Eye Magazine

When I saw the release of Silvio Lorusso’s What Design Can’t Do, I bought it immediately based on the title alone. One of the book’s opening epigraphs (by Antonio Gramsci) sums up the predicament of a designer in 2025 perfectly: ‘The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.’ The back cover blurb is more blunt: ‘[I]f you feel cheated, disappointed or betrayed by design, this book is for you.’ Regardless of age, I’d wager this describes more than a few working in design today.

Positing design amid a series of precarious ‘middle’ states, then splitting into two sections, ‘Expectations’ and ‘Reality,’ What Design Can’t Do promises frank talk and Lorusso delivers with a thorough, learned walk (496 footnotes over its 340 pages) through all the ways that graphic design yields disillusion. The book’s design is as sobering as the subject matter: predominantly text-based, printed on uncoated paper stock reminiscent of trade paperbacks, the occasional imagery (mostly internet memes) reproduced in black and white with coarse line screens. It vibes more manifesto than monograph. However seemingly modest the packaging, What Design Can’t Do is a colossal achievement of scholarship, synthesis, and, most importantly, honesty. Lorusso dismantles just about every Pollyannish framing of design, from the crassly professional to the most academic and rarefied.

Lorusso’s lucid and refreshing frankness is rare in a contemporary design discourse that is often polarised between the ethically challenged promotional sycophancy of the professional set and the speculative dreams in, and insulated by, academia. That alone makes the book a success …

Eric Heiman, principal at Volume Inc. and professor at California College of the Arts (CCA)

Read the full version in Eye no. 109 vol. 28, 2025