Rethinking Design Careers: Co-Ops, Collectives, and the Post-Growth Path
#009: Why opting out of growth-at-all-costs may be the most meaningful design choice you make.
👋 Welcome to Systems & Signals! I publish two issues a week:
Tuesdays focus on design leadership — practical insights and tips on teams, orgs, hiring, and navigating modern product environments.
Thursdays zoom out to explore design at higher altitudes — power dynamics, socioeconomic systems, global conflict, and the futures we’re shaping through design.
I’d love to know what’s resonating. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or on Bluesky @delabar.design.
Most designers got into this work because we care — about people, about systems, about making things better. But the longer you stay in this field, the harder it becomes to ignore the contradiction at its core: design asks us to empathize, while the systems we design for often ask us to extract.
The incentives are clear and relentless: maximize engagement, optimize conversion, drive growth. Success is measured in metrics that rarely reflect whether we’ve actually helped anyone — only whether we’ve moved the needle in a dashboard built for someone else’s bonus.
Over time, that dissonance takes a toll. Some of us try to rationalize it (“that’s just how the system works”), while others burn out or leave entirely. But a growing number of designers are choosing a different path — not just a different job, but a different relationship to labor altogether. They’re choosing to work outside the system, or at least at its edges, in structures that make room for values beyond profit and hypergrowth.
What if your job didn’t require you to compromise?
Worker-owned co-ops are one of the most compelling alternatives. They challenge the default assumption that companies must serve external investors, prioritizing instead the people who do the work. In a co-op, ownership is shared among the workers themselves, and major decisions are made democratically. There’s no C-suite carving off a disproportionate share of profits, no board pressuring leadership to cut headcount to improve quarterly margins. It’s a structure that redistributes power, aligns incentives, and makes it far more possible to say no to work that doesn’t align with your values.
Take Design Action Collective, for example — a worker-owned studio providing branding and design services for social justice organizations and progressive causes. Everyone on the team earns a similar wage. Everyone has a vote. The model allows them to focus entirely on the kind of work they believe the world needs more of — and to do it without having to justify the business case to a distant stakeholder.
It’s a structure that redistributes power, aligns incentives, and makes it far more possible to say no to work that doesn’t align with your values.
Or consider Radish Lab, which evolved into a co-op after years of operating as a mission-driven studio. That shift wasn’t just about fairness — it was a structural commitment to the kind of collaboration and equity they already believed in. Other groups, like CoLab Cooperative, focus on technology and open-source solutions for movements and organizations working for systemic change. What unites them isn’t aesthetic or domain — it’s governance and intent.
Beyond co-ops: expanding the menu of possibilities
Co-ops aren’t the only model. Designers are increasingly finding ways to work together in structures that prioritize purpose, autonomy, and mutual accountability — and that allow them to remain small enough, or aligned enough, to resist the gravitational pull of growth-at-all-costs capitalism.
Some form freelance collectives, where a handful of trusted practitioners share clients, leads, tools, and decision-making without formalizing into a legal entity. Others participate in mutual aid guilds or join creative cooperatives like RADCAT that exist somewhere between studio and community.
Many more embed themselves in nonprofits or public-sector organizations where the challenges are complex, the systems are messy, and the stakes are tangible. Civic tech initiatives like 18F and the U.S. Digital Service offer opportunities to work on services that people rely on every day — not to drive shareholder value, but to make government work better for the public.
Still others are reimagining the traditional startup path — building B Corps or forming mission-led organizations that bake ethics into their operating agreements, cap executive compensation, and seek alternatives to venture capital, like revenue-based financing or community-owned platforms (see: Open Collective, Zebras Unite).
The common thread is not a single solution but a shared refusal to accept the default. These designers and builders are asking a different set of questions: Who benefits from our work? Who decides what gets built? What are we optimizing for — and why?
Trade-offs worth considering
Of course, none of these models are free of trade-offs. Working in a small co-op or collective often means tighter budgets, slower decision-making, and limited access to benefits. Scaling impact is hard. Consensus governance can be messy. And because these models exist on the fringes of the mainstream economy, they sometimes require operating with a different definition of success — one not measured solely in headcount growth or quarterly revenue.
But what they offer in return is something many designers are quietly hungry for: the ability to do good work in a way that feels ethically and emotionally sustainable. A team that values care as much as craft. The freedom to say no. The dignity of co-creating your workplace instead of enduring it.
In a time when AI threatens to automate much of what designers once considered core craft, these structures shift the focus back to what can’t be automated: trust, alignment, shared intent, and the political and emotional labor of working together.
Design’s role in shaping labor
There’s a deeper layer here worth naming. Designers are not just workers within a system — we are also architects of systems themselves. We shape flows, policies, interactions, and defaults. That means we have a responsibility not just to our end users but to each other, and to the conditions under which our own labor is organized.
Design co-ops, collectives, and mission-driven orgs are not just an escape route for the disillusioned. They are design choices — alternative answers to the question, “What should the experience of work feel like?” In that sense, they are part of the same broader shift we see in union organizing, anti-monopolist tech efforts, and the resurgence of interest in localism and mutual aid: an attempt to reclaim agency in the face of a system that often feels extractive and dehumanizing.
What now?
If you’re reading this and feeling a pull — that quiet, persistent curiosity about whether your skills could be put to use in a different context — consider it a signal worth listening to. You don’t need to quit your job tomorrow or launch a co-op next week. But you might start by expanding your sense of what’s possible.
Here are a few places to explore:
Design Action Collective – worker-owned studio serving progressive causes
RADCAT – a collective of designers and technologists working for justice
Zebras Unite – movement for ethical, community-driven entrepreneurship
Open Collective – transparent infrastructure for funding collectives
Start.coop – accelerator for cooperative businesses
18F / USDS – civic tech design in government
I’d love to hear from you if you’re working in one of these models — or thinking about starting something new. These stories don’t get enough airtime, and I want to help surface more of them.
Final thought
Not everyone will want to work in a co-op, and that’s okay. But everyone deserves to know that alternatives exist — and that meaningful, ethical, impactful design work doesn’t have to come at the cost of your values.
The system won’t reinvent itself. But designers — especially when we organize, collaborate, and build deliberately — can.
And in a world that often mistakes scale for success, that might be the most radical design act of all.