Mixing Messages on Designer's Positioning

(x, y, z) MIXING MESSAGES ON DESIGNER’S POSITIONING

Mixing Messages é um trabalho de multirreferenciação que tem por base o artigo de Andrew Howard “There is such a thing as society”, escrito em 1994, e que se ramifica noutros quatro artigos com relevância para aquela que é uma preocupação sobre a posição que o designer deve assumir na sociedade.

Andrew Howard toma como ponto de partida o Manifesto First Things First (escrito por Ken Garland em 1964) para desenvolver o artigo em volta da função e do propósito social do design gráfico, um tema que começou a ser amplamente debatido nos anos 90. “Ver o design gráfico como forma de produção social em vez de actos de criatividade individual significa reconhecer que este é sujeito às mesmas forças económicas e ideológicas que moldam outras formas de actividade social humana.“. Apesar disto, existe a ideia de que não cabe ao designer fazer a análise do conteúdo do trabalho em relação à politica, economia etc. A propósito desta ideia, Katherine McCoy escreve em 1993 “Good Citizenship: Design as a Social and Political Force”, no qual apela à necessidade dos designers serem mais activos na formação da sociedade, de serem bons cidadãos. Apesar da noção de que o profissional de design deve ser neutro, distanciando-se dos seus valores políticos e éticos, “o ideal de design livre de valores é um mito periogoso. De facto, todas as soluções de design carregam preconceitos, quer de forma explicita ou implícita.”. No seguimento desta noção, é importante referenciar Michael Rock no seu artigo “Can Design be Socially Responsible?” de 1992, no qual Rock aborda a questão do design socialmente responsável, contrapondo a consciência social e a individual, sensibilidade ambiental e a procura pelo que é socialmente relevante na prática do design. Dentro da ideia de Andrew Howard de que “o design gráfico nunca pode ser visto individualmente, mas apenas inserido num contexto histórico e social, que o molda e se deixa moldar por este.”, faz sentido destacar o texto que Andrew Blauvet publica em 1994, intitulado “In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part I” – Blauvelt explora dois conceitos interessantes que reportam àquilo que é a posição do designer na sociedade. Por um lado, o designer tem um papel na construção de artefactos culturais e ao mesmo tempo vive na sociedade onde estes são distribuidos. Considerando estes factores, o designer tem de procurar posicionar-se e relacionar-se com e na sociedade. Outro artigo de relevância neste tema é escrito por Michael Bierut em 1992 e intitula-se “Waiting for Permission”. Bierut aborda uma experiência feita nos anos 60 sobre comportamento social, que usa como termo comparativo à relação do designer com o cliente e a audiência (a sociedade). Apesar da consciência que o designer tem vindo a ganhar a nível social e ambiental, a relação que este mantém com o cliente fá-lo reprimir essa consciência para tomar uma postura “profissional”. É tempo de criar parcerias deste tipo de relações, de modo a que o designer sirva o cliente e paralelamente, a sociedade.

DESIGN BEYOND COMMODIFICATION (Andrew Howard, 2000)

FIRST THINGS FIRST 2000 (Adbusters, 2000)

IN AND AROUND: CULTURES OF DESIGN AND THE DESIGN OF CULTURES, PART I (Andrew Blauvelt, 1994, p. 11)

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS SOCIETY (Andrew Howard, 1994, p. 3)

GOOD CITIZENSHIP: DESIGN AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL FORCE (Katherine McCoy, 1993, p. 21) CAN DESIGN BE SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE? (Michael Rock, 1992, p. 17)

WAITING FOR PERMISSION (Michael Bierut, 1992, p. 25)

GUERRILLA GRAPHICS (Steven Heller, 1991) DISPOSABILITY, GRAPHIC DESIGN, STYLE, AND WASTE (Karrie Jacobs, 1990)

FIRST THINGS FIRST (Ken Garland, 1964)

There Is Such A Thing As Society

By Andrew Howard

In 1964, British designer Ken Garland and a group of twentyone colleagues issued a manifesto entitled “First Things First.”

Aimed at fellow graphic designers, it was a succinct and gutsy appeal to reject the “high pitched scream of consumer selling” and omnipotent lure of the advertising industry in favor of what was defined as socially useful graphic design work. The manifesto was reproduced in the publication Modern Publicity, together with an interview in which Garland attempted to defend it to Douglas Haines (described as a creative executive with British agency and marketing specialists Mather and Crowther), who was hostile to the idea that there is anything wrong with the marketplace or that the advertising industry does anything other than a good and necessary job.

What makes the manifesto interesting today is the realization that its premises appear as radical now as they did thirty years ago. And more significantly, the issue it addresses is as unresolved now as it was then. But the manifesto also touches on a dimension that seems to be missing from current debate: a concern with the social function and purpose of graphic design.

Discussion in the profession in the mid 1990s appears to have crystallized into a debate between two schools of thought. On the one hand there is the “new wave” of Macintosh-devoted design, some of which has been produced under the theoretical auspices of poststructuralist analysis and is guided by an exploration of the formal problems of representation and meaning, as in the work of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Some of its exponents claim that their output represents a new aesthetic; their critics dismiss it as a form of visual pyrotechnics, a lavish aesthetic feast but low on nutritional content.

Such critics believe that despite its stated intentions (where there have been intentions to state), this work is aimless and impenetrable. On the other hand, a trend has emerged more recently that claims to seek a new clarity--of intention as well as aesthetic. Rick Poynor (Eye, Vol. 3, No. 9) suggests that

4

there is a growing reaction by “design students, teachers, and young professionals” against what are seen as the “excesses” of formal experimentation and in favor of a less ambiguous, more message-related program. In the Netherlands, designers Dingeman Kuilman and Neils Meulman are calling for an approach that is not sophisticated, not technological, and not intellectual, just “basic” (Emigre, No. 25). For some designers, and I would include myself and many of those I class as colleagues here, a search for formal solutions has only ever been a part of, not an alternative to, a longer-term socially and politically influenced project. For us (only an “us” in as much as we have histories and influences in common), to interpret much of what is characterized as “new wave” as playfully selfindulgent is not a refusal to “join in the party,” nor does it signify lack of interest in new technologies and experimentation.

Rather, it springs from a continuing interest that goes beyond a search for parts of the design jigsaw, of which formal visual vocabulary is a piece, to an understanding of how the jigsaw fits together. It is perhaps understandable that recent debate has centered on conflicting ideas about what contemporary design should look like and what methods it should employ in order to create understanding: how it should function formally.

The impact of computer technology has transformed the nature of the design activity, allowing designers to assume control (competently or not) of many stages in the production process that were traditionally shared among a number of people with different skills and expertise. It has also had a profound effect on aesthetics. The computer makes it possible to construct multifaceted compositions with relative ease and at vastly increased speeds. Its capacity for sampling, duplication, and the integrated assembly of all manner of visual elements has given designers the opportunity to view countless variations and to realize more visually complex ideas. Visual, formal possibilities have taken center stage.

Discussion of content, apart from as formal exploration, has tended to concentrate on the internal subject matter of individual works. But there is another sort of content in graphic design: its social content as a form of social production. The significance of this lies in the ways in which function influences form and purpose informs content.

It suggests that the character of our work is determined by more than our intentions alone, since production processes and the social context within which the work is received have a profound impact in directing, respectively, its aesthetic and the kinds of understanding it is capable of generating.

5 . There is Such a Thing as Society

These issues touch on the very definition of graphic design. To see graphic design as a form of social production rather than as individual acts of creativity means recognizing that it is subject to the same economic and ideological forces that shape other forms of human social activity. It means that in order to understand the nature of our activity and to think about its possibilities, we must be able to locate it within a historical context that relates it to economic and political forces.

“We have trained a profession that feels political or social concerns are either extraneous to our work, or inappropriate.”

Good Citizenship: Design as a Social and Political Force, p. 21

“All in all, designers in the nineties seem to want more than ever to create work that’s appropriate, that’s relevant, that challenges the client’s brief, that’s aimed at more than the next design competition.”

Waiting for Permission, p. 25

This is (strangely) problematic, as Anne Burdick rightly states (Eye, Vol. 3, No. 9), because “it is considered outside our role to analyze the content of our work in relation to politics, theory, economics, morals, and so on.” But if the present debate is about creating a body of work that is meaningful to people in general, that plays a part in the development of a stimulating visual culture, then it must involve understanding how our culture functions, how it is shaped, and how it shapes our perceptions of ourselves. It means addressing people’s need for a culture in which they can participate actively, for which they can help shape the agenda. It will inevitably involve an analysis of what prevents us from building such a culture. The economic organization of our society depends on the promise of ever-expanding production and the building of markets to absorb that production. We have the means to make goods in sufficient quantity and range to satisfy all our basic needs. But, “goods are no longer sold on the basis that they satisfy a known and voiced human need, but instead demands are developed through ‘research’ and through marketing in order that commodities may be produced to meet them,” explains Owen Kelly (Community, Art, and the State: Storming the Citadels, 1984). Goods are only a means to an end: the production of surplus value. Consequently, “there can be no such thing as sufficient production of any commodity, since there is no such thing as sufficient surplus value.” Whether one sees advanced capitalism and the consumer society as good or bad, one cannot ignore the ways they have encroached on previously private areas of consciousness. The building of markets is not a purely economic exercise: it is we, the “citizens” who are the intended markets, and their creation is very much an ideological task. This involves a process, explains Kelly, in which our needs are broken down into smaller and smaller units, “so that they match (and can be met by) the outputs of a profitable production process.” “Thus, for example,” says Kelly, “the desire to avoid giving off offensive odors is redefined as a positive, and normal, desire to achieve ‘personal hygiene,’ and

Andrew Howard . 6

is pictured as a continuous, and inevitable, struggle in which only the deliberately antisocial would refuse to participate.”

Convinced of the need to obtain this “personal hygiene,” we are offered our bodies divided into separate marketing zones — underarm, mouth, vagina, feet — within each of which, writes Kelly, “the consumer can be educated to make choices (roll-on or stick, fragrant or natural), and within each of which separate innovations are possible.” This fragmentation of our needs and desires does not operate only in relation to areas of industrialized production. It is paralleled in the operations of the state, from health and medicine to education and leisure, where we are taught to consume professionalized services. In this sense there are no areas of our personal lives that are not subject to the social pressures of the marketplace, wherein decisions that might have been made by consenting citizens are reduced to purchasing choices made by passive consumers. Since the 1950s and 1960s, writers have referred to these encroachments as inducing a state of crisis in personal and cultural life. In addition, the political avenues through which we might expect to control the decisions that govern our lives are severely restricted. Stuart Hall has talked about “a growing gap between where people are politically and the institutions and organizations which express that in a formal political way.” Recent trends reveal a growth in intense pseudoreligious movements, in nationalist and neo-fascist ideas, in young people embracing directly oppositional lifestyles. Few would deny that at the center of this is a search for something meaningful to believe in, a vision of ourselves as empowered human beings able to act upon our needs and desires as we define them. It is crucial that we recognize that there is a direct correspondence between the condition of our culture and the ways we organize the production of materials.

The form of economic organization we refer to as capitalism ceased long ago to be simply that, and has become a means of organizing the consciousness necessary for that economic system to flourish. As designers whose work is concerned with the expression and exchange of ideas and information and the construction of the visual vocabulary of day-to-day culture, we must establish a perspective on where we fit into this scheme.

We must ask in what ways our function helps to organize consciousness. We must also discover to what extent and in what ways the solutions, vocabularies, and dialogues that we are able to conceive and construct are determined for us.

We are surrounded by images that are crafted by designers. These constructions, most evidently in advertising and publicity, but not exclusively so, influence our worldviews. They create and sustain ideas about what is normal and desirable. They are cultural expressions designed to influence our aspirations and to fuel our desires. They impel us to participate in the creation of lifestyles that demand the acquisition of goods as a measure of progress and status.

We cannot allow ourselves to believe we are simply communicating information. Andrew Howard in Design Beyond Commodification

“Design’s relationship with cultural identification is a very important, that is to say, financially significant one. The “discovery” of various cultural groups within society coincides with their definition as an audience and as a market.”

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, p. 11

“With all the talk about social responsability, do we really understand the complexity of the problem as it pertains to design? “ Can Design be Socially Responsible?, p. 17

7 . There is Such a Thing as Society

The “First Things First” manifesto was an attempt at least to address these issues.Its conclusions, however, fall short of what seems necessary. Written at a time when the highintensity market was establishing itself at the heart of the design profession in Britain, it was perhaps a last-ditch attempt to hold back the flood of “gimmick merchants, status salesmen, and hidden persuaders” It starts off in a forcible and radical manner. But at the beginning of the fourth paragraph it extinguishes its own flames when it says, “We don’t advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this is not feasible”--without making clear whether or not this is perceived as desirable. After its declaration of a rebellion against the techniques and apparatus of high-pressure consumer advertising, there is a trace of retreat here, despite the fact that it would probably be defended as “realism.” Garland echoes this concession in the interview, and the power of his argument is all the less compelling for it. Early on he concurs with Haines that “we are not against advertising as a whole.

The techniques of publicity and selling are vital to Western society.” But isn’t that the problem? This allows Haines’s contention that high-pressure advertising and the ideology of the marketplace are healthy and natural to go unchallenged, and leaves an impression that what Garland is arguing for is the same cake, sliced differently. But the logic of the manifesto implies that social and cultural needs are constantly circumvented, if not distorted, by the power of an industry whose primary purpose is to create demand for consumption, regardless of usefulness. Furthermore, that the effect--on young designers in particular--of the absence of an alternative sense of what meaningful work might be is leading to a gradual erosion of enthusiasm and creativity. What is needed is a different cake altogether, but to argue for such a thing is to take a leap into the unknown. The modern advertising industry is the creation of the high-intensity market, and graphic design has always been at the center of its strategy. Its history forms a large part of the history of design. To question that industry and the ideology of consumerism it promotes is to question our whole economic organization. It is easier to argue for more of the cake. The manifesto’s concern with purpose and social function should not be confused with a moralizing preoccupation with “politically correct” subject matter. It should not be interpreted as a determinist concern with “the message,” though it does not exclude a commitment to direct (or indirect) political expression.

Andrew Howard . 8

FIRST THINGS FIRST MANIFESTO . 1964 We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, photographers and students who have been brought up in a world Devotees of the new wave well demonstrate little interin which the techniques andmay apparatus of advertising est the “message content”toapproach, perhaps haveinpersistently beenas presented us as the most lucra-justifiably, when one considers the unbelievably inane of “cultural tive, effective and desirable means of using our work talents.

We have been bombarded with publications devoted ground-breakers” such as Oliviero Toscani and his sponsors, to this belief, applauding thepeople work of those says who have Benetton.

“I want to make think,” Toscani in an flogged their skill Independent and imagination to sell such things “I want interview in The (December 16, 1992). as: cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer, them to remember a name.” Thus social criticism is appropriatstriped toothpaste, aftershave lotion, beforeshave loed in slimming the struggle forfattening brand identification.

“It [the advertising tion, diets, diets, deodorants, fizzy industry] persuades people that and theyslip-ons. are respected for what water, cigarettes, roll-ons, pull-ons

they consume, that they are only worth what they possess,” By farToscani, the greatest effort of those working in the advertissays angrily upbraiding the industry for corrupting soing industry are wasted onhethese ciety.

Most advertising, tellstrivial us, ispurposes, based onwhich the emotions contribute little orto nothing to our and has nothing do with the national product.prosperity.

One can only wonder what graveyard crosses during the Gulf War, a ship overflowing In common with an increasing numer of the general with refugees, an electric chair, children in Third World slums, public, we have reached a saturation point at which the and a nun and priest kissing have to do with expensive, mulhigh pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than ticolored knitwear? even these are surpassed

by Toscani’s sheer noise.

We thinkBut that there are other things more idea for a “fun” campaign about on. wife-beating for Guinness. worth using our skill and experience There are signs for streets buildings, books and periodicals, cataWhat makesandToscani’s ever-so-radical ideas ever so depresslogues, instructional manuals, industrial photography,industry’s ing is that his accurate critique of the advertising educational aids, films, television features, scientific effect on our aspirations and self-image appearsand to be of no industrial publications and all the other media through help to him in establishing the link between the industry and which we promote our trade, our education, our culture the economic spawned and our greater ideology awarenessthat of the world. it. Whatever his intentions, Toscani’s posters are merely a state-of-the-art marketing device masquerading social conscience.

It is extreme arroWe do not advocate theasabolition of high pressure consumer this isatnot feasible.

Norbelief do wethat wantthey need gance advertising: to throw images people in the to any what of theissues fun out But we are proposing to take be told areofoflife. social importance.

Radical work ais reversal prioritiesof in presenting favour of thecorrect more useful and opinions, never aofquestion political more lasting forms of communication. We hope that our but is concerned instead with the nature of the dialogue that society will tire of gimmick merchants, status salesmen is made possible between the author and the audience. It is and hidden persuaders, and that the prior call on our not all be clear, the other hand, inWith whatthis sense the approach skillsatwill for on worthwhile purposes. in mind advocated Dutchour designers Kuilman and Meulman we propose by to share experience and opinions, and to is basic, or what is the meaning and significance what they have to make them available to colleagues, studentsofand others who be perhaps interested. say. may Is this a private argument between them and the technological, intellectual sophisticates about the most effecsigned: Edward Wright, Geoffrey White,sausage William Slack, Cartive formal approach to sell spicy or decorative floor oline Rawlence, Ian McLaren, Sam Lambert, Ivor Kamlish, tiles? Or is the liberation from confusion they wish to achieve Gerald Jones, Bernard Higton, Brian Grimbly, John Garto reserved greaterFroshaug, purposes?

Appending political mesner,be Ken Garland,for Anthony Robin Fior, Germano sages toIvan workDodd, as if Harriet forms were empty vessels is simple-minded, Facetti, Crowder, Anthony Clift, Gerry and advocacy “basicness” is meaningless if it is concerned Cinamon, RobertofChapman, Ray Carpenter, Ken Briggs only with the internal logic of design.

BUT DOES THIS MEAN THAT FORMAL EXPLORATION, AS CONTENT, IS THE WAY FORWARD?

7 . There is Such a Thing as Society

FIRST THINGS FIRST MANIFESTO 2000 We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.

The “First Things First” manifesto was an attempt at least to address theseinissues.Its conclusions, however, Encouraged this direction, designers then apply fall theirshort skill of what necessary.

Written at a time whencoffee, the highandseems imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit intensity market was establishing itself at thecards, heartsneakers, of the toners, light beer anditheavy-duty recreational vehicles. designbutt profession in Britain, was perhaps a last-ditch atworkthe hasflood alwaysofpaid the bills, but many graphic temptCommercial to hold back “gimmick merchants, status designers have now let it become, in large what salesmen, and hidden persuaders” It starts off measure, in a forcible graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives and radical manner. But at the beginning of the fourth paradesign. The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacgraph turing it extinguishes ownthat flames when it says, “We don’t demand forits things are inessential at best. advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this isMany not feasible”--without making clear whether or with not this of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable view of as design.

Designers who their efforts primarily is perceived desirable.

After itsdevote declaration of a rebellion to the advertising, marketing and brandofdevelopment are consupagainst techniques and apparatus high-pressure and implicitly a mental environment so sumerporting, advertising, there is aendorsing, trace of retreat here, despite the saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the fact that it would probably be defended as “realism.” Garland very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and echoesinteract. this concession in theweinterview, and the power of his To some extent are all helping draft a reductive argument is all the lessharmful compelling it. Early on he concurs and immeasurably code for of public discourse. with Haines that “we are not against advertising as a whole.

There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills.

Unprecedented environmental, socialareand cultural crises The techniques of publicity and selling vital to Western demand our attention.

Many cultural interventions, society.”

But isn’t that the problem?

This allows Haines’ssocial conmarketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, tention that high-pressure advertising and the ideology educaof the tional tools, television charitable causes marketplace are healthy andprogrammes, natural to films, go unchallenged, and and other information design projects urgently require our leavesexpertise an impression that what Garland is arguing for is the and help. same We cake, sliceda differently.

But the in logic of of themore manifesto propose reversal of priorities favour useful, implieslasting that and social and cultural are constantly circumdemocratic forms needs of communication – a mindshift vented, if not by the and power of an whose away fromdistorted, product marketing toward theindustry exploration and production kinddemand of meaning.

The scope of debate is primary purpose of is atonew create for consumption, regardit must expand. Consumerism is running unconless ofshrinking; usefulness.

Furthermore, that the effect--on young deit must be challenged by other signerstested; in particular--of the absence of anperspectives alternativeexpressed, sense of in part, through the visual languages and resources of design. what meaningful work might be is leading to a gradual erosion of enthusiasm creativity.

What is needed is the a different In 1964, and 22 visual communicators signed originalcake call altogether, to argue a thing isuse. to take leapexplointo for ourbut skills to be for put such to worthwhile Withathe the unknown.

Theofmodern advertisingculture, industry is the creation sive growth global commercial their message has grown more market, urgent. Today, we renew theirhas manifesto of theonly high-intensity and graphic design always in expectation more decades will pass before it is been at the center that of itsnostrategy.

Its history forms a large heart. of design. To question that industry and part oftaken the to history the ideology of consumerism it promotes is to question our signed: Jonathan Barnbrook, Nick Bell, Andrew Blauvelt, whole Hans economic organization. It is easier to argue for more of Bockting, Irma Boom, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, the cake. manifesto’s concern purpose Chris and social Max The Bruinsma, Siân Cook, Lindawith van Deursen, Dixon, function should not beGert confused a moralizing preoccuWilliam Drenttel, Dumbar,with Simon Esterson, Vince Frost, pationKen with “politically correct” subject matter.

It should Garland, Milton Glaser, Jessica Helfand, Steven Heller, Howard,asTibor Ka, man, Jeffery Keedy, Zuzana not beAndrew interpreted a determinist concern with “the Licko, mesLupton, Katherine McCoy, aArmand Mevis, J. sage,”Ellen though it does not exclude commitment to Abbott direct Miller, Rick Poynor,expression.

Lucienne Roberts, Erik Spiekermann, Jan (or indirect) political van Toorn, Teal Triggs, Rudy VanderLans, Bob Wilkinso

Andrew Howard . 8

Devotees of the new wave may well demonstrate little interest in the “message as content” approach, perhaps justifiably, when one considers the unbelievably inane work of “cultural ground-breakers” such as Oliviero Toscani and his sponsors, Benetton. “I want to make people think,” says Toscani in an interview in The Independent (December 16, 1992). “I want them to remember a name.” Thus social criticism is appropriated in the struggle for brand identification. “It [the advertising industry] persuades people that they are respected for what they consume, that they are only worth what they possess,” says Toscani, angrily upbraiding the industry for corrupting society. Most advertising, he tells us, is based on the emotions and has nothing to do with the product. One can only wonder what graveyard crosses during the Gulf War, a ship overflowing with refugees, an electric chair, children in Third World slums, and a nun and priest kissing have to do with expensive, multicolored knitwear? But even these are surpassed by Toscani’s idea for a “fun” campaign about wife-beating for Guinness.

What makes Toscani’s ever-so-radical ideas ever so depressing is that his accurate critique of the advertising industry’s effect on our aspirations and self-image appears to be of no help to him in establishing the link between the industry and the economic ideology that spawned it. Whatever his intentions, Toscani’s posters are merely a state-of-the-art marketing device masquerading as social conscience. It is extreme arrogance to throw images at people in the belief that they need to be told what issues are of social importance. Radical work is never a question of presenting correct political opinions, but is concerned instead with the nature of the dialogue that is made possible between the author and the audience. It is not at all clear, on the other hand, in what sense the approach advocated by Dutch designers Kuilman and Meulman is basic, or what is the meaning and significance of what they have to say. Is this perhaps a private argument between them and the technological, intellectual sophisticates about the most effective formal approach to sell spicy sausage or decorative floor tiles? Or is the liberation from confusion they wish to achieve to be reserved for greater purposes? Appending political messages to work as if forms were empty vessels is simple-minded, and advocacy of “basicness” is meaningless if it is concerned only with the internal logic of design.

BUT DOES THIS MEAN THAT FORMAL EXPLORATION, AS CONTENT, IS THE WAY FORWARD?

9 . There is Such a Thing as Society

Writers such as Roland Barthes are said to have been of seminal influence in the development of the work and ideas of at least one agency of the new wave--the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Jeffery Keedy, a former Cranbrook student, says, “It was the poetic aspect of Roland Barthes which attracted me, not the Marxist analysis. After all, we’re designers working in a consumer society, and while social criticism is an interesting idea, I wouldn’t want to put it into practice” (Eye Vol. 1, No.3).

Barthes’s work is indeed poetic, which gives it a resonance lacking in much Marxist theory, but to disconnect the critique from the form seems a perverse example of literary raiding. The work of other French writers of the same period, such as the situationist Raoul Vaneigem, is also poetic and also concerned with the decay of personal and cultural life under modern capitalism. His book, The Revolution of Everyday Life deals with the subjugation of our potential to be active, independentminded, and creative. It is a complex description of our condition, which focuses on the corruption of our desires, dreams, values, and aspirations, and a ferocious social critique. If it is not on the Cranbrook reading list, perhaps it should be.

The major artistic movements of this century--the futurists, constructivists, dadaists, surrealists--all had a theory of society that guided their explorations. The exploration of the formal structure of language--its signs, symbols, and how these construct and carry meaning--should be the staple diet of designers. Language is a means through which we express our consciousness of ourselves and our relationship to the world; it is our attempts to describe our situation and to think about the future that lead us to search for appropriate vocabularies.

Language changes when it is no longer able to express what its users require of it, so unless it is to be of academic interest only, an exploration of language must also take into account the changing consciousness of human beings.

It is difficult to comprehend the point of exploring form if it is not related to contemporary problems of vocabulary and the search for meaning. The study of visual form and language is limited if it does not consider the forces of cultural production, which involve a set of social relations between producer and audience. Whether our activity and its products are open and empowering, whether they contribute to the building of a democratic culture, is not dependent only on the content of our work, but also on the productive social relations that affect the nature of the dialogues we are able to construct.

Graphic Design has a part to play in creating a visual culture that empowers and enlightens, that makes ideas and information accessible and memorable.

A large advertising poster for multicolored knitwear, for instance, is not a dialogue on equal terms, if it is a dialogue at all. It is designed to make an intervention into our consciousness in ways we cannot ignore; it shouts at us so that we may remember a name that will influence our acts of purchasing.

It is a form developed for a social context that the audience cannot control. This is what makes it oppressive. No amount of fiddling with the visual forms it employs or the message it carries will transform it into an open-ended product. But the ideology of consumerism is not limited to the world of commerce.

Our consciousness is fragmented so that we are better able to consume everything: films, music, fashion, diets, healthcare, education, information, even our own history.

Many designers may argue that their job is not politics, and they would be right. But this does not prevent us from developing ideas about cultural democracy. We cannot separate our work from the social context in which it is received and from the purpose it serves. If we care about the integrity of our design decisions, we should be concerned that the relations implicit in our communications extend active participation in our culture. If what we are looking for is meaning and significance, then the first step is to ask who controls the work and whose ends does it serve.

The computer revolution that brought us new aesthetic possibilities has given us other opportunities too. The technological condensing of the production process has the potential to alter our notion of authorship, and with it our aspirations. The technical self-sufficiency the computer has allowed may give us the conceptual space to develop a more complete consideration of our work in relation to the way it is received and the purpose it serves. It may encourage us to initiate more often, and in the process to establish partnerships and collaborations in which design is not simply a means to sell and persuade, but also a means of organizing ideas and finding forms of expression that suit the interests of a more specific audience. The work that flows from such a practice cannot be prescribed. It may or may not be sophisticated, technological, and so on. It will in no way preclude an exploration of the formal representation of language. Its content may be concerned with what it is we are able to think about (subjects), or the ways in which we are able to think (forms). It will recognize that how something is produced and distributed socially carries with it specific relations that affect the dialogue that is possible between author and audience and limit the sort of meanings that can be constructed. Above all, it will acknowledge the link between our choices as designers and the sort of culture we wish to contribute to.

This problem cannot be avoided simply by choosing between "good" or "bad" products, or between commercial and noncommercial work, since the nature of the problem is not just consumption but the ordering of our consciousness to become consumers in the first place.

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures Part I

By Andrew Blauvelt

The paradoxical nature of being both in and around is familiar to the cultural anthropologist, who might work in the field among the observed and at the same time remains apart from the observed. It is this observer status given to the anthropologist that creates this necessary dilemma. The conventional wisdom supporting the role of cultural anthropology has been its intention to study the cultures of other peoples as a way of reflecting on our own culture, or to borrow a phrase from Liberal Humanism, “To know others so that we may better understand ourselves.” The situation between an observer and an observed can never be neutral, however, since the power relationships are inevitably unequal.

The graphic designer shares a similar dilemma of being both instrumental in the making of cultural artifacts and living in the society through which they are distributed.

Graphic designers are often asked to remove themselves from their social positions and experiences and offer themselves as professionals, specialists in the various forms of visual communication. This detachment, which we might call “professionalization” or “specialization,” creates the mythical, autonomous observer in the design process. This is a learned method of being professional and a consequence of the “problem-solving process” at the core of every graphic design procedure. We are asked to be objective and to render rational decisions (solutions), and doing so places graphic design on a par with other professions.

12

The graphic designer is, of course, a member of society and thus lives with the artifacts of his or her making, as well as with the artifacts of other designers. In this way, designers are asked to be professionals outside of (to be around) culture, and at the same time, to be a part of (to be in), culture.

We are, with others in society, I am seduced by the messages of others

witnesses to and participants I appreciate the materiality of the finely printed book

in the consumption of cultural I respond to the urgency expressed by the political poster ... and I shop at the mall.

artifacts and, therefore, I am repulsed by the messages of others

share in the moments I am appalled by displays of injustice

of seduction and repulsion I am threatened by the signs of hatred ... and I shop at the mall.

that these artifacts generate.

The important lesson of this confession is that we consume cultural artifacts and their messages in different ways. While we consume these artifacts in the conventional manner of conspicuous consumption, which renders consumers as passive, blank slates upon which all forms of messages can be written, more recent research efforts have demonstrated another dimension to this idea of passive consumption, showing that we also consume artifacts symbolically and even ironically through small acts of individual resistance. I watch Melrose Place ironically, for the melodramatic plot lines and the obvious acting - it’s so bad, it’s good - while I resist buying cable television because that’s just too much television.

13 . In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures pt 1

THE DISCOVERY OF DIFFERENCE The dilemma of being both in and around culture exists at another level: at the level of individual subjectivity. I have already asserted that the phrase “in and around� constitutes a subject position, if only a paradoxical one. Just as a subject position will only be meaningful if it is defined in relationship to other positions, so too is the subject of that positioning.

We need other things to mark the boundaries of ourselves, our identities and our cultures.

Psychoanalysis tells us that this process happens at a very early age, when the child recognizes itself as a self; that is to say, as an individual, and also recognizes others as others. Similarly, cognitive psychologists have suggested that we seem predisposed at the earliest ages to recognize difference, the exceptional, as a way of making sense of the world around us.

This process of differentiation continues on a social level through identification with race, ethnicity, gender, age, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, class, etc. These social and cultural positions are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are. We find that we are culturally constructed as subjects and we are socially constructed through the identities we claim or the categories we are placed in.

Andrew Blauvelt . 14

It is easier to understand that class is a social construction but harder to consider how race is a construction, and not simply a natural phenomenon, until we realize that the idea of race emerged in a historically specific way, bolstered by the truth claims of science for various political ends. Race is not natural, it is cultural.

Gender is not natural, it is cultural. These statements are made to counter the extent to which ideas about woman, blacks, gays, etc. are so intertwined in the fabric of society as to appear inevitable and unquestionable - natural.

The relationship between self and others is a two-way street, producing effects on all parties within a power structure that is typically unequal. “The This “discovery,” others - that moment of first conshock of ofrecognition!

In an electric tact between information different groupsenvironment, and their subsequent relationships minority groups - has been characterized by the be French philosopher Jacques Derrida can no longer contained - ignored. as essentially “violent”: “... the anthropological war [is] the essenToo many people know too much about tial confrontation that opens communication between peoples and other.

Our new environment cultures, even each when that communication is not practicedcompels under the commitment and participation.

We have banner of colonial or missionary oppression.”

This violence occurs at the level ofbecome actual, lived experience involved and at the with, level of symbolic irrevocably existence, through and images; representations. and words responsible for,i.e., each other.”

Design’s relationship with cultural identification is a very important, The Medium is the Massage, Marshall that is to say, financially significant one. The “discovery” of various & Quentin Fiore, cultural groupsMcLuhan within society coincides with1967 their definition as an audience and as a market. It is no coincidence that Big Business Overaudiences a quarter-century hasturmoil passed since “discovered” other after the social of the 1950s and 1960s; thethis Civilprophecy Rights and Women’s Rights Movements to name about our technological but two. We are, in fact, witnessing renewedbydiscovery cultural relationship with aothers media of guru diversity under the banner of multiculturalism, a phenomenon that Marshall McLuhan. In the racial turbulence is reflected in “progressive” advertising campaigns. Tellingly, many of theare sixties, McLuhan sawcontributing the impact of these campaigns for fashion clientele, to the that increased informationInexchange notion that such “diversity” is “fashionable.” our discussions of others in this would culture,have it is hard to imagineparticularly a scenario that is not on society, a product of larger economic forces.

This applies to the economic on our relationships with other people. development of colonialism that brought slavery to the New World Tinged with the optimism that pervades and with it the foundations of racial supremacy, as well as to today’s all technological revolutions, McLuhan effects of global capitalism which turn those old feelings of suinjectsfor a message of intimate civic responsibility premacy into longings contact, even contact, with othanclothes, ethics language, of mutual dependency. ers - their skin, music, crafts, cuisine.It is this longing for contact with others, their exotic appeal, which drives the desire for cultural appreciation through cultural appropriation.

13 . In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures pt 1

THE DISCOVERY OF DIFFERENCE The dilemma of being both in and around culture exists at another level: at the level of individual subjectivity. I have already asserted that the phrase “in and around� constitutes a subject position, if only a paradoxical one. Just as a subject position will only be meaningful if it is defined in relationship to other positions, so too is the subject of that positioning.

We need other things to mark the boundaries of ourselves, our identities and our cultures.

Psychoanalysis tells us that this process happens at a very early age, when the child recognizes itself as a self; that is to say, as an individual, and also recognizes others as others. Similarly, cognitive psychologists have suggested that we seem predisposed at the earliest ages to recognize difference, the exceptional, as a way of making sense of the world around us.

This process of differentiation continues on a social level through identification with race, ethnicity, gender, age, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, class, etc. These social and cultural positions are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are. We find that we are culturally constructed as subjects and we are socially constructed through the identities we claim or the categories we are placed in.

Andrew Blauvelt . 14

It is easier to understand that class is a social construction but harder to consider how race is a construction, and not simply a natural phenomenon, until we realize that the idea of race emerged in a historically specific way, bolstered by the truth claims of science for various political ends. Race is not natural, it is cultural.

Gender is not natural, it is cultural. These statements are made to counter the extent to which ideas about woman, blacks, gays, etc. are so intertwined in the fabric of society as to appear inevitable and unquestionable - natural.

The relationship between self and others is a two-way street, producing effects on all parties within a power structure that is typically unequal. This “discovery,” of others - that moment of first contact between different groups and their subsequent relationships - has been characterized by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida as essentially “violent”: “... the anthropological war [is] the essential confrontation that opens communication between peoples and cultures, even when that communication is not practiced under the banner of colonial or missionary oppression.” This violence occurs at the level of actual, lived experience and at the level of symbolic existence, through words and images; i.e., representations.

Design’s relationship with cultural identification is a very important, that is to say, financially significant one. The “discovery” of various cultural groups within society coincides with their definition as an audience and as a market. It is no coincidence that Big Business “discovered” other audiences after the social turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s; the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Movements to name but two. We are, in fact, witnessing a renewed discovery of cultural diversity under the banner of multiculturalism, a phenomenon that is reflected in “progressive” advertising campaigns. Tellingly, many of these campaigns are for fashion clientele, contributing to the notion that such “diversity” is “fashionable.” In our discussions of others in this culture, it is hard to imagine a scenario that is not a product of larger economic forces. This applies to the economic development of colonialism that brought slavery to the New World and with it the foundations of racial supremacy, as well as to today’s effects of global capitalism which turn those old feelings of supremacy into longings for contact, even intimate contact, with others - their skin, clothes, language, music, crafts, cuisine.It is this longing for contact with others, their exotic appeal, which drives the desire for cultural appreciation through cultural appropriation.

15 . In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures pt 1

PICTURE THIS: VOICE AND AGENCY The debate on representation for the graphic designer seems to reside in the space between Karl Marx’s empowering dictate, “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented,”that is to say, act for others, and Gilles Deleuze’s categorical rejection of such presumed authority - “the indignity of speaking for others.” Marx’s famous dictate is the more typical task that artists and other cultural producers have assigned themselves: to speak for others. Less typical is the statement by Deleuze that suggests, perhaps, letting others speak for themselves.

The negotiation of representational strategies seems central for the graphic designer (and others) who are routinely asked to speak for others.

Graphic designers and other cultural producers are just beginning to rethink the terms of representation, away from speaking for others and towards speaking with and to others.

The factors that would allow others to speak for themselves deal with access to the means of representation that is ultimately a function of power. The debates around multiculturalism can be seen as a struggle for control over the means of representation. As Craig Owens states, it is representation itself that takes away the ability to speak for oneself.

However, the traffic in representations will not end since it is fundamental to the operation of our society. So, while increased instances of represented others (tokenism) inject some presence into the picture, they do little to explain the previous exclusions. Fundamental change is unlikely to occur through the pages of multinational corporate advertising no matter how many others are depicted. After all, have you “Come a Long Way, Baby!”? Fundamental change is much more likely to come at a broader social level through a multitude of changes from any number of sectors and inevitably it will be reflected in the construction of various representations, made by graphic designers and other cultural producers and ultimately incorporated in the constitution of identities. After all, corporate advertising campaigns and token representatives (spot the black, the Asian, the woman in the scene) do not create diversity but merely reflect it. The work of socially engaged activists, artists and designers tries to undermine the stereotype in innumerable ways; through disruptive strategies such as appropriation, subversion and inversion, as well as the destabilizing tactics of deconstructive textual readings and demystifying widely held views.

Andrew Blauvelt . 16

True inclusiveness, as a result of empowerment or agency, includes access to both the means of producing cultural representations and to the modes of their distribution in society. In this way, the voices of others will be heard only when those others have access to the larger public sphere.

While graphic designers may claim an independent status, like that of neutral observers, we find that their role is a central one in the system of representations. As producers and consumers of various cultural artifacts, understood as both tangible goods, such as books and magazines, as well as the more intangible products, such as ephemeral messages and images, graphic designers find themselves both in and around culture.

So what is the answer? The problems are multifaceted and much larger than design, which means we need a variety of responses on a variety of levels. It helps to remember that we are both designers and citizens. In this way, you can be part of the solution even if you are not designing for it. It also helps to remember that graphic design is about messages, and that our solutions are merely contributions to a larger effort.

There must be greater cultural diversity in the people who design, including an analysis of why these people are not there now. We need greater critical awareness that the teaching and practice of design occur in larger social frameworks, governed by rules of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, etc., particularly for those individuals who may not experience it themselves. We need a greater range of methods and options for practicing graphic design that begins to step outside of a reactionary response to problems with its outmoded, pyramidal (top-down) structure and towards a more inclusive, responsive position found in activities like, for example, collaboration and co-authorship. Much to the disappointment of many, these issues will not disappear with dismissals of “political correctness� since they reflect a fundamental social change that has been underway for quite some time, no matter how slow it seems in coming for the rest of us. Quite simply, design has no choice but to get used to it.

Can Design be Socially Responsible?

By Michael Rock

Responsibility is the design buzz word of the nineties, there’s no escaping it. Pick up a design magazine you’re sure to find it pop up somewhere. Big-shots, settling back after weeding trough the morass of entries from some design fashion contest, find time to lament the lack of social commitment in the work they just finished awarding. Professors scramble to inject some political content into their typography assignments. The AIGA even devoted an entire conference to the theme, giving all the regulars a chance to gather and explain how their work has been pro-active all along.

Somehow it seems to be about ninety percent pure spin. With all the talk about social responsability, do we really understand the complexity of the problem as it pertains to design? The issue of responsability in a profession involved in the modulation of information is daunting.

THERE IS AN IMPLICIT POWER INVOLVED IN GRAPHIC DESIGN THAT IS DERIVED FROM AN INVOLVEMENT WITH IMAGE PRODUCTION, AND ALL POWER CARRIES WITH IT RESPONSABILITY.

18

But to date, we have not sufficiently addressed this aspect of question. Is social responsability a function of the content, the form, the audience, the client and/or the designer?

According to conventional wisdom it comes down to two basic issues: 1) Don’t work for cigarette manufacturers or for companies that produce neutron bombs and nerve gas; and 2) be sensitive to the impact of the materials you specify for your clients. Eight color metallic ink on coated paper is bad; soy pigment on recycled stock is good. But the elementary reading of the surface problem tends to obscure the more important issues underneath.

In the era of the mega-corporation the delineation between companies is increasingly vague.

If you refuse work from the bomb company, will you work for the bank Everything you do is garbage.

There’s finances an idea. that it? What about the art I thought it might be fun to get up in front of 1000 graphmuseum itsayfunds?

Orit might theeven cable ics designers and that. I thought be dan-tv gerous. Everything you do is garbage. station it doesn’t owns?

Has a nice ring, it? If the designer is an The thing is that I mean it. And I mean it in two ways. advocate thegarbage. client, whose will There’s garbage for and there’s First of all, with the possible exception of books – okay, and message is paramount? and record jackets – everything you design is destined to be thrown away. And pretty quickly too.

Why do you think they call it ephemera?

Graphic design is the design of highly disposable items: newspapers, magazines, annual reports, packaging, promotional cards materials, capabilities brochures, posters.

It all is winds up in the garbage.

There a confusion here between social and personal responsability.

Think about like what’s in your personal landfill,the theimplication garbage The designer, any professional, must examine canany at activity your office, therelationship garbage can at home.

It’s own all stuff on or client in light of his/her posisomebody designed. a lotconscience of it is stuff you yourself tion. These are points ofOkay, individual and integrity rather than social and responsability. designed botched, crumpled up and trew away. But As for the designed ecological that issue, “I no love one comes out against the Lady, envisomeone New York and the ronment and as theMy “printed in recycled becomes ever too” coffee cup. own garbage is paper” full oftag press kits that more fashionable convincing to go the green or environsomebody designed the hellclients out of. ment-friendly route becomes easier.

Of course, the Literally, everything you doprogressively is garbage or at least is potenend result of a liberal environmental plan is positive whatever the cial garbage. After all, one man’s portfolio piece is another corporate motivation to adopt it may have been. While specifying man’s debris. less noxious materials may be the start – although the exact composition of recycled products is shrouded in controversy and often the term is pure marketing hype – the connection between design and waste may not be so easily remedied.

Can Design be Socially Responsible?

By Michael Rock

Responsibility is the design buzz word of the nineties, there’s no escaping it. Pick up a design magazine you’re sure to find it pop up somewhere. Big-shots, settling back after weeding trough the morass of entries from some design fashion contest, find time to lament the lack of social commitment in the work just finished The second way in which everything you do they is garbage has awarding.

Professors inject some political content into to do with anotherscramble type of to disposability. their AIGA even Style typography is the mostassignments. disposable The thing there is.devoted an entire conferencedesign to the is theme, giving all the gather Graphic largely used as regulars a way aofchance givingto things and explain their work has magazines, been pro-active all along.corporastyle.

It’s how about cloaking products, Somehow it seems to be about ninety percent pure spin. With all tions, events, whatever in newness. the talk aboutthe social we really Think about workresponsability, you do. How do many times understand des somethe complexity of the problem as it pertains to design? The isone call you up and say: “We want to hire you to make our sue of responsability in a profession involved in the modulation publication or our identity exactly the same as it’s always of information is daunting.

been.” I’m not saying this doesn’t happen. But design is mostly about the new.

The assumption is that when a designer is called in a lot of things are going to be thrown away. Granted, sometimes you’re asked to manufacture oldness, to do graphics that supply a make-believe history to a new product. But even that oldness is a form of newness. I think there’s an undeniable relationship between style and garbage. I think if you look at the evolution of style you will learn a tremendous amount about where garbage comes from.

THERE IS AN IMPLICIT POWER INVOLVED IN GRAPHIC DESIGN THAT IS DERIVED FROM AN INVOLVEMENT WITH IMAGE PRODUCTION, AND ALL POWER CARRIES WITH IT RESPONSABILITY.

Karrie Jacobs in Disposability, Graphic Design, Style, And Waste

18

But to date, we have not sufficiently addressed this aspect of question. Is social responsability a function of the content, the form, the audience, the client and/or the designer?

According to conventional wisdom it comes down to two basic issues: 1) Don’t work for cigarette manufacturers or for companies that produce neutron bombs and nerve gas; and 2) be sensitive to the impact of the materials you specify for your clients. Eight color metallic ink on coated paper is bad; soy pigment on recycled stock is good. But the elementary reading of the surface problem tends to obscure the more important issues underneath.

In the era of the mega-corporation the delineation between companies is increasingly vague.

If you refuse work from the bomb company, will you work for the bank that finances it? What about the art museum it funds? Or the cable tv station it owns? If the designer is an advocate for the client, whose will and message is paramount?

There is a confusion here between social and personal responsability.

The designer, like any professional, must examine the implication on any activity or client relationship in light of his/her own position. These are points of individual conscience and integrity rather than social responsability.

As for the ecological issue, no one comes out against the environment and as the “printed in recycled paper” tag becomes ever more fashionable convincing clients to go the green or environment-friendly route becomes progressively easier. Of course, the end result of a liberal environmental plan is positive whatever the corporate motivation to adopt it may have been. While specifying less noxious materials may be the start – although the exact composition of recycled products is shrouded in controversy and often the term is pure marketing hype – the connection between design and waste may not be so easily remedied.

Perhaps the most significant environmental impact designers could instigate would be convincing their clients not to produce half the useless printed materials they are being commisioned to create or to propose solutions that are significantly reduced in size and complexity.

As this is tantamount to encouraging real estate developers to promote open-space legislation, there’s not much chance of it happening to any great extent. The profit-minded practitioner is not going to argue to eliminate a project that will lead to a big fee. Enlightened self-interest aside, the laws of capitalist consumption insure this will not be a wide spread phenomenon. To really address this issue, designers will have to redefine how they bill for projects to break the correlation between the bulk of the final product and the design fee. The designer’s social responsibility is a responsability for creating meaningful forms. Designers may control the conduit through which information passes yet often s/he is unaware of the basic function of the very images being transmitted. The socially responsible designer should be conscious of the cultural effect of all products that pass through the studio, not all of wich have great significance. Designers have their hand in such a wide array of projects – from maps to clothing catalogues – that it would be absurd to say that there was a single identifiable social position in the work. Projects may range from the absolutely essential to the downright deceitful. Without evoking some preassigned, politically correct standards, is a working definition of socially responsible content possible?

Dilemmas of personal conscience and environmental sensivity aside, our preoccupation should be with the facets of graphic design that are directly related to society and our function within it. While we may have abandoned a purely pragmatic description of design, the basic social role – that of mediating, organizing, translating, and creating access to information – remains intact.

SO IS RESPONSABILITY A FUNCTION OF THE FORM, THE CONTENT, THE MATERIALS, OR THE CLIENT?

Michael Rock . 20

The idea of acceptable form is dubius; ecologically sensitive materials go without saying; content is too broad as to be definable; ad the client situation is murky. It seems that forgoing some standard accpetable content, the issue will be judged on a case by case basis. Most designers are able to juggle several seemingly contradictory accounts at the same time, each having specific value. Some see certain projects as means to fund other more vital, and less lucrative, activities. Professional design expertise is expensive; only the most profitable companies are able to afford access to sophisticated communication consulation (and we should be concerned about this nexus of money, power, and communication). Yet, interestingly many designers do their most effective, evocative work for their non-paying accounts. The point of taking on political work or pro bono projects is to use the tools of graphic design to help an organization fully access the audience that needs the services or information it offers. Pro bono work most often supports groups that service the segments of society that could benefit from – and are routinely excluded from – the information culture. The unfortunate reality is that many designers see the donation of service as an opportunity for a creative liberty they never realize with their paying clients (perhaps they feel empowered and self righteous through their charity) rather than focusing on solving the real communication problem at hand. A definitive definition of social responsability may elude us. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a recognition of the complex issues involved in communication.

Pro bono work must not be viewed merely as conscience-soothing “charity work”, but rather as a commitment. The occasional good deed is unlikely to change very much at all. What designers must do is take the initiative, select their own cause to champion, and be prepared to devote themselves to carrying out work in the cause’s best interest, not their own, over long period of time. Graphic desginers might not have the power to earn millions for a cause or regularly change legislation, but they can make some changes in the world if only an effort is made. Steven Heller

In the time when the access to real information among the disadvantaged seems in the increasing peril and where power and money control most of the means of producing and dispersing it, the goal of developing simple and effective mass audicence communication seems especially relevant. Clarity may once again become an important social concern, not by fiat but because the content is too vital and important to obscure.

Message may indeed rise up over style, but style will be recognized for the important cultural values it transmits. Perhaps the most socially irresponsible work is the over-designed, over-produced, typographic stunts that serve no real function, speak only to other designers and the cultural elite, and through opulence and uselessness revel in a level of conspicuous consumption that glorifies financial excess.

Good Citizenship: Design As A Social And Political Force

by Katherine Mccoy

Our increasingly multicultural society is experiencing a breakdown in shared values – national values, tribal values, personal values, even family values – consensual motivating values that create a common sense of purpose in a community.

THE QUESTION IS: HOW CAN A HETEROGENEOUS SOCIETY DEVELOP SHARED VALUES AND YET ENCOURAGE CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND PERSONAL FREEDOM? Designers and design education are part of the problem and can be part of the answer. We cannot afford to be passive anymore. Designers must be good citizens and participate in the shaping of our government and society. As designers, we could use our particular talents and skills to encourage others to wake up and participate as well.

There are serious threats to our civil liberties in the United States from both fundamentalist censorship of the Right and political correctness from the Left. We have seen the dismemberment of artistic freedom at the National Endowment for the Arts in recent years, and aggressive attempts to censor public school’s teaching - from Darwin to Hemingway to safe sex - continue.

22

A conservative Congress continues to push for content restrictions on Internet discourse. And as graphic designers specializing in visual communications, the content of our communication could be seriously curtailed if we do not defend our freedom of expression.

But even more troubling is our filed’s own self-censorship.

How many graphic designers today would feel a loss if their freedom of expression were handcuffed?

Most of our collegues never exercise their right to communicate on public issues or potencially controversial content. Remove our freedom of speech and graphic designers might never notice. We have trained a profession that feels political or social concerns are either extraneous to our work, or inappropriate. Thinking back to 1968, the atmosphere at Unimark International during my first year of work typified this problem. Unimark (an idealistic international design office with Massimo Vigneli and Jay Doblin as vice presidents and Herbert Bayer on the board) was dedicated to the ideal of the rationally objective professional.

The graphic designer was to be the neutral transmitter of the client’s messages. Clarity and objectivity were the goal. During that year, the designers I worked with, save one notable exception, were all remarkably disinterested in the social and political upheavals taking place around us.

Vietnam escalating We were encouraged was to wear white lab coats, perhaps sowith the messy body counts external environment would not contaminate our surgically clean detachment.

These lab coats make an excellent newscast; metaphor for touted onwhiteevery evening the New the apolitical designer, cherishing the myth of universal, valuefree design – that design is a clinical process akin to chemistry, Letf rioted before the National scientifically pure and neutral, conducted in a Democratic sterile laboratory environment with precisely predictable results. Yet Lawrence and Oppenheimer and a thousand examples teachMartin us that even Luther King Convention in other Chicago; chemists and physicists must have a contextual view of their work in the socio-political world around them. During that time, I beand Robert Kennedy were and came increasingly interested in the social idealism of theassassinated; times: the civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam peace movement, the antimaterialism and social of the New Left, and radical its riots just Detroit wasexperimentation still smoking from feminism. Yet it was very difficult to relate these new ideas to the design that I was practicing and the communication process that down the street fromwasour Yet hardly I loved so much.

Or perhaps the difficulty not the office. values of design so much as the values of the design community. a word was spoken on these subjects.

23 . Good Citizenship: Design as a Social and Political Force

EXTREME OF COOL OBJECTIVITY I’M A PROFESSIONAL, I CAN HANDLE IT PUT ASIDE ONE’S PERSONAL REACTIONS ACT LIKE A PROFESSIONAL IMPARTIAL NEUTRAL DISPASSIONATE DESINTERESTED PASSIVE ARBITRATOR

Here is the challenge: how to achieve the objectivity and consistency of professionalism without stripping oneself of personal convictions.

The implication of the word “professional” as we use it is indicative of the problem here. How often do we hear, “Act like a professional” or, “I’m professional, I can handle it?” Being a professional means to put aside one’s personal reactions regardless of the situation and to carry on. Prostitutes, practioners of the so called oldest profession, must maintain an extreme of cool objectivity about this most intimate of human activities, highly disciplining their personal responses to deliver an impartial and consistent product to their clients. Thist ideal of the dispassionate professional distances us from ethical and political values. Think of the words used to describe the disciplined, objective professional, whether it be scientist, doctor, or lawyer: “impartial”, “dispassionate”, “desinterested”. These become pejorative terms in a difficult world crying for compassion, interest, concern, commitment, and involvement. Disinterest is appropriate for a neutral arbitrator but not for an advocate. In fact, design education most often trains students to think of themselves as passive arbitrators of the message between the client/sender and audience/receiver, rather than as advocates for the message content or the audience.

Our concept of graphic design professionalism has been largely shaped, and generally for the better, by the legacy of the twentiethcentury modernism as it has come to us through the Bauhaus and Swiss lineages. However, there are several dominant aspects of this modernist ethic that have done much to distance designers from their cultural milieu. The ideals, forms, methods, and mithology of modernism are a large part of this problem of detachment, including the paradigms of universal form, abstraction, self-referentialism, value-free design, rationality, and objectivity.

The myth of objectivity unfortunately does much to disengage the designer from compassionate concerns. Strongly held personal convictions would seem to be inappropriate for the coolheaded, objective professional. Functionalism is narrowly defined in measurable utilitarian terms. Too often this means serving the client’s definition of function – generally profits – over other concerns, including safety, the environment, and social/cultural/political impacts. Universalism has brought us the homgenized proper corporate style base mainly on Helvetica and the grid, ignoring the power and potential of regional, idiosyncratic, personal, or culturally specific stylistic vocabularies.

Katherine McCoy . 24

Designers must break out of the obiedient, neutral, servant-toindustry mentality, an orientation that was particularly strong in the Reagan-Thatcher-Bush years, and continues to dominate design management and strategic design. Yes, we are problem-solvers responding to the needs of clients. But we must consider the problems we take on. Should one help sell tobacco and alcohol, or design a Ukeles (a garbage artist)forrealized that in only our society Presidential memorial library a man who reads pulp cowboy maintenance is undervalued. a strategic society driven novels? Does society really benefit In from plan for by plastic housewareskeeping or fast-food?

The answers may be more than a newness, the old well-maintained andsubtle intact yeswether or a no.it’s But aone thing isoverpass clear: Design not a neutral, – highway or ais toaster oven value– free process. A design has no more integrity its purpose is troublesome and unimportant.

Bridges than collapse and or subject matter.

Garbage in, garbage out.

The most rarefied toaster ovens get thrown away and replaced with new design solution canAnd neverit’s surpass the quality with of its the content. toaster ovens. this obsession new, Graphic design is a is powerful capable of informing, publicizing, someting which fed betool, every medium we come into and propagandizing environmental, andMy political messages contact with, thatsocial, gets us into trouble. question, as well as commercial ones. How does compassionate design one that I don’t really know the answer to, is how shape a practice? The occasional pro bono piece as a relief from important is newness? business as usual is not the answer here. The choice of clients or How important is stylistic change? content is crucial. The most fortunate can find a worthy cause in I’m not talking personally, need of atalking designereconomically. with the funds I’m to pay for professional design intellectually, emotionally. services. Unfortunetly, good causes often seem to have the least Is it a matter life and death?system. Is it possible to shape resources in ourof present economic It might be.

Honestly.

In certain ways, style is the most a practice around non-business clients or introduce social content important thing there into commercial work?

Theis.compassionate designer must strategize an ethical practice and be an informed, involved citizen in a JefI’ve been participatory thinking a lot about style.

About whatprepared it is to fersoninan democracy, agile and flexible, turn the of visualitcommunication toward a broad spectrum and howtools important is. I fin it hard to separate style of needs.

Am I advocating thethat production a generation of designers from content.

Granted when of there is no content, preoccupied politicalobvious. activism, aAnd kindwhen of reborn sixties mentalonly style, with it’s pretty there is not ity? I think what that’s I have in mind isas nurturing a crop of active style, onlyrather content, glaring well. But when citizens informed, concerned participants in society happen they’re –both present, it’s hard to tell where onewho ends to bethe graphic and otherdesigners. begins. We must stop inadvertently training our students to ignore their convictions and be passive economic servants. Instead, we must help them to clarify their personal values and to give them the tools to recognize when its appropriate to act on them. I do think this is possible. We still need objectivity, but this includes the objectivity to know when to invoke personal biases and when to set them aside. Too often our graduates and their work emerge as charming mannequins, voiceless mouthpieces for the messages of ventriloquist clients. Lets us instead give designers their voices so they may participate and contribute more fully in the world around them.

The ideal of value-free design is a dangerous myth.

In fact, all design solutions carry a bias, either explicit or implicit. The more honest designs acknowledge their biases openly rather than manipulate their audiences with assurances of universal truth and purity.

It has always been possible for designers to adopt a political stance in relation to their work. But doing so is normally seen as an individual (possibly eccentric) choice in which concerns which are understood as external to the activity of design are ‘smuggled in’ as part of a personal agenda. Yet we work with forms of visual communication every day, perhaps not understanding how they carry, and are in themselves, expressions of social value.

Andrew Howard

23 . Good Citizenship: Design as a Social and Political Force

EXTREME OF COOL OBJECTIVITY I’M A PROFESSIONAL, I CAN HANDLE IT PUT ASIDE ONE’S PERSONAL REACTIONS ACT LIKE A PROFESSIONAL IMPARTIAL NEUTRAL DISPASSIONATE DESINTERESTED PASSIVE ARBITRATOR

Here is the challenge: how to achieve the objectivity and consistency of professionalism without stripping oneself of personal convictions.

The implication of the word “professional” as we use it is indicative of the problem here. How often do we hear, “Act like a professional” or, “I’m professional, I can handle it?” Being a professional means to put aside one’s personal reactions regardless of the situation and to carry on. Prostitutes, practioners of the so called oldest profession, must maintain an extreme of cool objectivity about this most Everything do is garbage. intimate of humanyou activities, highly disciplining their personal reAndtoyou know what, maybe I’ve gotproduct this whole thing sponses deliver an impartial and consistent to their clients.backward.

Thist ideal of the dispassionate professional distances us from Maybe the important idea isn’t that stylistic ethical and political values. Think of the used to describe change begets garbage.

Maybe it’swords that garbage allows the disciplined, objective whether it be scientist, docstylistic change to professional, occur. We all generate a lot of gartor, or lawyer: “dispassionate”, “desinterested”. These bage.

It’s“impartial”, our by-product and our product. become pejorative stylistic terms in agarbage difficult world crying compassion, Generating is part offorthe creative interest, concern, commitment, and involvement.

Disinterest approcess. It gives you breathing room. Generatingisreal propriate for a is neutral but creative not for anprocess. advocate.

In fact, garbage also arbitrator part of the And this design education most often trains students to think of themselves garbage is beginning to deny us breathing room. as passive arbitrators of the message between the client/sender And garbage is hot topic... and audience/receiver, rather than as advocates for the message Garbage. Our problem with garbage, our obsession with content or the audience.

garbage. Our fucked-up love-hate affair with garbage.

So we are obligated to think about garbage. That might mean something simple, likehas getting Our concept of graphic designvery professionalism been clients largely to use recycled paper stock for their publications.

Creshaped, and generally for the better, by the legacy of the twentiethating a market recycled products is as as century modernism as for it has come to us through theimportant Bauhaus and paper and putting it ondominant the curb.aspects of this Swissbundling lineages. However, there are several We are obligated todone thinkmuch about garbagedesigners not justfrom bemodernist ethic that have to distance theircause culturalwe milieu.

Theintimately ideals, forms, methods,with and mithology of are so involved the disposmodernism are abecause large part of now this problem of to detachment, includable, but it is the style be environmening the paradigms of universal abstraction, self-referentialtally concerned.

And we form, are style-conscious people. ism, Environmentalism value-free design, rationality, objectivity. has beenand a style before. We’ve been through that. We’ve worn our ecology flags on our denThe im myth of objectivity unfortunately sleeves.

Now it’s style again. does much to disengageSo themaybe designer concerns. held thefrom mostcompassionate important thing we canStrongly do is figure personal convictions would seem to be inappropriate for the out a way to use the style of graphic design to make coolheaded, objective professional. Functionalism is narrowly the new environmentalism more than just a style. defined in measurable utilitarian terms. Too often this means serving theJacobs client’s definition ofGraphic function – generally Karrie in Disposability, Design, Style, Andprofits Waste – over other concerns, including safety, the environment, and social/cultural/political impacts. Universalism has brought us the homgenized proper corporate style base mainly on Helvetica and the grid, ignoring the power and potential of regional, idiosyncratic, personal, or culturally specific stylistic vocabularies.

Katherine McCoy . 24

Designers must break out of the obiedient, neutral, servant-toindustry mentality, an orientation that was particularly strong in the Reagan-Thatcher-Bush years, and continues to dominate design management and strategic design. Yes, we are problem-solvers responding to the needs of clients. But we must consider the problems we take on. Should one help sell tobacco and alcohol, or design a Presidential memorial library for a man who reads only pulp cowboy novels? Does society really benefit from strategic plan for plastic housewares or fast-food? The answers may be more subtle than a yes or a no. But one thing is clear: Design is not a neutral, valuefree process. A design has no more integrity than its purpose or subject matter. Garbage in, garbage out. The most rarefied design solution can never surpass the quality of its content.

Graphic design is a powerful tool, capable of informing, publicizing, and propagandizing social, environmental, and political messages as well as commercial ones. How does compassionate design shape a practice? The occasional pro bono piece as a relief from business as usual is not the answer here. The choice of clients or content is crucial. The most fortunate can find a worthy cause in need of a designer with the funds to pay for professional design services. Unfortunetly, good causes often seem to have the least resources in our present economic system. Is it possible to shape a practice around non-business clients or introduce social content into commercial work? The compassionate designer must strategize an ethical practice and be an informed, involved citizen in a Jeffersoninan participatory democracy, agile and flexible, prepared to turn the tools of visual communication toward a broad spectrum of needs. Am I advocating the production of a generation of designers preoccupied with political activism, a kind of reborn sixties mentality? I think rather what I have in mind is nurturing a crop of active citizens – informed, concerned participants in society who happen to be graphic designers. We must stop inadvertently training our students to ignore their convictions and be passive economic servants. Instead, we must help them to clarify their personal values and to give them the tools to recognize when its appropriate to act on them. I do think this is possible. We still need objectivity, but this includes the objectivity to know when to invoke personal biases and when to set them aside. Too often our graduates and their work emerge as charming mannequins, voiceless mouthpieces for the messages of ventriloquist clients. Lets us instead give designers their voices so they may participate and contribute more fully in the world around them.

The ideal of value-free design is a dangerous myth.

In fact, all design solutions carry a bias, either explicit or implicit. The more honest designs acknowledge their biases openly rather than manipulate their audiences with assurances of universal truth and purity.

It has always been possible for designers to adopt a political stance in relation to their work. But doing so is normally seen as an individual (possibly eccentric) choice in which concerns which are understood as external to the activity of design are ‘smuggled in’ as part of a personal agenda. Yet we work with forms of visual communication every day, perhaps not understanding how they carry, and are in themselves, expressions of social value.

Andrew Howard

Waiting for Permission

by Michael Bierut

It almost seems like a dream now. Big budgets. Fat, happy suggestible clients cruising happily along, with fat, happy design firms feeding greedily in their wake. Lavish corporate identity manuals.

Hardcover brochures promoting office space in shiny buildings by brand name architects. Annual reports for non-profit clients-nonprofit!-with a little picture on the cover, a flyleaf with nothing printed on it, then another page, new paper stock, with just one or two words in 8 point type, then another page, another paper stockwith nothing on it- then a piece of coated paper with another little picture on it, and then-maybe-the darned thing would finally start, after the atmosphere had been properly created....

The eighties seem far away now, so far away, so much farther than the calendar tells us. To young designers entering the field in the lean and mean nineties, the previous decade will surely seem like an impossibly golden age, one of almost unimaginable excess and bravura. Even to those of us who lived through it, it takes the incontrovertible evidence of a flashy portfolio piece-circa, say, 1986to remind us how much things have changed.

And they have changed. This decade sees a new awareness of environmental issues, much of it lip service abounding with soy-based images of squirrels and pine cones, but for the most part deeply felt. It doesn’t necessarily mean that graphic designers have ceased to trade in excess for its own sake, but the examples of that excess are just as likely to provoke embarrassment as envy.

This decade also sees among designers a new social consciousness as well, one provoked by equal parts Clarence Thomas and Daryl Gates. The voice this consciousness takes is sometimes cracked and halting (perhaps due to years of disuse) but genuine nonetheless.

Ten years ago, it seemed as though a typical pro-bono piece was a lavish six-color production of a clever visual pun: today it’s just as likely to be something down-and-dirty that as least looks as though it was designed to truly help the client’s cause rather than add awards to the designer’s trophy cases.

All in all, designers in the nineties seem to want more than ever to create work that's appropriate, that's relevant, that challenges the client's brief, that's aimed at more than the next design competition. In short, the spirit is willing.But the flesh, for the most part, remains weak.

26

While these issues dominate designer's consciences, they still remain peripheral to most of our practices. Designers continue to work dutifully (probably, in fact, more urgently than ever these days),wishing that they could do what they think is right, rather than what they're told to do, all in the name of "professionalism".

The fundamental idea of truly challenging the client’s expectations, of getting outside the grinding process of filling the orders and shipping the goods, of “being bad,” (as Tibor Kalman exhorted us at the 1989 American Institute if Graphic Arts Conference in San Antonio) still seems an elusive goal for most designers.

Is it hard to see why? As Milton Glaser said at that same conference, “Friends are friends, but a guy’s gotta eat.”

Most of us would say that our ideals, whether newfound or long held, give away at the end of the day to the pressures of running our businesses, that the sanest course of action is to push environmental activism or social consciousness as far as you can and then back off to fight another day, that a client’s a client and an invoice is an invoice.

Politics is already an active ingredient in visual culture, in forms of representation and expression, but the view persists that political emphasis is a question of personal choice connected to the individual rather than an integral and unavoidable part of the territory. Andrew Howard

In the end it’s all about money, isn’t it?

Well, maybe not. Maybe it’s about something else, something that hasn’t changes, something to do not with money but with very structure of the relationship between designers and their clients. Most relationships in daily life are defined at least in part, by hierarchy. Someone is in charge, and someone is following orders. Often these relationship are immutable: parent and child, student and teacher, employee and employer. Occasionally the roles are more interchangeable, as in the case of marriages or partnerships. If you believe what you read in most designer’s promotional literature, that’s what the designer-client relationship is meant to be: a partnership. Sometimes even clients themselves (at least new clients) enthuse about this idea as well. But privately, most designers would concede that most of their client relationships are anything but partnerships, a fact that’s seen as both frustrating and basically unchangeable.

27 . Waiting for Permission

In the early sixties, a psychologist at Yale University named Stanley Milgram did a series of notorious experiments that explored the dynamics of hierarchical relationships, ones where someone was in charge and someone else was following orders. He wanted to fins out how far someone would follow the orders of another person if he perceived that person’s authority as legitimate.

The experiments had many variations, but they all basically went like this. Milgram asked people to volunteer for an experiment they were told was about the relationship of learning and punishment. The volunteers, who came from all walks of life, were each paid $4.50 and were shown the same setup when they arrived in Milgram’s lab.

They were introduced to another person they were told was a fellow volunteer. The second person was to serve as the “learner” and the subject was to act as “teacher.” The teacher would be directed by the experimenter to read a series of word pairs to the learner, and then test the learner on his memory.

For each answer the learner got wrong, the teacher was to administer to him an electric shock. This was done with a control panel with thirty switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts, labeled in increments “slight shock,” “moderate shock,” “strong shock,” and on up to “extreme intensity shock,” “danger: severe shock,” and finally the cryptic and presumably frightening label “XXX.” For each wrong answer, the volunteer teacher was to increase the shock level by one notch.

Of course, the whole setup was an illusion.

The shock panel was a convincing-looking but harmless prop; the fellow volunteer, the “learner,” was an employee of Milgram’s who was particularly good at screaming in agony when receiving the imaginary shocks.

The purpose of the exercise was not to study learning, but to study obedience: Milgram wanted to find out how far people would go

up the scale, how much pain they would inflict on a fellow human being, just because someone else told them to.

Before he began, Milgram asked his students and fellow psychologists to predict how many people would administer the highest shock. The answers were always the same: at the most, one or two out the hundred.

Milgram himself, then, was surprised when almost two-thirds, 64% of the subjects, did and they were told and went all the way to the top of the scale. Milgram did a lot of variations in the experiment to try to drive the number down. He moved the setting from Yale to tawdry-looking storefront; he had the learner complain of a possibly fatal heart conditions; he fixed it so the subject actually had to hold the learner’s hand down on a “shock plate.” None of it made much difference. No matter what, about half of the volunteers administered all the shocks to the helpless learner.

These experiments are fairly well known to the general public, and the most common moral drawn from them is something like, “People are capable of anything if they’re given an excuse to do it.” However, this is a misinterpretation: most of the subjects, even the fully obedient ones, were anything but cheerful as they followed the experimenter’s commands. In fact, it was common for subjects to protest, weep, or beg to break off the experiment. Still, the obedient majority, prodded calmly by the experimenter, would pull themselves together, do what had to be done, and administer the shocks.

Of course, designers are regularly paid a lot more than $4.50 to do things a lot less overtly heinous than administering a 450 volt-volt shock to a fellow human being. Occasionally they help promote a cause or product they truly don’t believe in or design something to intentionally deceive the public.

But these dilemmas are fairly rare.

Michael Bierut . 28

Most commonly, what most of us have done at one time or another is make something a little stupider or a little uglier than we really thought it ought to be. We’ve had good reasons: we need the money, we need the experience, we don’t want to jeopardized the relationship, we know it’s wrong, we have no choice. This would sound familiar to Dr. Milgram. “Some subjects were totally convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing” he observed, “but could not bring themselves to make an open break with authority. Some derived satisfaction from their thoughts and felt that -within themselves, at least- they had been on the side of the angels. What they had failed to realize is that subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they were not transformed into action.” We too somehow remain on the side on the angels.

So is it all about money? Probably not. The subjects in Milgram’s experiments often wanted desperately to quit, but they couldn’t just get up and walk away. What kept them at the

shock panel wasn’t the $4.50 they were being paid but their idea that the experimenter, and not they, and certainly not the helpless subject at receiving end of the wire, was in charge. Designers, even in a climate that finds us more and more driven to question the social and ethical underpinnings of our work, cede the same authority to our clients. Most of us enter the field of design filled with individual passions and unrealized visions, and learn quickly that the other people know better: first teachers, then bosses, finally even the judges of design competitions and editors of design annuals. We put aside our doubts-none of us want to be prima donnas anyway-and become comfortable professionals in just another service industry. And when we’re roused to out feet by a call to action, second thoughts set in. “That’s easy for him (Tibor, Milton, fill in the blank) to say. “but my clients won’t let me do that.” But of course that’s not true. In fact, we don’t know what would happen of we tried: we take too much pride in the quality of our “service” to find out. So business as usual remains business as usual.

WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE, ANYWAY?

The designer-client relationship can and should be a partnership. It’s time to stop blaming the client when it’s not. Our work can and should serve society: it should serve an audience beyond ourselves, beyond our clients, and beyond the next design annual. Otherwise, the member of that audience, the users of the products and messages that we produce, will remain wired to their seats, awaiting the next shock.

And we designers, wanting to do what’s right but afraid to make trouble, will keep sitting, maybe just a little more nervously, our fingers on our control panels, waiting for permission.

BIBLIOGRAFIA There is such thing as society Andrew Howard http://www.studioandrewhoward.com/reading-writing/there-is-such-athing-as-society-article/ Originalmente publicado na Eye Magazine, edição 13, vol. 4, 1994 Good Citizenship: Design as a Social and Political Force Katherine McCoy HELLER, Steven e VIENNE, Veronique “Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility”, Allworth Press (2003). Originalmente apresentado como discurso na Design Renaissance International Conference em Glasgow, Escócia, a 4 de Setembro de 1993.

Can Design be Socially Responsible?

Michael Rock BIERUT, Michael, DRENTTEL, William e HELLER, Steven “Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design” Allworth Press (1994) . Publicado originalmente como “Responsability: Buzzword of the Nineties” no Jornal de Design Gráfico da AIGA, vol. 10, nº 1, 1992.

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Pt I Andrew Blauvelt http://www.emigre.com/Editorial.php?sect=1&id=23 Artigo publicado na Revista Emigre nº32, em 1994 Waiting for Permission Michael Bierut http://www.typotheque.com/articles/waiting_for_permission Inicialmente publicado em “Rethinking Design”, um jornal da Mohawak Paper Mills, Cohoes, Nova Iorque, 1992 Guerrilla Graphics Steven Heller BIERUT, Michael, DRENTTEL, William e HELLER, Steven “Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design” Allworth Press Originalmente publicado na Eye Magazine, nº 4, vol. 1, 1991 Disposability, Graphic Design, Style, And Waste Karrie Jacobs BIERUT, Michael, DRENTTEL, William e HELLER, Steven “Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design” Allworth Press Originalmente publicado no Jornal de Design Gráfico da AIGA, vol 7, nº 4, 1990 Design Beyond Commodification Andrew Howard http://www.studioandrewhoward.com/reading-writing/design-beyond-commodification-article/ Originalmente publicado na Eye Magazine, edição 38, vol.10, 2000 FIRST THINGS FIRST manifesto Ken Garland (1964) FIRST THINGS FIRST 2000 manifesto Adbusters (2000)

FICHA TÉCNICA Título (X;Y;Z) Mixing Messages on Designer’s Postioning Edição e Design Ana Neto Realizado no âmbito da disciplina de Design de Comunicação IV Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa Outubro/Dezembro 2011

“In order to understand the nature of our activity and to think about its possibilities, we must be able to locate it within a historical context that relates it to economic and political forces.� (Andrew Howard in There Is Such a Thing as Society)