Why Design Matters for the Future of Cameroon
Design is not a luxury but a psychological and civic necessity: the aesthetic quality of our built environment shapes who we become. Drawing on the 2018 presidential race and broader historical examples, the writer argues that Cameroon's future depends on treating design—from campaign materials to urban planning—as a serious act of nation-building.
This year’s race for Etoudi was different from any other we have witnessed before. This year, we pushed candidates to do things like tell us their political programs. Here on PoiseSocial, we reviewed the political programs of four candidates we thought were the spice to the whole event. We talked much on the content of their programs and every now and then, mostly in the comments sections of the posts, we talked of their tastes in terms of aesthetics.
Osih, Kamto, and Akere really shone when it came to the quality of their presentation; Osih in particular. I was particularly disappointed with Cabral. One would have imagined that his youth would mean he has a better eye for and appreciation of design. Kamto changed the design theme of his presentations quite a lot but the quality was good. Osih and Akere maintained a theme and wrapped everything they did around that theme. When you saw pink and green, it was Osih and when you saw orange, yellow and blue, it was Akere.
Design is the posh word for thinking a lot about how stuff looks. A designed object is one whose makers worked long and hard to get it just right. Most of the world has sadly not been well designed. It’s full of office towers, door handles, beds, lamps, and plates that have been deeply unloved and were thrown together in a hurry by untalented people.
When people people around the world lack the bare necessities, it can be tempting to say that good design can’t really matter that much but it does desperately so because of a weird quirk of our psychology - we feel like and in a sense are different people depending of what is in front of our eyes. Design matter matters because our identities and moods are fluid and shifting and its often the quality of the designed environment that determines whether we’ll feel confident or defeated, at ease or guarded, generous spirited or alienated.
One of the great debates about how much design should matter took place in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe between the catholics and the protestants. Broadly speaking, the protestants didn’t believe in spending much money on design. They put up simple functional churches, painted them plain white inside with minimal bother. Nowadays, many protestant churches continue to look extraordinarily cheap and basic, the intellectual thought being that what really matters is certain ideas and those ideas enter your mind through your understanding and not through your senses; you can get close to God by reading the bible in a hayloft, you don’t need a fancy building.
The catholics begged to differ. They invested heavily in designing stunning stained-glass windows, beautifully carved angels and passionate renditions of the life of christ because they fervently believed that our environments do change who we are. We may be further or nearer to God depending on what’s on the wall or how high the ceiling is.
Governments have always understood and respected the underlying idea that design changes us. Nazi designers paid a huge amount of attention to making sure the designed world will speak of Nazi values like aggression and power much as modern german architects have tried to ensure that contemporary Berlin will project an image of democracy, peace and openness.
We mould ourselves to the spirit that emanates from the objects around us. We become a little as they are even if we are not always able to say quite how the objects make us feel we all sense a spirit, better or worse, that emanates from a given set of objects. Design therefore matters because beautiful design encourages our better sides while ugly design stokes our worst ones. We should shoot for good design not out of some superfluous expensive taste but because good design helps us become the best versions of ourselves.
It is for this reason that the greatest inventions come for the more developed countries. Between when you wake up in America to when you settle down in your office desk, you have seen a lot of beautifully designed cars, buildings, etc that keep your mind in a hopeful and high spirited space.In Cameroon however, functionality seems to be the limit to design.
Personally, I can tell if I am attending an event or not based on the design of the flyers. The design tells me the taste level of the organizing committee and usually serves as an accurate predictor of the quality you expect. Design does not rest only on objects, we have to start thinking of the design of our cities which as we have established can determine our general mood and really be a catalyst to a more creative, happy and fulfilling lifestyle.
- Tino Foy
Written during Cameroon's 2018 presidential election, this piece reflects a moment when civic discourse was beginning to extend beyond policy substance into the signals candidates send through visual presentation and aesthetic choice. The writer situates design thinking within a moment of heightened political attention and implicit hope that how things are presented matters as much as what they contain.
The essay articulates a democratic principle often overlooked in resource-constrained contexts: that beauty and intentionality in public life are not frivolous but formative. It remains resonant because it claims that design—of cities, institutions, campaigns, everyday objects—is a tool through which societies either cultivate their better impulses or enable their worst ones. The argument against false dichotomies between functionality and aesthetics still speaks to how nations imagine and build themselves.