(...) If design sees itself as a service whose goal is to address the problems of the client, the design is ignoring what it really is, which is design is an environment for its audience. We need to reject the notion (…) that the people we work for are our clients. The people we work with should be our clients, the people we work for are our audience. Neglect that and you start to build dystopias, because you start to build systems of manipulation, systems of control (…)

Buddhist writings associated an intolerance for the imperfections of wood and stone with the failure to accept the inherently frustrating nature of existence. Unlike our own disappointments and decline, however, those represented in architectural materials were of an eminently graceful kind, for wood and stone, and now concrete and wood, age slowly and with dignity.

‘…ethics and aesthetics have a common semantic root that should be respected.’

— Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Canon

We need to appeal to people with discourse and optics which stress the positive features of the alternatives we want to build, emphasising the values of caring, vitality, cooperation, and creativity, and tone down (without dispensing with) the discourse and optics of revolt, struggle, attack, and negation. To repeat, we need both, but as of now, we need to alter the balance to favour the politics of creation.