the ritual of as

I notice a persistent trend in publishing about design, books, conferences, articles, all outputs of academia. Titles that follow a rigid, almost liturgical pattern: "X as Y."

"Designer as Author."¹
"Design as Research."
"Making as Inquiry."
"Design as Activism."

For a long time, I wasn't sure why this bothers me as much as it does.

To be clear: This is not a critique of any one author or project. I am less concerned with what these papers actually do inside their pages than with what their titles do before we ever open them. This is about paratext, not content.² The "as" construction operates as a signal. It frames the work before argument begins.

Think of this less as a thesis and more as a smoking-break conversation that refused to go away. It is a rant with footnotes. But naming a pattern is still analytical work. And patterns in language tend to reveal patterns in power.

The pattern is systematic. Search design conference proceedings. Scan CHI sessions from the last two decades. Look at re:publica track descriptions or any design research journal's table of contents. The "as" is everywhere.

Design positions itself as things that already possess legitimacy: research, activism, entrepreneurship, art, inquiry, critical practice.³

Design doesn't like to position itself simply as design.

Quarter Life Crisis

Ken Friedman, writing about design knowledge creation, notes that design is "relatively young" as a university discipline.⁴ Unlike medicine, law, or philosophy - fields with centuries of established epistemology - design entered the academy largely after 1950. It arrived without agreed methods for generating knowledge, shared standards for what counts as evidence, a stable theoretical framework independent of borrowed concepts and clear boundaries distinguishing it from craft, art, engineering, or business.⁵

Bent Flyvbjerg describes what he calls "physics envy" in the social sciences: the tendency of softer disciplines to imitate the language and methodological posture of harder sciences in order to gain funding, prestige, and institutional security (Flyvbjerg, 2001).⁶ We see this exact pattern in design as an academic discipline:⁷

Whenever design cannot yet confidently claim "we generate knowledge through design methods", it borrows a costume from what it admires: "We are just like research, so our outputs are knowledge".⁸ When it can't claim "We facilitate social change through practice," it pivots: "We create change as activism does.", and so on.

Whenever we cannot say, with confidence, "this is how design ...," we reach sideways.

Roll Credits

This ritual isn't just rhetorical flourish. It's an incantation.⁹

Imagine a design project that produces a poster for a protest movement. The poster exists. It's something, material, fact.¹⁰ The poster, in itself, still, is not activism. Activism possesses methods, histories, risks, and tangible consequences.¹¹ Your poster might in the best case help communicate, but it doesn't organize, doesn't occupy space, doesn't do the human work of activism. It is not design becoming activism; that is design assisting activism.¹²

So you perform a ritual. You title the work: "Design as Activism."¹³

The "as" is the incantation. You're summoning the spirit of activism to inhabit your poster. You're hoping for transubstantiation, for your project to become something it isn't through the sheer power of the claim.

To me, this sounds like a seance over a ouija board in a shared flat:

"Please, spirits, turn this prototype into knowledge production!"

"Please, ancestors, make this 'making' count as epistemology!"

"Please, legitimacy gods, transform this craft into critical theory!"

"Please, spirits, turn my design work into activism!" or research, or whatever you deem actually important. Because assisting isn't enough, design must be the turning point.

The workshop, paper, case study or whatever other portfolio piece that follows, with its retconned theoretical apparatus, citations, tables and personas, is the ritual performance.¹⁴ The more elaborate the ritual, the more it looks like the transformation actually happened.¹⁵

But at the end of the day, you still have a poster.

Alchemy

The issue is not that design relates to research, activism, entrepreneurship, whatever. Of course it can and it does. Designers sharpen messages for movements, create speculative futures that inform business strategy. We make tools for inquiry, and so on.

Problematic is the forced equivalence. The "as" skips the actual work of demonstrating relationship and jumps straight to claiming an identity.

It's not: "Here is how this design project participated in activist work, and what we learned about the friction between the two."

It's: "Design as activism". Therefore this design project is activism by definition. QED. Moving on.

The grammar of "as" does work the content can't support. It's a category error pretending to be a category bridge.

When something relates to X, you show the relation. When something is X, you demonstrate the equivalence. The "as" lets you claim the second while only doing the first; or sometimes, doing neither.

Why not just say "Design and Activism"? Or "Design for Research"? Or "Design in relation to Art"? Because honest framing doesn't summon legitimacy out of thin air. It doesn't let you borrow prestige. It doesn't shout "this paper is worth your time."

We look like alchemists working to transform lead to gold, before gaining the tools to form legitimate sciences of chemistry, physics and so on. Alchemists genuinely believed symbolic operations could force material transformation. Say the right words over lead, perform the right procedures in the right vessel at the right astrological moment, and it becomes gold.

We know better. We know calling something gold doesn't make it gold. We know transformation requires demonstrable mechanisms, not ritual performance.¹⁶

I don't think this alchemical phase is unusual for emerging fields. Chemistry and Physics emerged only when practitioners were able to find demonstrable mechanisms.¹⁷

The difference is time and necessity. Those fields had centuries to mature. Design entered the university during what Friedman calls the shift to a "knowledge economy", where institutional legitimacy depends on producing economically viable outputs.¹⁸ So is "as" just a symptom of capitalism™?¹⁹

just like whatever

Maybe, more concisely, it is a response to the "Knowledge Economy." Gert Biesta argues that in modern education, questions of content and purpose have evacuated in favor of a generic "learnification." When everything becomes "learning," we stop asking what we are learning or why.²⁰

Just as education becomes generic "learning," design becomes a generic "as" that can be plugged into any market-ready domain just as easily. In the university, academic design is often forced to side-track knowledge production as an end in itself to favor training workers and making products. Performing legitimacy through borrowed language is a survival tactic in a legitimacy economy where:²¹

• Researchers get funded only when design counts as "Research."
• Activists get institutional support only when design counts as "Activism."
• Educators get accredited only when design counts as "Knowledge Production."

Each borrowed frame opens specific funding streams, career paths, and institutional recognition. When we describe design as research, activism, or entrepreneurship, we defer the question: What is design actually doing? The answer becomes a tautology: whatever the borrowed domain does, but "designed."

My other job isn't design

Perhaps most damaging is how the "as" construction masks structural exploitation.

Orian Brook and colleagues, in their study of creative labor, describe a class-based filter through rhetoric:²²

Where working-class designers might see unpaid work as structural exploitation, those with more resources describe the same conditions as "creative freedom" and "autonomy".²³

The difference isn't in the work of course, but in the time and space granted to reach success by economics and class. The "as" construction helps mask this divide rhetorically: "I'm working as an entrepreneur" (not: I'm unpaid).²⁴ "This is design as activism" (not: this is unpaid labor for a political cause).

The metaphor provides just enough distance to avoid naming the actual condition: you are working for free because the field is precarious.²⁵ The "as" doesn't just borrow prestige; it sanitizes struggle. It turns 'unpaid labor' into 'entrepreneurship' and 'precarity' into 'activism,' allowing the institution to ignore the material conditions of the designer by focusing on the symbolic title.