The Circus of Performative Solutions

Let me be clear: I'm writing this because I care about what design could be, not because I enjoy watching people pander it as something revolutionary. I share the same building, walk the same halls and am just as proud to be a part of this institution. I've sat through the same critiques, used he same buzzwords and chummed up to the same guests. My problem is that the things I want to talk about are becoming culture, and culture is how we are defined.

The Performance Economy

Walk through a Design School and you'll hear the same script. "I'm designing for the unserved and underserved." "This addresses systemic inequality." "My project considers environmental impact." Beautiful words with literally no follow-through. Here's the thing: caring costs nothing. Actual change costs everything. And we're building culture around the former while congratulating ourselves for (barely) attempting the latter. We act concerned about AI's environmental impact while typing on devices manufactured through rare earth mining and drinking from multiple disposable cups daily. We've literally filled more water in disposable cups last year than 350k AI queries use in water (I’ve done the math), but one makes you feel like an activist and the other requires opening a calculator. You don't actually care about the environment. You care about being seen caring about the environment in the specific way that's currently fashionable in design circles. The same goes for privacy. You'll write passionately about data ethics while your entire workflow runs on Google Suite. You click "Accept All Cookies (without even knowing what a cookie is)" without reading because real privacy means inconvenience. It means switching to alternatives that exist but are effortful to learn. And without the social credit the effort isn't worth it.

Borrowed Thinking

Every week, someone "realises" that design isn't about aesthetics but problem-solving. Then another discovers that design isn't about solving problems, it's understanding them. Then someone else decides it's about function. Then back to aesthetics. We're not evolving our understanding, just recycling takes we found online, usually generated by the AI we oppose. Every semester there’s a 'breakthrough' that design is about [insert buzzword]. We've collectively had the same epiphany 47 times. At some point, we need to admit we're not having insights, we're just forgetting the ones we had last month.

Meanwhile LinkedIn has become a performative hall for borrowed credibility. Someone meets a white designer with a Wikipedia page and suddenly your feed is flooded with "Had the privilege of meeting [insert Western design celebrity(barely)]" posts that read like ChatGPT wrote them. Because ChatGPT did write them. You were in a queue of 50 people. You got a handshake and a book signature. You didn't get mentored. You got a selfie with someone whose work you learned about from Wikipedia ten minutes before the event." You're not engaging with their ideas. You're using proximity to predominantly white thought leaders as social currency, getting other people to generate the intellectual content, and passing it off as your own insight. It’s the same recycled "key takeaways" that could apply to literally anyone. You'll bend over backwards for a photo-op with someone from a prestigious Western institution, then turn around and talk about decolonizing design. The irony is completely lost on you.

And the deeper irony? You ask the same tired AI questions to every guest speaker, get your answers, let ChatGPT synthesise them, post them, collect your engagement. Rinse and repeat.

The Saviour Complex That Saves No One

Let's talk about your "impact projects." You've spent months on poverty porn, photographing struggles, conducting empathy interviews, mapping journeys. Beautiful documentation. Moving presentations. Now answer honestly: did anything improve? Did one person's life get better? Or did you just extract their stories for your portfolio and move on? We keep insisting design can address systemic issues in India. It probably can. But you won't be the one to do it, because you're not actually trying to solve systemic issues. Because we keep turning someone's actual struggle into an aesthetic object. Congratulations, you've literally made poverty into a design asset. And then you wonder why it never leads to change. It was never supposed to. It was supposed to get you through the semester.

Bonus points if you presented it at an exhibition. Extra bonus points if the people you 'designed for' will never see it because it's locked behind academic gatekeeping. You've helped no one, learned nothing actionable, but your portfolio looks incredible.

That's not shameful. That's just reality. You're not going to dismantle systemic inequality through design because you're not actually trying to solve systemic issues. You're trying to get good grades, build a portfolio, and get hired. Which is fine. Just stop dressing it up as activism.

You're trying to get good grades and look socially conscious while doing it. If you actually threatened power structures, you'd face real consequences(bande bhijwa dega koi). Instead your projects are designed to be just critical enough to seem thoughtful and just safe enough to get approved.

The AI Contradiction

The whole anti-AI stance reveals the deeper issue. You don't actually know how AI works. You've never tried to learn because you've decided learning technical concepts is beneath designers (when in fact it's above you). You want a seat at the table where these decisions get made, but you won't develop the literacy to even understand the conversation. The people actually making AI more sustainable and ethical? They're the ones who understand the technology deeply enough to improve it. Meanwhile, you're spreading misinformation about AI's water usage without knowing the difference between inference and training, between on-device and cloud processing, between open and closed models.

Someone told you AI is bad for privacy, bad for the environment, bad for creativity, so you parrot it. You can't ethically guide what you refuse to understand. That's not principles, that's just lazy opposition dressed up as morality. You've never considered that your opposition might be less about ethics and more about fear that these tools might reveal how much of what you do isn't actually that specialised or thoughtful.

What This All Means

Here's what I actually believe: design can address real problems. It can create meaningful change. But not like this. Not when every project ends at research with no implementation. Not when we're more concerned with appearing ethical than being effective. Not when we treat design as performance art instead of practical intervention. Not when we're too proud to learn adjacent skills, too lazy to follow through on commitments, and too comfortable with the gap between our stated values and our actions. You asked what design is. Here's my answer: design is what happens when you stop talking about designing and actually solve something. Everything else is just aesthetic intellectualism. The question isn't whether you recognise yourself in this. You do. The question is what you'll do about it. The thing is, recognising this pattern is the first step. Some of you will dismiss this as cynicism, while others share it performatively, proving my point. My hope is that just a handful will feel that uncomfortable recognition and actually do something different.