On design and fascism: a design philosopher’s perspective

Mara Recklies: The term “fascism” can be a bit limiting. It makes more sense to look at a broader picture that includes authoritarian and totalitarian systems as well. These kinds of regimes don’t just happen on their own, they need to be built, implemented, and maintained. And that’s where design plays a role. But we’re not talking about design in a general sense. It’s a very specific mindset around design — what I refer to, borrowing from Critical Theory and especially Max Horkheimer, as an instrumental approach to design. This approach sees design as a tool, a discipline that can be applied to solve virtually any problem, no matter what the goal is. And taken to its extreme, that logic means even something as horrific as the systematic extermination of millions can be approached as just another problem to be efficiently solved through design.

Mara Recklies: This instrumental approach to design is rooted in what Max Horkheimer called “instrumental reason”. It’s a distinctively modern, Western way of thinking — one where the focus isn’t on meaning or purpose, but purely on the most efficient means to achieve a goal. So imagine a design brief for creating a fascist infrastructure. That would require highly skilled, well-trained designers asking themselves, “What would this infrastructure need to look like to work well within a fascist system?” They wouldn’t ask, “Why are we building this?” or “Should we be doing this at all?” They would focus entirely on how to execute the task as efficiently as possible. And that’s exactly the problem. What’s troubling is that this kind of utilitarian mindset is still taught and passed on today. It’s a hallmark of modern Western thinking. That’s why philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Vilém Flusser, and Günther Anders have all argued that Nazism and WWII weren’t some kind of historical anomaly. On the contrary: what happened was a direct and chillingly consistent application of modern Western rationality and scientific thinking. That’s what makes it so disturbing: it wasn’t a breakdown of civilization but, in a way, the logical outcome of its own intellectual foundation. And even more troubling is the fact that this wasn’t really dealt with after the war. If you look at most design history books, the narrative just picks back up after 1945 as if nothing happened. Yes, there were efforts like the Ulm School of Design, which aligned itself with leftist politics and promoted functionalism as an anti-fascist approach. But here’s the thing: under National Socialism, fascist infrastructures were already built using a functionalist logic. So how did that happen? How did designers end up building concentration camps and extermination facilities? How did they help create the massive bureaucratic machinery needed to carry out genocide and total war? Those questions were never seriously confronted. Instead, we were told it was just a dark chapter – an exception. But it wasn’t. The same rationales, the same systems of thinking, and the same design methodologies continued on after the war, more or less unchanged.

Mara Recklies: This is a structural issue within design itself. For decades, there have been broader understandings of design that emphasize it’s not enough to focus on individual objects. What really matters is the system behind how things are made. When you sent me that swastika T-shirt Kanye West sold through his online shop as part of our interview prep, it might have seemed like a minor or isolated incident at first. After all, anyone can draw a swastika on a shirt and wear it. But when someone like Kanye West sells that shirt through a commercial platform, there’s an entire production and distribution machine behind it. A lot of people are involved, from the initial idea to manufacturing and marketing. So the question becomes: why didn’t anyone along the way say, “This isn’t okay”? That question of responsibility can be explored through something as seemingly simple as a T-shirt, but it extends to much larger and more complex systems too. In design discourse, I think we often place too much responsibility on individual designers. I see this especially in degree programs that aim to train designers for socially conscious or non-commercial work. But in the end, design is still a job—it’s wage labor. And within capitalist or authoritarian-leaning systems—and those often overlap—it’s extremely difficult to design in ways that are completely removed from those structures. What’s really needed is the courage to critique the systems you're embedded in. The idea that you have to somehow be outside of a system in order to criticize it is a myth. That kind of perfect “outside” position doesn’t exist.

Mara Recklies: Every design process should begin with one essential question: What is the purpose of this? Of course, not every design has to save the world, but at the very least, it shouldn’t cause harm. The more complex a design becomes, though, the harder it is to fully grasp its impact or intent. That’s where you can start reflecting on which side you're aligning with. None of us can completely remove ourselves from the systems we're part of. But even within capitalist or authoritarian-leaning environments, we still have the ability to act in ways that resist those structures. And I think that’s already a meaningful and hopeful step.

Mara Recklies: You could definitely argue that the kind of fascism we saw during World War II is a product of modernity itself. And thinkers from the Critical Theory tradition take that even further: They don’t just see modernity as an enabler of fascism, but as its very foundation. The focus on Enlightenment values like reason, progress, efficiency, functionality, and technological advancement defines a particular way of thinking that underpins the Western modern era. Even philosophers outside of Critical Theory, like Hannah Arendt, would agree that modernity naturally paved the way for fascism. Vilém Flusser expressed it most starkly when he said: “As long as we continue to think in this way, there will always be another Auschwitz”. That’s a deeply unsettling idea.

Mara Recklies: That’s exactly why philosophical critique of design fascinates me so much, especially the fact that it’s often overlooked within the design field itself. I think that’s because this kind of criticism approaches design from a completely different perspective. It asks questions like: “What did the design of Auschwitz look like?” The philosophers I’m referring to, all of whom were Jewish, experienced the horror of World War II personally. Their lives were at constant risk, and many lost family members in the camps or during the war. For them, modern design wasn’t just about sleek forms and rational structures: It meant Auschwitz. That was the ultimate symbol of what modern design and industrial logic could lead to. How could people plan the mass murder of millions? What kind of mindset enables that? How did the same tools and systems used in industry get repurposed for genocide? These were the questions that haunted them for the rest of their lives, along with their outrage that these questions were never fully addressed afterward. And now, we’re seeing what it looks like when highly advanced societies once again use their technology and systems with the intention of killing. It’s dystopian.

Mara Recklies: Exactly. Capitalism, as an economic system, has undoubtedly led to some improvements, like reduced infant mortality and increased life expectancy, at least for certain parts of the global population. But at the same time, capitalism is also a facilitator of fascism.

Mara Recklies: In philosophy, there’s a conviction that design is what made this profoundly inhumane and unjust world we live in possible in the first place, a world filled with staggering amounts of suffering. Design creates a kind of interface that separates those who suffer from those who cause the suffering. When I buy a pair of sneakers, I don’t see the people who were exploited to make them. When I share far-right propaganda, I don’t see the individuals it harms. When I say refugees from war-torn regions shouldn’t be allowed into Europe, I don’t see the surveillance technologies used by Frontex to enforce that. Frontex is just one example, so are the detention camps on the EU’s borders. These are systems specifically built to keep suffering out of sight. And the people working within them often feel like they have no choice, like they’re just doing their jobs. Frontex even deploys boats too small to rescue people in danger, by design. Philosophically, this reflects a broader logic: technologies used in war or fascist regimes are created to make violence as mechanical and impersonal as possible. The most horrifying example is Auschwitz. Early on, people, including women and children, were executed by firing squads. But the psychological burden on the soldiers doing the killing became too much. So they designed gas chambers to make the process more “efficient,” more detached. That’s how six million Jews, Roma, Sinti, and prisoners of war were murdered. Without that level of mechanization, such mass killing would have been unthinkable. Today, this same logic continues. Warfare is increasingly automated, through AI, through drones. In the end, it’s algorithms that decide who lives and who dies.

Mara Recklies: Yes, that gets right to the heart of the problem with fascist design: It often doesn’t look fascist. In fact, it usually appears completely harmless. The violence and horror embedded in these objects are hidden from view. You can see the same dynamic in social media platforms today: they seem innocuous, even welcoming, but they can actually be incredibly dangerous.

Mara Recklies: Günther Anders talks about this as the gap between what we’re capable of creating and what we’re capable of imagining. We can picture the deaths of ten people much more clearly—and feel them more emotionally—than we can when we hear about six million. Our minds just can’t grasp that kind of scale. You see this same limitation in how we talk about the climate crisis today. We can’t truly comprehend the enormity of it, just like we struggle to understand the sheer wealth of billionaires or the concentration of capital. These things are beyond our imaginative capacity. Complexity is hard for anyone to fully grasp, and I don’t think that’s about how educated or smart someone is. That’s why we need experts to help interpret and explain certain things. But here’s the problem: fascism, like capitalism, can infiltrate science itself—shaping the way knowledge is produced, hollowing out the discipline from the inside. Both systems bring their own worldviews, their own built-in assumptions about what questions matter and how the world should function. That’s where things become really complicated. Ultimately, it all circles back to ethics. And those ethical questions—about what kind of world we want to live in—belong to all of us. They’re not just for academics or specialists. Everyone should be part of that conversation.

Mara Recklies: It really shows how hard it is for us to grasp large scales—and how deceptive appearances can be. Scientists have found out that we can’t reliably judge how effective or functional something is just by how it looks. Things often present themselves in a certain way, but that presentation can be deeply misleading.

Take Auschwitz, for example. Its clean, rational design gave it an air of functionality—some even saw it as a logical, well-ordered system. But that “rationality” masked something completely irrational and horrific at its core. Even its most inhumane features, like the standing cells, were the result of deliberate, calculated planning. The historian Raul Hilberg wrote a lot about this paradox. I think we’ve been conditioned to associate a certain aesthetic—minimalist, utilitarian, streamlined—with rationality or efficiency. But that’s not necessarily true. Meanwhile, things that might seem overly ornate, emotional, or even kitschy to us, based on our visual training, can actually serve a very real and meaningful purpose.

Mara Recklies: I think we really need to move beyond this obsession with utility and functionality. Design should take a more reflective stance—one that questions the purpose behind what we’re creating. I believe it’s essential for design to engage with its own history, even the darkest parts. For example, I think the design of Auschwitz should be studied in design history courses. We need to ask: Why did designers make those choices? What were they thinking? That kind of reckoning should be part of every design education. To paraphrase Adorno, the ultimate goal of a design program should be to produce designers who don’t contribute to fascist infrastructures. At Auschwitz, many companies participated—motivated by profit, not morality. And today, we see something similar in this mindset called “solutionism,” where people jump to design solutions without ever asking if the problem is worth solving in the first place. What we need is an antifascist approach to design education. But that kind of framework is still largely missing. Sure, you might come across some critiques of capitalism here and there, but meaningful conversations rarely happen. That’s a serious issue. Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt both emphasized the importance of teaching critical thinking, and I agree. Günther Anders even created specific questions designers should ask before starting a project: What would my children think about this? What about my grandchildren? Will anyone be harmed by this design? His point is that you should only move forward if you can truly grasp the impact your work might have.

Mara Recklies: I think it’s a powerful idea, the way professional design has come to not only shape how things are made but also how they’re destroyed. Destruction has become something we design for, almost routinely. Günther Anders traces this back to the industrialized killing of people, which he sees as the starting point. From there, it shifts into mass-produced disposable products, especially in the 20th century. And eventually, it leads to the idea that even the planet itself is something we can just use up and discard. It’s the same underlying attitude toward the world that keeps repeating. But in the design world, which often puts designers on a pedestal, that kind of reflection rarely happens.

Mara Recklies: Empathy is a powerful tool, but it can also be dangerous. There’s a great book called “The Dark Sides of Empathy” that explores this idea. It points out that even acts of cruelty, like sadism, often require a deep understanding of another person’s feelings. And in highly capitalist systems, methods like design thinking actually use empathy to better understand customers and keep them hooked on products. So empathy is already a big part of design—but it’s often misused. That’s why I think we need to shift the focus away from individuals and toward humanity as a whole. We should be asking: What impact will this have on future generations?