I have submitted a paper to the NORDES 2023 Doctoral Consortium exploring something that has been building throughout this series: the psychodynamic processes that emerge when designers attempt to work with social material, and the vocabulary we lack for talking about them.
The submission, titled "Crucifying 'Service Design Jesus': Exploring Social Defences Encountered in the Design Process", draws on case reflections from my work at SCÖ and connects to psychodynamic theory from the Tavistock tradition. The core argument is that design practice and design research have developed sophisticated accounts of how social structures can be shaped through design (Vink & Koskela-Huotari, 2021), but remain poorly equipped to describe what happens when social material resists being worked, and what that resistance does to the designer.
The Problem
Throughout this series I have been circling a set of related observations. In the post on organisational metaphors, I described the "Jesus metaphor" - the expectation that the designer will work miracles, transforming intractable structural problems through sheer force of method and charisma. In performance and substance, I explored how organisations can adopt the forms of design without producing its intended effects, and how the gap between performance and substance gets managed through institutional decoupling.
What the doctoral consortium submission attempts is a more systematic treatment of the mechanisms at work. I draw on Fotaki and Hyde's (2014) account of "organisational blind spots" - the psychodynamic processes of idealisation, splitting, and blame through which organisations sustain commitment to failing strategies. As I discussed in the limits of making visible, these are not failures of information but organised ways of not-seeing. The organisation does not refuse to see. It develops systematic methods for managing the anxiety that seeing would provoke.
What I want to add here is the designer's position within these dynamics. The designer is not simply an observer of organisational defences. The designer is recruited into them.
Idealisation, Splitting, and Blame
The submission develops three interrelated processes, each grounded in case material from SCÖ and from an earlier gender equity project in Swedish rehabilitation services.
Idealisation is the process through which the designer becomes the bearer of organisational hopes. Amongst many proponents of service design there is an observably idealistic streak - it is easier to find accounts of how design can reshape social structures, transform organisational cultures, and redesign complex sociotechnical systems than it is to find accounts of when it has not been possible to do so. This idealism is not incidental. Von Busch and Palmås (2022) have critiqued the "utopian idealism" in design practice, and Stankiewicz (1987) identifies a "Hegelian idealism" that privileges mind and idea over material conditions. In my experience at SCÖ, this idealisation was projected onto me personally - what I described as the Jesus metaphor captures how the designer becomes a messianic figure onto whom others project their aspirations for change.
This connects to something I have been observing more broadly: what Alvesson and Spicer (2012) call "functional stupidity" - the organisationally-supported lack of reflexivity, substantive reasoning, and justification that allows institutions to continue operating without confronting uncomfortable truths. Functional stupidity is not individual ignorance. It is a collective arrangement that suppresses critical thinking because critical thinking would be disruptive. When design is idealised, its capacity to surface inconvenient truths is neutralised. The designer is simultaneously expected to see clearly and to not disturb the arrangements that depend on not-seeing.
Splitting is the process through which the social gets divided into manageable parts. In the Nordes submission, I explore how design practice itself participates in splitting - the designerly use of personas, for instance, transforms "the social" into "the individual", projecting individual characteristics onto collective phenomena. There is a further split between the ideals of the design project and what it takes to realise them. Designers are simultaneously expected to deliver transformative outcomes and to absorb the resistance, conflict, and opposition that transformative work provokes. The idealism and the difficulty are treated as separate rather than as inseparable aspects of the same situation.
Blame is what happens when idealisation fails. If the designer has been positioned as the one who will make things right, then the designer becomes the explanation when things do not go right. The designer who provoked uncomfortable truths becomes the target for the discomfort those truths created. As I noted in images of organisation, it is easier for managers to project negative emotions onto the designer who surfaced them than it is to reflect on the organisational conditions those emotions reveal.
Emotional Labour and Professional Practice
One dimension the submission explores that I have not addressed directly in this series is the emotional labour involved in design work. Drawing on Hochschild (2012), I argue that the expectation for designers to manage others' anxieties - absorbing projection, carrying hope, weathering blame - constitutes a form of emotional labour that design's professional discourse largely ignores. The design research community has begun to acknowledge this (Hay & Vink, 2023; Yee et al., 2024), but there is still a gap between design's self-presentation as a transformative, participatory practice and the tools it provides practitioners for managing the personal cost of that work.
The submission proposes developing two practice-based outputs: a self-reflective aide for individual designers and a group-based activity for surfacing social defences in participatory settings. Both draw on the Tavistock tradition's emphasis on making defensive processes available for conscious examination - not to eliminate them (defences exist for reasons) but to prevent them from operating invisibly.
Connections
Writing this submission has clarified how several threads in my doctoral work connect. The technomagic concept I have drawn from Wastell throughout the project is itself a social defence - a way of managing the anxiety of complex problems by investing magical properties in technology. The abstract signifier phenomenon, where terms like "AI" or "data science" absorb incompatible meanings, functions as a form of organisational splitting - keeping contradictions from becoming visible by ensuring they never occupy the same semantic space.
What the doctoral consortium submission attempts is to bring these observations under a common framework. Idealisation, splitting, blame, and projection are not separate problems. They are aspects of a single dynamic: the way organisations manage anxiety about change by recruiting particular actors - designers, consultants, technology - to carry that anxiety on the organisation's behalf.
The submission also connects to the companion paper Ana and I are presenting at Nordes on generative metaphors for the service designer role. The ten metaphors we identified - healer, plumber, teacher, evangelist, democrat, bureaucrat, and so on - can be understood as different positions within this defensive system. Each metaphor assigns the designer a particular role in the organisation's management of its own anxieties about change. The "miracle worker" metaphor persists not because anyone genuinely expects miracles but because it provides a container for hopes that would otherwise have nowhere to go.
What This Means for the Series
This submission marks a shift in how I am thinking about the "social materials" framing that has structured this series. In the earlier posts, I explored how design works with intangible materials - metaphors, counterfactuals, organisational structures. The implicit assumption was that these materials, while complex, were available for design to work with. What the psychodynamic perspective introduces is a different possibility: that social materials do not simply resist being worked because they are complex. They resist because the resistance itself serves a function. Social defences are not obstacles to be overcome. They are load-bearing structures that organisations have built to manage anxiety, and removing them without understanding what they support risks collapse rather than transformation.
This has implications for how I think about the relationship between making visible and creating change. If visibility itself provokes defensive responses, then the design orthodoxy of "surface the problem and people will act on it" requires qualification. Sometimes making things visible strengthens defences rather than dissolving them.