In this month’s issue of Communication Arts, columnist Natalia Ilyin discusses the process of creating stories–mythologies, as Roland Barthes would call them–as part of the design process. It’s a wonderful article, yet simultaneously alarming. I’ve excerpted part of it here:

A designer wants to “Make Things Better.” And this ideal hints at a different plane of consciousness, a place of perfection, just like the construction of a story hints at a world where things can make sense. Designers tell everyday people that there is a beautiful world out there, just out of reach. We design bits and pieces and sometimes whole scenaria of a beautiful world that they can be a part of, if they buy the artifacts of our story.

We may call ourselves nihilists, we may call ourselves monists, but we promote a view of reality that is dualist: A person in our society lives in a world of job and mortgage and family, but believes that right out of sight there is another world, the one described by L.L.Bean, the one described by Design Within Reach, the happy family of the IKEA catalog—a carefree world that he himself almost has, although he cannot quite seem to get there.

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Since we are the people who give the stories of a culture their recognizable forms, we participate in creating culture’s ideal vision of itself. We are, in fact, propagandists.

Ilyin notes that perhaps Americans have gotten a little too good at buying into these artificial worlds that designers conjure up; we consume relentlessly, complain loudly when we hit the most minor and irrelevant of inconveniences, and worst of all, many of us seem largely unable to think outside of this beautifully designed box.

Could it be that Baudrillard was right all along–that we’re happier living inside a simulacrum of photo shoot-ready reality that has been so art directed and airbrushed that it becomes more and more difficult to grasp what’s really going on around us?

In many cases I worry that it’s true.  We vacation in Vegas and marvel at how “real” the canals and the painted sky of the Venetian seem.  We watch Gordon Ramsay on Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen and then dine at his restaurants, marveling at how perfect they are, just like the TV show suggested they would be.

Ilyin hits what I think might be a major nerve when she suggests that “the America we continue to reference does not actually exist. The old myth has not grown, has not changed. It is an aging story.”  We are highly dependent on foreign oil, she points out; that’s no secret, but advertisers continue to downplay alternative energy because car manufacturers can make much more money on a gas-guzzling beast of a machine that is constructed largely of parts that were imported.  So much for good old “American-made quality.”

The real question here is, what should the story we tell about America truly be?  Must we continue living in a semi-conscious state, where most of these pieces of Americana that we adorn our homes with are manufactured in Mexico or China or Thailand, or is there an inherent danger in deluding ourselves into thinking that we’re as self-sufficient as ever?

As a designer I think I myself need to give a significant amount of thought to what my own work says.  Some time ago I wrote some notes to myself about an art project that I wanted to embark on; its tentative title was “Points of Origin,” and to that end I began collecting various images in a morgue file that I hoped to incorporate into a project. Looking in the folder, there are lots of very large ideas there–photos of spiral galaxies and cellular clusters.  Perhaps I’d be better served by starting at the humanistic, individual level if I ever revisit the project.