Design in the Age of Permacrisis: Possibility or Cruel Optimism?

2025 was tumultuous. So far in 2026, the turmoil has amplified.

The term permacrisis somehow seems both inadequate and appropriate: a state of ongoing, overlapping emergencies and tragedies.

As I know it has for many of my friends, all this has brought me to question my ideals and practices and commitments.

For over two decades, I've studied, written about, and tried to use the tools, methods, and institutions of design to contribute to building better worlds. But, to me, these have all become so fraught. The complications certainly aren't new. Design and fascism have long gone hand in hand. Susan Sontag's 1975 essay "Fascinating Fascism" argued this so well, over 50 years ago. The entwining of contemporary UX culture with the newly fashioned, utterly jingoistic National Design Studio and the America By Design initiative really isn't all that surprising.

And yet, I still hold on to the promise of design: its capacity to reimagine systems, propose alternatives, and shape our lived experience here and now. So many friends and colleagues are trying to use design differently, and that work is compelling. Is this a form of hope, or is it what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism—an attachment to something that actually thwarts the flourishing it promises?

Several years ago, during another, different crisis, a Ph.D. student and I read Lauren Berlant and José Esteban Muñoz together. We used the readings and our time talking through them to think about what we were doing as scholars, designers, and activists, and how we might make sense of the world and how else we might go about our work and living in the world, when we were so anxious and confused. I've gone back to those authors recently, for much the same reasons.

Design, at its best, offers a means of reorientation. As Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia, "we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world." Design can give material and experiential form to those dreams: not just objects or interfaces, but also through environments, events, our contributions to publics and counter-publics, institutions and counter-institutions. The long history of design suggests that it can be put to service for collective flourishing. When design works this way, it's not an answer but an opening.

But this vision of design also risks becoming a site of cruel optimism. After all, design has been making claims about its social and political significance and potential for over 100 years. As Berlant writes, the cruelly optimistic object is "a cluster of promises" that becomes "an obstacle to your flourishing." More often than not, design isn't giving material or experiential form to other ways of being in the world. More often than not, design is used to patch broken systems and deliver "resilience" without meaningful difference or change. In doing so, it offers the aura of progress while reproducing the very harms it aims to solve. We see this in typical responses to climate change, in design for "user engagement" that extracts attention, and in service design for hostile bureaucracies. In these instances, design doesn't liberate—it manages decline.

To continue to hold onto design seems to require a double move: to accept a belief in its capacity to contribute to other presents and futures, while refusing the narratives that obscure its complicity in the present.

Design's potential isn't in its solutions, but in its capacity to help hold space for the otherwise. Maybe, in this way, there's a lot design can learn from art and from activism, two domains that established design often eschews. Where I land with all this—at least this week—is whether this is a form of radical hope or cruel optimism depends on how we reckon with the politics and limits of our practices.

I don't know how or where that happens. I'm pretty confident it doesn't happen in traditional design schools or programs, or in storied studios or consultancies. And I know, at least for me, this means taking a humble approach to learning other ways of being and acting in the world. As I start 2026, that's one of my commitments: to try to spend the year exploring and learning with and from others how else we might be making and living the worlds we aspire to.