Designing in the Ruins: On durability and mutation in a world coming undone
This essay is a response to Adam Garcia’s “Mutant Systems”—a manifesto that rattled me in the best way. What follows is part alignment, part pushback, and mostly an exploration of how design might help us metabolize collapse.
A few days after launching my new design studio, Durable, I felt great. The work felt honest. The name felt right, like a small offering of sanity in a world spinning faster and fragmenting more every day.
A day later, I was alerted to a manifesto arguing against everything my name seemed to represent.
The manifesto was Mutant Systems by Adam Garcia, a designer whose work I've long admired for its depth and point of view. His piece is a poetic call to arms for creative workers disillusioned by design under "late capitalism." Though I'd argue we're actually living under corporate mercantilism, where government and big business collude to protect established players from genuine market forces. Either way, his invitation to embrace "unstable, adaptive, plural practices" and reject "branding's demand for consistency, clarity, and legibility" cuts to the heart of our current predicament.
I resonated with much of it, particularly the guidelines for political, emotional, and economic applications in the second half of the piece. Mutant Systems are clearly about more than just visual design and branding. And yet, I bristled at two points: that "mutant designers" must refuse to "romanticize purity, nostalgia, or tradition," and reject the very clarity and legibility that my new studio promised to deliver.
Here I was, one day after announcing my presence with a post featuring nostalgic brutalist architecture, reading a critique that seemed to indict my entire approach.
Beyond the binary
The initial sting gave way to something more complex. Adam isn't creating a binary between durability and mutation—he's distinguishing between stagnation and adaptive transformation. And he's right that much of design has become stagnant, clinging to familiar forms out of fear rather than intention. But I don't think durability automatically equals stagnation.
What if durability doesn't resist change but helps us metabolize it? What if the real choice isn't between stability and transformation, but between conscious design and unconscious drift?
If style is "spellwork meant to protect us from the chaos outside," as Adam suggests, then it matters what kind of magic we're casting. Are we enchanting audiences into inertia, or into possibility?
The case for scaffolding
I think about scaffolding—those temporary frameworks that hold buildings steady while renovation happens inside. Good scaffolding doesn't prevent change; it makes radical transformation possible. The Swiss grid system isn't a prison for content but a framework that frees cognitive resources for more important work. When typography follows clear hierarchies and layouts have predictable logic, viewers can focus on meaning rather than decoding.
Consider how Massimo Vignelli's 1972 New York subway map used systematic color coding and geometric clarity to give millions of people a shared language for moving through an overwhelming city. Or how standardized street signage—designed with clear typography, consistent symbols, and color cues—helps people navigate unfamiliar terrain, respond to emergencies, and move safely through public space. These aren't tools of oppression but of liberation.
I wonder if Adam's main gripe is truly with stylistic applications and branding as a concept. The problem isn't classical design principles themselves, but how they're deployed. When applied without soul or context (flattened into trend cycles, stripped of depth, optimized for dopamine hits) they become exactly what Adam critiques. But that's true of any approach, mutant or otherwise.
Reckoning with history
If the gripe is in fact with things like styles popularized in the past, a fair challenge lingers: When I say "classic design clears space for what matters," who decides what matters? Whose needs and perspectives are centered in that claim? It's a fair challenge. Traditional design approaches do carry the DNA of systems built to manage rather than transform. And let's be honest about whose DNA that is. The modernist canon, from the Bauhaus to Swiss typography, was shaped almost exclusively by white men working within systems of exclusion. Women like Muriel Cooper at MIT and people of color like Emmett McBain were doing groundbreaking work but remain footnotes in design history.
But here's where that critique of style, of branding, becomes limiting. At their core, these things are tools. Tools can be repurposed.
Contemporary designers like Paula Scher and the late Virgil Abloh have shown how to deploy various styles strategically: using classical typography for a jazz poster, corporate branding logic for streetwear, systematic design for cultural institutions. They understand that the same grid system that organizes a corporate annual report can structure a community resource guide, that typography designed for banks can serve activist manifestos.
Take designer Mike Monteiro's book Ruined by Design, a scathing critique of the tech industry's ethical failures. The site promoting this book in it’s various forms uses clean, minimalist design: readable typography, clear hierarchy, digestible structure. Monteiro could have made it deliberately difficult to read as a form of resistance, but instead he deployed familiar design languages to make his radical arguments as accessible as possible.
This isn't compromise; it's strategy. Sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is make alternative systems look "professional," "trustworthy," and "well-designed" in the way that mainstream audiences understand those terms. Using familiar visual languages to make unfamiliar ideas accessible is often the most effective way to move people who aren't already converted.
Resilience, not permanence
When I named my studio Durable, I wasn't thinking about permanence—I was thinking about resilience. There's a difference between things that last because they resist change and things that last because they adapt to it.
The ancient Japanese practice of sashimono—wood joinery without nails—creates structures that can flex and sway without breaking. Traditional Western framing would snap under the same stress. This is what I mean by durable design: frameworks that hold while everything shifts around them.
My clients often come to me precisely because they're navigating this tension. They're building something generative (a community resilience project, an immigrant rights group, a documentary production company) but they need to communicate with people still embedded in the old systems. They need brand systems fluent in multiple registers: something reassuring to funders, grounded enough for longtime organizers, and simple enough for the person just tuning in.
This requires remaining present to complexity, rather than escaping into purity or the romanticism of bygone eras. After reading and re-reading Adam's piece, one line kept echoing for me: that mutant systems signal "a refusal to romanticize purity, nostalgia, or tradition." That word—romanticize—is the key. We ought not apply those styles blindly, but with intention, and integrity. That I do agree with, wholeheartedly.
Finding alignment
Adam's piece ends with an invitation to hold two truths at once, and I think that's what we're doing. We're more aligned than our vocabularies suggest. We're both trying to practice with integrity in impossible conditions. We both understand that transformation happens from within systems, not outside them. We're both suspicious of design that optimizes for engagement over meaning, that reduces people to data points in attention economies.
The world is coming undone, and design won't save it. But thoughtful, conscious design (whether mutant or durable or something we haven't named yet) can help us stay oriented while we collectively mutate into whatever comes next. The scaffolding matters, even if it's temporary.
In the ruins of old systems, we need both demolition crews and careful builders. They're both advancing mutation in their own way, constructing new frameworks as old ones are falling apart. I'm grateful for Adam's call to embrace the chaos. I'm also committed to creating spaces of clarity within it.
It's true: the future isn't a style, it's a system waiting to emerge. And every system needs structure—and space enough to mutate.
