issue one
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autumn 2014
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sphere
quarterly design journal; discussing design and debating ethics the global issue
editorial statement ICOGRADA. Leading Creatively. Founded in 1963, ICOGRADA (the International Council of Graphic Design Associations) is a voluntary assembly of organisations concerned with graphic design, visual communication, design management, promotion, education, research and journalism. ICOGRADA promotes communication designers’ vital role in society and commerce and unifies the voices of graphic designers and visual communicators worldwide. The vision, mission and core values of the council are collectively embodied in the statement ‘leading creatively’ and manifested through our members’ diverse activities to use design as a medium for progressive change. Communication design is an intellectual, technical and creative activity concerned not simply with the production of images but with the analysis, organisation and methods of presentation of visual solutions to communication problems. The ICOGRADA Foundation was established in 1991 for the advancement of worldwide understanding and education through the effective use of graphic design. Sphere, the latest in a series of publications from ICOGRADA, will cover the ethical principles surrounding all aspects of design in quarterly reviews. It will act as a hub for discussion and debate, each issue being run from a different location with contributions from leading industry professionals in the given geographical area. We hope to open our reader’s eyes to the wider world of design, learn from each other, make new connections and reinstate the design environment. In this launch issue we take a look at the environmental impact our work can have on a global scale, meet future contributors and discuss what we can do for the greater good.
first things first 2000 a design manifesto manifesto first published jointly by 33 signatories in: Adbusters, the AIGA journal, Blueprint, Emigre, Eye, Form, Items fall 1999 / spring 2000
We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it. Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best. Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly
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endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse. There are pursuits more worthy of our problemsolving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help. We propose a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication—a mind-shift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.
In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.
Signed: Jonathan Barnbrook Nick Bell Andrew Blauvelt Hans Bockting Irma Boom Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Max Bruinsma Si창n Cook Linda van Deursen Chris Dixon William Drenttel Gert Dumbar Simon Esterson Vince Frost Ken Garland Milton Glaser Jessica Helfand Steven Heller Andrew Howard Tibor Kalman Jeffery Keedy Zuzana Licko Ellen Lupton Katherine McCoy Armand Mevis J. Abbott Miller Rick Poynor Lucienne Roberts Erik Spiekermann Jan van Toorn Teal Triggs Rudy VanderLans Bob Wilkinson and many more
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working with values Collis Ta’eed
there are no friends in business this is the real world
it’s all about the bottom line 6
Choosing Projects From An Ethical Standpoint As a freelancer newly started in the design business, I’ve been on the receiving end of many such a comment from helpful, if somewhat jaded friends and co-workers. The perception of business as a sphere of life where values are not just out of place but in fact detrimental to success is a surprisingly persistent one. Call me naive but I don’t agree. There is no reason why values should not be a part of a business strategy, particularly that of a design business. As designers we find ourselves in a field rife with loose ethics. Having worked for the last year in the property advertising industry I can personally testify to the sorts of subtle deceit and exaggerations that we perpetuate every day in our work for what are all too often products, services and ideas of no particular benefit to anyone. Applying a system of values and ethics in your design practice is almost certainly something you’ve thought about at some point or another, probably in some hypothetical question relating to doing work for a cigarette manufacturer, oil company or the like. However I think a fuller more complete approach is necessary. In this article I’ve briefly examined a few of the issues that all designers should seriously consider.
Touched on in many a university course and perhaps the most obvious ethical issue in the creative industries, this can be quite a dilemma for the struggling agency. In my own experience I was once approached to produce a string of adult sites complete with all the latest bells and whistles and with the prospect of a very large sum of money. I immediately said ‘yes, let’s have a meeting!’ but as the day proceeded my conscience started to kick in. I tried to convince myself that as long as I wasn’t creating the content I could stay neutral, and that if I didn’t do the job somebody else would. In the end, though, I decided I couldn’t feel right about it and called the whole thing off. While not everyone might feel the same way about adult sites, it’s important to have some general guidelines as to the sort of projects you think are ethically sound. The hard part is sticking to them no matter how much money is waved in front of you. It’s tempting to give in to the money, or the alluring idea that it doesn’t really make a difference what you do, but for your own sake, be prepared to take a stand on issues you care about and to draw the line on projects which you think detrimental to society. In the end, the global community is made up of nothing more than individuals making small decisions every day, but it’s these decisions that affect us all. As a designer you have a lot of power held in your hands. You have the power to make almost anything seem desirable or even essential, to change the way people see what’s around them. This may sound exaggerated, but consider how important Hitler saw his propaganda ministry. It was paramount to his success in getting Germany to its pre-WW2 attitudes.
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Creating Value, Not Just Making Money While you will doubtless never be involved in anything so overtly wrong, you should bear in mind the implications your work has the potential to have. Here are some examples of the sorts of projects I personally would stay away from. This is by no means a definitive list, but some areas our practice chooses to avoid: - anything detrimental to the environment — overfishing, uranium mining, etc. - gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, X-rated adult projects - marketing aimed squarely at children for products which have little real benefit - companies on the global offenders list (companies that use child labour in the making of their wares, take advantage of developing countries, or grow genetically modified ingredients) I have been amazed by how many creatives have sung the praises of certain multi-nationals for their huge budgets and creative thinking without a minute’s thought to where this money is coming from. These companies can often seem like a dream client, until you realise that their huge budgets are made off the back of child labour or shoddy environmental practices.
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This is by far the most subtle issue and involves a bit of mind-shift. When considering your business it is very tempting to think of everything in terms of the bottom line, to measure success only in monetary terms. Now I am by no means saying you should forget that aspect of business, particularly if you want to last out the year. However there is more to what you are doing than just bringing in money, there are a variety of benefits that you and your business will be providing for those around you. The best way to illustrate this idea is with an example. Imagine a hypothetical business, let’s call it Anderson & Sculthorp Design (ASD) with ten employees in various capacities. Now even if ASD were to only be just breaking even every year the business would still have value, and I’m not referring to the business assets. There are ten people whose livelihood is provided, who are gaining experience and living off ASD, and there are clients who have a relationship and rely on the ASD team and so on. Taking this to its logical conclusion means thinking of a business as an entity interconnected with those around it. Rather like a parent might provide for their family, in the same way a business provides for its employees and clients. My own agency Good spends a significant amount of money for web hosting every year. While we on-sell much of that hosting we also provide free hosting for organisations who we think shouldn’t have to pay, or put another way, who have better uses for that money.
Free Pitching
Sustainable Materials
Every design practice is called on at some time or another to provide a free pitch for a job. You know the story, great client, big project, you could really use the cash flow, but they have asked for some ideas and mocks up front—for free. It may seem harmless enough, especially if you get the job, but what you are doing is effectively crippling the design industry. Every time an agency pitches for free they are creating the impression that design is cheap and that it’s not really necessary to pay for their or any other design agency’s time. No other service-based industry provides a sample of their services for free. Have you ever been to a mechanic who said they’d do an oil check for free in the hope that you’d get them to permanently service your car? Or how about a doctor who gave you your first visit to see if the “relationship gelled”? Of course not, but this is the sort of thing that design agencies do all the time, and unfortunately clients ask for constantly. By all means show your portfolio, chat to the client, give costings and quotes, but don’t work for free.
Interesting designs and formats with unusual materials are probably the highlight of print work. However, it’s important to bear in mind when choosing stocks, sizes and materials the environmental cost of what you are doing. There are a variety of things you can do in this regard too, for example choosing recyclable materials over non-recyclable, biodegradable over non-biodegradable, keeping paper sizes relatively standard to prevent huge wastage in offcuts, selecting a printer or manufacturer that has a commitment to the environment and so on. The key factor to remember is that in virtually any print job, there will be a run of thousands of copies, so a small change will make a large difference. It may cost slightly more (though certainly not always), but you can simply pass this cost on to the client, explaining the reasoning. If you aren’t proposing anything outrageous and they are a reasonable sized client, they will more than likely accept, no sweat off your back and you can sleep better at night knowing you’ve made a contribution.
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Telling It Like It Is
Ethically Sound
Now we all know that advertising is about glossing over a product’s failings and focusing on its strengths and this is a great way to market things. Occasionally however advertising falls into the domain of outright lies. I once built a website for a property development billed as being the ultimate in design and location. The property itself, a perfectly ordinary looking building in an ordinary location near an airport with planes constantly flying overhead. Now I dutifully went about my job and listening to the client went about cropping images in such a way as to only highlight parts of the building, zooming in on the view of the coastline to make it seem closer and so on. Who loses out in such a scenario? The average guy on the street who is out buying a home. Maybe he’s a bad guy, maybe he’s a good guy, maybe he’s you. We all hope that once the guy gets there he’ll make his own decision, but this stuff works, so it seems he doesn’t. Why do sports cars have half naked women draped over them? Why do they then sell so well? We are all so much easier to fool than we’d like to admit. The point is, advertising is all well and good, but you should always use your best judgement in marketing products and services and keep things in check, exactly the way I did.
These few points are just the tip of the iceberg, and there will be issues that you believe in as an individual more than others. But hopefully the distinctions that we at Good believe in have got you thinking. If our businesses are ethically sound, we will have a more prosperous community.
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being good Lucienne Roberts
The current interest in ethics and its relationship to design seems a jolly ‘good’ thing to me—indicative of increased scrutiny of what designers offer and what they leave behind. But this is a convoluted and protean business and is not to be confused with the notion of ‘selling designer souls’. This rather comical phrase is sometimes misunderstood as shorthand for ethical awareness, but it focuses the debate on the individual designer soul—ethics is a bit bigger than that. Twenty years ago, having just left art college, I naively set myself a rather grandiose problem to solve: to make the world a better place through design. With an almost missionary zeal I set about ‘doing’ in a way that I thought was obviously ‘good’. To begin with it seemed fairly simple to me—it’s OK to work for nice people (generally on the left, obviously) and not to work for those nasty business people on the right —and so on. Then the Wall fell, the left became the right(ish) and what had seemed like simple demarcations became a bit of a blur. I was confused and unhappy.
When designers start to question what words such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘soul’ really mean, they can’t avoid ethics. And that’s no bad thing.
This was no ‘bad’ thing. In common with many designers I had been preoccupied with organising—tidying up the world in the hope of finding some order amid the chaos. I had wanted some ‘goodness’ rules to follow but I’d not spent enough time considering what ‘being good’ in graphic design terms really means. So, in writing and researching the book Good I started to unpack the phrase and found it encompasses many things—most are related to ethics.
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A.C. Grayling on who to work for
‘Professional interests and obligations are perfectly legitimate, and the value of free speech and the value of alternative points of view are so great that it must surely be up to individuals to decide what moral stance they take.’
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The Pursuit Of Truth
Aesthetics And Happiness
Within philosophy, ethics is the branch of knowledge concerned with moral principles. This is not primarily in order to develop strategies by which to judge one another. It is about the pursuit of truth—questioning whether there is such a thing as the property of ‘goodness’ and testing the resultant ideas against various models. I wanted to do some of the same within design. I started by talking to the philosopher A. C. Grayling and then Richard Holloway (retired Bishop of Edinburgh and now chair of the Scottish Arts Council), Delyth Morgan (a British Labour peer who used to work in communications) and Jacqueline Roach (a barrister who used to work in voluntary sector press and publicity). In these conversations some themes recurred which I went on to explore in essay form and in conversation with design practitioners. Some of the persistent issues are listed here.
For many designers the property of goodness lies primarily in aesthetics. When a piece of work is deemed ‘good’, really what we mean is either that it is to our taste or that we think it has merit for expressing the zeitgeist or being ground-breaking in some way.
When ‘ethics’ and ‘graphic design’ are put in the same sentence, two subjects inevitably come to mind. One is that of production methods—recycled paper and so on. The other is the client. ‘The client’ is shorthand for ‘the client’s message’. The job of graphic design is generally to persuade—so do we have a responsibility to be mindful of what we are persuading people to do or does this role as censor sit uncomfortably alongside tolerance and openmindedness? The free market has delivered enormous choice, but design plays a part in encouraging insatiable desire— with the resultant discontent and environmental consequences. Capitalism thrives by encouraging entrepreneurialism—which is perfect for many designers—but design is a competitive business that requires enormous self-belief and selfdetermination, and therefore engenders insecurity and envy in its practitioners. Does being successful within this framework necessitate bad behaviour? Should we be more critical of what we consider to be design ‘achievement’?
However, if we consider aesthetics more deeply, it relates directly to ‘goodness’ in an ethical sense. Is our work good if it engenders happiness, for example—if it adds to someone’s quality of life by making the world a more delightful or pleasurable place? This argument runs contrary to the belief that ethical work is necessarily less visually engaging, the result of a misconception that design is a luxury add-on associated primarily with wealth. Perhaps this belies the notion that being an ethical designer requires a self-sacrificial subjugation of artistic drive, with a resulting dissatisfaction and unhappiness? We don’t need to have experienced something to imagine what we would feel if we were in a similar situation to someone else. Almost all world religions and secular belief systems agree on one principle: the ‘golden rule’, or ethic of reciprocity, that says: ‘treat others as you would wish to be treated’. What this prescribes is consistency between our desires for ourselves and for others. Applying this rule within design might mean we are more polite, take plagiarism more seriously, argue for environmentally friendly print techniques or advocate inclusive design. But this is not as simple as it seems. Take the last example: most designers fear that in order to achieve access for all they will have to adhere to creatively restrictive guidelines. So accessible design could result in exclusion of a different kind— aesthetic refinement. Could it be argued then that goodness does not lie in the design outcome alone but that the intention of the designer has some bearing as well?
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Jacqueline Roach on having influence
‘When it comes to graphic design, isn’t it better not to walk away from jobs on ethical grounds, but to ask if there’s some way that you can have influence, something you can bring?’
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Our ethos is expressed both professionally and personally but consistency between the two is sometimes hard. In accepting a commission we agree to do a job to the best of our abilities, on time and within budget. In exchange, we have the right to be paid as agreed and not to be hindered in our job. How then do we justify marking up print and not telling the client, or saying yes to a deadline we know to be unachievable—lying in other words? Easy—because clients think nothing of pulling a job at the last minute, are always late themselves and, despite the fundamentally neutral nature of the exchange of money for services, abuse financial power all the time. Is the problem that the market decides all? Free pitching, for example, is unethical, in that clients are being given unprotected design ideas for free, but while ours is a buyer’s market it will continue. The market will not determine best practice, so would some kind of otherwise determined code perhaps be useful? Having embarked on this investigation I find that a consensus is emerging. Grayling argues that ‘a code that says “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” is inflexible and fits awkwardly with real life, which is complex and protean. Therefore to devise an ethical code for designers, one would do better to say: here are examples of what a responsible and well intentioned designer might be like; go and do likewise’. Implicit in this is a belief that goes far beyond the immediate realms of design: that it is possible to change many things for the better. The value of considering ethics in any activity lies partly in being forced to question the fundamental nature of things. For designers, the eye may be the window of the soul—but one that is looking out rather than in.
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ZAPPO
THINK SUSTAINABLE. BE SUSTAINABLE.
Sustainable Design And Printing On A Coaster. With this coaster, sustainability becomes a handy, easy to understand, constant companion. It allows you to immediately analyse, evaluate and improve any project during a meeting with clients or partners. The coaster helps you to have an open, goal-oriented discussion and encourages you to find alternatives in design and printing. These 85 square centimetres of cardboard show all the important issues and all factors that need to be considered in a designer’s work and its subsequent realisation. How Does That Work? With the help of the radar or spider chart it is easy to evaluate and compare a product according to certain criteria. For printing and design we have devised six main criteria each. And each of them is defined by further points of action. So now you can quickly navigate the areas of sustainable design and sustainable printing with little effort. “Design and Sustainability” facilitates the complex, process-oriented approach to design. It is the basis for the way in which a modern designer works. It is important to remain openminded and to constantly broaden your horizon, for applying the principles successfully to your work. “Printing and Sustainability“ focuses on the environmentally friendly production. Of course you need a thorough knowledge of materials, technologies and processes. The search for alternative options is at the centre of both “Design and Sustainability” and “Printing and Sustainability“. How Does It Actually Work? You rate each criterion on the concentric circles (1 = worst to 10 = best), i.e. how well a solution meets or should meet a criterion. This can be based on an objective analysis or your subjective assessment. You need to mark each solution with a different colour and connect each point of a colour with a straight line. The result gives you rating profiles for each solution. Do not forget to include solutions already realised. Solutions with lines furthest from the centre are better than those with lines closer to the origin. The area itself has no meaning as it is defined through the individual weighting of various criteria. This process should be iterative. You should constantly strive to find an even more sustainable solution. And it’s actually quite fun to do! Try it. Christhard Landgraf © 2012, Zappo, Berlin
zappo-berlin.de
Printing and Sustainability
paper printing ink number of copies/print run
Reduce Material Adapt to Product’s Life Cycle material printing finishing protection
Reduce Energy Consumption choice of paper routes of transport printers finishing
Design and Sustainability
Replace Material
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choice of paper recycled materials printing ink finishing
Recyclability deinking, make materials Production Processes easy to separate and reuse optimize the workflow avoid mistakes ideal cooperations regional collaboration
form and aesthetics subject and function semantics
zappo-berlin.de
Good Design Sustainability
Design Repertoire physical and intellectual resources, tools/aids
Innovation usage production accessibility material technologies intelligibility
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ecological, economic and social factors
Planning design function production Process Management use reuse analysis disposal concept development design management implementation and verification
CUT OUT AND KEEP
empower with design; be inspired by nature this issue’s photographs brought to you courtesy of National Geographic.
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contents 6
first things first 2000
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working with values
14
being good
Collis Ta’eed
Lucienne Roberts
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cause and effect: design for social causes Jacques Lange
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copying as flattery? Michael Johnson
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debating design integrity Sara Curtis
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sustainable printing Susan Ritcey
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turn around: about trends & sustainable design Michael Hardt