I t's well known how design's influence on our everyday customs and beliefs and how it has an active role in defining our everyday.

But out in the world design slips out to be defined as a thing itself, while paradoxically constantly defines the outer notion of what the field is. Still, trough my daily encounters, design field portrays itself to be something like this: Design student loans; "Lidl" branded socks; styrofoam furniture in an Instagram post;  a design thesis about mycelium; unpaid internships; wobbly looking ceramics; somebody talking about "OOO"; fashionable workwear;arduino based moving stuff; an exhibition about decolonization in an european museum; freitag bags; dude's designers doing projects around "surf" as a concept; biolabs; Ikea's Off White; a ripoff of memphis graphics -but make it pastel-; Formafantasma's dog in a castle; obscure design awards; -"somebody told me stockholm design week is more serious"; Karim Rashid fitness routines in instagram; Enzo Mari complaining in Dezeen; Alice Rawsthorn reclaiming planetary values; Jan Boelen saying "recycling is crap"; 5% of royalties; a crack version of Adobe Suite Pro; V.A.T returns; etc. If something of this makes sense, it means i'm talking about us

It's unavoidable to agree that design it's out there, and actively shapes the world, surroundings, behaviors, and ourselves. But paradoxically, it often looks like the design field is stuck in itself, and designers are mostly subjected to, rather than be part of. Nevertheless, the labor of designers become double fold, such as performing within the parameters provided by the status quo while cynically position oneself in it.

By this and other things I've resisted calling myself “A” designer for quite some time due the awkward privilege one gets while defined by the word. Especially since in common imagery the designer remains outsider to notions of true authorship but as a superficial lifestyle adjective. Such as an aesthetic authority, a problem solver, an agent of taste, an articulator of meaning or even a “new kind of artist”.

Jesus Christ!

Rather to clarify what a designer does as an individual in society, its entitlements and adjectives evolve into a lifestyle covering the professional deregulated precarity through the idea of the designer above and beyond its own limitations by having the privilege of “creative freedom”. Anyway, I’m not trying to ask you, you dear reader, to become a nihilist like me here. But if the four horsemen of the neoliberal apocalypse would enter a race, the Designer would be at the lead followed by the tech entrepreneur, the lifestyle coach, and a tired social media influencer.

Still, this undercover precarity comes from a long time run. According to the design historian Adrian Forty, in his book Objects of Desire, one of the first documentations where an individual was introduced to perform creative work in the assembly line, was driven by Wedgwood at his factories in Etruria, England, in 1769. Facing the irregularity of its production and in order to establish the transition from craftsmanship, that originally created single-pieces to being sold in local stores, to a widespread sales system using catalogues around the United Kingdom, Josiah Wedgwood faced the necessity of a central figure that could standardize pieces to be reproduced.

The necessity of an individual that could reach the neoclassical style demanded by the upper class, led Wedgwood to establish a new position in the production line with a new profile of worker, someone between the stubbornness of the artisan and the anarchic freedom of the artist, educated enough in order to be admired by the aristocracy and reach the academic precision, but broke enough to be employed as such.

This has led to how design has emerged as a task division given to factory workers in order to complete a product. Needless to say, this division was exploited by the industrial revolution and was further galvanized by Marx’s definition of alienated labor. But comes into the account that design even from its vague origins intrinsically relates to class division and the conformation of the twentieth century proletariat.
Even though this particular fact was part of a broader division between designing and making sustained by the industrial revolution. The withdrawal of the artisan’s creative decision and an emphasis on the division of tasks within the workforce was established using an assembly line to create a single product through multiple phases of alienated work. Therefore we can situate the designer from its early beginning staged as an ideologically neutral individual between the upper class values and the workforce, alienated from notions of collectivity in the workforce in a networked position of soft power.

My several hours in front of a computer screen due to the multi-tasking individual became since I’m a freelancer, created a solid pouch around my waist that evidenced my soft hands as a design practitioner. After a full morning of static clicking, my google calendar reminded me I needed to stand up and address my daily ritual that many either hate or love that is going to the gym. Dressing in the traditional athletic gear of one who is trying to fit in amongst the ly cra and spandex clad bodies pressing weights or running in place, I am reminded of the simplicity and complexity of the codes that embodied here.

Partly outsider and partly insider, I avoid joining in on this feral recreational masculinity, instead maintaining my place on the treadmill with the elders, watching reality shows on their phone screens. While the machine moved at an odd factory pace I couldn’t help but remembering that someone once told me that threadmills were originally used as prison torture in England’s Victorian era. Prisoners would walk for ten hours straight grinding grains, serving their sentence. In an odd juxtaposition, I look at myself, an overeducated white man with a slight existential anxiety, performing the same walk of shame, going nowhere.

Why was I really here?

The gym circuit runs as a factory line rather than a sports facility. The Etruria factory workers in their carefully fitted sports gear moved and stretched on what they lacked in their digitally mediated life. Apparently in an economy of fingertips, the body needs to perform like a machine to burn their surpluses after a sedentary day of coffee and sugar in front of a screen.

work becomes purely cognitive  and the body is its own assembly line.

Wait, I’m I a couch potato or a conscious proletarian?

Probably both.

But even Etruria factories are not even there anymore,  the distance between designing and making keep further separating to such an extent that the designer is an agent that doesn't even need to produce tangible objects. Yet, like its early counterpart, it articulates the power struggles between; the contractor, the market forces, and the executional phase by the workforce. Its practice has evolved from linear factory tasks to a mindset and a Post-Fordist production through global outsourcing. Remaining as an inflection node in a network of social forces under the illusion of a certain diplomatic neutrality.
But, due the ironic twist from neoliberal restructuring policies between the 70's and 80's to contest labor movements that reclaimed more freedom in work s tructures in Europe. And later through the dictatorships in South America such as Chile, Brazil,Argentina and Uruguay. Alienated labour became autonomous labour posing as professional freedom.

Nowadays a long lasting discussion between the dissolution between life and work has taken place through its impact in the psicosocial sphere. By how neoliberal practices removed bodly connection with work become the source of its social deregulation. While Post-Fordist labour transformed any source of social life into an economic space through forms of cognitive labour. Where the only rule is to supply a demand within an increasingly privatization of services

However, history reminds us that the designers' subjectivity was positioned out of the design work, but in an ironic paradox now can't separate the work with the self anymore. Where designers should carry themselves trough  its conflicted awareness and its historical position as an ideological neutral individual.
Freezing they agency between personal beliefs and the market's expectations. If once the designers' practice created value in the production line, now designers are the production line through cognitive modes of production. Where their values rely on the immaterial limits of their subjectivity, that is, the essence of their work itself.

While my treadmill (now torture machine) stops I wonder, how did I end up studying industrial design in a country that has barely any industry in the first place?. How can I, between a tower of bills needed to sustain a comfortable lifestyle, overcome the limits of my own ideological sandbox? In countries such as Uruguay, the lack of governmental fundings or institutional spaces outside hardcore academia are limited. The designer as a worker must multitask to survive; becoming a generalist in their own labour and eventually coping with what they don't want.The flat and gentle surfaces of my treadmill were witness to my professional dilemmas. While its round edges and purist control board masked as a simple interface to its complex engineering, its material interface assembled together the several parts that I, as a user, would ever see. However, as a designer I should know they are there; parts that were mostly fabricated quickly became a faster replacement while outsourced globally in precarious labour conditions. Then there is me, running as a result of certain lifestyle choices, cynically coping with this dynamic.

Isnt more needed that designers explore their own sense of subjectivity?. S ince identity is already our human burden, we should find our anchors trough it. Not as a source of added value as we used to, but rather as a symbiotic engagement between personal beliefs and practice.Since, in times where clients address designers for criteria rather than skills, design becomes a sort of labour of symbolic craftsmanship. But as in the expanded notion of craft, as the possibility of establish an intimate sense of iden tity and belonging into one's interface with the world, while defining its own specific skills and rituals into material culture.

Here the attitude of the craftsman comes into the account, that rather to preaching the notions of talent, and creativity broadly distorted by the individualistic aspect of neoliberalism. Craftmanship allows to focus in the development of the work by the sake of it. Such a s def i ned by R icha rd Sennet in its book The Craftsman as “an enduring, basic hum a n i mpu l s e , t he de s i r e to do a job well for its own sake”

And, in difference to generic design, a craftsman mindset allow us to establish a continuity and further stability into the universe of one's own. While recognizing and stabli - shing the boundaries between itself and other people. In an act of joi - ning skills in community.Is due this bonding betweek the thinking and making that - optimistically- the de - signer could act as gatekeeper of its own convictions . While adressing our soft power in pursuit for an honest and lon - glasting engagment with the field. Where will we be able to realize what needs to be protected and wea - ponized, and what needs to be shared and collectivized.

ABSTRACTION AND EMPIRICAL ILLUSTRATION

We live our lives made up of a great quantity of isolated instants. So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things. (From the Double Dream of Spring, 1970.)

1. Gavrilo Princip’s last grocery list written
   
2. The time that alligator ate that fish
   
3. When the Yongzheng Emperor found that weird dust bunny under his throne
   
4. The great earthquake of Alexandria