Dear David,
Thank you very much for sharing your experience. You said:
"Most human centred design in information design is actually customer
centred. It is only human centred in the sense that being a customer is one
small aspect of being human. Moreover, ‘customers’ are a construction of
commercial organisations and capitalism. And commercial organisations are
by their nature interested in extracting money from your wallet and mine
and putting that money into their own wallet."
It seems that any potential of design (from information design to social
transformation design) to benefit humans or transform the world is
ridiculously small in our complex socio technical commercial world.
This makes me think who the designer really is: Mumford's megamachines?
(Mumford [1967] explained the origin of social organizations of power and
mass control that he calls Megamachines. He stated that these organizations
are the end of human autonomy because a minority controls the mass. He
presented historical events as a partial cause of this. One recurrent
example is the overemphasis in preserving tools and the disregarding of
symbolic forms through history. He argued that in past time the Greek term
Techne combined industrial production and symbolic art, which is not the
case contemporarily. The social evolution towards technological heritage
and the appearance of civilizations generated a type of social organization
that functions as a machine; a megamachine that is a cause of mass culture
and mass control.)
Best wishes.
Mumford, L. (1967). *The Myth of the Machine*. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich:
New York.
--
G. Mauricio Mejía, MDes, PhD
Associate professor in design
PhD in Design and Creation program director
Universidad de Caldas, Colombia
https://co.linkedin.com/in/gmmejia
--
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