story—if we are to sincerely imagine, in author Brian McLaren’s words, “a new story, a story that gives us a deeper sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose”—then we are obliged to take the next harder step and describe or flesh out that story in at least some detail.² Not just gesture at it. Not slap the word “sustainable” on it and call it a day. We should describe it. What does this world look like? What does the designer do all day inside it? Who pays them, if anyone? What do they make, and for whom, with what, and why? 

This paper is my attempt to take that obligation seriously, and it may require a feat of imagination that many designers in the United States are not especially well trained for. Because there is an uncomfortable truth at the center of everything that follows: communication design as we practice it today is not a neutral set of skills that happens to operate inside capitalism. It is, to a degree most of us would rather not examine, a product of capitalism—an instrument that capitalism built, for capitalism’s purposes, in capitalism’s image. The Dutch designer and educator, Ruben Pater, makes this case with impressive thoroughness in Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It, and the title alone should indicate that this is not a comfortable book for a working designer to read.³ Designers tend to think of ourselves positively as creative problem-solvers, as storytellers, as the good-faith translators between businesses and human beings. And we are those things. But we are also, overwhelmingly, the people hired to manufacture desire, to differentiate the indistinguishable, to make the disposable look desirable and the desirable look disposable, to lubricate the gears of a growth economy that treats infinite expansion on a finite planet as not merely possible but mandatory.

These issues are raised not out of self-hatred or contempt for my peers and creative colleagues but because we cannot escape a trap we refuse to admit we are in. The trap is real. As long as the only economic story available to us is the one in which “value” means “number-go-up” and refers exclusively to exchange-value—money, price, riches, the relentless conversion of abundant use-value into artificially scarce commodities—then design will remain, for the most part, the handsomely dressed servant of that story.⁴ We will keep designing the packaging for the water we pollute and make scarce. We will keep making the ads for the phones we engineered to die in twenty-four months.⁵

So here is the question this paper exists to ask:

What would communication design look like in an alternate economy—one that was not competitively market-based, or predicated on achieving infinite growth on a finite planet, but one that instead resembled the economies imagined by degrowth theorists, or by the advocates of literary, aesthetic, and social movements like solarpunk?

This question may sound somewhere between naïve and unhinged. An economy without market competition? Without growth? And you want to know what the brochures look like? But the question only sounds unhinged because we have been so thoroughly encapsulated within a single economic imagination that we have come to mistake it for reality itself—to mistake, as the saying goes, the map for the territory. It has become, as the critics Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek have variously observed, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.⁶ But, increasingly (and encouragingly), there are people out there trying. The contemporary 21st century literary, artistic, and social movement, solarpunk, exists precisely as a refusal of that failure of imagination; in the words of Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, “A solarpunk imagines new futures in the shadow of and in opposition to environmental collapse, then works to create those futures.“⁷ The ultimate goal for solarpunks seems to be to learn to live within our geological epoch known as the Anthropocene—named after us for the devastating effects human activities have had on the planet thus far—rather than simply burning through it. Driven by similar motivations and questions, degrowth can be described as the rigorous economic counterpart to solarpunk’s insubordinate refusal to stop imagining a different world. Degrowth is a body of theory and policy proposing a planned, democratic downscaling of material throughput in the wealthy nations in service of human and ecological flourishing rather than gross domestic product (GDP).⁸ And these are not fringe daydreams entertained only by graduate students and science-fiction writers. Variants of post-growth thinking have begun showing up in actual policy, from the Wellbeing Economy Governments network to the encyclicals of the Vatican.⁹ The story is, slowly, beginning to change and thank goodness designers are here to help plan out the new one.

Fortunately, we do not have to speculate entirely in the dark about what design might look like inside non-capitalist and/or post-capitalist economies. Aside from the common sense observation that the practice of design existed well before market-based capitalism officially came on the scene (which deserves a lengthy paper in and of itself) there are numerous examples in recent history, and in the present, that we can certainly learn lessons from. Within living memory, large portions of the globe have organized their visual and material culture outside of, or in deliberate tension with, the competitive market, and real designers with real careers and real bodies of work practiced there. They made objects, posters, advertisements, identities, and institutions under economic conditions radically unlike our own. Some of what they made was beautiful and visionary. Some of it was a cautionary horror. All of it is instructive, because it constitutes empirical evidence—actual data points, not thought experiments—about what happens to communication design when you change the economic story underneath it.

That is the work of the section that follows in Part I. Before we dream forward with degrowth theorists and solarpunks to imagine the world of the post-capitalist designer (Parts II and III), we are going to look back—and, in one case, sideways at a world unfolding right now. We will visit four laboratories of non-capitalist and postsocialist design: revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union; socialist Yugoslavia; contemporary Cuba; and Maoist and post-Mao China. As we explore each, I will have the same set of questions in mind: What did design become when it was uncoupled, partly or wholly, from the competitive market? What freedoms did designers gain? What freedoms did they lose? And what—if anything—can these strange, and largely unknown histories teach a designer who wants to help build a future of beauty, sufficiency, and collective care? As we will see, the answers are neither a simple endorsement of socialism nor a simple rebuke of it. They are something more useful: a set of hard-won lessons about the difference between merely abolishing the market and genuinely liberating design. Let us begin in Russia where a beautiful Eastern idea of friendship was born.

…

Notes

1. Jesse Turri, “Sustainable Design and Telling a New Story” (paper, CODS-506, Kutztown University, September 22, 2024), 10.
2. Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024), as quoted in Turri, “Sustainable Design and Telling a New Story,” 1.
3. Ruben Pater, Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023).
4. Kōhei Saitō, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, trans. Brian Bergstrom (New York: Astra House, 2024).
5. Paul Micklethwaite, “Design Against Consumerism,” in A Companion to Contemporary Design Since 1945 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), 436–56.
6. The observation is variously attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek and was popularized by Mark Fisher; see the discussion in Lenneke Kuijer and Matthias Laschke, “Designing for a Post-Growth Society through the Eco-Harmonist: A Critical Examination of the Role of HCI and Technology Design,” Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (October 13, 2024): 9, https://doi.org/10.1145/3679318.3685405.
7. Brontë Christopher Wieland and Phoebe Wagner, eds., Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2022).
8. Saitō, Slow Down; see also Matthew Bernico and Dean Dettloff, Enough Is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology (Bloomfield: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2026).
9. Lorenzo Fioramonti et al., “Wellbeing Economy: An Effective Paradigm to Mainstream Post-Growth Policies?,” Ecological Economics 192 (February 2022): 107261, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107261; Robert Francis Prevost, “Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026),” Vatican, accessed June 5, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html; Jonathan Watts, “‘Happiness Is Not Just About GDP’: Ambitious Plan or Utopia?,” *The Guardian*, June 4, 2026.