Below is the final section of Part 3 from my recent grad school design paper in which I attempt to imagine a not-so-distant future world for the post-capitalist designer. We began by de-commodifying the basic necessities of life in Part 3a before proceeding to identify some post-capitalist design needs in Part 3b. Now, in Part 3c, we will consider three roles of the Regenerative Commons Designer.
Please find the preceding sections of the paper below if you’d like to catch up:
Part 1a: The Designed Object as Comrade in Constructivist Russia
Part 1b: Advertising as Cultural Strategy in Socialist Yugoslavia
Part 1c: Design in Cuba: Sufficiency and Resourcefulness in Action
Part 1d: The Design Institutes of China
Part 3a: Imagining the World of The Post-Capitalist Designer – What has changed?
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In his book Caps Lock, Ruben Pater spends a great deal of energy describing the graphic designer not as a fixed professional identity but as a set of ever changing roles or postures the designer inhabits depending on who they are working with, what they are working toward, and whose interests are actually being served. This can be viewed as advantageous to the usual professional titles we find (e.g. art director, brand strategist, UX lead), which tend to describe function while staying silent about relation. Below is a quick sketch of three roles a designer might occupy inside a post-capitalist regenerative commons.
The Designer as Moral Compass
“Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another;” –Pope Francis, Laudauto Si’102
As a discipline that blends science and art, one reason design might fall short of being considered a hard science is precisely because of its sensitive artistic intuition. This could mean that designers can more easily embrace some of the aesthetic-spiritual traditions that have long taught human beings how to distinguish between things like sufficiency and excess or reverence and acquisitiveness. Minimalism, for example, was an art movement that emerged in 1960s America as a reaction against the excess of Abstract Expressionism, prizing the right angle, the cube, and a “minimum of compositional manipulation”— basically, the idea was to shoot for literal nonreferential objecthood over illusion and ornament.103 But minimalism as a design ethic reaches back further than Donald Judd’s painted boxes (pictured above105), drawing on centuries of contemplative traditions linking the emptying of physical space to the filling of inner life. Zen aesthetic principles, as scholars Yan Jia and Muhammad Firzan explain, “aim to create a pure and simplified environment that harmonises the tangible and intangible elements. The philosophy of ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form’ is exemplified through the use of minimalist, unadorned spaces, wherein physical emptiness enriches spiritual abundance.”104
In the West we find another group known for their minimal spiritual-aesthetics that the Regenerative Commons Designer might learn from. Quakers arrived at a strikingly similar conclusion to the Zen practitioners but by an entirely different theological route. As Peter Collins argues in their essay “Quaker Plaining as Critical Aesthetic,” the Quaker testimony of simplicity is not merely a preference for grey over color but a critique — “the plain has most often been invoked in order to curb the excesses of the influential, the dominant, the powerful,” functioning as “a moral, aesthetic and religious critique of consumer culture.”106 In fact early Friends did more than just slap stickers over their apple laptop logos, they went as far as to ban superfluous ornament in dress, speech, and worship on the conviction that “simplicity is spiritual detachment from the [possession by] things of this world.”107 Once again the warning seems clear: our possessions can very well possess us.
One more example of a spiritual-aesthetic tradition that any designer as moral compass (now or in the near-distant-future) may draw from can be found secularized and commercialized in the global popularity of Marie Kondo, whose KonMari Method borrows its emotional impact from Shinto animism. Kondo trained for five years as a miko, or shrine maiden, and The Economist notes that her signature practice of thanking discarded objects “is said to be inspired by Shinto’s emphasis on process and ritual.”108 Folklorist Amelia Mathews-Pett situates Kondo’s practice within a broader, often unconscious Western animism, arguing that the “Japanese kuyō ritual of ceremonially thanking exhausted possessions” before disposal offers “a model for performing responsibility and respect” that officially non-animist Western consumers instinctively crave.109
For the Regenerative Commons Designer, one lesson embedded across these spiritual-aesthetic traditions (Quaker, Zen, Shinto) is the same one Alexander Rodchenko reached for in his letters from Paris a century earlier: objects, whether kept or released, are never merely inert commodities but comrades, animate participants in a shared life, deserving neither idolatrous worship nor careless disposal but honest, respectful relation.110 The designer as moral compass, then, who is forever oriented toward beauty, sufficiency, and collective care, strives to bring this same reverence to whatever they make, resisting the manufacture of desire, and designing instead objects a community can live alongside with as equals.
The Designer as Community Facilitator
The second role, Community Facilitator, responds to a demand voiced by both degrowth economists and solarpunk writers: that design abandon its posture of top-down authorship and become a practice of convening. Since design as a form of “commercial art” should always have been viewed as a team sport anyway (vs. the inward gazing, individualized expression stereotypically associated with fine art) this should be easy for designers to comprehend. Considering Alix Gerber’s fieldwork with mutual-aid networks once again (which may not be glamorous but definitely embody a whole prefigurative politics), our Regenerative Commons Designer might spend much of the week running workshops rather than producing finished comps, doing things like: teaching neighbors to use a tool library’s cataloguing system, facilitating a co-design session in which residents decide how to retrofit a courtyard for rainwater collection, documenting every decision in an openly licensed wiki so the community can reproduce and adapt the system without the designer’s continued presence.111
The outcome of the work of the designer as community facilitator is not necessarily a polished “product” but a working commons the community can run, repair, and revise itself. This is exactly the kind of transferable, systemic knowledge that the Dutch Expertise Network Systemic Co-Design has begun to formalize through tools like the “Co-Creative Competences Map,” which is a visual instrument meant to help civil servants, designers, and citizens “recognize, reflect on, and strengthen the ‘invisible competences’ at play in urban collaboration.”112 Facilitation, in other words, is not the absence of design skill but its redirection toward legibility, shared authorship, and the patient cultivation of a community’s own capacity to keep making things without a professional gatekeeper.
The Designer as Speculative Artist
“The future is fertile ground for creativity, in the form of dreams, oracles, horoscopes, or science-fiction movies; humanity is always eager to find new ways to anticipate its fate. The future is a way for designers to imagine fantastic worlds and float ideas that are not yet feasible.” –Rubin Pater113
The final role, Speculative Artist, returns our designer to something closer to conventional graphic practice, but repurposed toward imagination rather than persuasion. Rubin Pater devotes real attention in his book Caps Lock to speculative and critical design (relating it closely to science fiction) as one of the few genres not wholly absorbed by capitalism’s demand for exchange-value, precisely because its “products” are frequently unbuildable, unsellable, and deliberately provocative. Pater warns us, however, that the “paradox of speculative design is that designers can avoid taking responsibility for a future by imagining it outside of their own social context.”114 Pater goes on to explain that a “lack of intergenerational thinking is a typically Western phenomenon…” and that if “speculative design wants to play a role in imagining better societies, designers should assume responsibility for the current crises and understand their own role in them. By embracing the emancipatory potential of the future and resisting the enclosure of the future by capitalism. If not, the future will only exist as commodities for entertainment or financial speculation.”115
So for the Regenerative Commons Designer, speculative work is not an indulgent detour from “real” labor but arguably its most necessary form, since a community cannot collectively will into being an economy it has never been permitted to picture. A poster imagining a neighborhood after the parking lot becomes a food forest is one example. A mocked-up interface for a communal tool-sharing app that does not yet exist is another. In a way, the designer as speculative artist takes on one of design’s oldest tasks: helping people to see, and begin to want, a world that does not yet exist.
Conclusion: Hope is Here and Still-to-Come
“Creation is not a site of economic potential waiting to be realized but a good in itself, beautifully worthless, excessively useless.” –Matthew Bernico and Dean Dettloff113
From revolutionary posters to shrine rituals to sun-warmed rooftop gardens, this paper has returned again and again to one conviction: the story design tells is never separate from the economy that pays for it, and both stories can be rewritten. Russia, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and China each showed us that design uncoupled from the competitive market does not vanish but transforms, for better and for worse; degrowth and solarpunk take up that same lesson and aim it at the future, offering sufficiency, repair, and collective care in place of manufactured desire; and the Regenerative Commons Designer imagined in Part III is simply what a designer might look like once given permission to build toward that future rather than merely packaging the status quo. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland write encouragingly in the conclusion of their book, reminding us that resistance “through creating outside of the boundaries of capitalist, colonial, white supremacist systems should be fun,” and that once “we remove ourselves from those systems, those boundaries, the possibility for creation no longer follows the market or what will sell but rather what is engaging to us and our communities. Solarpunk has always been about hope—not just the emotion but the action that necessitates and is necessitated by hope.”118 Hope through action, afterall, is a guiding principle that the designer might be uniquely equipped to comprehend, since we’re quite familiar with sketching worlds that do not yet exist and daring people to want them. So, from now on may we all diligently go about our daily lives designing for a world of beauty, sufficiency, and collective care as if that world is already here but yet still-to-come.
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Notes:
102. Francis, “Laudato Si’,” 79.
103. Genevieve Slomski, “Minimalism Emphasizes Objects as Art,” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2023, 1.
104. Yan Jia and Muhammad Firzan, “Exploring the Zen Aesthetic Principles in the Design of Tea Rooms in Hebei Province, China,” Buildings 14, no. 11 (2024), sec. 3, “Design Principles of Zen Aesthetic Tea Rooms.”
105. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1961, liquitex on canvas, 122 x 244 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
106. Peter Collins, “Quaker Plaining as Critical Aesthetic,” Quaker Studies 5, no. 2 (2001): 121–139, at 131.
107. Quaker Faith and Practice (1995), 20.27, quoted in Collins, “Quaker Plaining as Critical Aesthetic,” 122–23.
108. “Through the Looking Glass; Japan and Shinto,” The Economist 431, no. 9141 (May 4, 2019): 35.
109. Amelia Mathews-Pett, “I Want It to Go to a Good Home: Animism in Western Relationships with Personal Possessions,” Performance Research 24, no. 6 (2019): 86–94, at 91.
110. Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 1–7; see also note 21 above.
111. Alix Gerber, “Building a New World in the Shell of the Old: Co-Designing Post-Capitalist Visions,” Societies 15, no. 10 (2025): 283, at 5.
112. Van der Touw and Overdiek, “Leveraging Systems Thinking in Social Design Practice,” 102, sidebar.
113. Ruben Pater, Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023), 399.
114. Ruben Pater, Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023), chap. on speculative design.
115. Ruben Pater, Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023), 415.
116. Superflux, “A Just World on a Safe Planet,” digital triptych artwork, 2024, https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Hero-Cover-img-b.jpg (accessed July 19, 2026).
117. Bernico and Dettloff, Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology, 113.
118. Wagner and Wieland, “Conclusion,” 198-199.
