Product designers have developed an unfortunate habit of appropriating architectural movements, stripping them of their philosophical foundations, and reducing them to a set of optimistic but still existentially restrained aesthetic guidelines. Brutalism is perhaps the most prevalent example of this trend.
The brutalist movement emerged from post-war Britain's urgent need for social reconstruction in the early 1950s. Rather than merely an exercise in aesthetic provocation, as some later interpretations suggested, brutalism represented a radical reimagining of architecture's social purpose. The brutalist housing blocks that rose from London's bomb-scarred landscapes were architectural manifestos in concrete; each attempted to realize the principle that access to sunlight, green spaces, and community areas weren't luxuries for the wealthy, but fundamental human rights. Though the execution sometimes fell short of these lofty ambitions, the underlying social philosophy remained revolutionary.
Through a contemporary aesthetic lenses, one may argue that brutalism is an ugly form of design. But through a philosophical lens, we can give ourselves permission to shift beyond what we see toward how we experience. So what do we experience when we experience brutalism?
We experience truth—not the superficial truth of surfaces, but the profound truth of material existence. This is our reality; this is our reality. In brutalist spaces, every beam, joint, and mechanical system presents itself without pretense. It is an architecture of radical authenticity, where the raw material surfaces become a kind of architectural dermis, bearing witness to their own creation through patterns and construction marks that remain deliberately unmasked, exposed, vulnerable not in the structural sense but in the semantic sense.
But more fundamentally, we experience a kind of architectural democracy through an experiential language of authentic presence. These are, like some of us, spaces that refuse to perform social status through artificial refinement, where the deliberate exposure of its own nature mirrors our own struggle with authenticity in an increasingly mediated world. The inanimate material says, in a rather human way: "This is what I am. This is how I was made." It's an architecture that strips away the comfortable lies we tell ourselves about class, status, and social hierarchy, replacing them with brutal honesty about the nature of built space, about human habitation, and about ourselves. This is what I am. This is how I was made.
Brutalism in design demands that we confront our own relationship with authenticity in order to experience a radical proposition about human dignity: that truth, even in its roughest form, has more value than comfortable illusions. That architecture can serve a higher purpose than mere aesthetic pleasure. That in stripping away artifice, we might find something more real—a kind of spatial honesty that speaks to the fundamental equality of human experience.
What we're currently calling "neo-brutalism" in digital design bears little resemblance to these principles. Instead, it has become shorthand for a particular kind of startup aesthetic, where high-contrast colors, deliberate "roughness," and playful irregularity bring a kind of nostalgic variance to what is typically the same things we do in all software: create data, retrieve data, update data, and delete data. While these design choices are fun and engaging to those who appreciate the minimalism, they serve primarily as brand differentiators in increasingly crowded digital marketplaces. This kind of superficial decoration is what original brutalism stood against—and reminds me of the kind of superficial social decorations with which bloated technology companies perpetuate their cultural facades.
Brutalism in product design challenges us to move beyond surface-level aesthetics, to embrace its radical ethos, and to expose ourselves—not code, not servers—as the raw material of product design. This might mean making accessibility not just a consideration but a foundational principle (e.g., [and despite my personal opinions about them] Adobe's React ARIA components). This might mean prioritizing functional needs over visual trends, even when it sacrifices popular design patterns (e.g., the Inclusive Components project). This might mean creating systems that serve all users equally, regardless of their technical expertise or economic status.
Whatever the case for us individually as designers and builders of products, remember: it is not the aesthetic differences between products that lend one toward brutalism—it is the revolutionary spirit embodied by design choices that presents us not with but into the existential vulnerability of confronting who we are and how we are made.