Bad Mood: On Design and 'Empathy'

Evocative design is not only concerned with enriching our experience of our environment: it can also be used to seduce us into consuming. Empathy is as crucial to this strategy of entrapment as it is to designing with more magnanimous aims in mind. Benjamin H Bratton, Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego, reflects on the matter, and considers whether the moodlessness that defines seemingly empathy‐free design is necessarily a bad thing.