Eye on Design magazine - Issue #04 “Worth” by Eye on Design

Eye on Design #04: Worth

is a triannual publication that explores the connections between graphic design and the wider world. Each new issue revolves around a central theme and is designed cover-to-cover by a special guest designer, someone whose work weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve long followed and admired. We think of the magazine as an extension of our daily online coverage (eyeondesign.aiga.org), and a space for longform writing, in-depth reporting, and collaborations with exceptional illustrators, photographers, and designers.

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EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH

Reader

You now have in your possession issue #04 of Eye on Design magazine, which, for this triannual publication, means that one whole year of publishing is under our belt, and a new one’s just begun. We’ve learned a lot about magazine-making this past year—everything, really (we all come from web journalism)—from how to develop a flatplan, to the many surprises that print production can bring, to the fine art of fulfillment. Not to mention our beloved P&L spreadsheet, one of many financial tracking tools now tattooed to the inside of our brains. With money on our minds, we decided to dedicate this new issue to “Worth,” exploring both the value of design, and how design influences what we value. As with every issue, we prefer not to take things too literally. Sure, we talk about the business of design, but we also look at the more human side of worth: What do we deem truly “good” and worthy of our respect? How do we place value on our work and on ourselves? On the money-money-money side of things, we travel to the United Arab Emirates, a country as young as it is rich, and one that’s investing a surprising amount of federal resources into graphic design. Then we head west to understand what happens when America’s top designers get lured in by Silicon Valley. And we dig into the current obsession with “empathy,” a term that has sparked a burgeoning cottage industry in UX design, suggesting empathy is not only something that can be taught, but also something that can be packaged and sold. We also find out who’s making money in graphic design, and what that means for the rising tide of women executives. It comes on the heels of our global survey of gender equality at design conferences—you’ll want to see our tally of the speakers who got the most time on stage. Then we dive into our longform interview, a rare conversation with 1970s aerosol artist PHASE 2, whose flyer 4

EDITORS’

LETTER designs define the style we still associate with hip-hop today, though you won’t find his name in any of the major design history books. Another conversation with five designers on how their self-worth has ebbed and flowed throughout their careers puts the spotlight firmly on how much humanity is at the core of issues of work and value. Paired with stories about employee-owned design studios and some fascinating experiments in universal basic income, a new, very crucial thread became clear: What we’re really talking about when we talk about “worth” is equality and balance. In 2019, in design—and in society at large—it’s impossible to talk about business without also talking about ethics. And it’s impossible to talk about money or power without also talking about who has them—and who doesn’t. When it comes to design and creativity, financial worth and self-worth are two sides of the same coin.

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“My initial idea was that I wanted the fonts to be as small as possible, and the magazine to be as black and white as possible. But then I got the brief. I was told that it should be bright, colorful, and loud. I also learned that the issue had barely any images. It was going to be extremely text heavy, with a lot of space for not a lot of content. “I began by playing around with the illustrations by Celestin Krier. I cut them up, rearranged, and blurred them. I layered the components in various ways. The idea came from the illustrator’s brief, which was that his illustrations should deal with surface, texture, and materiality—they are supposed to play on the idea of material worth and the sheen and shine of precious stones. So I also started to play around with surfaces, too. “The blurred elements don’t have a structured surface—they’re soft and out of focus. I like their heavenly color palettes and their ghostly sense of spirituality. For me, when I think of ‘worth,’ I translate it to the German, ‘wert,’ which has very heavy associations with self-worth and self-help. I therefore think of religion—and not just the idea of worshipping money, but also worshipping your career. “I had to create variety using these soft elements, and then I also tried to push text to the edges of the pages, breaking up space in other ways. I mixed typefaces, too, especially for the title pages, which feature Din 1451 and Secretary, a self-made pixelated font from the ’90s. I stretched out pull quotes so that they sneak, and snake, around the text.”

Y S NEAK, AND SNAKE, AROUND THE TEXT.

Note from the editors: Issue #04 was an interesting one to theme “Worth,” as it was also when we decided to cut our production budget back a bit. With three issues done, we now had a better idea of scope and scale—what exactly it took to make a magazine— and we knew we could be a little leaner. What better time than for an issue all about money and perceived value? We decided to go with one illustrator to stay inside our art budget, which meant handing over less art than usual to David Benski, this issue’s designer, based out of Berlin. Still, our ambitions were as big as ever. We chose David for his energetic use of typography, inventive approach to text layouts, and experimental approach to magazine-making as seen in Lodown and Plasma. We knew he’d know what to do.

Brave New World TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

FRANKENSTEIN

Coming in 2019

The Old Man and the Sea

Inferno

Crime and Punishment

ORWELL1984 CONRAD

JANE EYRE

Heart of Darkness

A PASSAGE TO INDIA Emily BrontÃ«

Wuthering Heights Commercial Classics

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EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH

Contents

EDITORS’ LETTER

DESIGNER’S LETTER

10 IS IT WORTH IT? Designers go head-to-head to debate the value of design awards, MFAs, and quitting a full-time gig to go freelance 18 AFTER THE GOLD RUSH A decade ago, the center of the design universe was New York City. Now designers reflect on the mass migration of talent to Silicon Valley

By James Gaddy

28 THE EGG’S JOURNEY A contemporary homage to the illustrator and author Tom Seidmann-Freud, Sigmund Freud’s visionary, gender-bending niece

Comic By Brie Moreno

38 WHO’S AFRAID OF UBI? Around the world, a new generation is eager to explore the promises of universal basic income—and how it could flip an exclusionary design industry on its head

By James Cartwright

46 READY TO DO MORE THAN JUST DONATE TO A CAUSE? MEET YOUR PERFECT MATCH Designers Available has grown from a humble spreadsheet to a robust network connecting nonprofits in need with designers who can help 50 WHAT’S IN A COLOR? Inside the search for the next great red pigment

Photography by Clayton Cotterell

60 WELCOME TO THE DESIGNERS’ CLUB—KEEP OUT When you keep design for designers only, you shut out the world and design’s place in it

By Khoi Vinh

TABLE

CONTENTS

69 PROVING YOUR EXTRAORDINARY ABILITIES IS AS EASY AS 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 A guide to the American O-1 non-immigrant visa

By Tala Safié

75 GETTING AN EQUAL SHARE In a time of growing economic inequality, could design studios benefit from a worker-owned co-op model?

By Meg Miller

82 WHAT ARE YOU WORTH? An Eye on Design quiz 84 FUNKY NOUS DECO In the late '70s Bronx, PHASE 2’s party flyers created a visual language for hip-hop

By Jerome Harris

100

By Eye on Design in collaboration with notamuse

GENDER AT DESIGN CONFERENCES We surveyed the top design conferences around the world to see who's getting the most time on stage

106 FINDING THE C-SUITE SPOT In an industry that's more than half female, more women designers are reaching the corner office than women in other fields—what’s giving them a leg up? 116 CRUSHING IT Five creatives discuss the highs, lows, “likes,” paychecks, prizes, and mental hurdles that have shaped their sense of self over the course of their careers 126

By Laura Bolt

By Emily Gosling

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: SARA CWYNAR Two new pieces by the artist examine the ways cultural value shifts, evolves, and decays over time

132 FEELINGS FOR SALE T he empathy economy is booming, but what happens when our emotional connections to others are designed, packaged, and sold? 140 MAKE IT BIGGER The UAE is where you’ll find the world’s tallest building, largest shopping mall, and biggest man-made island—is it now home to the world’s fastest-growing graphic design scene, too? 149 DESIGNBOT3000 IS COMING TO YOU SOON Five designers brand the fully automated design studio of the future

By Liz Stinson

By Perrin Drumm

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KIS ROMAN

“Design awards establish what constitutes excellence. They motivate people to do their best work. Award shows also curate the most brilliant work from the last year, so they become an important marker every 12 months. They also help recruit new people into the business. They inspire the next generation of talent, which is vital for the industry because without it, it would shrivel and die. I could go on and on listing reasons why design awards are worth it. “For example, they’re a fantastic way for new talent to promote themselves. Winning an award as a newly established design studio can be a fantastically helpful thing, in terms of building your business. Designers also get the opportunity to be judged by professionals in the field that they respect. Design awards are a great way of encouraging clients to embrace creativity, because clients aren’t always in the same boat as an agency or design studio. A client might trust you to be more innovative if they see you’ve won an award. Competition naturally also encourages experimentation and the pushing of boundaries, which is absolutely essential for our business to survive. “At D&AD, we run awards for designers at different stages of their career. The students who win our New Blood pencils get huge value from the award as they get to go to our academy for two weeks—a intensive bootcamp that prepares them for life as a professional. Pretty much all of our winners then go on to paid internships afterwards. It’s a great way of getting into the industry hitting the ground running. “Designers often say: ‘We don’t have enough money, we can’t afford it,’ and there is a lot of truth in that. If you look at our design categories at D&AD, they tend to be cheaper to enter than our advertising categories. But they’re still not cheap, and we completely acknowledge that it can be difficult for a smaller company or startup to enter. Our justification is that every single pound we make in profit is put back into the industry. We’re a non-profit, so the money we make from training, membership, and the awards themselves gets used to fund various programs, including New Blood, diversity programs like Shift, and the gender balance program Rare. We support the industry with all the money that we make, so when people apply, they’re supporting the industry too.”

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Tim Lindsay is the CEO of D&AD, the global association for creative advertising & design awards 12

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“I wonder about the cost of design awards, their questionable lasting value, and the false presupposition that design is an endeavor that can be made competitive.

I IMAGINE THAT IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIB L E

Ian Warner is the creative director at State, a design consultancy in Berlin

T O JUDGE THE EFFICACY OF A DESIGN SOLUTION WHEN SO LITTLE CONTEXT IS PROVIDED A

“The studio that I co-founded, State, won a German Brand Award in 2018, and the ceremony was completely surreal. We’d already picked up our certificates in the afternoon, and the evening event was a gala dinner with a huge catering effort, lots of lights, and big screens on stage. It was hosted by somebody picked for their polished hosting talents rather than someone from the field, which made for more than a few awkward moments. There was also no sign of the full jury, and because over 60 awards are granted each year, only a tiny minority were actually announced. The event was over-slick, over-produced, and while efforts were made to make everything feel glamorous, it came across as impersonal and disinterested. Obviously a lot of money had been spent on the evening. Perhaps not the best use of the fees the winners are required to pay. “Someone might argue that awards are good for raising a studio's profile and pleasing clients. But our experience is that most clients aren’t even informed about design awards in the first place, so they aren’t in a good position to understand their value. That requires some explaining. An award might confirm that a client has chosen a good studio to work with, and that the work is perceived to have value within the design field, but they don’t understand why a prize needs to be purchased. In the end, clients place more value in design solutions that they know are working in their favor, and in the working relationship with the designer. “When it comes to the judging process, I imagine that it’s almost impossible to judge the efficacy of a design solution when so little context is provided alongside the work. The danger is that entries in the same category will be judged against each other, rather than in terms of each work’s context. That’s a fatal misunderstanding of design’s actual role. "Ultimately, the glory of an award only stays within the design community. That’s nice, but doesn’t automatically translate to a studio’s long-term success.”

L O NGSIDE THE WORK.

EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH

“Going freelance has been a brilliant experience: I’ve been able to tap into all the things I learned being full-time and use those skills independently. It’s been a very liberating experience, too. When you’re working full-time, you’re pretty much told exactly what to do and limited to what the studio has coming in, and that is very much dictated by the studio’s own reputation.

FREELANCING MEANS CREATING THE WORK THAT I WA N

Noemie Le Coz is a freelance graphic designer and art director; Australian-born, based in New York; been freelance for two years 14

T TO BE CREATING, AND PUSHING PAST CHALLENGES IN A WAY THAT I WANT TO.

“Now that I’m freelance, I have the ability to try out so many different things and jump around. I've been able to work at big places like Apple and Google Creative Lab, while still getting to pop into boutique design studios, or work on pitches for clients like Nike, or even take off a few days to work on my own stuff. The other brilliant thing is that it gives you more financial freedom if you play your cards right. Freelancing at big companies can set you up financially, then if you’d like a break you don’t need to work for the next couple months, which is kind of brilliant. On a very basic level, freelancing means creating the work that I want to be creating and pushing past challenges on my own—not in a way that’s dictated by an entire team. I can make the time to create the work that I want to put out into the world and spend as much time as I have making sure it gets to the level it needs to be at. You learn things much more quickly working freelance. You're responsible for your own mistakes, and you can make a lot of them, but that just means that you get better at doing those things faster. “The other advantages? Personally I just love staying in my pajamas more than anything. I love the fact I can get up at 10 a.m. if I want to and spend as long as I want procrastinating, but also have the ability to really focus without distractions. I can gauge how I’m feeling and work my life around that: If I’m stressed or have a creative block, I can build in time to do things that inspire my work. Maybe on a Thursday afternoon I can go to a museum, or I could book a trip to Mexico for two weeks. “It’s all about freedom. It's kind of like when you move out of your parents’ house and can suddenly work out life for yourself—only this time it’s not just personally, it’s professionally, too.”

WORTH

“When I graduated [from graphic design at Camberwell College of Art] I just started editing, doing my own thing as a one-man band, and I did that for about 10 years. The reason I applied for a full time job was because [my position as head of motion graphics at Spyscape] is all based around contemporary and historical areas of espionage, and I’ve always been relatively intrigued by that. “I’d only ever been freelance; the decision to go full time was to see what the other side is like. With freelancing, it’s constantly job- and money-orientated. As much as you want to let the creative side be part of your life, most of the time it’s finding jobs, hassling clients, trying to get paid—it doesn’t really let up. I wanted to see what it’s like not to have that stress. “The longest time I was freelancing in-house was three months, so you don’t ever see the project from start to finish; you just see a snippet when you’re brought in as a skilled technician. The museum job seemed appropriate as it was from the ground up. When I started working for them, there was nothing. Now there’s a building in New York. “When I was freelancing I went through three different studios in the past 10 years. It was a constant cycle: sometimes sharing a workspace with friends, sometimes working from home. There was that constant tension. One of the very appealing things about going full time was that I don’t have to worry about any other stuff apart from the actual work. You clock in and clock out, and you don’t need to think about work after hours—it’s 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., then you’re done, finished. “The other advantages? Paid holidays, that’s a new thing. You know you’re going to get paid and when; you know there’s someone above you to deflect things that aren’t part of your job. The one big thing I still hear from freelance friends is pricing: working out what you’re worth is always difficult. It also brings up a lot of existential insecurities. “Working in a team full time is very different to being freelance: things take longer as you have to go through more people, but it means I now work with developers, people who code games, lots of different disciplines, so we share knowledge and collaborate. I do think I made the right decision.”

Hans Lo is head of motion graphics at New York’s interactive spy museum Spyscape; based in its London studio 15

IT?

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“I find grad school to be a deeply personal thing; when I talk about it, I always start my sentences with, ‘for me,’ because it's not for everyone. For me, there were a few key things that I got out of school. One of the most important is that it’s very different than working as a graphic designer, because you aren’t beholden to this idea of the client-designer. “I think for a lot of people who come out of undergrad and start working, the client-designer relationship is the way that they understand their role as a designer. Now that I’m a teacher [and co-director of an MFA program], I find that a lot of people just coming in don't know how to make anything without someone telling them what to do. It’s symptomatic of most undergraduate curriculums. Graduate school can be a good way to really dig deep into what your voice is. “It can also give you a hearty confidence. In grad school, your work is so much more about the things that you care about. After school, when I was working with people, I felt like I was so much surer as a communicator and a cultural producer. I was a better collaborator. I can talk about my work in a way that I was not able to before going to graduate school. I learned a new language from my peers in different disciplines. My relationship to work changed. “The students who I see coming to get their MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, they're looking for something more, for criticality, and they want to have a community to look for that with. They want a varied group of voices to have conversations with, housed within a really amazing art school. They want that flexibility to engage with failure and play, and to think about graphic design on a spectrum and to figure out where they sit on that spectrum. “I am in favor of free education. I'm in a lot of debt from grad school, and from undergrad. No one else can tell you if that's the right decision or not. At the end of the day, my graduate education was worth it for me. Do I wish I didn't have debt? Of course. I think there's an academic bubble waiting to pop, and I'm not sure what's going to happen, but my colleagues and I are constantly trying to fight for our students to be able to study freely and afford this next level of their education, because I do think it’s important. I will always fight for education, in all its forms.” Nicole Killian is a designer, artist, and educator at Virginia Commonwealth University; has an undergraduate degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a graduate degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art 16

WORTH

TA GGERING. I THINK ONE HAS TO WEIGH TH E

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C O ST AGAINST THE RELATIVE VALUE OF GET TING THAT TRAINING.

WHEN I WAS CONSIDERING GRADUATE SCHOOL, THE COST WA S S

“For me, getting an MFA in graphic design [in the United States] was not worth it, and I've thought about this for awhile. The main reason is just the cost and debt. I was fortunate enough to do my undergrad at Cooper Union in New York, which is free. When I was considering graduate school, the cost was staggering. I think one has to weigh the cost against the relative value of getting that training. And I don't just mean the transactional value; I don't just mean ‘I make this much more money as a result of my degree,’ although I do think that that's a reasonable thing to ask. But also, what would you get out of that experience? And is that worth the cost? “In a better world—and in other countries outside of the U.S.— that would not be the calculation. In a better world, I wouldn't have to consider whether or not tuition would be crippling. But I don't live in that world, and not taking on debt gave me the luxury of doing what I do now. I was able to take more chances with my work because I’m not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. I could choose to start my own studio instead of making significantly more in advertising or working for a big company. In some ways, that was the trade-off that I had to consider: Where do I get that continued education? Do I take it from grad school or do I take it from the practice, the work? “On the one hand, graduate school gives you the opportunity to explore. The opportunity to step into a ready-made community is really enticing, and I think really valuable for a lot of people. When I was considering going for an MFA, I already had a community of people; I was already working. I was already where I wanted to be. “When I talk to other people who are considering going to grad school, I usually ask them, ‘What have you been doing? Where are you now?’ I want to see if they're already part of a community that allows them to explore ideas and topics in design. Is it necessary to go into a program where you are paying for the privilege of doing so? Some people have a very clear idea of what they want to pursue if given the opportunity. If that's clear, I think that's certainly an argument in favor of school. But if it seems like it's something that they're doing to fill a void in their lives, I usually advise against that.”

Andy Pressman is a principal designer at the design studio Rumors; has an undergraduate degree from Cooper Union 17

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After Gold The WAS gush 18

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was people like Alexey Brodovitch, Peter Saville, Neville Brody, and David Carson that my designer friends wanted to be. They passed around copies of The Face, Beach Culture, and Wet like bootleg Grateful Dead VHS tapes. One of my buddies was convinced he was going to be the next Jim Moore. Some days, he would bring in the latest issue of GQ and try to explain the nuance of the sliver of colors that overlapped between the G and the Q. Can’t blame the poor guy, though. The early 2000s were heady times. Back then, New York was the place to be for a designer interested in the cutting edge of culture. Today, the Bay Area is seen as the epicenter of commerce, and, by extension, the graphic design that services it. Roughly 10% of all Fortune 500 companies are headquartered there, making it a close second to New York. Early last year, Facebook reported $13.23 billion in revenue in a single quarter, and yet stocks tanked because it wasn’t the projected $13.36 billion. Meanwhile Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and GQ, reportedly lost about $120 million in 2017. Designers are flocking to the West Coast in droves, and it’s not hard to see why. “It’s a double-edged sword,” says one ex–Condé Nast creative director who now runs a startup in the Bay Area. “In magazines, you get access to powerful, thoughtful people, celebrities, and you rub elbows with some incredible people, but at the same time, the publishing industry has gone through such profound change, it gets tiring 20

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to deal with cutbacks every half or every quarter of every year.” A former New York print designer who now works in Silicon Valley and can’t speak publicly puts it more bluntly: “Anyone not mentioning money is full of shit.” While some are lured by the potential for fame and fortune, simply “following the money” is not enough to explain the consolidation of talent in the Bay Area. Others are finding the opportunity to have wide-reaching influence irresistible. “Every era is defined by an industry,” says Keith Yamashita, cofounder of SyPartners, a bi-coastal design and business consultancy. “Ours is defined by technology— it’s where so much of society is being made.” To put it in perspective: Even Paul Rand did work for Steve Jobs.

Su Mathews Hale has seen both sides. She worked in New York as a designer at Lippincott, where she’s now a senior partner, doing rebrands for everything from Walmart to eBay. Two years ago, she moved cross-country to San Francisco and now consults for top tech brands while also serving on the board of trustees for ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. (She is a former board president of AIGA). She hikes on the weekends and loves it so much she decided to stick around. Somewhat ironically, working in print media is seen as excellent preparation for work in Silicon Valley. Since 2014 there’s been a steady stream of magazine creative directors and designers leaving to work in Silicon Valley, where their storytelling and multidisciplinary roles are valued at a premium. Bay Area companies, by and large, Hale says, tend to believe that print designers from the East Coast are more experienced and have a more refined eye than those who came up in the tech world. So, if I have this straight: You can leave one failing industry and go to another where you’re needed, and make more money. The cherry on top is that you are taken seriously, says Robert Brunner, who built Apple’s design department and now runs the studio Ammunition with co-founder Matt Rolandson. 21

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“In Silicon Valley, design is held up as one of the major disciplines to be good at to be successful. Yes, there’s software development and hardware, engineering, marketing—but design sits at that level, too. You end up with a seat at the table.” Some of Silicon Valley’s shine has dulled lately as consumers become more aware of how their privacy has become compromised and tech giants’ complicity in the rise of data-mining, surveillance, inequality, environmental damage—all in the name of convenience. Not to mention the likelihood of screen addiction for children, the ease with which hate speech is broadcast on these platforms, and the general annoyance at those people who walk around, head down, oblivious to anything but the app that’s open on their device. A former colleague of mine, Lindsay Ballant, remains on the East Coast as a teacher, political designer, and art director of The Baffler magazine. She has been offered jobs in Silicon Valley, but turned them down on philosophical grounds. “When we look back on this era, the designers who helped shaped the image of these tech titans will rightly be treated as if they worked for cigarette brands in the ’60s. We wouldn’t be celebrating good design from Halliburton or Palantir, would we? I must have missed the moment when a bunch of Raytheon designers were invited to speak at design conferences.” I called up another old friend, Cliff Kuang, a former editor at Wired and Fast Company, whose book, User Friendly, explores how UX design shapes our daily lives.

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I DON’T WANT A MOVE TO BE ALL ABOUT STATUS, STABILIT Y, AND FINANCIAL BENEFITS. NONE OF T

SE THINGS IS WHY I BECAME A DESIGNER.

He recently made the move back out to Silicon Valley and agrees that money is part of the draw. Designers can actually be wildly, stupidly rich—a first—but the bigger appeal is a chance to be on the front end of culture instead of being asked to come in and do the metaphorical logo at the end. “Designers are just going where the most interesting problems are,” he says. “There’s opportunity to have influence, and if you’re not working on these kinds of problems, you’re on the receiving end of culture as opposed to the creating end.” But scale, for some, only goes so far. “Scale, scale, scale,” sighs that same former New York designer who now works in Silicon Valley. “Designers get so hyped on the fact that people are going to see their work. But the question is, are you influencing people in a meaningful way? Every company is basically just selling ads. Scale for the sake of scale is not the thing that wakes me up in the morning.” I talked to a current creative director at Condé Nast to get his take. He says he, too, has considered moving to Silicon Valley, given the volatility of media and seemingly unsustainable nature of print. But he considers the scale of the audience to be a drawback, not a plus. “Most big tech companies see their potential consumer base as being the entire world—that’s 7.7 billion people. Designing for 7.7 billion people is a noble challenge, but currently, I still find it interesting to make work intended for a smaller audience,” he says. The mystique of answering the profound challenges of our time can’t be underestimated, but they come with their own set of limitations. “A smaller audience allows me to have a specific point of view in my work, to be very playful, to take risks, and to be imperfect,” he continues. “You’re not trying to please everyone. I don’t want a move to be all about status, stability, and financial benefits. None of those things is why I became a designer.”

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In Berlin in 1906, a 15-year-old girl called Maria-Gertrud Freud changed her name to Tom and started to occasionally dress in men’s clothing. She and her bourgeois, Jewish family (her mother was a sister of Sigmund Freud) moved to the city from Vienna. As a teenager, Tom Freud spent countless hours writing and illustrating stories, and she enrolled in classes on graphic design, drawing, painting, engraving, and printing to hone her craft. By the end of WWI, she’d published three titles, including her very first children’s book. After moving to Munich in the ’20s, during a time of hyper-inflation and extreme Weimar decadence, she married the writer Yankel Seidmann, becoming Tom Seidmann-Freud. Together, they set up a children’s publishing house called Peregrin Verlag. Peregrin, which means “foreigner” or “wanderer” in Latin, was also the name of the protagonist of Seidmann-Freud’s most successful book, The Fish’s Journey. In the tale, a young boy gets swept away from his poor, lowly life by a gigantic fish, who brings him to a utopian world where money doesn’t exist. In a bright green, luscious land peppered with fresh apples and sleepy animals, a group of children construct homes together in the daytime and break bread in the evening. There’s no difference between boys and girls; all the children dress in plain trousers and button-down shirts, and don sharp, angular bobs like that of a page boy or Louise Brooks. Like the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Seidmann-Freud’s fables were laced with socialist ideals and anchored in a belief in the power of storytelling in early education. Her artistic style departed from the decorative and expressive nature of the Art Nouveau movement and embraced the period’s socially-minded New Objectivity instead, favoring geometric shapes, sharp lines, and bold colors. The philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin was an early admirer of her work. After the economic crisis of 1929, which put an end to Peregrin Verlag, Seidmann-Freud’s husband committed suicide. The illustrator took her own life just a few months later at the age of 37. In subsequent years, as the Weimar Republic fell apart and Hitler took full control of the country, Seidmann-Freud’s books were systematically destroyed 30

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as part of the Nazi’s eradication of “suspect” literature. It wasn’t until 1978, when Seidmann-Freud’s daughter inherited a box of her mother’s work, that the illustrator’s extensive output was brought to public attention again. We invited comic artist Brie Moreno to create a contemporary homage to Seidmann-Freud’s The Fish’s Journey. Moreno says that her characters are an extension of herself; her worlds are adorned with flowers and butterflies, and built from bright felt-tip pens and striking, simple lines. In her version of Seidmann-Freud’s story, a young girl named Peregrina is swept from her home not by a fish but by a glamorous, humanoid egg. Moreno’s utopia is full of play, music, drink, bright hair, delicious food, and art-making. Machines, winged-beasts, and the world’s smiling inhabitants collaborate and celebrate together. But as both our guide the egg and Seidmann-Freud’s own wise fish tell readers: “This land is not real, at least not yet.” Brie Moreno (1994) grew up in Ottawa, Canada, and currently lives in London, England. Her work has been exhibited at Printed Matter in New York as well as at the Galerie du Jour - agnès b in Paris. She has worked with Art Gallery of Ontario, Bloomberg Businessweek, Novembre Magazine, Lagon Revue, and Breakdown Press.

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AFRAID

UBI?

In the summer of 1968, five of the top U.S. economists wrote an open letter to Congress that ran on the front page of the New York Times. In it, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Lampman, Paul Samuelson, James Tobin, and Harold Watts—with the signed support of 1,200 peers—pressed the federal government to create a guaranteed income for all U.S. citizens—in effect, a universal basic income (UBI). 39

BY JAMES CARTWRIGHT

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“The country will not have met its responsibility,” they wrote, “until everyone in the nation is assured an income no less than the officially recognized definition of poverty.” BUT THIS TIME, IT’S PREDOMINANTLY CHAMPIONED BY TH E

R E SIDENTS OF SILICON VALLEY INSTEAD OF WASHINGTON, D.C.

The letter came after a lull in the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty that included the Economic Opportunity Act and the Food Stamp Act of 1964, as well as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Social Security Act of 1965. These acts, and seven others passed by the Office of Economic Opportunity, still form the foundation of the welfare state in the U.S. today. A Universal Basic Income Act could have been the crowning glory of Johnson’s anti-poverty policy, but he ceded the presidency to Nixon in November 1968, and the new president’s brief flirtation with UBI ultimately fizzled out. Now, 50 years later, poverty in the U.S. still hovers between 11-15%. Perversely, in the last 40 years, U.S. Gross Domestic Product has grown over 154% with the income of the top 1% of earners increasing over 190%. As a result of this growing state of inequality, the concept of UBI is back on the agenda, with pilot programs testing the impact of sums between $600-1,000 per month on unemployed recipients. But this time, it’s predominantly championed by the residents of Silicon Valley instead of Washington, D.C. The reason for the tech industry’s current interest is twofold. First, it’s contributed to that 190% hike in income. Because Silicon Valley is home to 74 of the world’s 143 tech billionaires, perhaps the industry carries the responsibility—and some guilt—for its contribution to global wealth inequality. Second, the tech industry threatens to exacerbate the situation further with its continuous development of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and automation, posing a potential threat to the workforce of the future in jobs both skilled and unskilled. An alternative income system could be essential for people made redundant by the industry’s developing automata. Design is not a discipline cushioned either from the effects of economic policy or the forward march of automation. While it’s debatable that creativity is a uniquely human achievement, much of the day-to-day 40

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work of design could be, and in some cases is being carried out by machines. If a technological revolution that puts all designers out of a job seems distant and far-fetched, it’s still worth considering the impact that a basic income could have on an industry struggling with issues of diversity, inclusion, and its dependency on the work of unpaid interns. The barriers that currently plague minority groups within the design industry could be alleviated by the adoption of a basic-income scheme. It’s a policy that the Movement for Black Lives advocates based on how economic insecurity affects those who are already disadvantaged. THE CONCEPT OF UBI I S

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“Research points to negative economic, social, and psychological feedback loops that keep individuals without a steady income ‘trapped’ in poverty,” reads a report published in 2017 by Y Combinator, a California-based seed accelerator. “A basic income seeks to break these feedback loops. Interest in basic income has recently skyrocketed, but the debate often relies on conjecture, stereotypes, and studies that are out-of-date, methodologically flawed, or from disparate contexts.” Thus, Y Combinator is investing in its own basic income research and pilot program to ensure that any future policy decisions made by government are supported by robust evidence. Their study may benefit from the findings of similar pilots and grassroots campaigns across the globe. In 2016, for example, Switzerland held a referendum to decide if each citizen should receive, without condition, 2,500 Swiss francs per month, which is roughly the same amount in U.S. dollars. The proposal was roundly voted down with only 23% of voters in support, but it engaged the nation in a debate about how citizens might live and work together in future. Unlike most countries, the Swiss democratic system allows anyone to initiate a national referendum on an issue, provided they can raise a petition with over 100,000 signatories. While none of the country’s sitting political parties had any interest in the idea of a basic income, a group of NGOs and activists continue to campaign for a UBI referendum. For Swiss designer Martina Huynh, the 2016 referendum provoked a lasting interest in the subject.

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“All of a sudden, these really big questions were on the table that none of the political parties were in favor of,” says Huynh. “It felt like a very constructive idea, and with all of the things that were going on in 2016, it was very inspiring.” Huynh wasn’t surprised that the UBI initiative failed to win support in Switzerland because it is a traditionally conservative country. But if nearly a quarter of the country is in favor of the idea, she says, then it may only be a matter time before its popularity increases. Huynh is so invested in UBI that she dedicated her graduate project at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands to the topic. The allegorical installation explains two potential forms of basic income that global advocates are currently debating. While some advocates suggest an unconditional income paid to all, others seek to incentivize work by ensuring that the basic income paid to the low-waged or unemployed doesn’t permit them to get too comfortable, fearing that a UBI might promote idleness and undermine the worth of paid work. However, longstanding advocates for UBI assert that any programs attempting to incentivize work do not equate a true universal basic income. Huynh’s Basic Income Café explores these ideas by requiring customers to use different basic-income methods to access their daily coffee. At one table, participants get one full cup of coffee freely and without any conditions. If the customer would like another cup, they must go to work by grinding beans by hand to pack the coffee machine. The grinded beans and the coffee brewed from them is then taxed at source. So for every additional cup of coffee a customer makes by hand, a percentage of that coffee goes back into the collective pot. This ensures each new customer receives their own free cup on arrival. The second table offers a meager half cup of coffee for free to incentivize customers to get out of their chairs and work for a full cup. This time when they grind their beans, all the coffee brewed belongs to them. There’s no “tax” that would flow back into the collective pot, which all sounds a little depressing and lonely. But the point of Basic Income Café isn’t to lionize one form of basic income over another. Rather, it’s simply meant to present a political concept in an environment that circumvents the participants’ own biases. 42

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I NCOME COULD HAVE ON AN INDUSTRY STRUGGLING WITH ISSUES OF D I V

Currently, Finland is studying whether the half-cup method might encourage more people to work. Launched in 2016, the government scheme ultimately is concerned with reducing welfare spending by shrinking Finland’s unemployment rate, which has long stood at around 8%. For the last two years, 2,000 unemployed people had their conditional forms of welfare replaced with a fixed, unconditional monthly payment. Their progress is being measured against a 175,000-strong control group of regular benefit recipients. Miska Simanainen is a researcher at Kela, the Finnish social insurance institution responsible for the study. “One particular issue we want to address is so-called income traps in the current social security system, where it’s not that attractive to take on a job because your income would not increase at all, or it would increase only a little compared to being unemployed and on benefits.” Beyond the bottom line, the Finnish experiment also assesses the qualitative impact of a basic income, and will involve extensive telephone interviews with participants about their general wellbeing under the scheme. What the results will be Simanainen is reluctant to say, although he assumes that “when you are introducing a kind of minimum income system, you expect to increase the economic security of the individuals and that we might get some positive impacts on their perceptions of their wellbeing.” But it’s difficult to say for sure. “It might be that this policy doesn’t much change the lives of the participants,” he says. Simanainen is likely hedging his bets. Nearly all of the research conducted into basic income schemes in the last 50 years have demonstrated a positive effect on employment, education, and general wellbeing; what has plagued pilot schemes is political indifference and a lack of 44

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IT’S WORTH CONSIDERING THE IMPACT THAT A B A S

“It's a little bit of a trap,” says Huynh. “You think you’re getting free coffee, but we’re gonna talk about money. I think by de-contextualizing it, the subject becomes a bit more approachable. And because the café is physical, you really see where the taxes flow and where your cup of basic income comes from, even if people don't understand the full economic concept behind it.”

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funding to analyze the results. For example, between 1974 and 1979, low-income households in three regions of Manitoba, Canada, received a basic-income payment. The “Mincome” scheme was scrapped without any analysis in 1979 when a conservative federal government came to power. When the data was finally assessed, the results were published in 1993. The most notable trends were a reduction in hours of paid work among women raising children, and an increase in high school completion among children who had previously taken on paid work to support their families. Further analysis by Evelyn Forget and others in 2011 even showed that Mincome had reduced hospitalization rates for physical and mental health issues among its recipients and that its flexibility in comparison to benefits schemes paid on condition of seeking work had allowed single parents to pursue education that later made them more competitive in the jobs market. While it would be pure speculation to say that the Finnish trial might yield similar results, the potential positive effects on wellbeing and inequality are hard to deny. The implications of a universal basic income are clear to Huynh. “When I look at the people in my class at the Design Academy, it's mainly people from wealthier countries or wealthy families who can send their children to such a place. A UBI would limit these kinds of barriers, allowing more people to feel able to pursue design. Likewise, it would stop people from having to work in exploitative conditions or take on unpaid internships.” Conjecture aside, the current momentum of UBI is unavoidable with substantial modern data now imminent to support some of its many promises. What threatens its rise is the same issue at play in Huynh’s café — convincing both society and government to see the value in sharing more of the coffee in its pot. Precarious patterns of work and job insecurity show no sign of changing, and as the Movement for Black Lives suggests, “it is likely that Black America and other populations that are already disadvantaged will bear the brunt of whatever economic insecurity and volatility results.”

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TO A CAUSE? MEET YOUR PERFECT MATCH READY TO DO MORE THAN JUST DONATE TO A CAUSE? MEET YOUR PERFECT MATCH

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How did you start Designers Available? It was in reaction to observing that pre-election/post-election feeling of urgency, and hoping to capture and harness it. I was trying to figure out the role that graphic design, specifically, could have in supporting social justice movements and grassroots political work in a meaningful way. It started as a Google Sheet. The idea was that I’d gather a small list of designers— people I went to school with, people I have worked with—who were willing to work pro bono, and partner them with a small nonprofit. There are now, officially, more than 200 people across the country in the Designers Available network. As a designer, I like to give things structure and form. I basically work as the project manager, making the match, facilitating conversations, and intervening when things need to be reined in. At this point, we’ve completed six projects in two years, from branding to web design to one-off print pieces that promote events and fundraisers.

$3.30 CRIPTION

Right after the 2016 presidential election in the United States, amid a flurry of call-to-action Google Sheets and activist organizing, a modest effort began in order to connect designers with the social justice organizations most in need of their services. More than two years later, that effort—Designers Available—isn’t just going strong, it’s expanding, thanks to the organizing prowess of its founder, Joelle Riffle, who acts as the connective glue between a nonprofit with a design need and the designer who can meet it, pro bono. This year, Designers Available is evolving that model to include a handful of larger nonprofit design projects that will offer a stipend. These projects will be designed and led by designers from marginalized backgrounds, and ideally from the communities that the nonprofit they’re working with intends to serve. We spoke with Riffle about playing the role of facilitator, practicing what you preach, and making space within the design community for people of color, women, and immigrants.

who are really just creating products and donating the proceeds to big organizations like the ACLU or Planned Parenthood. It’s time to get more specific than that: What are the causes that you care about? What are the protections that some Americans have that other Americans don’t? Who are the people who have already been doing the work to address those injustices?

Is there a certain quality of work you require from the volunteers? I’m primarily looking for ambitious, talented people who have less work experience and are hoping to be able to gain that experience by working with nonprofits. A lot of people get involved with the network because they are not doing the kind of work that they want to be doing. People come to me saying, “I‘ve been meaning to get more involved in local politics.” Designers Available prepares people for what it’s like to work with these types of organizations. It’s less about me personally making the calls on what’s good design and what’s not, or evaluating designers on technical skills or conceptual strengths. It’s more a question of: Is this a good match? Can we work together to make something that the organization is really proud of and that also benefits the designer?

We’ve noticed that a lot of the most impactful, ongoing projects that came out of the fervor of the 2016 election result are the ones that play a facilitator role, connecting people and resources. I feel a lot of frustration around people who are extremely well-intentioned but

ore han st

READY TO DO MORE THAN JUST DONATE TO A CAUSE? MEET YOUR PERFECT MATCH you think these things are important, I want to ask you to take yourself out of the equation as the creative [on these larger projects] and instead help fund the effort. This is an opportunity to offer people from marginalized backgrounds a place in the design community, while not asking them to do this work for free.

There’s a letter on the Designers Available site explaining how you’re reframing it from a network, as it is now, to a “cooperative.” Can you talk a little bit about what that means? I had been thinking a lot about the value of these volunteer designers’ time and the value of resources and skills. As a person of color and a single mother from a low income background, I figured out what design was and how to do it mostly through community. For the next phase of Designers Available, I want to tap into the resources of designers who have, relatively speaking, a ton of privilege, with access to a certain pay grade, an education, a studio space. It’s time to redistribute those resources. In disability activism, there’s this concept of “Nothing about us without us,” in regards to who speaks for differentlyabled people. It’s not 100% analogous, but there’s something there: If you have an organization for and about black immigrants in the United States, and it is run exclusively by black immigrants in the United States, what does it mean for a designer who is not black and not an immigrant to be designing your messaging? It’s the people who are most affected by a social justice issue or political issue that we should all be listening to. In an industry like design, where there is such great disparity between who gets to learn design and who gets to work as a designer, I want to build some sort of access framework. The idea that I’m experimenting with now is to initiate a buy-in for designers who want to be part of Designers Available. In addition to the regular offerings of pro bono work, we will also have quarterly cycles and open up applications to designers and organizations, and those projects will be paid. The work that we do is primarily with organizations that serve people of color, immigrants, women, and people from marginalized backgrounds. So if you have a certain amount of privilege and

What are the next steps for developing this new model? Right now I’m working on spreading the word and fundraising. I have a Patreon set up where people can support on an ongoing basis, which I hope will eventually turn into that new member-supported model. Those funds will be for the designers, and ideally also for the project manager for each project. I‘m committed to a $400 per project flat rate for the designer, so that will dictate how many projects we end up taking on.

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COLOR?

E S TAT GON OR E A LL R <> RV ND, O SIT Y, C O A L T P OR UNIV ER

0 0.0PHOTOGRAPHY BY CLAYTON COTTERELL

Humans have been searching for the perfect shade of red since the Stone Age, when our ancestors ground up ochre to create a deep, earthy hue. Thousands of years later, we still haven’t found it. Red is an inherently imperfect pigment. It can be bright but toxic, or dull but safe; it can shine brightly then fade quickly, or last thousands of years but lack brilliance. All of the world’s known red pigments come with tradeoffs, which is why scientists are hard at work to find one that doesn’t. “We’ve been looking for a brilliant, stable red,” says Mas Subramanian, a chemist at Oregon State University, who is best known for discovering YInMn, the dazzling shade of blue derived from the elements yttrium, indium oxide, and manganese. Subramanian and his students have spent the last few years searching for a new red pigment—one that’s bold, long-lasting, non-toxic, and hopefully worth buckets of money. It’s strange to think of colors as sellable products, but that’s exactly what they are. High performance pigments like YInMn can be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars in revenue. By one estimation, the pigment industry will be valued at $31.9 billion by the end of 2023—and that’s without a perfect red. A new high performance red pigment could add to that number significantly. The most valuable shade on the market today—Red 254, also known as “Ferrari red”—is worth an estimated $300 million annually according to Bloomberg Businessweek, and it’s still vulnerable to fading. Truly new colors are rare. They aren’t so much discovered as they are meticulously willed into existence though the scientific process. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” Subramanian says. So far, Subramanian’s experiments have yielded a sunny yellow, a deep orange, and a burnt copper hue. A true red could be one experiment or many years away—that’s the nature of research. “We’re still not quite there,” he says. “But we’re getting closer.”

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Creating a chemical reaction requires heat. The lab's furnace can reach upward of 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The elements tin (Sn), niobium (Nb), oxygen (O), and sulfer (S) are weighed on a scale that is accurate to 1/10th of a milligram.

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The elements are combined and pulverized into a fine powder.

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The powder mixture is added to a press where it's formed into a small disk. The compact tablet ensures the elements are intermingled.

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The elements enter the furnace as a light gray disk and are heated at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit for upwards of 12 hours.

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The resulting color is placed on an x-ray disk so its atomic structure can be analyzed.

COLOR?

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CLUB

BY KHOI VINH

WELCOME

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Designers like to think design is an amazing, transformative force for the betterment of the human condition. But the rest of the world doesn’t see it this way. Not that there’s vehement opposition to that idea; rather, much of the population is oblivious to design’s relevance altogether. Why is that? 62

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SSION IS WHITE AND MALE NOW, IMAGINE IF WE INSTITUTED THE EQU I V

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This question is a pivotal one for the profession. Understanding the gap between how designers see our work and how society values it will determine how we practice our craft for the next several decades—at least. It’s the difference between accepting design as a small, insular culture and it living up to its promise as something that can change the human experience. To that end, it’s useful to examine how the practice of design—specifically, of creating interfaces to technology—compares with the practice of engineering—of constructing the technology. The two are inextricably linked, but the nature of their divergence is striking. Those who aspire to write code know that there’s a virtually limitless number of ways to study engineering. Even outside of the halls of “traditional” computer science programs, there are countless books and online resources that teach any flavor of coding. Even Apple, perhaps the world’s most successful purveyor of design, actively encourages people to learn how to code using its Swift programming language. On the company’s website, they promote resources for learning Swift with the headline, “Everyone Can Code”—a beautifully democratic declaration that belies the company’s desire to engage developers on its proprietary platforms. But that headline is also telling about the way engineering is valued. If everyone can code, and if Apple, one of the world’s largest companies, is endeavoring to teach us all to do just that, the implications are potentially immense: There are many, many more new engineers on the horizon. Lots of them will likely be hobbyists, but inevitably, lots of them will be entering the field as professionals, too. The quality of these new engineers will be highly variable. Some of them might become world-class programmers, but many of them will not. Plenty of these new entrants will, as a matter of course, write lots of “bad code.” Yet, as a trade and a profession, the world of engineering hardly seems troubled by this at all. There’s no sense of alarm that this potential influx of new practitioners will somehow disenfranchise the incumbent professionals. And no outrage at the likelihood of lots more bad code being written. 63

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In fact, the sentiment among both professional engineers and Western society is that we’re not producing enough engineers. Among employers, the competition to hire engineers is consistently high, and working engineers are among the most well-positioned to explore new opportunities or be selective in choosing their own career paths. All of this is a reflection not just of how the world values engineering, but also of how comfortable the world has become with it. We’re all steeped in engineering in some form or another: Not only do we use the products and services that result from it, we also “speak” technology, routinely using words like “reboot,” “bandwidth,” “offline,” and “beta,” in all kinds of contexts, technology-related and not. The fact that engineering has become heavily democratized has only made it more integral to our existence and a more powerful force for change. But designers don’t think this way about design. For us, the prospect of more people everywhere doing design is not something to embrace, but to forestall. Take, for example, platforms such as 99designs or Fiverr, marketplaces where design is inexpensive and highly variable in quality. Most professional designers regard these with extreme disdain, as embodiments of a systemic undervaluing of design. But looked at another way, these sites represent opportunities for those without formal Western design training to log valuable experience. They’re onramps, effectively, for a wider population to take part in the design process. Or consider the continually simmering debate over certification, the argument that our profession’s “all comers” policy actually tilts the playing field against the most capable. In an emphatically argued article called “Design’s Lost Generation,” Mike Monteiro, cofounder of Mule Design, contends that modern design problems have become so complex that “we ought to need a license to solve them.” This assessment correctly appreciates design’s potential to impact the world, but it fails to address the notion that certification is sure to make design even less diverse and inclusive. If you think the profession is white and male now, imagine if we instituted the equivalent of a bar exam. O PPOSITE.

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The list of these misguided objections goes on. But the theme that runs through all of them is a kind of territorialism, a feeling that only “real” designers should be allowed to practice design. All others should stay in their lane. If we follow the example of engineering, what’s clear is that design’s protectionist attitude is shortsighted and self-defeating. Where engineering has gone wide, has let the world in, has proliferated its ideas and culture to people from all walks of life, design has done the opposite. It has focused on limiting participation, on preserving its perception as a highly specialized craft, and has even exaggerated the mystical nature of the creative process. Out of the belief that we were making design better for ourselves, we’ve held it down so tightly that it makes little sense to everyone else. Case in point: If you Google the term “tech backlash,” you’ll get no shortage of links about how society is reevaluating its relationship with technology. There are widespread concerns about the access to our personal data, how our devices are impacting our mental health, and the way that our own social activity is essentially being weaponized against us. But if you Google the words “design backlash,” the results are like a ghost town, with tumbleweeds of irrelevance blowing through. There’s nothing about design’s role in these challenges, nothing even about design’s culpability in creating these problems. To the world at large, these are classified as technology problems, but the answers to these problems are at least as much about design, about putting humane interfaces on powerful technology. That, as much as anything, reflects how little the world understands design. The question before us now is: Will designers be satisfied with continued marginalization as the world grapples with problems that we helped create—and that we know we can help to resolve? Or are we ready to embrace a radical new view of who can practice design, who can take part in it—and what our own responsibility is to help the world at large understand what design actually is? Only if we do can design fulfill its potential to be the difference-making, transformative force for change that every designer believes it can be. 68

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Partner & Partners, is knee-deep in the legal language and regulations of a half-updated operating agreement(1). He’s consulted the city’s small business resources(2) and reached out to a trade association for worker cooperative businesses, which promptly directed him to two other nonprofits. He’s contacted the lawyer who drew up the studio’s first operating agreement and sought advice from another lawyer friend out of Chicago. Partner & Partners has been operating as an LLC for six years, but Mihalko and his colleagues are considering a transition to a worker-owned cooperative, and they’re not finding a ton of designer-specific advice. “There are a lot of theoretical notions on what a worker-owned model would look like, but nothing that says, ‘Here is how to apply these principles to your specific situation,’” Mihalko explains. Put simply, a worker cooperative, or co-op, is a business entity that is owned and governed by the people who work there (3). It’s not a new concept, but it is one that’s gaining renewed traction against a backdrop of growing economic inequality. According to the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, there are 500 democratic workplaces in the United States, which together employ 8,000 people and generate more than $400 million in annual revenues. A scroll through the organization’s national co-op directory surfaces the kind of left-leaning, community-based initiatives you might expect—the Green Mountain Spinnery of Vermont and Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, among them. But increasingly, more conventional businesses across industries are looking into the co-op model as both a reinforcement of their social values and a savvy way to run a small startup. And that includes design studios. For Partner & Partners, transitioning to a worker-owned co-op wouldn’t drastically change the nature of how it operates as an LLC, but it would codify the studio’s nonhierarchical workplace structure and set up a formal pathway 77

BY MEG MILLER

GETTING

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1 A key legal document for an LLC that outlines the 4 Some co-ops require a buy-in for employees to beownership and member duties, as well as processes come owners, others require employees to work for for the business’ financial and functional decisions. a certain number of years before they are eligible. 2 aigaeod.co/nyccoop It’s up to the individual business. 3 In a worker cooperative, ownership and control of 5 This could come in the form of company bylaws or an the business are derived from working in the cominternal manual that dictates how each worker gets a pany, rather than from simply investing capital in it. note when making decisions about the business.

to ownership for its employees (4). Like many designers who go into business for themselves, Mihalko formed a studio where he and the two other partners who joined him shared the responsibility, the risks, and also the profits. There was no hierarchy, because there were no employees—“worker-owned” is the default when your only workers are the founders. A company that maintains that model as it grows benefits from making it official with a business valuation, a plan in place for collective decision-making (5), and all the paperwork and lawyer fees that go along with it. For a certain type of entrepreneurial designer, that effort might be worth it: The co-op model is the sweet spot between collectively pooled financial backing and creative and professional autonomy. Sabiha Basrai, a designer and worker-owner at Design Action Collective in Oakland, California, says the organization’s co-op model empowers her to make design choices and take ownership over projects. Decisions like setting rates and bringing in new work are made collectively, but when it comes to actually designing for clients, Basrai says she has full creative power. And as a worker-owner, she also has a real responsibility to make those projects successful for the good of the company (and her own dividends). “I came to Design Action from a national nonprofit organization that was extremely hierarchical; I had a boss and he had two other bosses, and they had bosses over them,” she says. “By the time anything got to me, a lot of decisions had already been made. Here, it’s much less about, ‘Am I following the instructions correctly?’ and much more about feeling accountable to the movement you’re trying to serve.” Design Action began as a spin-off of the Berkley co-op Inkworks Press, founded in the 1970s, and is behind the branding for Black Lives Matter and other progressive social change organizations. Designers who work there are involved in social justice organizing inside and outside 78

GETTING

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ATIVE AND PROFESSIONAL AUTONOMY.

Design Action Collective is incorporated as a worker-owned cooperative under California state law. There’s no buy-in process, and all 12 Design Action employees are either owners or on an ownership track. They’re paid the same hourly wage regardless of how long they have been part of the collective, but they also accrue patronage based on the number of hours they worked the previous year. This means that whatever profits remain after the fiscal year closes, and expenses and wages get paid, are distributed in proportion to hours worked that year (6). In order to maintain the business’ cash flow, patronage is paid out in installments after three years over the course of five years (you still get paid after three years even if you leave the company). Basrai says that although she was making salary in her last job at the non-profit, the amount of unpaid overtime she worked there meant her salary consistently translated to a lower hourly wage than the one she makes at Design Action. She also notes that the collective has been 15 years profitable, so while patronage does vary according to the amount of profit the company earned that year, she feels she can count on the extra money year after year. Both Basrai and Mihalko say that an important perk to the worker-owner model is that it reinforces their own beliefs about equally distributing power and ensuring that employees feel valued. That ethos is echoed by advocates of worker co-ops that also view them as a way to address economic inequality on a larger scale. The city government resources that Mihalko has been consulting are courtesy of the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative, a city council–backed venture that put $2.2 million toward fostering co-ops in 2017, under the belief that they will promote entrepreneurship and “improve New York City’s economic landscape.” Similar city-sponsored programs are underway in Cleveland, Ohio; Austin, Texas; and Richmond, California. That equitable ethos can also be something that benefits a company’s bottom line, with the right company structure and what Pentagram partner Abbott Miller calls “organizational intelligence.” Since its founding in 1972, Pentagram has grown into one of the most reputable design firms in the industry; today it has 23 partner-designers in 4 cities across the United States, UK, and Germany. At its core, Pentagram operates like a traditional company and not a co-op; the firm’s partners are all shareholders (7), while the employees under them are not. However, the finer points of the company structure have several intentional similarities to a co-op model, with little institutional hierarchy (8) and, crucially, partners in each office pooling their profits and

THE CO-OP MODEL IS THE SWEET SPO T B

the office, and in many cases they’re assigned work based on those interests, which for Basrai means working with immigration rights NGOs.

GETTING

6 So, for example, if the entire collective worked a total of 10,000 hours over the fiscal year, and you personally worked 2,500, of those hours, your patronage will be 25% of the patronage distribution that year. 7 Incoming partners buy shares at a set value over the course of a number of years; it typically takes about 9 or 10 years for new partners to buy into full partnership. In the meantime, they are considered “partner-elect,” but are still given full voting power for any decisions made at partner meetings. Money from the shares goes toward expenses that affect the whole company, such as updating the website or funding a publication. 8 All Pentagram partners meet twice a year to collectively make decisions about the company and review each other’s work. According to Miller, there’s little official “voting;” rather, if even one partner dissents on a decision (i.e. bringing on a new partner), they don’t go forward with it.

EQUAL

9 “Each partner runs our team the way we want to, so we pretty strenuously avoid things that feel like typical management structures,” says Miller.

dividing them evenly among themselves. Miller says that the unique business model, created by founding partner Colin Forbes, gives each of the partners a sense of financial stability while also instilling a healthy competition among partners who don’t want to appear like they aren’t pulling their weight. “The brilliance of the model that Colin divized is that it creates a sense of incentive for partners, but it also creates this incredible stabilizing influence in what can be a very mercurial profession,” he says. This financial structure also influences one of the most interesting aspects of Pentagram’s functional structure: Each partner has a team of around 8 to 10 employees, and each team essentially operates as its own individual studio (9). In many cases, partners were already running studios of about that size before they came on to Pentagram; joining the firm gives them IT support, an accounting department, legal advice, the cultural capital of being part of a renowned design firm, and the actual capital that results from the shared profits of 23 design powerhouses. The benefits of a collective model, however, don’t come without expending the considerable amount of energy to establish and maintain it. Unlike more established and traditional business models, operating a co-op means a lot of trial and error without a clear-cut path, which not all designers have the interest or stamina to do. “With someone like Colin Forbes, he saw it as a great design project,” Miller says. “It takes a designer who is as interested in the design of a business as the business of design.”

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What does your mom think you do?

Dick about all day with pictures or something.

Draw packaging for cookie startups that never actually start. But hey, good job!

Hotshot design hero, apple of eye, topic of all supper-club showing off.

Where is the most significant place you’ve been invited to speak in public?

Your book group, which lasted for exactly one meeting. You vomited on your shoe.

Your former art school. Real nice kids.

Typo, Design Indaba, AIGA Design Conference. Please see my website for the full list.

Your work has been featured on…

Your very brief high school romance’s wall, very briefly.

It’s Nice That.

AIGA Eye on Design (both print and online).

MOSTLY B: Hey buddy, you’re doing okay! You’re sort of worth something, but not loads just yet. Keep on trucking. I like your attitude. Stay cool. Keep reading Eye on Design. Maybe buy our back issues! They make you a ton worthier and also make you look both sexy and cool.

Go on then. What are you worth? MOSTLY A: You’re worthless. Stop smoking weed. You did not “invent” ugly design. You copied it, just like everyone else. Your Tumblr looks like shit. Sort your life out. 82

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Where has your work been copied, to your knowledge?

Xerox machine, Hackney Central Library.

A recipe app stole my idea of a smiling fork icon wholesale. Likely from my brimming Behance page.

By multiple large brands which I can’t discuss due to ongoing legal proceedings.

What’s the most exciting job offer you’ve had?

Flyer designer, small punk show circa 2009.

Designer at a small boutique design agency in Portland, Oregon.

Pentagram partner.

Have you, if you’re really honest with yourself, made it?

Um...

Not yet, but I’m getting there!

Please direct these inquiries to my comms team.

“genius” ever again. Why are you even reading this? Haven’t you got a monograph of your illustrious career to be overseeing?

MOSTLY C: You’re worth a shitload, you arrogant prick. Are you taking this quiz while you luxuriate in a big bath of dollar bills, or in an original Eero Aarnio egg chair? You’re worthy, pal, and I’m pretty sure you know it. Go on, retire: you’ll never have to deal with another client who doesn’t get your 83

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to form at large musical gatherings called jams. In local buildings packed with people, a group of DJs developed techniques like sampling, breakbeats, scratching, cutting, and backspinning. But news of a jam didn’t spread by word of mouth alone: Low-fi, photocopied flyers made from Letraset, markers, cut-up photographs, and glue were distributed by hand, traveling fast along the uptown streets. Geometric shapes and action lines merged with collages of artists performing, conveying the energy of whatever night—perhaps emceed by The Sugarhill Gang, Doug E. Fresh, or DJ Kool Herc—was being promoted. THERE‘S DEFINITELY A LOVE AND ADDICTIO A large portion of these flyers were the work of PHASE 2, a young artist from the Bronx who was becoming known as one of the best aerosol (1) writers in the city, and who could often be found DJing, dancing, or rapping at the local nights. Recognizing a lack of promotional material surrounding jams, PHASE 2 asked hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash if he could design a flyer for an upcoming event. The rest is history. His flyers went well beyond pure promotional material, drawing influence from Art Deco, Jack Kirby comic books, Romare Bearden paintings, and manga. While April Greiman was initiating the “New Wave” on the West Coast, PHASE 2 was

T O CREATING THEM.

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having similar impulses on the East Coast, pushing legibility, breaking the grid (as if a grid mattered to him to begin with), and working predominantly with sans serif type. In the mid ’80s, PHASE 2 began art directing and co-editing (alongside founder David Schmidlapp) the notorious street writing and subway art publication IGTimes. Its international distribution brought New York–style writing to city streets worldwide. Today, PHASE 2 works as a fine artist, creating skateboard decks and prints, and most recently working with vinyl. PHASE 2’s layouts helped to define the aesthetics of the hip-hop movement. Yet while hip-hop evolved from a small music scene of black youth in the Bronx to the worldwide phenomenon it is today, his influential designs never quite made it into the annals of design history. There’s no mention of him in Meggs’ History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs or Graphic Style by Steven Heller, the history books that tend to make it into design school curricula. And it‘s not like PHASE 2’s work is difficult to come by, either. As a party flyer designer in the early 2000s, I stumbled upon PHASE 2’s designs on small hip-hop blogs, and his compositions became deeply influential on my work. In 2014, while researching these flyers in graduate school, I came across Cornell University’s hip-hop archive, which houses hundreds of early party flyers. After curating a show on the history of African-American design practitioners for Maryland Institute College of Art, which featured many of PHASE 2‘s flyers, I began a series of email exchanges with contemporary designers for whom PHASE 2 has been a major influence. Eventually, I connected with the man himself. What follows is our conversation, which I hope can express the level of value that I find in PHASE 2’s words of wisdom, his dedication to his beliefs, and the genius of his graphic design.

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What inspired you to begin creating artwork growing up in the Bronx?

Later on, there was the Boogie Boys Romeo Knight LP (6). Using different approaches, I did work with Rawkus Records and Definitive Jux, Company Flow, KRS-One, DJ Spinna (7), El-P, and did a bunch of posters overseas for Soulee B’s Flavor of the Year jams in Bologna. There‘s definitely a love and addiction to creating them.

Long story short, I grew up on music—older sister‘s music, mom‘s music, the radio. That‘s my first love. I wanted to be a radio DJ. So I think it was only natural that I played music even before we called it hip-hop. I basically did it all: danced, created dances, emceed, threw jams, and eventually promoted. I appreciate that you recognize the flyer designs we did as “graphic art” and not just some hip-hop stuff done by train dudes(2). I was drawing when the train culture didn‘t even exist. Technically, I‘ve been making art for a lifetime. I‘ve always looked at the flyers as ads. That was my initial reason to do them.

Was there a community of flyer designers at the time? Was there any competition or collaboration?

It‘s kind of a yes and no. Some of us did know one another and actually chilled at times. I knew Buddy Esquire (8), Anthony Riley, and Sisco Kid. There’s those who I considered the major league and some that just dabbled in it. A good handful of them were super dope tag-team partners. I did a couple of collabs but mostly did my own flyers in an array of styles. I’d never say it made me “better,” but I feel that versatility really separated me from the overall pack. We’d compliment one another when a flyer was just killing it.

Did you have any other art training outside of aerosol writing?

No. Actually if not for piecing (3), painting really isn‘t my forte. I like to draw and draft. With a ballpoint pen, by the way.

What characterizes hip-hop to you?

It‘s a gumbo. That‘s what always made it different from what came before. It’s an extension of our past culture… taken to another level. It‘s life, it’s evolution. It’s life and flavor.

Your collages and layouts are so dope. Can you give me an idea of your process from start to finish?

Who would you credit as the first artist to create a flyer for hip-hop culture?

Well, the whole “first” thing is always tricky. The first hip-hop flyers that I consistently saw were for Kool Herc’s earlier ’70s jams, even before the term was insinuated. And, as I remember, they were by a brother named Kareem, and then it’s like he disappeared. I will put it this way: When I went to Grandmaster Flash‘s manager to suggest making flyers to advertise their jams, there really wasn’t anything like that happening, and that‘s why I suggested it. What you did have were big Merengue posters by Salsa Kenny and Izzy Sanabria (4), but we weren‘t really promoting jams on any real level like that. I thought that it made sense to, so I started doing flyers for Flash, and then the wave came behind it.

I love photography, so I‘m pretty particular about the pictures I use. I gather them up and basically ad-lib from my mind’s eye, I guess. I imagine that particular influences crept in from all types of things that I saw growing up, from Kirby (9) to Romare Bearden (10), Art Deco to slick LP art.

Where did the photography come from? And how did you print multiples of the flyers?

At that time a lot of the collage pictures and the artists’ pics were from my own archives or given to me by the artists or whoever was throwing the jams. Other pics, maybe from magazines. To print the flyers I’d accompany Mike (of Mike & Dave Records) and take the flyer masters way uptown in the Bronx to a very professional print pro named Larry. He was really tedious with the masters. They printed for big companies like Hasbro. It was great: He apparently really respected the work. He put his expertise into it and even asked one day, “Who the heck does this stuff?”

Who else did you make graphic design work for?

Besides the flyers, I was promoting the culture, making logos for Mike & Dave Records (5) of Cash Crew fame. Starting in 1981, I designed logos for the Crash Crew and did a slew of logos for Europe Ones NYC Rap Tour in 1982, and created the original Tuff City Records logo in that same year. I also did the Fast Money LP for Mike & Dave. 90

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1 PHASE 2 prefers the term “aerosol writing” to graffiti. He and others rejected the latter term to refer to their craft due to its negative connotations; the word "graffiti" comes from the Italian graffio, meaning "a scratch." 2 PHASE 2 was known across the Bronx for his aerosol writing. From 1971, he began using the name PHASE 2 to tag. It's often said that he invented the "bubble letter." PHASE 2 and other Bronx writers of the early 1970s often met at a local coffee shop before heading down to the Concourse subway station at 149th Street. Its lower platform was an ideal spot to watch passing tagged trains on the IRT. 3 Collaging.

DECO

4 Merengue is a style of Dominican music and dance. Israel "Izzy" Sanabria was a designer, writer, and performer known as "Mr. Salsa." He purportedly popularized the term "Salsa," creating a Latino version of Soul Train titled Salsa in 1973. Born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, in 1939, he grew up in the Bronx after his family relocated. In addition to designing numerous album covers and posters, Sanabria launched the magazine Latin NY, and in 1975 debuted The Latin NY Music Awards, which forced The Recording Academy to add a Latin Music category to the Grammy's. 5

Can you share a memory of putting together a flyer? Who was it for, and how did the jam turn out? How did people respond?

started to make flyers where I would repeat the info on each side. Jumping letters and doubling words were just a matter of feeling.

What tools did you use?

Hmm, that‘s a tough one. I can just say that it was always an adventure. There was a lot of anticipation as to how certain jams would turn out. But I can recall giving out the December 31, 1981 Borough Boogie-Thon flyer, and just from looking at it, someone said something like: “What is this? Yo, I‘m going to it!” That was type crazy. But it spoke to the whole purpose of doing them. Also a different style flyer, The Audubon Ballroom Flash vs. Cash Crew, was pretty slick. I‘m not going to proclaim that the flyer brought the crowd in, but as far as attendance, that was one of the craziest hip-hop parties I‘ve ever been to. The Audubon (11) was jam-packed from the stage almost to the entrance, and Flash didn‘t even show. But no one seemed to care.

Outside of a ruler, anything that I could make a shape with when needed. I honestly couldn‘t say that there was a basic process, besides just figuring out how much space I would need for info or pictures, on top of my mood. I was always amped. I’d say by ’81, I’d perfected a particular style and technique. At this point, I was doing tons of flyers and they were just on another level compared to the earlier ones.

What were your influences and inspirations when you created these flyers?

Partly a love for music and being involved in parties, and wanting to make them known in a bigger way. That‘s even how getting pictures from the artists came in. “Let’s do it like the pros,” so to speak. Even though they were pretty crude at first, I had free rein to create in my own way. Phrases, intros, and such. Like “The Founders of Funk.” Mike and I would come up with titles like “Rockathon” and “Funkathon.” It was strictly about drawing the crowd, not just the design.

Can you talk about how you applied the typography?

At one time I didn‘t have access to the better press type. So I just had to do it with what I had. Stick-on letters are a trip. Letraset, Chartpak markers, and other rub-off letters were easy to maneuver efficiently.

Are these flyers the only way that hip-hop events were promoted? Were there large posters at all?

What inspired the composition of the type?

I was looking forward to trying to create something fresh. On a technical note, it kind of always depends on the amount of info. How many acts, and of course there was a title. Odd or even numbers of acts would determine placement. I like things to look balanced, so I

Posters, definitely. Mike usually would be the one to have them made up. But I‘d say once it started, it was pretty imperative to have flyers. Big or small. They were in demand. To the degree of someone knocking at your door at 11:30 at night. Seriously.

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gets added to by a community of artists. Are you concerned with being credited when your style is used by others?

People would knock on your door at 11:30pm for a flyer?

Well, usually they would call unexpectedly, probably in desperation. The hypsters would like to make everything seem like we live under the gun; it would sound better for to me to say they’d come to my door with a pistol in their waistband, but it wasn’t that critical. I knew everyone, so...

As far as “imitating” the style, for me, it‘s more of a big deal when people assume that the style is someone else’s. If someone emulates the whole style overall, it’s cool to a certain degree. But not when they know the influence and pretend not to know who it came from. Or they hire someone to do that style as opposed to getting it from the source, and then it goes unrecognized. And heads do know.

So what would happen?

Ring, ring... “It’s Tiny… I really, really, really, really, really, need a flyer, P.” So what am I going to do? Ha! Know what I mean?

The artwork for Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and The Get Down Netflix series were clearly inspired by your work. Are you the originator of this style? What particular elements make this style yours?

Can you tell me more about the way you designed IGTimes (12)? What were your artistic goals?

Artistically I was trying to create something slick. Mind you, using photos in layers isn‘t like using pics from zines. Because of their thickness. So that was different. On the content end, the science that Dave [Schmidlapp, founder] dropped was what drew me to the paper. After the dismissal of the less concerned heads, we were on some next kebob. All the way around the board. Basically we were dropping kamikaze news and mind states that were meant for whoever was hip to reality. No holds barred and not for the marshmallow-in-denial types. It was the source before the source. Kicking state of the state of the state. Even before I popped in: music, art, politics, life. Peace to Bronx Style Bob, wherever you are.

I call it “Funky Nous Deco,” no doubt. It was my approach to eventually combine those elements— the stars, symmetry, circles, squares — in a particular fashion, even with things like silhouettes. That‘s become somewhat of a staple and hip-hop trademark. I saw the Block Party poster (13) in the street and thought that it was something of mine. It‘s a style that is recognized as and definitely spells hip-hop. I’d say that the proof is right there. Then and even to this day, if you see a chronology of flyers in this type of style, you’d find that it’s pretty evident that I implemented it. Nike had someone run with it more or less, as well as Adidas. And surely VH1 Hip Hop Honors.

I spent years as a party flyer designer in NYC between 2006 and 2012. This is around the time that I first discovered your work on hip-hop blogs

In hip-hop, like with a lot of art movements, there are people who originated an aesthetic, but then it

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8 Buddy Esquire is also notorious for his flyer designs, and created more than 300, which were handed out around the neighborhood to advertise jams. He called his style "neo-deco," a nod to his Art Deco inspirations. 9 Jack Kirby (1917–1994) was the prolific comic book artist, writer, and editor known for creating Captain America with Joe Simon, and Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and X-Men with Stan Lee, among others. 10 Romare Bearden (1911–1988) was an African-American artist known for his collage, cartoon, and oil painting work. He lived most his life in New York. 11 The Audubon Theatre and Ballroom was located at 3940 Broadway at West 165th Street, the site of Malcolm X's assassination in 1965. It served as a vaudeville house, a movie theater, and a meeting hall for political activists. 12 The IGTimes is often referred to as the first magazine devoted to New York street and subway art— an amplification of counter-culture and political provocation through the medium of aerosol art.

DECO Founder Schmidlapp met PHASE 2 while interviewing him for the second issue of the publication, and PHASE 2 then began art directing the title in 1986. Inside, articles on police brutality, HIV/ AIDS, apartheid, Iran-Contra, and corporate greed shared a page with photographs of aerosol art on trains and interviews with aerosol writers.

online, and it taught me how to work with photography in a new way, and arrange text in more compelling compositions. I feel like your work should be studied.

What wisdom can you bestow upon a young designer, like me, and anyone else reading this?

From an “artist’s standpoint,” I think just to be naturally original and flow with what you feel in the moment. But for a “rule” of sorts? Have the mind to know and be recognized as dope! Know what you‘re best at. Commercially, there’s too much cloning as opposed to being influenced and taking those influences to another level.

I knew that people were without a doubt using the style that l used in hip-hop flyers to promote certain affairs and brands that appeal to youth and the hip-hop population, so to speak. So evidently they had to “study” it. But I would never have thought that it had an influence and effect to the degrees and levels that you speak on. It’s pretty crazy to know this.

Is there anything else that you‘d like to share?

Yes. When it comes to your wanting to know the history: You have to research way beyond the research, because for whatever array of factors throughout the ages, too much of what‘s been presented, written, and supposedly documented as our origins from aerosol to hip-hop is far from our reality. It’s a mish-mosh of sorts. And it’s not that difficult to see if you look further. Also, recognize that your passion and love can’t compensate for having the necessary knowledge. And when you don’t have the true knowledge, what you advocate for and relay in respect to the culture could actually be more of a detriment to its legacy and integrity. There are really no “experts” here. There’s only fact and fiction. Sad, but true. The question is: Who is keeping it real?

How would you feel about your methods and aesthetics being taught in an academic setting?

I don‘t know. When you use the word “studied,” it becomes questionable to me. Mainly because from what I’ve seen, people who don‘t have a clue tend to stretch their imagination and theoretics far beyond what the actual factual reality is. Such is the case in almost everything written in hip-hop’s so-called “history.” I remember this collage that I did that was reproduced in a book. It was broken down, with the hows and whys explained, supposedly by me. I’d never said anything in respect to its construction. With hip-hop, it’s some Tarzan-of-theJungle type nonsense, with a tinge of the butcher Christopher Columbus tossed in. We already know what came after that. The way I see it, it’s like time is repeating itself in a different way. As opposed to the hip-hop masses being wiped out, the integrity of its reality and past is being raped and massacred. 95

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Designer, writer, and design faculty at RISD “The flyers make me think of the 1980s, growing up in New York City, seeing all kinds of paraphernalia printed in black-and-white posted all over the city. The energy they evoked and radiated is unique, alluding to a community that has its own groove, its own spaces, and its own points of reference. I can recognize, in the silhouettes, people from my community in uptown Manhattan and all the energetic people I encountered on the subway when I ventured downtown. People that look like me. My silhouette. All the fly, kool characters that were on the fringe and the underground that made NYC so exciting.”

DECO

Artist, longtime friend of PHASE 2, and founder of IGTimes “PHASE 2 picked up that I was doing a publication on his art form [New York street and subway art]. I was willing to listen, willing to be ignorant, while also able to put the work in a social context and a political context. I saw this wonderful stuff coming out from young kids uptown, and people downtown started embracing hip-hop pretty heavily. It needed a voice of its own.”

Graphic designer and founder of 12:01 “My immediate response was how it was like nothing I’d seen before. PHASE 2 worked almost exclusively in black-and-white, yet everything felt like it jumped right in your face. Understanding the music his flyer work was promoting, it makes total sense to me—his lines, shapes, and letters directly reflect the energy and punch of the music, acting almost as exclamation marks to each artist’s name. He also had some great content to work with—all of the artists’ names were incredible back then. Overall his aesthetics are extremely important to the design world, especially understanding the DIY nature of his work.”

Graphic designer and researcher “Like any good handbill, PHASE 2’s 1984 ‘The TV Party’ flyer covered the basics of ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘when,’ and ‘where.’ But it went above and beyond that, too, name-dropping various artists and ghetto superstars on the guest list. We’re talking rap groups like Cold Crush 4 and Soulsonic Force, the b-boy dance crews Rock Steady and the New York City Breakers, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000, the beatbox master Doug E. Fresh, DJ Red Alert, DJ Grandmixer DST, and others. On every level, the piece was ‘information overload,’ bursting with text and visuals that were all skillfully employed to induce whoever was looking at the flyer to feel that if they weren’t at that party, they were going to miss out—or had already missed out— on something major.”

Designer and founder of Slang Inc “PHASE 2’s flyers have been a huge influence on me, even though I didn't know who was behind them at the time. The way he used type, a standard

photo (or drawing), and one color established a feeling for the vibe of the culture in a way that few people can pull off today, almost 40 years later. That work is still ahead of its time.” 99

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the speakers at Brno’s International Biennial of Graphic Design were women. The Brno Biennial is considered one of the most prestigious graphic design events in Europe, and the lack of gender inclusivity among its speakers sparked a lengthy discussion thread online and riled the design community. Soon after, the speaker lineup was announced for Germany’s CXI Brand talks, the largest corporate and brand identity conference on the continent, and zero women made the cut. If women didn’t have a place onstage at either the most conceptually-driven design event in Europe or the most corporate one, then where do they? When a conference organizer gives a designer the opportunity to speak onstage, it’s a statement that their perspective is of value to the design community. If the majority of those given the stage are men, it’s implicit that the most valuable perspective is that of a man’s. To what extent do men currently outweigh women at industry events? In order to investigate gender inclusivity among conference speakers, our associate editor Madeleine Morley teamed up with Lea Sievertsen, Silva Baum, and Claudia Scheer of notamuse, a German platform that profiles women in contemporary graphic design. Our goal has been to evaluate which conferences are worth supporting, and which must do better when it comes to gender inclusivity.

O N FERENCES.

A LIST OF 30 VISUAL COMMUNICATION AND GRAPHIC DESIG N C D In early 2018, designer Christoph Knoth posted on Facebook that only around one-third of

Our Methodology To determine each speaker’s gender, we went by the pronouns provided in the speaker bios, in the press releases, on professional websites, in online articles about the speaker in question, or we emailed conferences for more extensive data. Notably, our results have no gender nonconforming category, as the conference sites and speaker bios were absent of language identifying gender nonconforming speakers.(1) We define a woman as anyone who identifies herself as a woman. Our count is trans-inclusive. This has been done with the understanding that many experience oppression that affects their experience of and access to privilege, including career opportunities and public recognition. Gender inclusivity isn’t the only issue when it comes to lineups: The design industry must be more inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as those underrepresented when it comes to age, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and physical ability. Since conferences as a whole do not survey their speakers in order to determine identity, we found the current data pool too limited to provide an exact breakdown of underrepresented groups at each conference. An ideal investigation would send surveys to each individual speaker to gather this information.(2)

For the purpose of our research, we counted speaker lineups; we did not include workshop and lab leaders, jury members, or exhibitors, so that our search could be applied across various types of conferences (which often differ in activities). We selected a list of 30 visual communication and graphic design conferences in order to present a broad overview of the landscape. This is not an exhaustive list; rather, it’s intended as a sample. We chose our list based on the following criteria: 1

Conferences that we’ve attended or covered in Eye on Design and that we believe our readership would attend.

Large-scale conferences that are deemed important industry events.

Conferences that reflect our goal of global coverage.

The conferences that we’ve looked at took place between winter 2017 and winter 2018. The largest conferences had more than 210 speakers, and the smallest 10. As with any data set, this one is not perfect. To calculate our percentages, we counted the people listed on conference speaker pages or schedules. 102

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24.6%

21%

100%

CXI Bielefeld 2018 (Bielefeld, Germany)

Bangkok International Typography Symposium 2018 (Bangkok, Thailand)

30% 70%

37.5% 62.5%

38.4% 61.6%

By Design 2018 (Bratislava, Slovakia)

Offset 2018 (Dublin, Ireland)

41% 59%

58.3%

58.9%

Design Fabric Festival 2018 (Mumbai, India)

50%

Graphic Design Festival Scotland’s Top Form 2018 (Glasgow, United Kingdom)

Design Thinkers 2018 (Toronto, Canada)

50%

Typographics 2018 (New York City, New York, United States)

50%

99U Conference 2018 (New York City, New York, United States)

It’s Nice That’s Here 2017 (London, United Kingdom)

46.7% 53.3%

Brand New 2018 (New York City, New York, United States)

40% 60%

TYPO Berlin 2018 (Berlin, Germany)

41.7%

41.1%

Design Indaba 2018 (Cape Town, South Africa)

38.8% 61.2%

Adobe Max 2018 (Los Angeles, California, United States)

37.1% 62.9%

Brno Biennale 2018 (Brno, Czech Republic)

38.1% 61.9%

Fontstand 2018 (Zagreb, Croatia)

34.8% 65.2%

Typojanchi Biennale 2017 (Seoul, South Korea)

27.3%

72.2%

OFFF Barcelona 2018 (Barcelona, Spain)

33.3% 66.7%

Adherente 2017 (Guatemala City, Guatemala)

24.6%

75.4%

Us By Night 2018 (Antwerp, Belgium)

30% 70%

By Design 2018 (Bratislava, Slovakia)

50%

75.4%

79%

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50.9%

Creative Works 2018 (Memphis, Tennessee, United States)

50%

49.1%

50%

Weltformat Festival Symposium 2018 (Lucerne, Switzerland)

Typecon 2018 (Portland, Oregon, United States)

45.5% 54.5%

Redo 2018 (Prishtina, Kosovo)

12.5% 44%

40% 56%

AIGA Conference 2017 (Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States)

37% 60%

Eye on Design Conference 2017 (Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States)

33.3% 63%

Fikra Graphic Design Biennale 2018 (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates)

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66.7%

SPAN, Google Design 2018 (Helsinki, Finland)

87.5%

WeMake Disrupt 2018 (Portland, Oregon, United States)

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18.6%

28.8%

100%

81.4%

71.2%

CXI Bielefeld 2018 (Bielefeld, Germany)

Bangkok International Typography Symposium 2018 (Bangkok, Thailand)

28.8%

71.2%

77.3%

By Design 2018 (Bratislava, Slovakia)

69.9%

39.8% 60.2%

By Design 2018 (Bratislava, Slovakia)

Offset 2018 (Dublin, Ireland)

42% 58%

50.8% 49.2%

Design Fabric Festival 2018 (Mumbai, India)

Design Thinkers 2018 (Toronto, Canada)

40% 50%

50%

52.6% 47.4%

Creative Works 2018 (Memphis, Tennessee, United States)

41.7% 50%

It’s Nice That’s Here 2017 (London, United Kingdom)

46.4% 53.6%

Brand New 2018 (New York City, New York, United States)

40% 60%

TYPO Berlin 2018 (Berlin, Germany)

42.1% 57.9%

Design Indaba 2018 (Cape Town, South Africa)

47% 53%

Adobe Max 2018 (Los Angeles, California, United States)

37%

63%

Brno Biennale 2018 (Brno, Czech Republic)

36.2% 63.8%

Fontstand 2018 (Zagreb, Croatia)

22%

78%

Typojanchi Biennale 2017 (Seoul, South Korea)

20.3%

79.7%

OFFF Barcelona 2018 (Barcelona, Spain)

34.7%

65.3%

Adherente 2017 (Guatemala City, Guatemala)

30.1%

72.5%

Us By Night 2018 (Antwerp, Belgium)

22.7%

27.5%

50%

Typecon 2018 (Portland, Oregon, United States)

47.3% 52.7%

60%

58.3%

Graphic Design Festival Scotland’s Top Form 2018 (Glasgow, United Kingdom)

47.6%

Typographics 2018 (New York City, New York, United States)

35.7% 52.4%

AIGA Conference 2017 (Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States)

99U Conference 2018 (New York City, New York, United States)

48.4% 64.3%

Eye on Design Conference 2017 (Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States)

Weltformat Festival Symposium 2018 (Lucerne, Switzerland)

26.1%

40% 51.6%

Fikra Graphic Design Biennale 2018 (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates)

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Redo 2018 (Prishtina, Kosovo)

60%

SPAN, Google Design 2018 (Helsinki, Finland)

73.9%

WeMake Disrupt 2018 (Portland, Oregon, United States)

GENDER

DESIGN

CONFERENCES

1 If you have spoken at one of these conferences and do identify as gender non-conforming, please email us at submit@aiga.org and we will immediately correct the data in our online article. 2 In 2019, we plan to dig more deeply into the gender breakdown of conferences, and to also ascertain the breakdown of underrepresented groups. 3 If you’re a conference organizer or attendee with more data to share, please send the lineup’s gender breakdown to submit@aiga.org.

Us By Night, which already had a meager 24.6% women, dropped to just 18.6% time on stage for women. That means that at Us By Night, 40.8 hours were dominated by men and only 9.35 hours by women. Out of the women speaking, one-third of them were in creative duos with male partners—so in a conference of 63 talks, there were only nine instances of women onstage without a man. That’s only 14%. For a conference that aims to represent the very cutting-edge of design, these numbers suggest the opposite. While many conferences have an even balance of men and women speaking, they may have few, and sometimes no, WOC in the lineup. Gender inclusivity isn’t the only area of concern when it comes to design conference lineups: Like many industries, the design industry must be more inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities. Conferences overwhelmingly reflect the bias, when they could be combating it. Conference organizers have a unique platform with the power to literally set the stage for what truly inclusive conversations should look like. (3) When it comes to diversity and inclusion, it’s not enough for organizers to say that they tried their hardest. There is simply no excuse for inclusion apologetics. In 2019, we urge designers to turn down invitations to conferences that do not demonstrate inclusive politics. We urge you to put community before self-promotion, and to encourage your colleagues to do the same. Explain to organizers why you are rejecting their offer. Demand better.

E S THAT WE’VE LOOKED AT TOOK PL ACE BE T WEEN WINTER 2017 A

THE C ONFERE N

Our investigation found that, on average, U.S. conferences had a gender breakdown of 54.6% women, whereas in Europe the average was 35.7%. Across all the speakers, when looking at how many spoke on stage alone rather than with partners or in groups, 36% were women and 64% were men. We found that men are more often given a stage independently, whereas women are more likely to speak in pairs or in groups that include men as well as other women. As well as charting the gender breakdown of each conference lineup, we calculated the time on stage of women and men. This shows how much time speakers were actually allocated. If a studio of two was on stage for one hour, for example, we allocated 30 minutes to each speaker. We calculated time on stage to emphasize that it is not simply an inclusive lineup that is vital, but also the time that’s allotted to each person. Counting time on stage often altered our findings. For example, the Brno Biennial talks, which had 34.8% women in its lineup, had women onstage for only 22% of the time, meaning that men had roughly 78% more time speaking. The Weltformat Graphic Design Festival symposium, which had 50% women, dropped to 40% when accounting for time on stage for women; similarly, Graphic Design Festival Scotland’s TopForm dropped from 50% women to 41.7% time on stage for women. AGI Open also dropped from 37.5% women speakers to 30.1% time on stage. While a lineup may appear equal in regards to a speaker list, the time women are given to actually talk does not necessarily equate.

D WINTER 2018.

Reading the Results

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W OMEN (A STEEP DROP FROM THE 70% OF WOMEN DESIGN STUDEN T S The history of design has been written by both women and men, but there have been times when it was difficult to see where women have had a seat at the table, and just how significant their contributions have been. While the doors of design have always been open to women (sometimes just a crack, sometimes more), the industry has not been immune to sexism, outdated expectations around gender roles, and the claustrophobic effect of the glass ceiling. It’s no secret that no matter the industry, corporations are unfriendly to change: As of January 2018, women represented only 4.8% of CEOs on the Standard & Poor’s 500. Female-only–founded startups received just 2.2% of 2017’s total venture capital funding, and according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the gender wage gap is unlikely to close before the year 2059 if current trends continue. Low numbers are concerning enough, but the rate of stagnation is cause for real alarm. Women are the chief executives of just 25 of the 500 most profitable companies in the United States. The share of IPOs led by female CEOs in the United States has averaged around 5% since 2000, and the percentage of female senior venture capitalists has actually dropped from 10% in 1999, to just 6% today. As an industry that prides itself on being forward-thinking, designers owe it to themselves to turn their critical eyes inward and look at just who’s leading the charge for change. Gender parity and pay equity are still issues, but the landscape isn’t actually all that bleak. And when compared to many other industries, design has come a long way, and women have always been part of the lifeblood of the design world—whether or not their contributions were acknowledged at the time. Lella Vignelli, after all, was not just Massimo’s wife—she cofounded Vignelli Associates and ran the business for years. If the most effective change truly comes from within, the key to getting more women into management roles is to tap into the collective power they have within the field, a movement that’s already underway.

). T HE RATE OF FEMALE CREATIVE DIRECTORS ACROSS THE INDUSTRY ROS E F

R OM 3% IN 2008 TO 11% CURRENTLY.

54% OF DESIGNERS WORKING TODAY A R E

Picture your favorite font. What do you see? The shapes and contours that inspire and excite you, or the person who designed it? Let’s say you choose Helvetica. Do you picture the friendly counter of the lowercase a, or the smiling face of Massimo Vignelli, who made it famous? Bonus points if you pictured his designer wife, Lella, who shared his affinity for the Modernist typeface.

Pay disparity in male and female artisans has been recorded as far back as the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century, when women were trained in artistic and production skills but paid a wage that was considered “supplemental” to their husbands’ income. Decades later, during the advertising boom of the 1960s and ’70s, women had a clear 108

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creative presence, though neither their salaries at the time nor their lack of recognition reflect that. Design luminary Paula Scher started her career designing album covers in the CBS promotion department in the ’70s, and while she later became one of the most famous designers in her field, she certainly wasn’t alone coming up. Scher recalls a sense of community and camaraderie among herself and her fellow female designers. This group included influential designer Henrietta Condak, who Scher says, “helped her [illustrator] husband, worked three days a week, and did the best work in the joint.” While Scher and her fellow designers knew they were hired because their talent was more “bang for the buck” than their male counterparts, she says that their real focus was always simply on the work. They produced the best design they could and believed the rest would come later. Success did come later for Scher. She was hired as the first female partner at Pentagram in 1991, yet it would be decades before the same could be said of other women on a significant scale. One major downfall of the ’70s was that talented female designers weren’t given the tools to succeed as independent business owners, making it hard for them to launch their own companies and upend the status quo. Even in large, progressive cities, women were faced with sexism from both colleagues and clients. Scher notes that while women fostered their design skills, male-dominated business culture not only discouraged women from starting their own companies, but made it extremely difficult to win clients if they did. Scher says that when trying to build up her business after leaving CBS, “expectations were low.” During her early days at Pentagram, she was often mistaken for a spouse at company events. Since then, Scher has redefined graphic design through her work with Microsoft, Citibank, MoMA, The Public Theater, and many more, meanwhile making significant headway in creating opportunities for other women on their way to top design positions. Pentagram now has five female partners in its U.S. and UK offices, most recently Astrid Stavro, who was hired in late 2018. While there is a long way yet to go for the industry at large, it’s still encouraging to view the design world compared to other sectors. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 54% of designers working today are women. The rate of female creative directors across the industry rose from 3% in 2008 to 11% currently. While this number of women in leadership positions is certainly not the end goal, it indicates a positive momentum and genuine sense of progress. And with more than half of the industry being women, the chance to effect change is even more significant. It’s even more encouraging to look at the number of women graduating with advanced degrees in graphic design. According 109

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to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 60% of graduate graphic design degrees go to women (by contrast, it’s estimated that fewer than 50% of MBA students are women). However, this highlights the stark contrast between women in school and women in C-Suite positions. Why do these high numbers of female grads and working designers start to taper off the closer you get to the top?

IT'S O N

LY IN THE PROFESSIONAL WORLD THAT YOU START TO SEE LE A D

As the global CEO at brand consultancy firm Wolff Olins, Sairah Ashman is one of the few women who has made her way up the ranks. Like Scher, she recalls a time when the expectations of women’s professional goals were egregiously low. Her school counselor advised her to decide between being a secretary or a nurse. Luckily, she says, “I had different aspirations.” Even today, design education doesn’t always set up students to succeed in the professional world. The priority of rigorous design programs is to build technical skills, learn design history, and create a portfolio of work, all of which is gender agnostic. But entering the workplace means navigating the gray areas of negotiating salaries, balancing family life, and projecting confidence in a world that is not always friendly to women. Many female design graduates feel unprepared for that, no matter how strong their work is. “I didn’t see the gender difference in a school setting,” says Min Lew, creative director at Base Design in New York City. “It‘s only in the professional world that you start to see leadership roles mostly represented by men.” The main differentiator between design and industries like tech and finance is the fact that design is a visual and productoriented industry, driven by the power of creation. Scher says that while she and her contemporaries were building their careers, she took comfort from the fact that “design is a visual profession—you can see if someone is good. That’s the advantage every woman has. If you stay in the game and you do the work, you’ll be recognized. Women have the work.” In other words, while women in design are still fighting for power and recognition, they have, for half a century, at least been in the room.

E R SHIP ROLES MOSTLY REPRESENTED BY MEN.

FINDING

The gospel of “the work” is a belief that many young designers share. Scher’s fellow partner at Pentagram, Natasha Jen, notes that “gender never came to my mind until I was in more of a leadership position. I was very focused on my work and developing my skill set; just trying to be the best in whichever group I was part of.” The most crucial key to unlocking opportunities in graphic design to women is actually the women themselves. After hearing the personal stories of more than half a dozen women, it was heartening to learn that, in their view, the design world has bred a remarkable degree of compassion and cooperation among women in powerful positions, and 111

EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH a sense of responsibility to give back. As the New York Times recently noted, change starts in the boardroom. The same is true of the design industry: The most significant change has relied on women climbing to the top of the ladder and extending a rung to young up-and-comers.

THE MOST CRUCIAL KEY TO UNLOCKING OPPORTUNITIES IN GRAPHIC DESIGN TO WOMEN I S

A C TUALLY THE WOMEN THEMSELVES.

Kat Gordon is one of these women. Gordon was taken aback in 2012 when she learned that grim 3% statistic about the amount of female creative directors. Having started her own agency years before, Gordon knew firsthand the challenges women faced when it came to moving into leadership positions. Her solution was to create the 3% Conference, an annual conference that teaches professionals from around the world best practices for managing employees, cultivating work/life balance, and fostering diversity in the workplace. “Sexism is not only asking somebody to sleep with you,” Gordon told the the New York Times last year. “We’re getting at those subtle things—how much your firm is celebrating women, how much you’re giving them the stage to own the floor, to being in front of key clients, to participate in pitches.” No longer just a two-day conference, Gordon’s organization has launched MiniCons in cities around the world, a certification program for agencies that want to cement themselves as equality-driven, agency consulting programs, a student scholarship fund, and a series of significant research projects. For Jessica Walsh, partner at Sagmeister & Walsh, a sense of internal frustration at the lack of women in power spurred her to curate a conversation series called Ladies, Wine & Design, in which women come together to seek knowledge and inspiration through mentorship circles, creative meet-ups, and portfolio reviews. Walsh’s frustration, that there simply aren’t enough opportunities available to women from the top down, is shared by many, creating a new paradigm where women fight from the ground up. The organization, which started in New York City, has spawned more than 200 outposts around the world. “We’ve heard stories of women who formed bonds through our meet-ups and who went on to create studios or new businesses together,” says Walsh, “women who were inspired from the events to make career changes to pursue what they truly love doing; women who got the courage to ask for a raise or confront a coworker who was being sexist.” For Cat Hyland, ECD of Portland-based agency Swift, “creativity is a team sport.” Launched by Liz Valentine and Alicia McVey in 2007, Swift prides itself on being a female-led company. As a firm with an impressive history of female entrepreneurship, Swift’s leaders feel an inherent duty to pay their insights forward. “It‘s really all about goal-setting and accountability,” says Hyland. “Female leaders should 112

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be using our privilege to help others benefit. Mentoring makes all the difference. Investing in your people is one of the best ways to create change.” Yet even as women designers look inward at the design industry’s own gender parity problems, most practitioners still have clients to contend with. Design doesn’t exist in a vacuum; as part of a service industry, graphic designers often work with companies in an adjacent industry, whose values may or may not align with their own. Lew describes her professional agency experience as supportive and harmonious, with many women in director and staff positions. However, she notes that “as creatives, the reality is that we do deal with clients. It‘s been interesting for me to notice who’s on the other side of the table.”

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WAS IN MORE OF A LEADERSHIP POSITION.

Many female designers are also hopeful for a more inclusive future because of the nature of design itself. The goal of design lies not simply in economics, it’s about creating something—from a typeface or logo to an entire brand identity or digital product—that speaks to and represents the world around us. The most significant change usually happens in direct proportion to the bottom line, and increasingly, consumers are flocking to brands with values (or, at least, purported values) that align with their own. According to one 2017 study, 90% of millennials prize authenticity in advertising, but only 57% of consumers say that brands create campaigns that feel authentic. Global powerhouses Nike and Audi have debuted ad campaigns this past year that call attention to racial and gender equality, and to significant profit. After their ad featuring football player and social justice icon Colin Kaepernick, Nike says its sales rose 31%. Successful firms intrinsically understand that a more diverse workforce leads to more dynamic, effective, and relatable design. According to Hyland, this heightened cultural awareness has presented both designers and clients with opportunities to educate. “Minorities deserve to see themselves in media,” she says. “The future belongs to creatives, brands, and agencies that see how powerful design and advertising can be in that regard.” While the design industry hasn’t been as demonstrably affected as Hollywood or news media by #MeToo, it has still felt the cultural shift the movement incited. “As a society, we’re a lot more aware of gender inequality issues,” says Jen. “And as women, we have the opportunity, as well as the responsibility, to actually shape and fine tune this movement so it doesn‘t fall into a simplistic battle between men and women.”

EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH

Additionally, opportunities to work remotely have helped ease the pressures of family life, which is something that is still a very real concern for women in every industry. Walsh agrees, saying, “Social media combined with cheaper tools that allow for a lower barrier to entry and the flexibility to work from home have all helped democratize who can become a designer or who can receive recognition and work, and find success.” This past November, Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, the founder of the Gaia Project for Women’s Leadership, took the stage at the 7th Annual 3% Conference and asked the audience to think of one commitment they could make to help steer the organization toward its goal of 50% female leadership. That may seem daunting, but history has shown us that daily perseverance and support from women working in design has made us all more empowered, each generation improving on the last. The design industry is poised to be a leader in adapting to equality and making women’s voices heard, in the boardroom and beyond. We haven’t arrived yet, but reflecting on the experiences of the women who have made it to the top thus far, the future is in good hands. If everyone, both men and women, grasped the lessons those early female leaders have to teach, design stands to outpace other industries when it comes to creating a more inclusive workplace. Design is a discipline that improves only with a combination of self-awareness and keen perception. After all, you can’t design the writing on the wall if you can’t understand its message.

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HING IT ing It CRUSHING

Beth Pickens career consultant for female, LGBTQ+, and POC creatives.

Noah Beckwith graduated in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. Works as a designer for Nike in Portland.

Qieer Wang graduated in illustration from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2016. Works as a freelance illustrator and animator in New York.

Lance Wyman graduated from the Pratt Institute in industrial design in 1960. Created Mexico â&#x20AC;&#x2122;68 Olympics logotype. Still working at 81.

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Tea Uglow graduated in fine art from Oxford University in 1997. Creative director at Googleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Creative Lab in Sydney. Has worked at Google since 2006.

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and one ripe for undulations over years, days, and even hours. This is especially true when we frame self-worth purely in the context of creativity: A single project might begin by bolstering it, then start to shred it, build it up again, and tear through it with something as simple as a mean tweet or scathing crit. And while the notion of selfworth is a wholly individual one, certain conditions around it are shared by most people working in a creative field: rejection, moments of imposter syndrome, unpredictable client responses, and those stifling perfectionist standards. Beth Pickens works as a creative consultant, and starts all client relationships by trying to understand how their individual personal histories and beliefs around labor, class, and family affect their practice. Much of her work deals with helping clients understand the monetary value of what they do. “Self-worth as a human concept intersects with the job market for creatives in a lot of ways,” says Pickens. “Something a lot of my clients as women, queer people, and people of color have in common is that they aren’t generally socialized by their family or culture to understand the world of money. People who don’t work in the creative industries often devalue what they do, or see it as a luxury, and it’s hard not to absorb that cultural messaging.” Self-worth that relates to your work as much as your being, then, is utterly unique: A commission or accolade will mean something quite different from one person to the next. IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MUCH YOU’RE GETTING PAID, IT MATTERS THA T

We wanted to explore these individual and universal experiences of selfworth and self-doubt through the lenses of four design practitioners at different stages in their careers, along with Pickens’ own insights. We asked them about the projects that changed everything or nothing, the role education plays in evaluating self-worth, about their highs and lows, and about how all these things impact their creative output. 119

O U BELIEVE IT WHEN PEOPLE TELL YOU YOUR WORK IS GOOD.

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What does the idea of “self-worth” mean to you? Lance Wyman LW S elf-worth is a barometer for the confidence and energy I bring to solving a design problem. I am a better designer when I don’t get in my own way. TU It’s about whether you believe in your own ideas. At a Tea Uglow certain level, we’re commercial artists—our worth is financial, which is valuable and measurable, but that’s not usually a strong motivator for creative individuals: It doesn’t matter how much you’re getting paid, it matters that you believe it when people tell you your work is good. To me, that’s what self-worth is, but there’s a very important distinction between self-worth as a human— you’re a good person and do good stuff—and as a creative. NB I think it’s always changing, and every framework we set Noah Beckwith up to feel self-worth, or have a sense of identity, always erodes or shifts. If you feel your vision is intact, that’s what it comes down to. QW For me, it’s during the creative process that I get to know Qieer Wang myself better and from different perspectives. I purposely make my process interesting and make sure I really feel passionate about it. That’s what transforms my anxiety into satisfaction in a way; when I just draw, with each stroke there’s that feeling of breaking through anxiety.

What points in your career stand out as times that have been particularly crushing? LW A s a high school graduate with a weak academic record, I was crushed when I wasn’t accepted to study at Pratt Institute in New York. After a year at another college, I was finally accepted at Pratt, where I studied industrial design. This was the first time my self-worth was bolstered by my ability to design. NB W hen I got to art school I wasn’t necessarily sure I was going to do graphic design. During freshman year at RISD, you do drawing classes and I was thinking, “I’m probably going to be one of the worst people here.” That was the first hurdle. But it was fine—it’s the classic imposter syndrome thing. Otherwise, with Instagram and the way everything is really visible now on the internet, you can see all these people’s practices, the press they get, and other external markers of achievement. On the other hand, when I was a junior and started getting more attention online, it made me feel really good at first, then that quickly faded away. BP Our brains are always looking toward the negative. It’s Beth Pickens hardwired into us: You can have 99 positive comments and one troll saying something awful and it’s the one troll who’ll haunt you. I tell people to get off social media as much as possible. It just facilitates compare and 120

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despair. Comparing other people’s exterior to your interior will always make you feel awful. People have to learn how to use the internet and social media as a tool that’s useful to them—not something to numb out with, or something that erodes your sense of self and your communication with other people.

How much does self-worth vacillate project to project, or day to day?

Are there any particular projects in your career that have bolstered your sense of worth? NB My final degree project. I didn’t post it online until after graduation, so in school I got to just experience the pure worth of it and not think about how many likes it got. That sort of thinking is impossible to avoid: When you know you’ve made something good but it doesn’t get many likes, you think, “Why?” But if you don’t have that external validation, you can do it totally by your own standards. QW I was doing gifs and illustration for a year, and it wasn’t really going anywhere. Then NPR contacted me asking if I wanted to do an animation for them. It was my first big job, and in that moment I just thought, “YES! I can do it!” Every little achievement builds up to more personal satisfaction. LW I felt most confident when my logotype and graphic system for the Mexican Olympics was accepted by the Mexican Olympic Committee. The logotype for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico is one of my biggest achievements. It did its job well 50 years ago, and it’s still young. TU A nice one for me is that the Royal Shakespeare Company are still talking about the #Dream40 project we did with them five or six years ago. I wrote an essay on all the things that went wrong with that project, but it’s lovely that the ideas have resonated for a long time. It’s the same for [the experimental publishing imprint] Editions at Play. We’ve done 10 books, we won a Peabody, and the

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NB N ow that I’m working at Nike, it’s a great job, but I don’t have that much energy to do my own work. I get waves of feeling if I haven’t made something in a while, and then I get an idea, and can chase it—but trying to ride those highs and lows can spill over into everyday life. You can’t let the low points make you feel like you’re a shitty person or a failure in other ways. Sometimes it’s just that you didn’t make something for a month, but it feels like a whole existential thing. QW One important thing for me is that I want to combine the passion I put into my own work into client work so that they’re 100% the same. I get very easily bored of my work, so I have to try and push myself and manage myself mentally.

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IT British Library is archiving it, so it’s been recognized, but it takes a long time to actually believe all that. I don’t think anything is ever as good as I want it to be.

Does never feeling satisfied with a project ever feel like a defense mechanism? TU I like the process of thinking that it‘s going to be brilliant, then it’s not. It doesn’t feel masochistic—that’s just my process. I often find that I’ve missed a lot of things… it’s like when you’re at home and wearing something you think is great until you go into the daylight and then you wish you’d stayed in. Life is basically that! BP A lot of creative people have tinkering brains, and one’s brain isn’t always the best judge of whether the work is great or not after the exciting limerence or honeymoon phase. You make the woods, then get lost in them. You think, “Is this making sense? Should you give up and be a nurse or something?” It’s really normal. But there are paths out of the woods—your vision is your vision.

What can creatives do to help bolster their sense of self-worth?

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LW F irstly, start off by just “showing up”—being present and involved in whatever you’re doing, without a preconceived attitude. Understand what you’re involved in. Secondly, try only to take on work that you like doing and give it your all. And finally, get your work out there. You don’t just design for yourself, so get it out there, and learn from the responses you get. BP Community is one of the foundations of self-worth. Surround yourself with people who also want to succeed. To grow your self-worth, you have to have it reflected back on you. People tell themselves crazy shit around their work. I think what’s crucial is that people have their own creative practice outside their jobs—it helps with the obsession for validation.

Do bigger budgets equal a greater sense of self-worth? LW I see this as an area where balance is important. On one hand, my self-worth is bolstered more by creating a powerful solution to a meaningful project than by the size of the budget. On the other hand, an inadequate budget can contribute to me failing to meet my financial responsibilities, which is damaging to my self-worth.

Does your sense of self-worth increase when you know a project is doing good? QW I t definitely does. I was working on a project for the Johns Hopkins Hospital [in Baltimore], making installations of motion work in the waiting room for the patients. 123

EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH I’m pretty depressed about that project now as it’s on hold. I want to do something that can build a bridge for communication, and make people feel less stigmatized.

Do you find it detrimental to your sense of self and wellbeing to tie your personal identity to your professional identity, or to your creative output? NB A s a graphic designer, that’s an interesting question. If you’re doing projects for yourself, it’s okay to really put yourself in it and sort of let the practice be intertwined with who you are. But when working for a client, you have to put them first. You’re not doing a good job if you’re just doing what you want to do for them. It’s about modulating and choosing when to have a more active role in your relationship to your practice. BP It’s so important for all creative people to really practice the concept of a weekend: having at least 24 hours in which they don’t do anything that could lead to earning money. Don’t reply to emails at all, just spend time purposefully inhabiting the other parts of yourself. That also makes the actual work more enjoyable. Work should fuel your life, not the reverse.

How does being freelance affect your sense of yourself and your work? QW I t’s really tough for everybody, I guess. I do put myself out there and try not to be too sensitive: Everything is about the experience, and so far, it’s been pretty nice. I’m lucky; when I approach people, even when they have no work for me, they might say, “I love your work, but it doesn’t match our style.” I have the strength to keep going with creative stuff even though I don’t get those jobs. But with both my work and me as a person, either you like it or you don’t. Frustration and rejection are normal. BP When a lot of freelance clients realize they’ve devalued their work compared to how much others who have learned to negotiate are making, they blame themselves. They see people getting paid more, and see the gender or racial pay gaps. There’s a wonderful organization called WAGE [Working Artists and the Greater Economy], founded by artists who created a suggested pay scale, whether the work is for a museum or artist-run space. There’s so much expectation, especially for emerging creatives, that people could or should be doing things for free, and it’s unclear when they can say no. People talking about how much money they’re getting or asking for is one of the biggest things we can do.

Do different cultural experiences enter the equation at all? QW I was brought up in Chengdu in China, and I think when you start to respect yourself is probably different in the 124

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IT Western world than in my country. At least for my generation, to your parents and other people, you’re always just a kid; they don’t respect you as human. Maybe I’m too sensitive or rebellious, but I always got really mad that people weren’t respecting me all through high school. Then, in my second year of undergrad—at that time I was doing comic books—I began to see that what I was doing was interesting, and people would say so on social media and things. It was only then that I realized I needed to respect myself more. In China it feels like people only care about you if you’re rich: Your worth is how you’re valued in money.

How much does self-worth as a creative change with age, or experience? LW E xperience has taught me a few tricks, and I know age will only stretch so far. I’m 81 and still love working. My confidence level still fluctuates, but along with my family and my work, my self-worth is doing well. TU I think I had much more ambition when I was younger. As you get older, you realize which bits of what you do are of value. I have terrible self-worth issues, I really do, and that’s misunderstood—it’s a mental health thing. Selfworth isn’t a given. There are two options: either you accept the fact you’re really good and become insufferable, or you don‘t, in which case you’re going to be tormented by the fact that for you it’s just not good enough, and you have to accept that every day. I can’t bear those people who think what they’re doing is significant and special. We’re making pretty pictures, everyone, calm down! QW W hen I’d just started I was like a brave kid—I’d just blindly put myself out there and see what happened. But with experience I started to realize what skills I needed, and how I worked, and I got more confident. I think the point is I need more respect from myself: Even though people might be telling you how good you are, if you don’t realize it yourself, it makes no sense. NB It definitely does—at the very least it changes with life experience. When I went into school I was very immature in a lot of ways, and it took a lot of different experiences and time and practice to end up where I am now, and that’s always a process. But I guess the big message is that it’s okay to take an active role in how you feel about your practice. But that’s not to say you should always feel good, or be blind to where you can improve.

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Sara Cwynar’s ‘A Rococo Base’ starts with a picture of a Rococo sculpture and a woman reclining, then spreads out into a “crazy field of imagery,” cluttered with Cezanne-brand makeup, images of Jeff Koons Old Masters handbags, and Paloma Picasso perfume bottles. The Baroque period, she says, best reflects contemporary capitalism, and all the excess that it entails. “There’s this feeling of being constantly inundated with things to buy, and also an idea about how arbitrary value can be, and how the ways we value objects are often connected to the ways we value human beings.” Cwynar first started making work in this vein with a 2016 piece called ‘Soft Film.’ The video explores the life of objects and images over time, but also responds to the idea of “soft sexism,” and the challenges that women face when they are trying to prove they’ve been discriminated against. A lot has changed in the years since making that piece, with the #MeToo movement putting a spotlight on sexism that’s both pervasive and difficult to name. The flip side to such swift and profound change, notes Cwynar, is when the language of feminism or progressivism is then co-opted by companies to sell things. Enter ‘Rotting Fruit,’ another new piece that starts with an image of rotting lemons she found in a bookstore in Arles, France. Weaving around a collage of advertisements, designed objects, and found photographs is a text Cwynar has written about how cultural value is often connected to outward appearance, and what we might know about a person from seeing his insides. “I was thinking about the #MeToo movement,” she says. “I was thinking about how Harvey Weinstein literally looks rotten, like he’s falling apart, and how Steve Bannon kind of looks that way, too, and so does Trump. I wanted to talk about these gross, visceral men who are often preying on really beautiful women, and the way that beauty plays so much of a role in power, or lack of power.” Sara Cwynar is a New York-based artist working in photography, installation, and book-making. Her work involves a constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials. She is interested in the way that images morph, accumulate, endure, and change in meaning and value over time, and the effect this has on a collective worldview. She is a former staff graphic designer at the New York Times Magazine.

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Image caption: Sara Cwynar, ‘A Rococo Base,’ 2018, archival pigment prints, 50 x 63” (127 x 160 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto.

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Sara Cwynar, ‘Rotting Fruit,’ 2018, archival pigment prints, 50 x 63” (127 x 160 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto.

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On a Monday afternoon in late fall, a group of 30 or so adults in various interpretations of business-casual sat in neat rows of chairs facing a projector screen with the words “Applied Empathy” written across it. They had arrived minutes earlier, lanyards in tow, at the spacious West Village event room of Sub Rosa, a creative marketing agency whose clients include Pepsi, General Electric, and Nike, for a workshop on how to bring more empathy into their work.

PEOPLE THINK EMPATHY IS ABOUT BEING NICE, BEING COMPASSIONATE, BEING SYMPATHE T I

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IT’S NONE OF THOSE THINGS.”

At the front of the room, Sub Rosa’s founder and CEO, Michael Ventura, stood before the glowing screen. Tall with long dark hair, a beard, and fashionably casual clothes, he exuded a kind of urban shaman vibe. As one of the Fast Track sessions at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, the 90-minute workshop promised to introduce attendees to Sub Rosa’s Applied Empathy methodology, a corporate leadership approach designed to “drive internal cultural change, build better products, and connect [businesses] more deeply with [their] audiences.” Ventura authored a book titled Applied Empathy and designed an Applied Empathy card game called Questions & Empathy that he describes as “a highbrow Cards Against Humanity—it escalates you from small talk to big talk ultra fast.” (1) Ventura started the session with a vocabulary lesson. “I’ll begin by asking a fairly obvious question that we often ask ourselves: Why empathy?” he said, as attendees dug through their bags for a pen to take notes. Empathy, he continued, is a chronically misunderstood term, particularly in the business world. “People think empathy is about being nice, being compassionate, being sympathetic—it’s none of those things,” he said. At Sub Rosa, he explained, empathy has a broader meaning that extends well beyond its dictionary definition of “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” “We say empathy is self-aware perspective-taking to gain richer, deeper understanding,” he said. And all the niceties he mentioned before? Those are simply the side effects of being a more empathetic person. For companies like Sub Rosa that position themselves as design-centric problem solvers, developing a deeper understanding of their clients—or of their clients’ clients—has very real economic benefits. It can lead to more impactful campaigns and more memorable brand activations. It can produce more useful products and solve overlooked needs. According to a company called The Empathy Business, empathy is a quantifiable metric. In 2015 and 2016, the UK company released an Empathy Index, which ranked the top 100 companies based on an analysis of corporate culture, ethics, leadership performance, social media presence, and brand perception. Businesses can be good or bad at empathy (Facebook ranked first in 2016, so take from the index what you will), but the company argues that those who build an empathetic culture can see real economic benefits. “The top 10 companies in the Global Empathy Index 2015 increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10, and generated 50% more earnings,” Belinda Parmar, founder of The Empathy Business wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2016. The idea that soft skills can net hard numbers was boardroom catnip for many of the attendees, who were sent to the workshop on behalf of big companies like Microsoft, Kelloggs, and L’Oréal. Unlike other corporate self-improvement initiatives that have the scent of snakeoil, empathy has a hard-to-hate charm. What monster doesn’t believe having more empathy in business is a good thing? 134

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But getting to the point where teams operate in truly empathetic ways takes work, Ventura reminded the crowd. Empathy is like a muscle, and if you don’t exercise it, it will atrophy into self-involved mush. The workshop—and the Applied Empathy methodology in general—is a first step toward recognizing your own biases and ultimately making better products and solutions for your clients. “When you get into the shoes of someone else, you’re able to really see something from their eyes and use that to inform the decision-making and the problem-solving you’re doing,” Ventura continued. “Does that make sense? Cool.”

E S N ’T BELIEVE HAVING MORE EMPATHY IN BUSINESS IS A GOOD THING?

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Turn on the news. Scroll through Twitter. Click on seemingly endless news stories with headlines like “How to Use Empathy to Get You What You Want” and “Discover Your Biggest Business Advantage—Empathy.” In 2019, the drumbeat of “more empathy” is hard to escape. The term has become a cure-all salve for a time of deep divisiveness. If we’re to believe the news, it’s the stitching that can unite opposite sides of the political aisle. It’s the key to making technology less toxic and addictive. It’s the secret ingredient to ensuring your design is truly “human-centered.” It’s also a hot commodity. The empathy economy is booming, and understandably so. Empathy is, in theory, the perfect antidote to the anger, tension, and world-weariness that so many people currently feel. The logical thinking goes: If everyone put themselves in another person’s shoes, they’d be able to see things differently. It’s a sentiment that, inevitably, people have learned how to profit from—perhaps nowhere more than in the design world where the concept of “user-centered design” has become the default methodology. Right now you can go on Amazon and buy dozens of books (2) that teach you how to use empathy as a leadership and marketing tool, and at least one that tells you empathy is total bullshit. You can hire a coach who will teach you how to be more empathetic or sign up for an online empathy skills training course that promises to teach you tips and tricks for imbuing your emails, body language, and verbal delivery with a sense of compassion. But the rise of the empathy economy isn’t a bulletproof path to hugs and happiness. With empathy’s rapid ascent into the communal medicine cabinet, there are new questions to consider, like: What happens when empathy becomes a marketable skill? Will its meaning become diluted as its worth ascends? And is empathy something you can learn—let alone buy? Apparently it is. A few weeks after the Sub Rosa workshop, I found myself on the phone with Whitney Hess, an executive coach in New York City who offers coaching for individuals and businesses who are feeling stuck, adrift, unhappy, or some combination of the three. I found Hess by googling “empathy coach,” but she’s just one of a whole page of results advertising motivational language and corporate problem-solving advice. In the current climate, empathy is reliably a marketable—and thus SEO-able—term. For the better part of a decade, Hess has owned her eponymous consultancy, which boasts the tagline “Improving the human experience one day at a time.” Hess’ website tells me that she is a Myers-Briggs ENFJ (The Protagonist, The Teacher, The Giver) and that her conflict style is Accomodating (“you win, I lose”). Her services, which include things like “management coaching,” “facilitation and mediation,” and “narrative shifts,” make me feel like she’ll be able to guide me to a higher moral truth and help me make more money while I’m at it.

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Hess told me her coaching sessions are designed to peel back the layers of hardness and rationality that prevent people from confronting the emotional roadblocks and blind spots that can make it harder to truly connect with people. Most clients pay Hess for a package of sessions, but there’s also a pay-what-youwish form on her website where people can decide on their own fee. The average payment for an hour-long session is $196.

DIVISIVENESS. A TIME OF DEEP Hess is a former user experience designer who spent her early career

wire-framing apps and websites at digital agencies before she quit to make a go of it as an independent consultant. She says many UX designers and researchers are natural empaths who’ve found themselves in a position where their sensitive attunement to human nature is funneled toward a business goal. “I see all of user experience as being an empathy practice,” she said. “There’s a particular set of goals that we‘re trying to achieve that are ultimately for the businesses’ benefit, but the vantage point of a user experience practitioner is, ‘How can I find the intersection between what the business wants and what the user needs?’” UX research is predicated on uncovering gems of insight found only by gaining access to a user’s mind and emotions. To understand another person— better yet, to empathize with them—is to be able to make something they want and maybe even need. But for Hess, empathy isn’t just getting to the point where you can imagine where another person is coming from, it’s feeling where another person is coming from. “Empathy is actually a relatively new word in the English language,” she explained in her slow, deliberate cadence. “It comes from a German word (3) that I’m going to butcher if I try to pronounce it, but the literal definition of it is ‘to feel into.’ I see ‘to feel into’ as being very different than ‘to feel for’ or ‘to understand.’” That’s the main problem with empathy and design, Hess conceded. Lots of designers get caught up in the idea that empathy is merely understanding another person’s perspective. They approach empathy as another step in a user-centric design process or as a mental puzzle to solve rather than an emotional state to tap into. “I sometimes worry that in the field of design, when we talk about empathy, we really mean cognitive empathy,” she said. Empathy coaching is, in part, a way to strip away any notion that empathy is an item on a checklist or best practice in the design process. Hess is insistent that before people can practice empathy in their work, they must practice empathy with themselves, which tends to be a long and messy process. When I told her that empathy coaching sounds a lot like therapy, she quickly corrected my choice of words. “It’s not therapy. It’s not anything else—it’s coaching,” she said. “The work that I do with my clients is not explicitly about empathy. What I’m really doing with my clients is helping them to better understand their own feelings and needs. Because when we’re not self-connected, we are much less capable of connecting with others.” “Connecting with others” has always been the lofty promise of empathy. It explains why many of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are so enamored with the word, and why some of them have turned empathy into a formal practice. In a blissfully naïve interview with Freakonomics Radio in 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg opined on his company’s power to make people more empathetic by showing them what they share. 136

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1 Questions include: "What makes a meaningful experience?" and “What questions make you the most uncomfortable?” 2 Titles include: - T he Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill ($18.62) -E mpathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It ($13.59) - A gainst Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion ($11.59).

3 The word is Einfühlung, and it's pronounced eín-fhoo-loong.

“First you connect over something that you have in common. So you recognize that the other person is a person,” Zuckerberg told the host. “But then they go connect over other things, and they debate other things, and they find that, ‘Hey, we agree on other things; we disagree on them; but now we can have productive and empathetic discussions, because we‘re all people, and we recognize our common humanity.’” It would be an admirable sentiment if it wasn’t merely sugar-coating. For companies like Facebook, empathy is often used as shorthand for “hyperpersonalization.” As the world becomes more complex and divided, knowing how factions of users want to experience its platform is not just good for business—it’s essential to the company’s survival. In 2015, Facebook launched its Empathy Lab as an effort to make its products and services more attuned to users with special needs: people with disabilities or those living in underdeveloped countries. Though it’s hard to argue with Facebook’s desire to make its products more useful and accessible, the effort highlights the inherent tensions in connecting empathy and business: More thoughtful products are important, as long as they attract more users. Danielle Krettek is used to navigating the contradictions of the technology world. When she joined Google, she came to the notoriously engineering-led company with a radical idea. Having spent her earlier career working as a designer and researcher at Nike and Apple, she’d noticed how technology—despite its makers’ best intentions—often ignored users’ emotional well-being in return for efficiency and functionality. At Google, she wanted to bring an element of humanity to the company’s products. “I was seeing how technology ignores this whole emotional layer of our human experience,” she told me over the phone from her office in Mountain View, California. “I’ve noticed that the intuitive interaction of multitouch and the appverse has led to very simple, very light, and deeply functionally-led experiences. And the thing that’s glaringly missing for me is all of the emotional experience. Now that technology is wall-to-wall and in every nook and cranny of our lives, it’s just radically insufficient.” A few years ago, Krettek started Google’s Empathy Lab, a multidisciplinary team that works mostly within the company’s AI and Machine Learning team, but also acts as a roving research group that advocates for users’ emotional well-being across various product teams. Krettek is guarded about the specifics around the kinds of projects the Empathy Lab works on, but right now most of her lab’s resources go toward helping machine learning engineers “build humanity” into their training models and algorithms for voice assistants. “We work in a group of 600 or 700 people doing lots of different things, and what I tend to do is kind of be the human inspiration,” she explained. That companies like Google are willing to throw money at building products with an emotional conscience is, on one hand, an admission of what’s been sorely lacking in all of our habit-forming, thumb-swiping inter137

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EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH actions with tech products for the past decade. But it’s also a reaction to the way technology itself is changing. As apps become more personalized and predictive, and voice assistants more pervasive, Krettek’s work is a small but important effort that will help technology slide even more seamlessly into every aspect of our lives.

IT'S TAKING ONE OF THE MOST INHERENT HUMAN QUALITIES WE H

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Other big tech companies have begun to catch on, too. Nokia Bell Labs, the research center famous for inventing the transistor, has spent the last couple of years investing time and money in developing wearable technology that will help people communicate more empathically. Marcus Weldon, Bell Labs’ president, believes that most of the world’s problems are solvable by facilitating a deeper connection than what‘s currently possible with phones and computers. “We’ve become isolated in little silos of existence,” he told me for a story I previously reported for Wired magazine about the company. “What’s lacking is state transfer between individuals so you can actually feel how they feel.” Bell Labs’ solution, called The Sleeve, is like a souped-up Apple Watch that’s able to measure biometric data like heart rate and perspiration, then translate that information into more emotionally rich messages communicated through haptic feedback. Eventually, this form of “sixth sense” technology could be embedded into more of our devices, layering the world with a heightened sense of emotion. We’re already seeing that happen in some form, on a much smaller scale. For Krettek’s part, she’s spent the last couple of years with Google Assistant’s personality team, which is responsible for imbuing a sense of humanness in products like Google Home or Google Assistant. Krettek describes herself as helping engineers, product managers, writers, and scientists to better understand the nuances of human sentiment, which can make the difference between a technology product sounding creepy or comforting. The way she sees it, technology is unavoidable for most people, and it’s only going to become more intimately embedded in our lives. The defining challenges of contemporary UX design are to ensure that people interact with technology in a way that feels natural—if not quite yet human—and that technology interacts with people in a way that feels respectful. “I think we’re moving into a new wave for a new era, where it’s actually about ‘design feeling’ instead of ‘design thinking,’” she said. Krettek’s idealism is echoed by many of empathy’s biggest advocates, who say the word’s sudden preponderance is inherently good. “In my view, if empathy becomes more ubiquitous, that’s probably not going to be a bad thing for anybody,” Sub Rosa’s Ventura said. There’s plenty of reason to believe that a more empathetic world could solve some of the problems caused by blind self-interest. But practicing personal empathy is different from selling it as a marketing tool that can be learned and honed for the betterment of the bottom line. In the last few years, empathy has garnered some vocal opponents in the design world, who argue the concept is self-serving, narrow-minded, and used as a crutch in the design process. These failures, the thinking goes, lead to designing products that solve only a small subset of users’ issues and ignore the wider implications of designing empathetically. 138

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4 According to the Grant Thornton Jargon Index, these are the most-used business buzzwords of 2018: Best in class, Value add, Game changer, Action plan, On the same page.

“We should think of ourselves as empathetic people within an empathetic practice,” said design consultant Thomas Wendt, who wrote a piece for the ethnography website EPIC titled “Empathy as Faux Ethics.” “But I don’t know—for me, that’s as far as it goes. Anything beyond that becomes sort of a commodification of empathy, which feels very counterintuitive and frankly, just kind of icky.” Even outside of the design world, the selling of empathy as a silver bullet solution runs the risk of neutering its power. Wendt takes particular issue with the contradiction of for-profit companies using empathy as a means for making more money. “It’s weird right?” he said. “It‘s taking one of the most inherent human qualities we have and putting a price tag on it.” Ask proponents of empathy like Ventura, Krettek, and Hess, and they’ll acknowledge empathy isn’t foolproof. Companies can “empathy-wash” their message in the same way some “greenwash” their marketing to look more environmentally friendly. Empathy can be misused for narrow- or shortsighted goals, and at its worst, can even be manipulated for malevolent purposes. Ventura brings up the point that, by his own definition, Cambridge Analytica’s mining and analysis of Facebook data to influence the 2016 elections could be considered empathetic. “It was nefarious, but at its core it was a deep understanding of these particular people. There was a lot of empathy in their behavior.” The greatest risk of empathy-washing is likely just a classic case of user fatigue. Like other well-intentioned words (4) and phrases that are absorbed by the business leadership machine, empathy runs the risk of losing its value the more it’s plastered across book covers and headlines. Marketing empathy’s pristine altruism has the unintended effect of diluting its power. Back at the workshop, Ventura instructed the crowd to split off into pairs of strangers. Each attendee was armed with two tarot-style cards printed with probing questions like “What questions make you most uncomfortable?” or “What motivates you to progress?” Ventura set a timer for 10 minutes, and the room lit up with quiet conversations that cumulatively produced an echoing boom. The woman I was partnered with told me that her marketing team at a global consumer brand had been having trouble communicating. People were stressed and stretched. There was no time for taking stock of her team’s mental health. She said she wanted to be able to apply the same level of care and empathy she feels in her personal life to her work life—and that it was, frankly, really hard. The conversation felt a little weird and forced, but it also worked. Despite knowing only her first name, I felt like I learned more about her outlook on work than I’ve learned about many of my friends. “It’s really beautiful to see a room shift like that,” Ventura said at the end of the exercise. When it works, he continued, empathy can get people to open up—even with perfect strangers. “Quick show of hands,” he said, ready to prove his point. “How many of you have these kinds of conversations with your colleagues?” No one raised their hand. TA

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THE UAE IS WHERE YOU’LL FIND THE WORLD’S TALLEST BUILDING, LARGEST SHOPPING MALL, AND BIGGEST MAN-MADE ISLAND — IS IT NOW HOME TO THE WORLD’S FASTESTGROWING GRAPHIC DESIGN SCENE, TOO?

EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH cation, and, surprisingly enough, on design. And not just architecture and industrial design, but graphic design, too. While many of the country’s biggest architectural draws may not be to your taste (unless you have a thing for marble columns, gold accents, and chandeliers bigger than most New York City apartments), the UAE’s graphic design game is strong— stronger than in many countries that have been around for centuries, let alone one that’s better known for its traditional values and conservative, authoritarian politics than for a progressive cultural agenda. The UAE got its first major graphic design infusion in 2006, when Salem Al-Qassimi founded Fikra. What started as a one-man practice has since grown into a small graphic design studio, and now into a wide-reaching “design-led educational platform” that also includes a café and coworking space, a designer-in-residence program, and, as of fall 2018, a Graphic Design Biennial—the very first in the Middle East, and one of only a handful that exist in the world. At the annual design weeks held in the United States, UK, and Western Europe, the words “graphic design” are barely breathed (unless it’s by me, wondering why it was forgotten, yet again). And yet despite being founded as a country less than 50 years ago, the UAE has devoted an entire biennial to it; the ambitious, month-long exhibition takes graphic design well beyond the traditional bounds of typography and calligraphy and into the realm of the conceptual, with a curatorial viewpoint that seeks to show how graphic designers approach broader social and political issues. The show’s underlying conceit, which riffs on the structure of the government’s many ministries, is a fictional Ministry of Graphic Design with departments like Graphic Optimism, Non-Binaries, and Flying Saucers as lenses through which to examine the many potentialities of graphic design.

1971 was a year of firsts. For early adopters, it was the year of the microprocessor, the pocket calculator, and the floppy disk. For explorers, it was the year of the Soviet space station (and NASA’s third manned moon mission); for the war-weary, it was the year of Greenpeace; for children (of all ages), it was the year of the Walt Disney World Resort. And for a quarter of a million people living in the desert region off the Persian Gulf known then as the Trucial States, it was the year of independence after more than 150 years under British rule. There are roughly 9.4 million people living there now, enjoying the kind of rapid expansion that’s possible only when a country comes into a lot of money very fast. At the same time oil was discovered and being exported in the ’50s and early ’60s, it was dawning on the British government that they couldn’t afford to protect what was becoming an increasingly vulnerable region. And so in 1971, the United Arab Emirates was born. You might know it as the home of Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world; or Burj Al Arab, the world’s only seven-star hotel, as it has come to be known. Or perhaps you’re familiar with its more than 300 man-made islands, including one that looks like a palm tree and an archipelago resembling a map of the world. More likely, you know it as the country where Sex and the City 2 was shot; you know, the one with all the tall, shiny buildings and the chic desert people? A good chunk of the movie was shot in Abu Dhabi (the country’s capital, and one of the seven emirates), and it caught the director’s eye for the same reason it caught all of ours. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, this region had transformed itself from an Arab backwater, where the biggest economic driver was a dwindling pearl trade, to a major international player, rich in oil and ready to spend their wealth—on infrastructure, edu142

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Clockwise: Music cassette, sock package, lyrics book, Quran. Private collection of Rasha Dakkak. Shown as part of Elham Namvar and Rasha Dakkak of Bayn Journal’s curation of everyday graphic design at ‘Fikra Graphic Design Biennial 01: Department of Non-Binaries,’ 2018. Images courtesy of Fikra.

“Design as a career path is not something that used to be taken seriously, and I think this is changing,” says Al-Qassimi. “The government is investing heavily in design and the arts in general, and is recognizing the value of the creative industries and their global impact.” And the globe is taking notice, too. IDEO recently partnered with the UAE government on Palmwood, a “design-led movement” that works with governments and organizations, and Wolff Olins, Siegel+Gale, Interbrand, and Landor are among a growing group of expansionminded design firms with Arab outposts. If there was ever a sign that graphic design is good for business, this is it. But when it’s taken decades for countries with established design histories to grasp that concept, how is it that a country with zero graphic design history is on track to outpace the rest of the world—not only in bringing graphic design to business practice, but in the way it invests, on a governmental-level, in design? This year, the UAE passed its biggest federal budget yet: $49 billion over the next three years, or roughly $16.4 billion per year. This is up from its 2018 budget of $14 billion, of which $240 million (1.7%) was spent on ministry projects. There are currently 31 ministry positions that oversee primary functions of state as well as things like Happiness and Wellbeing, Artificial Intelligence, Future Food Security, Climate Change, and finally, the Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development (MCKD), which invests in design projects like Al-Qassimi’s biennial. Compare this to the tenuous position of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, which gets $152 million (approximately .004% of the federal budget). The UK fares better, even as it continues to shrink its investment in culture and heritage, down to £392 million this year from £400 million the previous year.

BIGGER While other countries are slicing away at their cultural budgets, the UAE is doubling down. According to His Highness Shaikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, the UAE’s “pursuit to be among the most advanced countries in the world won’t be realized unless we enhance our cultural heritage. The future of our cultural development should be based on creativity and innovation.” Earlier this year, he helped launch the UAE Cultural Development Fund, which is overseen by MCKD and provides funding for a broad range of cultural pursuits. Crucially, it also includes something called the Creative Industries Contributions Index, which will calculate the economic returns on those pursuits, and show how the culture economy drives revenue and development. Even as the UAE continues to make its commitment to cultural investment loud and clear, with its $1.4 billion licensing and lending deal with the Louvre and a handful of other Paris museums, and its ever-expanding annual Dubai Design Week, Salem Al-Qassimi wasn’t hopeful when he approached the MCKD about his biennial funding. To his surprise, government support was easy to secure, and more surprising still, it came with no strings attached. Or perhaps the strings were just really hard to see. “The support that the government here provides is just, I don‘t even know how to explain it. There was so much support, it was just crazy,” he said. My thoughts exactly. In my experience, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. “We wondered the same thing,” he continued. “If we do get the government‘s support, how much influence would they have over the work? Honestly, it was none at all. We told them about the biennial and the concept of Ministry of Graphic Design, and they were like, ‘Yes,

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Lawrence Lemaoana, ‘I wanna be like you,’ 2015, embroidery on kanga, 61 x 43” (155 x 110 cm) © Lawrence Lemaoana. Shown at ‘Fikra Graphic Design Biennial 01: Ministry of Graphic Design,’ 2018. Image courtesy of Afronova Gallery.

EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE #04: WORTH we love it.’ We didn‘t run anything by them. We had the full green light. We just invited them to the opening, and that’s it.” As anyone who has dipped a toe into the muddy waters of U.S. government grants knows (at its inception, Eye on Design was funded in very, very, very small part by the NEA), access to even scant funding is mired in paperwork and bound in red tape. Artists and designers in the UAE, on the other hand, have seemingly unfettered access to ministers (anyone can come into their homes during set hours and bend their ears) and generous government assistance. That is, as long as they keep things G-rated, respect those traditional values, and aren’t too critical of the government. One of the services MCKD provides is conducting an “aesthetic and censorship assessment to all play scripts to be licensed before they are performed in public.” Information regarding the censure of other public arts programming isn’t as readily available, but it’s hard to believe this close assessment is reserved for playwrights only. For many artists and art forms, this presents an obvious problem. It’s likely part of the reason why the permanent exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi—a sweeping look at global cultures from pre-civilization to the

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modern era that includes no mention of war, slavery, or injustice of any kind—comes off as a happy, shiny, “It’s a Small World”–style revisionist history that suggests people have more similarities than differences and Why can’t we all just get along? That’s very nice, but it’s not honest, or nuanced, and it’s not self-reflective in the least.

But for other disciplines that seek to provoke in a more cerebral way, the rules of government funding seem to present little to no barrier to producing thoughtful and impactful work. For many graphic designers, who have become accustomed to feeling like the underdogs of the design world, with all the attention going to fashion, automotive, architecture, and product, this influx of support can feel like a welcome relief. And while UAE graphic designers are right to be skeptical of a funding structure that still includes censorship and suppression, they needn’t be surprised by the cash outlay. Given the country’s drive to diversify its revenue beyond oil, it’s invested in the kind of soft power that grants one elite access on the world stage, a place the UAE is eager to secure a spot on. Soft power also has a way of overshadowing other hard truths, like a sketchy human rights records. Recent examples include the British Ph.D. student, Matthew Hedges, who was arrested on the grounds of spying while on a research trip in Abu Dhabi, and was wrongfully detained for six months in a manner that was described as “tantamount to torture.” There’s also the ongoing controversy over human rights violations in camps housing migrant laborers, who make up nearly 90% of the workforce (who do you think is building all those highrises?). It’s harder to paint that picture when the same country

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Image caption: Lawrence Lemaoana, ‘The world is our Shepherd,’ 2017, embroidery on kanga, 61 x 43” (155 x 110 cm) © Lawrence Lemaoana. Shown at ‘Fikra Graphic Design Biennial 01: Ministry of Graphic Design,’ 2018. Image courtesy of Afronova Gallery.

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Image captions: Fikra Graphic Design Biennial department logos, 2018. Design by Fikra and Wrkshps. Images courtesy of Fikra.

is also a very vocal, very generous patron of the arts. Surely, foreign investors think, there is some cultural sensitivity to be found here after all? That kind of cultural sensitivity is created in shows like Al-Qassimi’s, which is not to imply that he was bought or taken advantage of. Rather, that there is a system in place that is open to change at best and is

capricious at worst, and at the time his biennial happens to fit the bill. Fikra is in good company with the well-regarded Sharjah Art Foundation, the speculative Museum of the Future (currently under construction), the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and, if it can get past its migrant labor disputes (it’s been stalled out for more than 10 years), the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will join as the latest jewel in the UAE’s glittering culture crown.

They say change is slow, but in the UAE things are moving fast. Just how fast is harder to appreciate from a distance, when your view is obscured by more newsworthy stories of censorship, homophobia, and unfair labor practices. No amount of arts funding can right those wrongs. At the same time, there’s a more progressive faction working toward reform around issues of gender equality, and with women currently outnumbering men in government positions, that only stands to improve. 148

There is one universal law of change that holds true in the UAE, too: Change grows where money flows. And since good design has proven to be good for business, we can expect to see more dirham devoted to it. While in the Western world it’s typically the populace that forces the government’s hand, in the UAE it’s the other way around: What the government invests in is what’s valued by the people. That’s good news for progressive Emiratis. If conservative leaders aren’t yet ready to overwrite

outdated rules, don’t underestimate the effect of soft power to move minds. And fortunately, there are enough forward-looking leaders to fund a growing graphic design scene that deserves to be nurtured, regardless of what it might do for its country’s outward image and internal politics. Given the UAE’s Miracle-Gro mindset, there’s a lot to hope for. Who knows, the Louvre Abu Dhabi may even show a boob one of these days.

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EYE ON DESIGN Founder + director Perrin Drumm @perrindrumm MANAGING EDITOR Liz Stinson @lizstins SENIOR EDITORS Emily Gosling @nalascarlett Meg Miller @Megilllah

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ASSOCIATE EDITOR + ART DIRECTOR Madeleine Morley @maddymorley DESIGNER Tala SafiÃ© @talasafie COPY EDITORS Liz Carbonell Sarah Dzida Esther Gim SOCIAL MEDIA L P IA SOC Plural

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ISSUE #04 DESIGNER: David Benski is a graphic designer and art director from Germany, currently living in Berlin. @davidbenski

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WRITERS Laura Bolt is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor. She’s contributed to Details, Salon, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Nylon. @la_vie_bolt James Cartwright lives in nature, bakes bread, and is currently on the hunt for a “cool” baby papoose. @jdmcartwright James Gaddy is a former editor at Print, Interview, Details, and the Wall Street Journal. He currently works on the Pursuits section of Bloomberg Businessweek. Jerome Harris is a graphic designer, educator, writer, and curator. He holds an MFA from Yale University and is currently a teaching fellow at Maryland Institute College of Art. @jwhgddotco Khoi Vinh is principal designer at Adobe and the writer of the widely read design blog Subtraction.com. @khoi ILLUSTRATION Célestin Krier is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Paris, France.

@celestin_krier

COMIC Brie Moreno grew up in Ottawa, Canada, and currently lives in London, England. She has worked with Art Gallery of Ontario, Bloomberg Businessweek, Novembre Magazine, Lagon Revue, and Breakdown Press. @briemoreno PHOTOGRAPHY Clayton Cotterell is a photographer and director based in Portland, OR and Los Angeles, CA. His work has appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, California Sunday Magazine, the Guardian, and Fast Company. @claytoncotterell RESEARCH Lea Sievertsen, Silva Baum, and Claudia Scheer are the founders of notamuse, a German platform that profiles women in contemporary graphic design. @notamuse

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Eye on Design magazine - Issue #04 “Worth”

Articles inside

What's in a Color?

After the Gold Rush

Editors’ Letter + Table of Contents