Existential Solutionism: A Dive into the Designerly Unconscious

This is a slightly edited version of an article included in Reclaiming Hope: Navigate (Un)certainty, Imagine Better Futures (2025), edited by Ivica Mitrović and Dora Vanette and published by Centre for Creativity / MAO.

Le Corbusier photographed by Willy Rizzo in 1951 for Le Journale de la Photographie.

The Designerly Unconscious

Within design studies, a lot of attention has been given both to the thinking in and on the actions of designers¹ and to their peculiar ways of knowing,² as well as to their tacit knowledge.³ This scholarship was partly self-fulfilling: by asserting the existence of a “way of knowing” specific to designers—a category perhaps too diverse and protean to be treated as such—, a distinct epistemology, separate from that of other practitioners, would come to exist. Whatever the case, far less interest has been given to what I propose to call the designerly unconscious: the “givens” of (a) design culture, automatically employed and rarely questioned, without which (that) design culture would not exist as such. These are the conditions that make designerly thinking and knowing possible.

The designerly unconscious should not be seen as ‘metadesign’—it is not something that underpins or towers over design, but that which lies beside it. It is made of the invisible forces that perturb design ideas and orient its activities. To approach the designerly unconscious, we must ask: which aspects of the design activity are removed? A tentative answer might be: first and foremost, the designer-planner—a subject with their own unconscious and their removals—who, to a great extent, disappears into the very activity of designing and planning. Furthermore, the designerly unconscious needs to be tied to a social configuration specific to a time and a place, as well as to the operations that produce such configuration. In other words, it should be tied to a Gesellschaftsgestalt/ung, akin to the double character of nature as natura naturans and natura naturata. That is, how “figures”⁴—myths, issues (e.g. “the social question”), institutions, ideologies, conspiracies—stand out from the background of the social-historical magma to acquire a structure. The designerly unconscious is what lies on the surface of this magma.

To be clear, this notion should be understood first as the hypothesis of something akin to a collective unconscious of design culture,⁵ in which case it has the same self-fulfilling potential of the designerly ways of knowing: by naming it, one brings it to existence. Second, it should be seen as an investigative lens for examining the seething foundations of design culture. These foundations are not only concepts but also attitudes tinted by emotion.⁶ Take optimism, for example: since the purpose of design is to focus on how things ought to be, optimism should be seen as a given of design culture.⁷ While localized expressions of pessimism certainly exist—especially today, when the prevailing “structure of feeling”⁸ is far from enthusiastic—they remain marginal and are typically neutralized by a “constructive” stance. In fact, the very opposition between constructing and destroying, that is, how this binary is framed, belongs to the sphere of the designerly unconscious, and in particular to its superego component. According to Raymond Geuss,

“any society has a tendency to try mobilize human inertia in order to protect itself as much as possible from radical change, and one main way in which this can be done is through the effort to impose the requirement of ‘positivity’ or ‘constructiveness’ on potential critics: you can’t criticize the police system, the system of labor law, the organization of health services, etc., unless you have a completely elaborated, positive alternative to propose. I reject this line of argument completely: to accept it is to allow the existing social formation to dictate the terms on which it can be criticized, and to allow it to impose a theoretically unwarranted burden of positive proof on any potential critic.”⁹

In the field of theoretical physics, David Ritz Finkelstein briefly explains the method by which the givens (what he calls the “absolutes” of a theory) can be elucidated: “As we have seen, we cannot always detect important absolutes easily from within a theory. By never moving, some idols make themselves invisible. We must step outside the theory and examine both what physicists say and what they do, and especially the connection between these two modes of action—the semantics of the theory—to discover what absolutes are tacitly assumed”.¹⁰

There are two main reasons for stepping outside the theory and dive into the designerly unconscious. The first is purely inquisitive: we must strive to truly know what we think we know, to catch sight of the submerged iceberg beneath the visible tip. The second is corrective: by getting a sense of the content and operations of the designerly unconscious, we might be able to expand the scope of conscious designerly activity and redirect its trajectory. This effort would parallel the systemic role that Gregory Bateson attributed to art, namely, an antidote to the mere purposive rationality of solutions.¹¹ If unaided by art, religion or dream—an aid he calls “unconscious mediation”—the “primary processes”¹² supporting rationality become “necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life”. In this view, art is a corrective to utility because it maintains systemic “wisdom”. This also explains why what we generally consider irrational is not always anti-rational, but rather more-than-rational, so to speak. There is a further advantage to the study of the designerly unconscious: it might enable the researcher to identify foundational issues that not only underlie the specialist knowledge of professional designers, but also that of the layperson. This entails stepping once again outside the magic circle of design culture,¹³ as a designing individual immersed in the cultural and operational context of radical modernity. As an example, the analysis of ‘vernacular’ forms of designing might not require explaining in which way they are design, but rather how they aren’t.

One of these foundational issues is the notion of problem, a key term in design culture and a common concept in everyday life. Within designerly consciousness, a problem is regarded as something to be solved—that is, cracked, unraveled, or disentangled like a puzzle—or something that must first be identified and framed, and thus constructed, structured, organized. In the first case, the problem is tautologically defined by the aim of problem-solving: it exists to be brought to a solution. In the second case, the activity of problem-framing becomes an evaluation of the situation at hand through a set of cultural values. Yet, neither approach truly addresses what a problem really is. From within the designerly unconscious, the key question is neither “how to solve the problem?” nor “how to frame a problem?” but rather “what is a problem?” and “what does the problem do to me?”. That is, how can a more or less inert piece of reality come to be recognized and treated as something animated, something that calls our attention, that transforms us? Since a full answer to this question is beyond the scope of this text, I’ll instead offer a definition of “problem” from Flusser, one that is deeply resonant with the idea of the designerly unconscious in its metaphorical framing (problems stand for obstacles, progress stands for tractability, etc.)

“‘To live’ means to proceed towards death. On the way, one came across things that blocked one’s path. These things called ‘problems’ had therefore to be removed. ‘To live’ then meant: to resolve problems in order to be able to die. And one resolved problems either by transforming intractable things into manageable ones—this was called ‘production’—or by overcoming them—this was called ‘progress’. Until eventually, one came up against problems that could not be transformed or overcome. These were called ‘last things’, and one died of them. This was the paradox of living surrounded by things: One thought one had to resolve problems so as to clear the way to death, so as to ‘escape from circumstances’, and it was the unresolved problems one died of. This does not sound very pleasant, but it is basically comforting. One knows what to hold on to in life—i.e. things”.¹⁴

Existential Solutionism

Flusser shows how problems are tied to things, and therefore how we, as human beings, are existentially tied to both. This existential bond found its own technological formulation in what Evgeny Morozov called solutionism, namely, an overreliance on technical quick fixes which reduces complex issues to solutions.¹⁵ As an epigraph to his book, Morozov places the following statement by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google between 2001 and 2011:

“In the future, people will spend less time trying to get technology to work […] because it will just be seamless. It will just be there. The Web will be everything, and it will also be nothing. It will be like electricity. […] If we get this right, I believe we can fix all the world’s problems”.¹⁶

“Everything and nothing”: Schmidt’s Internet-centric solutionism carries a strangely Zen-like, almost unconscious quality, as it seems to move against—or perhaps beyond—the principle of non-contradiction. Certainly, Schmidt was not wrong to predict that the Web would become ubiquitous and therefore on par with electricity. But how does this help us solve the world’s problems? Because the Web gives us, according to Schmidt, immense knowledge, among other things. It is not surprising, then, that solutionism thrives in the technological sphere, in an era where technology has enveloped everything. However, “everything” includes us, so Schmidt’s external approach to problems, which are “the problems of the world”, extends to the personal sphere, increasingly involving the problems of the individual person. This way, solutionism becomes a way of life, a mentality, an attitude—it becomes existential solutionism.

Is solutionism different from the instrumentalism? In its most distilled form, instrumentalism sees everything as a means to an end, which in turn becomes a further means, thus eliminating any ultimate purpose. Similarly, solutionism turns the what into the how. But while the instrumental reason generates tools, solutionism produces obstacles—what we call problems. This is why, when solutionism shifts from the external techno-social sphere to the existential one, it becomes a burden. At the individual level, the rhetoric of easy solutions collapses in the face of unavoidable complexity and ambiguity. Morozov gives the example of obesity: “The solutionist says: everyone has a cell phone so we have to make an app that alerts people when they eat too much or walk too little. A band-aid, not a solution”.¹⁷ When we move from an abstract “obesity issue” to the lived experience of a concrete person, what existential solutionism actually achieves with its techniques (digital or otherwise), is not only to offer a patch instead of a solution but also to make the obstacle more imposing, the mountain steeper and more disorienting.

Morozov effectively captures the simplistic thinking of some technologists. Yet, even attempts to confront the causes of problems “in their complexity” can slip into the realm of existential solutionism, as they tend to expand problems indefinitely, without offering resolution. The risk, then, is that a ‘complexist’ approach not only leaves us with unresolved problems (some of them unsolvable by nature) but also burdens us with an excess of information over which we have little power and limited use. We remain, in this sense, within the domain of Schmidt’s “everything and nothing”.

The issue, then, lies neither in the simplicity nor in the complexity of how problems are approached, but in the very notion of problem. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is Michael McClure—a Beat poet from San Francisco, the city that would later become the cradle of Silicon Valley and technological solutionism—who grasps this more deeply than either problemists or solutionists.¹⁸ This is what says the man standing alongside Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg while wearing a flashy crucifix:

“Everybody wants a solution instead of realizing that the universe is a frontier, that the universe is a messiah for this whole total… this beatific complex meat structure that you are a tentacle, an aura, an extrusion, an experiencing of. They say instead, we want a solution, we want a utopia, we want bliss, we want progress, we want revolution, we want this, we want that. These are all simplistic solutions. It’s like we are all trapped in solutionism. As one solution fails, another solution is tried. Everybody wants a solution. When they realize the defeat of a solution they split as rapidly as they can to another solution to rid themselves of any anxiety”.¹⁹

Is, then, anxiety one of the ‘primary process’ of design culture? Perhaps. What’s certain is that we can speak of existential solutionism even when the solutions are not explicitly technological. In fact, they cannot be otherwise: problematization itself is an operational form, a technique / technicalization, a ‘modal’ way of seeing the world that unconsciously underpins designerly modes of thinking and knowing.