I’ve started a PhD examining Psychological Safety - the conditions that allow people to speak up without fear. Seems like a good thing to have, nē?

Realising, with some horror, though, that this comes from an industrial/managerial tradition, and is valued because /1

...it increases productivity, and therefore profitability. So...’we want you to feel safe and express yourself so that we can make more money’.

Not stopping my research, but pausing, at the sight of the true nature of the thing. /2

...is *everything* in the world we have designed (even the ‘good’ things) just in service of the market?

I remember my horror at realising that Public Libraries are a contemporary colonising force. Now realising that Design is just prettified Capitalism. /3

I don’t yet quite know how I feel about this. Or what I will do. I haven’t been anti-Capitalist, as such...I grew up in an India that became much more livable because the markets opened. In a country with no social welfare, open markets saved many from starvation /4

And, to be sure, I owe my own livelihood to a Capitalist system.

But a deeply help value has been to use design to ‘move organisations from a profit focus to a people focus’. My Psychological Safety work has been part of this. /5

Is my work similar to what Mao seems to have wanted to do (writing in On Guerrilla Warfare), filling the ‘regular’ army with ideologically and militarily trained guerrilla communists? (Not that I care for Communism as ideology either). /6

I left church (that I loved) soon after going into Christian missions. I left Libraries (that I loved) soon after going to a leadership programme. Is studying design going to end it?

/end