Dear FVS community, we have seen one of the biggest shifts in design in the last 20 years. The shift from static to flexible. What if this shift just laid the groundwork for another, even bigger shift? The shift from flexible to contextual. From becoming more eloquent to becoming more conversational.

Why am I hopeful? Because de-contextualised communication has caused harm to us, our societies and even our governments. De-contextualisation has made us blind and confrontational, unable to steward an entangled world. Designers may live in a bubble, but many are increasingly aware of the role their profession has played, and more importantly, could play.

What if FVS were used to increase contextualised understanding? Would it be an antidote to misinformation through decontextualisation? Would contextualising communication enable conversations? What is necessary to make such a shift happen?

The debate around What Design Can Do and What Design Can’t Do has been loud in the design sector but relatively silent outside of our silo. Maybe because it has been communicated and not conversed, demanded rather than negotiated with non-designers.

What Design Can Do (WDCD) is an international organisation: whatdesigncando.com

What Design Can’t Do is a collection of essays on design and disillusion by Silvio Lorusso: silviolorusso.com/work/what-design-cant-do/

Some parts of this text might read as if I am only talking to designers, but please be assured that you, the non-designer, will play a vital part in this shift. Design, if successfully transformed, becomes a relational craft, transparent in how these relationships are shaped, providing conversational spaces. 

The first major paradigm shift in communication design in this century was the move from static to flexible.* Communication design was concerned with fixed messages, logos, campaigns, and controlled narratives, optimized for one-directional transmission. 

The shift towards flexible design systems described a transition from designing messages to designing languages. In the beginning, this shift was purely formal. It did not disturb the power balance between sender and receiver. Slowly, this division softened. 

*Although you could argue that the design of flexible systems has always been part of human culture, as I stated in the History Course, the technology has not been able to display the full flexibility of its systems. In my opinion, responsive web design, reacting to changing devices, viewports, and users, had a major influence on how we design and perceive design. During the first two decades of this century, it has been a struggle to explain this paradigm shift to clients. Books published about the subject still timidly tried to make the static logo flexible. It was only when working on The FVS Atlas that I realized that designers around the world fully embraced the design of flexible visual systems. 

The potential shift from Communication Design to Conversational Design

The shift laid the groundwork for the potential move from Communication Design to Conversational Design, but it did not complete it. More flexibility does not automatically lead to a shift from one-directional communication to a multi-directional conversation. Conversational spaces are shaped by underlying strategies and incentives, often hidden, often extractive, that determine who can participate, how attention is steered, and which outcomes are rewarded. When these strategies remain opaque, conversation is simulated rather than stimulated.

The next paradigm shift must therefore give flexibility a purpose: the ability to make the conditions, incentives, and power structures of interaction visible and negotiable. Design must make its own strategies legible, how systems govern participation, how value is extracted, and how power circulates. This calls for an open-source logic of design, where the conditions of interaction are inspectable, contestable, and adaptable.

The Open Source ideology as an opportunity to shift how design is developed, what it is valued and used for and the effects this might have on collaborative work and education.

Such transparency provides a new form of cognitive security, the capacity to understand the systems that shape collective sense-making and public discourse. In this sense, conversational design becomes a democratic practice.

Can Open Source Design restore cognitive security, a state in which citizens become depoliticized by untrustworthy communication? 

The Open Source Way:
Transparency. collaboration, release early and often, inclusive meritocy, community. 

https://opensource.com/open-source-way

Shifting from authorship to stewardship, from ownership to responsibility.

For design itself, an open-source ideology offers a parallel benefit. It shifts the discipline from producing closed solutions to cultivating shared infrastructures of knowledge, enabling designers and non-designers alike to learn, adapt, and collectively improve systems. Design moves from authorship to stewardship, from ownership to responsibility, strengthening its relevance in a world where the quality of our conversations increasingly determines the resilience of our societies.

Losing ownership sounds threatening from today’s perspective. In an extractive economy, losing ownership means losing the assets you are trading with. Market value in design has long been tied to marketing strategies around technological innovation, trademark styles, and exclusive commercialisation, conditions that appear incompatible with open-source thinking. 

Shifting the purpose of our work will also shift the meaning we are looking for in our work. At the moment the “how” we do something still seems to take the center stage, and not the “why”. Maybe because the “why” contains uncomfortable answers we do not feel ready to confront.

But what if design’s future relevance lay not in what can be owned, but in what can be accessed, shared, and collectively governed? In a world defined by distrust, division, and depoliticization, such a shift does not weaken design (and its stewards) but allows it to mature into a societal pillar. 

Shifting purpose requires shifting values. 

A personal reflection: 

A note of comfort to my fellow designers: What teaching Flexible Visual Systems made clear to me is this: there are only a few types of design systems, often centuries old. What makes them exciting and “new” is not the system itself, but the human interpreting it. None of us designs in isolation. We inherit, remix, and extend a centuries-old flow of ideas. The “new” is never created from nothing; it emerges from making surprisingly new connections. Once students understand the basics of flexible system design, and they start playing with it, it becomes the vessel for the wonderful complexity of what it means to be part of this world. Making design open source is an invitation to a collective conversation. It is not the rejection of the inexplicable and seemingly contradictory. On the contrary, great conversational design causes friction and raises new questions. 

A note to the non-designers who made it until the end of this text: Make use of the additional perspectives that good conversational design can offer. Don’t commission design; work together with a designer. Great conversational design starts with a great conversation. 

As mentioned in the beginning of this text, this shift needs to be a conversation between many. I would like to start our conversation with these questions: 

What if we understood design as a societal pillar? 

Would it turn communication design
into conversational design? 

Would making design strategies open source
reestablish cognitive security?

Would it allow conversational spaces to co-exist multiple languages and perspectives, not as confrontational parties, but as a recognition of partial knowledge
and experience? 

How to respond? 

You could write your own publication and publish it on your own channels. Referencing everyone part of this conversation we would create our own network within networks. 

You could also send an email or have a coffee when we happen to be in the same town.