Frode and I have known each other for as long as I’ve lived in Norway. That’s a solid fourteen years, now. So I should have expected him to give me homework for this short intro. But I’m not an academic, and I also think that between the two of us we have both, at many points, laid down entire philosophies of ❝why do we do what we do❞. So let me summarise, in my own words, some reference texts and fourteen years of friendship, in about ten minutes. Then you’ll be all up to speed with tonight’s discussions. I’ll talk about this from three angles:

Angle one.

Simone Weil was the embodied philosopher. She lived her values. In the biggest way possible, what she believed in in an academic philosophical sense was also what she believed in for her own life. None of her views existed on paper only. So her political opinions, for example, also became political activism. Her ideas about labour led her to start working in factories, where she had the terrible time that she intellectually knew she would have – but the lived experience proved it, and it strengthened her socially-minded ideas. To choose to work in a miserable job specifically to learn what it’s like is not the typical philosopher’s experience – for every one Greek guy who lived in a barrel, ten philosophers get paid by the Norwegian state to think about life.

Weil believed that what you do shapes you. And if you can choose what you do, you can shape the world with your values, in the same way the world shapes you and your values. A symbiotic relationship as the answer to the question: why bother trying? Why do anything well? Because it comes back to you.

If you explain the depths of research you did for a typeface, for example, then others can learn what you know. They can continue into the wider world with more knowledge, which makes the world wiser and more complex. Simone Weil’s concept of attention says you should open up to opportunities. What you do shapes you. What you allow to happen, then, also shapes you. If you choose to open up to the world, to the many possible answers to our many impossible questions, then you will learn new exciting ways to be a designer, a friend, a teacher, a person.

We can’t always do that, however. We don’t always have the freedom to put our passion into work. Weil talked about how modern work removed the ability to think. Her time in the factories showed her that brutal menial, meaningless work exhausted the critical and nuanced faculties of the mind. The work was numbing the workers’ ability to think too much about the very work they were doing, and how inhumane their working conditions were. In very simple terms, when you’re surviving, you can’t dream or hope or plan – you move day to day, task to task. Industry can and will make us all into blunt instruments.

Angle two.

Walter Benjamin had a lot to say about industry and art, but Frode wanted me to bring up his views on history. Particularly: whose history are we telling, learning, continuing?
He critiques the “historical materialist”, someone who sees the present as final, a point in time of no time: the end of time, when all the things that can happen have happened. And with a mindset like that – which Benjamin sees as a common mindset among historians – you end up seeing the things that have passed as justifiable or inevitable. And it presumes that we know everything that happened. And the problem with that, well, the saying goes, “history is written by the victor”. But what about the side that lost? Are their stories told? Are they history, or are they a sort of “anti-history”: the thing that didn’t happen.
But let’s take heart: history is written by us, now. Our ideas now influence how we interpret history. And we can choose to dig deeper and tell stories of the downtrodden, of the oppressed, of the ❝failures❞ we lost to history. Because history is also what happens now. We’re far from done here – we can write the history of the future, in action and in careful, caring reflection on the histories we have been told.

Angle three.

A third reference text is by Francisco Laranjo, from Modes of Criticism – the name also of this talk. It’s a criticism of “it’s nice, that” culture – the design culture that only wants niceties and inspo, and would rather not talk about who we’re designing for. Because what does design accomplish, in your eyes? What is it for?
In the eyes of the general design press – a concept now whittled down to a blog and a handful of for-pay visual journals – design is grids, Pantone colours of the year, ❝design thinking❞ as a consulting gig, advertising, RISO printing, hashtags and reaching audiences. Design is superficial, the layer of paint barely concealing the hulking beast underneath; we redesign packaging for artisanal hamburgers and start-up breakfast cereal companies; we post our ideas on how design can change the world on the same platforms that got Trump elected, the same platforms that JK Rowling uses to harass trans women, that Elon Musk uses to influence elections, and we use a really good font while we do it; we rebrand the military for our more inclusive present day; we make attractive protest banners for marches we don’t attend.
Of course people think design is superficial.

Design doesn’t need to be a tool that empowers individualist and hypercapitalist forces – it doesn’t need to be a lie, it doesn’t need to be cynical, and it doesn’t need to be superficial. Design is a vague field, a means to an end, a tool for something. And we can choose what that something is.

Now, there’s more on my reading list, I see phrases like “maintaining the capitalist state” and “economic determinism” but I’ll leave that to the eager reader. Let’s slowly wrap up on the stuff I’ve said so far.

These are big ideas for a talk about design. But Simone Weil didn’t talk about the misery of a factory job just to talk about it. She talked about the need to escape that misery, to cure society of the ills caused by unbridled capital, war mongering, all sorts of causes of social affliction. She believed in a roadmap for a better world, a world where we all participate in our collective systems – from your apartment to the city, from your country to the world – and where we all manage to keep alive the past and dream of the future. She calls that rootedness, a connection with one’s environment. And she says money destroys roots, because money does not care for the connections we have. It should be our desire and our goal to make and maintain roots.

Since this is my little talk, I get to also make a philosophical statement – a hybrid of ideas Frode and I have discussed for the past fourteen years. My biggest interest is why. Why are we doing this? Sure, some of us see type design as a business opportunity – and that motivation is very common in a world where we do have to pay for food and shelter – but many of us also see it as a way of expressing ourselves. Type design as a craft reveals so much about the designer. I can identify type designers by their quirks and opinions and choices – there’s a Norwegian designer I recognise by his R, and a friend of mine spaces his designs in a distinct way that I can always spot. Weird, but also completely germane to the world of craft.

Why do we do anything? I think we are the product of opinion × care × hours spent trying our best. Passion and caring across the process, from concept and history and cultural roots, to product, tool, installable file, use case and, simply, text – it’s an antidote to the dehumanising nature of hypercommercialisation, the exploitative squeeze of capitalism, and the cynical forces of anti-intellectualism that push people to reductive, cruel and exclusionary politics.

By caring, we become more human. Caring about type design – or whatever your thing is – is a strange but rewarding way into learning more about the complexities of humanity. Or, in other words: your care, for anything, gives you the tools to be a better person. And I think that’s why we do what we do, the way that we do it.

Robin Mientjes, 2026