The Culture of Design by Marina Liu

the

culture of design a compilation of essays

Colophon Book and cover design Marina Liu Hardware MacBook Pro Software Mac OS X Applications Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop Typefaces Abadi MT Condensed Light, Helvetica Neue Text Essays from EmigrĂŠ Images Photographs from Flickr Creative Commons

ÂŠ 2011 Marina Liu No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission in writing from the author/publisher. Printed in San Francisco, CA by BPS Reprographics.

the culture of design a compilation of essays

table of contents In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures by Andrew Blauvelt

Part I

Part II

Sustainable Consumerism by Chris Riley

Notes

In and Around

Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part I

Andrew Blauvelt

To know others so that we may better understand ourselves. The paradoxical nature of being both in and around is familiar to the cultural anthropologist, who might work in the field among the observed and at the same time remains apart from the observed. It is this observer status given to the anthropologist that creates this necessary dilemma. The conventional wisdom supporting the role of cultural anthropology has been its intention to study the cultures of other peoples as a way of reflecting on our own culture, or to borrow a phrase from Liberal Humanism, “To know others so that we may better understand ourselves.” The situation between an observer and an observed can never be neutral, however, since the power relationships are inevitably unequal. The graphic designer shares a similar dilemma of being both instrumental in the making of cultural artifacts and living in the society through which they are distributed. Graphic designers are often asked to remove themselves from their social positions and experiences and offer themselves as

professionals, specialists in the various forms of visual communication. This detachment, which we might call “professionalization” or “specialization,” creates the mythical, autonomous observer in the design process. This is a learned method of being professional and a consequence of the “problemsolving process” at the core of every graphic design procedure. We are asked to be objective and to render rational decisions (solutions), and doing so places graphic design on a par with other professions. The graphic designer is, of course, a member of society and thus lives with the artifacts of his or her making, as well as with the artifacts of other designers. In this way, designers are asked to be professionals outside of (to be around) culture, and at the same time, to be a part of (to be in), culture. We are, with others in society, witnesses to and participants in the consumption of cultural artifacts and, therefore, share in the moments of seduction and repulsion that these artifacts generate.

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

I am seduced by the messages of others I appreciate the materiality of the finely printed book I respond to the urgency expressed by the political poster...and I shop at the mall. The important lesson of this confession is that we consume cultural artifacts and their messages in different ways. While we consume these artifacts in the conventional manner of conspicuous consumption, which renders consumers as passive, blank slates upon which all forms of messages can be written, more recent research efforts have demonstrated another dimension to this idea of passive consumption, showing that we also consume artifacts symbolically and even ironically through small acts of individual resistance.(1) I watch Melrose Place ironically, for the melodramatic plot lines and the obvious acting—it’s so bad, it’s good—while I resist buying cable television because that’s just too much television.

The Discovery of Difference The dilemma of being both in and around culture exists at another level: at the level of individual

subjectivity. I have already asserted that the phrase “in and around” constitutes a subject position, if only a paradoxical one. Just as a subject position will only be meaningful if it is defined in relationship to other positions, so too is the subject of that positioning. We need other things to mark the boundaries of ourselves, our identities and our cultures. Psychoanalysis tells us that this process happens at a very early age, when the child recognizes itself as a self; that is to say, as an individual, and also recognizes others as others. Similarly, cognitive psychologists have suggested that we seem predisposed at the earliest ages to recognize difference, the exceptional, as a way of making sense of the world around us. This process of differentiation continues on a social level through identification with race, ethnicity, gender, age, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, class, etc. These social and cultural positions are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are. We find that we are culturally

I am repulsed by the messages of others I am appalled by displays of injustice I am threatened by the signs of hatred...and I shop at the mall.

constructed as subjects and we are socially constructed through the identities we claim or the categories we are placed in. It is easier to understand that class is a social construction but harder to consider how race is a construction, and not simply a natural phenomenon, until we realize that the idea of race emerged in a historically specific way, bolstered by the truth claims of science for various political ends. Race is not natural, it is cultural. Gender is not natural, it is cultural. These statements are made to counter the extent to which ideas about woman, blacks, gays, etc. are so intertwined in the fabric of society as to appear inevitable and unquestionable - natural. The relationship between self and others is a two-way street, producing effects on all parties within a power structure that is typically unequal. This “discovery,” of others—that moment of first contact between different groups and their subsequent relationships—has been characterized by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida as

essentially “violent”: “... the anthropological war [is] the essential confrontation that opens communication between peoples and cultures, even when that communication is not practiced under the banner of colonial or missionary oppression.”(2) This violence occurs at the level of actual, lived experience and at the level of symbolic existence, through words and images; i.e., representations. Design’s relationship with cultural identification is a very important, that is to say, financially significant one. The “discovery” of various cultural groups within society coincides with their definition as an audience and as a market. It is no coincidence that Big Business “discovered” other audiences after the social turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s; the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Movements to name but two. We are, in fact, witnessing a renewed discovery of cultural diversity under the banner of multiculturalism, a phenomenon that is reflected in “progressive” advertising campaigns.(3) Tellingly, many of these campaigns are for fashion clientele,

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

contributing to the notion that such “diversity” is “fashionable.”(4) In our discussions of others in this culture, it is hard to imagine a scenario that is not a product of larger economic forces. This applies to the economic development of colonialism that brought slavery to the New World and with it the foundations of racial supremacy, as well as to today’s effects of global capitalism which turn those old feelings of supremacy into longings for contact, even intimate contact, with others - their skin, clothes, language, music, crafts, cuisine.(5) It is this longing for contact with others, their exotic appeal, which drives the desire for cultural appreciation through cultural appropriation.

Imaging the Other: The Digital Fiction of First Contact This “discovery” of cultural difference through the recent guise of multiculturalism can be seen in a fall 1993 issue of Time magazine entitled “The New Face of America.” Created as a special issue and devoted exclusively to issues surrounding what we now call “multiculturalism,” this publication effort was sponsored, exclusively, by Chrysler Plymouth Corporation. From the cover: “Take a good look at this woman. She was created by a computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a remarkable preview of The New Face of America.

How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society.” We learn inside that this new woman is a composite creature created through the digital “morphing” process combining specified amounts of ethnicity: 15% Anglo-Saxon, 17.5% Middle Eastern, 17.5% African, 7.5% Asian, 35% Southern European, and 7.5% Hispanic. Least we consider her some sort of ethnotechno-Frankenstein, we are told that this woman stole the hearts of several magazine staffers, obviously unaware of her virtual existence. Of course, it doesn’t take a cynic to realize the fallacy of asserting that today’s America represents the world’s first multicultural society. The history of the world’s oppressed would say otherwise. Even though the issue contains a story on interracial marriage and what it calls “crossbreeding,” complete with real husbands and wives and their real mixed-race children, it expends a great deal of effort in the presentation of its digital ethnic-mixing “times table” shown

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

It is this longing for contact with others...which drives the desire for cultural appreciation through cultural appropriation. in the next spread. Using the same “morphing” technology as the cover creation, they have assembled 49 others using a 50-50 mixing formula. In a similar vein, the magazine Colors sponsored by the Italian fashion corporation Benetton, in a spring/ summer 1993 issue devoted to race, offers a six-page section of digital “possibilities.”

In these pages, celebrities are transformed, much like Ted Turner’s colorizing technique, creating a “black” Queen Elizabeth, a “black” Arnold Schwarzenegger, a “white” Spike Lee, an “Asian” Pope John Paul II and a “white” Michael Jackson. The absurdity of these “possibilities” as reality creates the humor that makes us laugh. These

possibilities do not represent any lived reality but a mythic realm where we can now dissolve the outward boundaries of “us and them”-ness through the wonders of digital imaging. Our fascination with others has been rethought by anthropologist Michael Taussig, who turns the table on the observer and the observed. Taussig asks “Who

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

is fascinated by what?” when he questions early anthropological expeditions and their use of the camera and the phonograph to make contact with and record other peoples. According to Taussig, “the more important question lies with the white man’s fascination with the non-whites’ fascination with these mimetically capacious machines [the camera and the phonograph].”(6) Similarly, we need to ask ourselves who is served by the wondrous potential of digital imaging to transform pictures of race, ethnicity or gender? Who are these images for? “The shock of recognition! In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained - ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.” — The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, 1967

Over a quarter-century has passed since this prophecy about our technological relationship with others by media guru Marshall McLuhan. In the racial turbulence of the sixties, McLuhan saw the impact that increased information exchange would have on society, particularly on our relationships with other people. Tinged with the optimism that pervades all technological revolutions, McLuhan injects a message of civic responsibility—an ethics of mutual dependency. Fast-forward to yesterday: “Our critics felt that Matt Mahurin’s work changed the picture fundamentally; I felt it lifted a common police mug shot to the level of art, with no sacrifice to truth. Reasonable people may disagree about that. If there was anything wrong with the cover, in my view, it was that it was not immediately apparent that this was a photoillustration rather than an unaltered photograph; to know that, a reader had to turn to our contents page or see the original mug shot on the

opening page of the story.” — James R. Gaines, Managing Editor, Time, July 4, 1994 This statement was a defense for the use of Matt Mahurin’s digital photo-illustration of O.J. Simpson for Time. This recent event underscores the relationships among electronic technologies, representation and cultural identity and the many issues their convergence raises. There are many instances in recent memory of the manipulation of photographic imagery by digital technology, such as the headof-Oprah-Winfrey + body-of-Ann-Margaret collage for T.V. Guide or National Geographic’s shifting of the Great Pyramids at Giza, which stirred numerous public controversies over the myth of “the truthfulness of photographs.”(7) In the case of the O.J. Simpson cover, Time decides to use as its defense the argument that the illustration transcends the original mug shot photo and becomes art, thereby placing it in a special cultural category reserved for suspended judgments, a place where my taste is not yours,

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

yours is not mine, let’s agree to disagree and other relativisms that seemed to have been inherited from the “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” ‘70s. By placing this commission in the realm of art, the editor can argue that the artist who created it (or rather re-created it) gave it something it lacked. This lack occurs, of course, because of the kind of image it is—a mug shot. Justification for Mahurin’s image hinges on displacing everything we know about the social significance of mug shots as documents of suspected criminals and re-reading the image as an intervention of the artist’s hand and eye, thereby elevating the commonplace mug shot to the extraordinary realm of art. The greater at-large and largely negative reaction to this image occurs at a level of understanding about how images are conceptually framed in society. According to Time management, detractors didn’t read the image “correctly” as a work of art, but rather as what it is, a technological alteration of a mug shot—a photographic document of criminal surveillance.(8) What was read, at least by some, was the darkening of Simpson’s skin tone, which shows that some grasped the fact that this was not the “original” because it did not conform to what they knew (mostly from other pictures) about O.J. Simpson. It did not correspond to the “truth.” The reinscription of a police mug shot, #BK4013970 06-17-94, into the red frame of a Time cover, trades our abstract belief in “innocent until proven guilty” for the

tacit knowledge of assumed guilt. The resulting re-creation mixes several other social messages: the story of a fallen public figure (“An American Tragedy,” reads the cover) subconsciously translated in many minds as the verification of everything they think they know of black males and criminal activity. This mini-controversy is but the latest episode in the on-going struggle for representation in our culture that is dressed in the high-tech clothing of digital imaging, while revealing the same old social truths. McLuhan saw a social opportunity but lacked critical insight into the social reality that limits individual options that seek to operate in opposition to established social truths. What is interesting to me is how new digital technologies have been harnessed for representing racial “possibilities.” These ethnic fictions populate the world of cyberspace in ways that picturing others used to reside in the mind, moving away from imagining the other to imaging the other. Unfortunately, little has changed in the conceptions of race, only the spaces in which they are articulated. The representations of other cultures have moved from the conspicuous colonialism of stolen and bartered objects found in the curiosity cabinet and the natural history museum to the neocolonialism of appropriating cultural representations, including the creation of yet another “other:” a fictive one you can’t know because it doesn’t really exist.

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

It is this aspect of fictitiousness that distinguishes the use of digital imaging techniques to capture and fix the image of the other. Photography has been consistently used to “capture” others, particularly in the field work of anthropologists or the surveillance of police. These photographic depictions have their own level of conceit but always remain true to their claim to capture reality “as it was.” These recent uses of digital imaging techniques, however, relinquish their claims to reality in favor of picturing reality “as it isn’t,” or “as it might be.” The fictive domain of the digital construction can be seen more obviously in another Colors (June 1994) depiction, a portrait of former President Ronald Reagan with skin lesions next to an obituary citing his recent death from complications with AIDS. The fictitious photo and obituary rewrite the Reagan-era policy on AIDS and extol the virtues of a man who “is best remembered for his quick and decisive response to the AIDS epidemic,” under the headline “Hero.” While at great pains to establish a level of reality for their story, Colors declares the fictitious nature of the story in a footnote and uses the word “manipulation” in the attached photo credit. These are offered to prevent misreading the story as true, while trying to preserve the supreme irony of the story itself. Again, the absurdity of the story plays havoc with the reality of its presentation. Unfortunately, we are left with the “wishful thinking” of the obituary and the all- too-real historical record on the subject. The fictive fantasy of digital “possibilities” seems so appealing because they offer us a form of pleasure through their refusal of a known reality.(9) The ease with which such productions are made is in contrast to the difficulties of easing racial conflict or ending political apathy towards the AIDS pandemic. As a counterpoint to these instrumental uses of digital technologies by mainstream media is the use of similar technologies by British artist Keith Piper, whose video installation “Surveillances: Tagging the Other,” deals with the use of that technology within the climate of European racism. Piper appropriates

the slang term of “tagging”—the marking of territory by a unique graffiti signature—and applies it to the use of electronic technologies to mark and track others. In this way, Piper shows how, for example, a proposed New European State could utilize digital technologies and information networks to target social “undesirables” and keep them under surveillance. Piper’s digital images foresee a distinctly 21st-century vision of documenting and analyzing cultural differences in much the same way as 19th-century phrenologists studied the head structures and facial features of others, particularly the insane, the criminal and the “Negro.” Keith Piper’s use of the same technology creates a different digital fiction: one you fear because it might just exist.

Picturing Difference / Representing Diversity We come to know ourselves and others less often through actual contact and more usually through representations in society. Cultural identification is a factor of representation. For example, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, speaking about the concepts of woman and sexuality, said it succinctly: “Images and symbols for the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman. It is representation, the representation of feminine sexuality... which conditions how it comes into play.”(10) The debates about multiculturalism are debates about representation. Although many people consider the issue in terms of sheer numbers - a quantitative approach to representation - the issue is not necessarily a lack of representations but the diversity of them; for as the art critic and theorist Craig Owens reminds us: “In our culture there is, of course, no lack of representations of women - or, for that matter, of other marginalized groups (blacks, homosexuals, children, criminals, the insane...).”(11)

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

Representations can be depictions of others as a kind of shorthand that we substitute for specific cultural categories. The effect of the linkage between dominant political interests and the use of various representations can be seen when we confront wholesale categories that are themselves amalgamations of sex, race and class, without imagery. For example, what image do you form for “welfare mother,” “crack addict,” or “AIDS patient?” These code words are the cultural shorthand for young, unmarried, poor, African-American woman; young, poor, African-American man; and young, white, gay male respectively. Their power derives from their ability to exploit media images of these scenarios in the minds of the public without directing attention to their misogynic, racist and homophobic roots.

Picture This: Voice and Agency The debate on representation for the graphic designer seems to reside in the space between Karl Marx’s empowering dictate, “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented,”(12) that is to say, act for others, and Gilles Deleuze’s categorical rejection of such presumed authority—“the

indignity of speaking for others.”(13) Marx’s famous dictate is the more typical task that artists and other cultural producers have assigned themselves: to speak for others. Less typical is the statement by Deleuze that suggests, perhaps, letting others speak for themselves. The negotiation of representational strategies seems central for the graphic designer (and others) who are routinely asked to speak for others. Graphic designers and other cultural producers are just beginning to rethink the terms of representation, away from speaking for others and towards speaking with and to others.(14) The factors that would allow others to speak for themselves deal with access to the means of representation that is ultimately a function of power. The debates around multiculturalism can be seen as a struggle for control over the means of representation. As Craig Owens states, it is representation itself that takes away the ability to speak for oneself. However, the traffic in representations will not end since it is fundamental to the operation of our society. So, while increased instances of represented others (tokenism) inject some presence into the picture, they do little to explain the previous exclusions. Fundamental change is unlikely to occur through the pages of multinational corporate

advertising no matter how many others are depicted. After all, have you “Come a Long Way, Baby!”? Fundamental change is much more likely to come at a broader social level through a multitude of changes from any number of sectors and inevitably it will be reflected in the construction of various representations, made by graphic designers and other cultural producers and ultimately incorporated in the constitution of identities. After all, corporate advertising campaigns and token representatives (spot the black, the Asian, the woman in the scene) do not create diversity but merely reflect it. The work of socially engaged activists, artists and designers tries to undermine the stereotype in innumerable ways; through disruptive strategies such as appropriation, subversion and inversion, as well as the destabilizing tactics of deconstructive textual readings and demystifying widely held views.(15) True inclusiveness, as a result of empowerment or agency, includes access to both the means of producing cultural representations and to the modes of their distribution in society. In this way, the voices of others will be heard only when those others have access to the larger public sphere. While graphic designers may claim an independent status, like that of neutral observers, we find that their role is a central one in the system of representations. As producers and consumers of various cultural artifacts, understood as both tangible goods, such as books and magazines, as well as the more intangible products, such as ephemeral

messages and images, graphic designers find themselves both in and around culture. So what is the answer? The problems are multifaceted and much larger than design, which means we need a variety of responses on a variety of levels. It helps to remember that we are both designers and citizens. In this way, you can be part of the solution even if you are not designing for it. It also helps to remember that graphic design is about messages, and that our solutions are merely contributions to a larger effort. There must be greater cultural diversity in the people who design, including an analysis of why these people are not there now. We need greater critical awareness that the teaching and practice of design occur in larger social frameworks, governed by rules of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, etc., particularly for those individuals who may not experience it themselves. We need a greater range of methods and options for practicing graphic design that begins to step outside of a reactionary response to problems with its outmoded, pyramidal (top-down) structure and towards a more inclusive, responsive position found in activities like, for example, collaboration and co-authorship. Much to the disappointment of many, these issues will not disappear with dismissals of “political correctness” since they reflect a fundamental social change that has been underway for quite some time, no matter how slow it seems in coming for the rest of us. Quite simply, design has no choice but to get used to it.

There must be greater cultural diversity in the people who design...

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

In and Around

Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part II Andrew Blauvelt

As a spectator to the saber rattling of recent articles arguing, in very different ways, for graphic design to understand its social consequences and function, I am led back to their usual foil: style. In this line of reasoning “style,” particularly when seen as formal experimentation, is explicitly or implicitly contrasted with “substance,” usually understood as the content or message.(1) Of course, these oppositions of style and substance, form and content, are as old as the art versus design debate. The newness of recent arguments, however, lies in the epiphany that graphic design is a product of larger social forces and contributes to this thing called “culture.” This reasoning extends the analysis beyond the substance of any particular message to examine content in the bigger picture of cultural consequences and social functions; in short, its context. As an articulate contributor to the debate, Andrew Howard in his essay, “There is such a thing as society,” notes that the concern for understanding graphic design in a larger framework of society

does not “preclude an exploration of the formal representation of language.”(2) This statement is made to counter the extent to which discussions of social and cultural context seem to situate themselves against the kind of intense visual experimentation associated with recent graphic design. In this way issues of form are separated from issues of content while style is severed from meaning. I believe it is necessary to rejoin these artificially constructed oppositions in order to engage in a more meaningful discussion of graphic design. For graphic design to understand its relationship to culture, we need to consider how its visual language operates in society; its locations and dispersals and how these, in turn, effect meaning. We also need a better understanding of why graphic design exists in society, which requires a critical examination of the interests it serves and can serve. With this in mind, I would like to consider a space that is opened through an understanding of the relationship between the concepts of design and culture. I wish to explore this design-culture relationship through two terms borrowed from recent work in historical studies: circulation andnegotiation.(3) These two terms describe a relationship between design and culture in two related ways. I use the term “circulation” to speak of the traffic in visual languages, or styles, focusing on their location within particular groups and their dissemination among other social groups through forces like appropriation. Negotiation relates to the idea of the transference of visual languages or styles from one group to another, not as simply a wholesale acceptance, but as a consequence of some give and take. These forms of exchange should not be thought of as somehow even or balanced, because the social positions of who gives and who receives are different, thereby reflecting an unequal distribution of power. Additionally, the circulation of visual languages is not unidirectional, flowing one-way from the top down or from the bottom up, but rather, an exchange among various social strata, where they attain specific meanings and associations and generate new meanings through each transference.(4)

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part II

The Traffic in Signs The traffic in signs is the big business of professional graphic design. The high contrast marks of corporate symbols and logotypes and the ubiquity of the international signs of the pictograph are the products of this business of graphic design, signaling the way through the contemporary public sphere. Graphic design literally packages the commodities of consumer culture as it shows us the way to the bathroom. The corporationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s identity is protected through its status as a registered trademark as it makes its way through the global marketplace asserting its uniqueness, its difference, in the face of utter homogenization - illustrating a basic premise of consumer promotion, the first principle of advertising: how to be a unique individual while being like everyone else. It is the particular nature of corporate culture which can speak of difference through the language of sameness.

This condition of sameness should be familiar to anyone who has lived with its environmental equivalent, suburbia. Now referred to as the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Wal-Marting of America,â&#x20AC;? the feelings of sameness and placelessness can now be exported on a global scale under one of the many signs of late-capitalist corporate culture. Just as an economy based on old trade routes fostered the development of colonies and colonial imperialism, the new global economy continues this, shuttling products between countries and consolidating capital in certain places, namely the U.S., Japan and Western Europe. This vision of globalism with its transcendence of cultural differences is different than earlier, decidedly modernist visions of universal communication based on the hopes for a shared visual language.(5) While English may be the international language of business, it is the language of capital that facilitates the exchange of goods, the accumulation of wealth and the ever increasing penetration of foreign markets by transnational corporations.

At a global scale, the circulation of graphic design is predicated on its instrumental use by and for dominant interests. However, reactions to the forces of corporate imperialism and cultural homogenization vary from wholehearted embrace to subversive resistance, including much in-between these opposing positions. It is some of these uses or reactions to the more dominant forms of visual language, and the interests they support, which I would like to journey through.

Trickle-Up Aesthetics: Artistic Appropriations The world of logos, symbols and pictographs, as the invention of graphic design, becomes the material of artistic production through the work of numerous artists who came to typify artmaking in the 1980s, using the language, style, and the

promotional strategies of mass media advertising. The roster of names should be familiar, from “image-scavenging” artists such as Barbara Kruger to “word smiths” of language such as Jenny Holzer, all of whom provide, in different ways, a critique of mass media. In these artistic strategies the traffic in signs moves from the spaces of popular culture to the spaces of elite culture - into the world of museums, galleries, alternative spaces, art journals and eventually art history. The work of three artists serves to illustrate the reuse of two types of signs; one type held within the public domain and the other circulated within the public domain but protected from infringement through copyright and trademark registrations. The signs, symbols, and pictographs of the public sphere are the subject of artist Matt Mullican’s work. These signs should be familiar to anyone who moves about in today’s society; high-contrast, simplified, and silhouetted forms, some personified with names like “Mr. Yuck” but the vast majority

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part II

living life in anonymity. These signs constitute what Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller refer to as a form of contemporary “hieroglyphics,” occupying a “space between pictures and writing,” and combining “the generality of the typographic mark with the specificity of pictures.”(6) These signs exist in society for the purpose of conditioning our behavior and controlling our actions, limiting choices by simplifying options. As Henri Lefebvre notes, “the signal commands, controls behavior and consists of contrasts chosen precisely for their contradiction (such as, for instance, red and green)”(7) thereby paring down options by setting up binary oppositions, organized into systems of codes. Mullican appropriates and originates these marks and recasts them, sometimes literally, into situations which point out their presence in the world and that presumably make us question their social function. 28

Critics have been quick to point to the subversive quality of Mullican’s work, particularly his more public projects.(8) Walter Kalaidjian describes how Mullican’s works “function to disorient and estrange the ‘normal’ traffic in social communication”(9) and then relates Mullican’s reported reaction to a work that caused Belgian and Flemish nationalist tensions to run high when he placed a large flag over a museum in Brussels using yellow and black, unbeknownst to Mullican as the Flemish national colors: “When I put an image on a flag, I found it meant something very different than when I put it on a piece of paper.”(10) Mullican’s discovery that a change in format changes meaning is incomplete without the recognition that the concepts of cultural specificity and context - those colors, that site, those cultures - are necessary for a more complete understanding of the event. In an ironic turn of events, Mullican and his New York gallery, Mary Boone, are upset with a banner hanging in the clothing store next door, Max Studio.(11) Mullican is arguing that the store’s logo is a work he first unveiled as a flag at the 1982 Documenta art fair. The store argues that a graphic designer created their image independently of Mullican and with symbols in the public domain. In this case of ownership and property rights, symbols circulated in the public sphere and considered generic are now argued as unique, protected works, whether by artist or designer. The sites of consumption, whether gallery or clothing store, attempt to control the system of codes and find, to their surprise, the truly subversive irony of their struggles. The corporate domain consists of legally protected symbols, logotypes and other graphic marks circulate globally and have come to represent the corporation itself. Indeed it is argued that these marks come to represent the “personality” of the corporation, its (inter)face with the public.(12) It is presumably the concept of differentiation which enables each corporate body to have a unique, memorable face. Corporate uniqueness is played against corporate sameness in the need for an image that is able to transcend specific cultures and national boundaries, not only in the form of a global spokesperson or universal human themes, but also in a way that obscures the compulsion to consume and

the realities of industrial production. The advent of zip code clusters and increasingly sophisticated tracking methods enables a narrower demographic profile of consumers and their consumptive patterns. This penetration of everyday life is supported by the massive saturation of corporatesponsored images and messages that have effectively substituted the value of the image itself for a product’s inherent usefulness or exchangeability. (13) The artist Ashley Bickerton gives us the quintessential late-capitalist consumer portrait in his construction “Tormented Self-Portrait,” emblazoned with the corporate emblems that constitute the life of his subject, including Bickerton’s signature - effectively objectifying the phrase: “You are what you eat.” Mullican and Bickerton appropriate the marks of public life knowing that their reception within the world of art galleries and museums will be received with a knowing irony, effectively negotiating their

meanings from their circulation in popular culture to the institutional spaces of elite culture. This pattern of circulation and negotiation shifts meaning from the specific character of a generic existence (the logotype or pictograph in the world) to a generic character of specific existence (the logotype or pictograph in the art world). While Mullican and Bickerton offer us one critique of contemporary life by representing these signs in a different context, other artists such as Hans Haacke have deployed a social critique of corporate life that focuses on exposing its instrumentality by adopting its language. In a range of works Haacke subverts the propriety of corporate symbols and advertising codes not simply by appropriating them outright but by manipulating them to expose corporate interests that lie behind logos, ad campaigns and spokespersons. A particular example is Haacke’s 1976 exhibition titled “The Chase Advantage.” In this project, Haacke appropriates Chase Manhattan Bank’s symbol, the octagon shape designed by

Chermayeff & Geismar in 1960,(14) and inserts into its empty center an “advertisement” juxtaposing a statement made by Chase’s chairman justifying the company’s support of and investment in modern art and another statement by a public relations expert extolling the need for a company to “induce the people to believe in the sincerity and honesty of purpose of the management of the company which is asking for their confidence.” This project was part of a series exposing the interconnectedness of corporate patronage of the arts thereby implicating the art world system in a larger framework of corporate interests and demystifying the seemingly neutral status of the museum or gallery. The controversy and censorship that greets much of Haacke’s work stands in contrast to the subversive qualities attributed to Bickerton or Mullican.(15)

Stealing the Signs: Voices from Left Field At another point on the cultural spectrum, in the space of subcultures, we witness another series of appropriations. Stealing the signs of commerce— appropriation is, after all, a term reserved for art—is the ultimate copyright infringement. The equity of the sign, its semiotic investment, is emptied and dominant meanings subverted. The high-jacked

symbol or pictograph is pressed into service, delivering a new message and engaging in what Umberto Eco calls “semiotic guerrilla warfare.” British fashion stylist Judy Blame’s T-shirt design brandishes the message against the intellectual pollution of neo-fascism by recycling the image of “tidy man” putting litter in its place. Blame substitutes the paper wad of the famous pictograph with the Nazi swastika, which was previously borrowed from its ancient associations with good luck and fortune, now recovered from history by Neo-Nazis. The obviousness of the political message of Blame’s design points up the seemingly apolitical nature of the original pictograph. To say that Blame’s design politicizes the pictograph is to miss the original encoding of tidy man—a sign that compels our allegiance to prevailing social standards of hygiene and ecology. Blame’s message registers with its intended audience through the recontextualization process, an intellectual project made famous by the Surrealists, who knew the power of the unexpected. Another symbol of Nazi Germany is the subject of recontextualization, this time by AIDS activists. The Silence = Death Project inverts the pink triangle used by Nazis to identify homosexuals in concentration camps and subverts its infamous meaning from a sign of stigmatized visibility to an outward

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part II

gesture of the invisibility of the AIDS crisis. This symbol of AIDS activism does not borrow wholesale from history, but rather alters the original by rotating its orientation from downward to upward and incorporating the typographic message “SILENCE= DEATH.” Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston relate the linkage between a symbol associated with Nazi death camps and the contemporary AIDS crisis: “SILENCE=DEATH declares that silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival.”(16) Stuart Marshall, co-chair of Positively Healthy, an organization of people with AIDS, has pointed out the problematic nature of this historical appropriation. Marshall argues specifically against the use of the pink triangle as it fosters a notion of victimization, “which has tended to stress death, annihilation, and holocaust and genocide analogies in its attempts to stir the state into a caring response to the crisis.”(17) Marshall’s arguments are well taken, particularly as they relate to one form of AIDS discourse dominating the voices of those surviving with AIDS. However, although Marshall relies on a specific historical understanding of how the Nazi’s dealt with homosexuals (understood as gay men, lesbians are not mentioned), he seems to inadequately address the recontextualization of that symbol or the circumstances of its contemporary reception. The mark itself is not simply the pink triangle—taken from the past and displaced into the present—but rather a signature mark combining an inverted symbol and typographicmessage, with its own history. The meaning of this transformed symbol registers with its audiences not only because of the familiarity of its previous existence— even if it is a suppressed history—but also because it is transformed in the act of possession. Capturing the language of oppressors, making it one’s own, is seen as an important event on the way to ending that oppression and underscores the importance of controlling the codes of representation.(18)

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part II

The Ecstasy of Communication The appropriation of the symbols and images of popular culture is by now a well-documented tactic of youth culture in its subcultural manifestations, such as the punk movement of the 1970s and the rave culture of the 1990s. The graphic design produced for rave culture (promoting its raves as well as its diversified interests in things like clothing), illustrates an interesting recent phenomenon of the circulation and negotiation of visual styles as they move from design cultures to popular culture and back again to design culture. The rave graphic represents the technological mutation and synthesis of pop culture imagery and the typographic manipulations available on the personal computer. The rave graphic entrepreneur, especially as an untrained professional, represents graphic design’s technophobic nightmare. The demystified technical processes of graphic design are readily available to “kids” educated on Macintosh computers who have the ability to transform found images and to skew, outline, bend, and otherwise “mutilate” type.(19) As graphic designer Jeffrey Keedy suggests, the source material for much of this work is the stuff of

professional graphic designers of yesterday: “The old and low cultures that rave designers borrow from are primarily American corporate and package design of the seventies and eighties (now there’s some hacks)! Rave designers love logos, lots of color and outlined type, and hey who doesn’t? The fact that the ‘professional designer’s’ work is now being reworked like any other bit of ephemera might be some kind of poetic justice, but it fails to be an interesting design strategy. That’s because their work (like their predecessors) is essentially a oneliner that has little resonance beyond the ‘shock of the old.’”(20) This maybe true if you are judging this work with the values near and dear to graphic design, a notion of stylistic invention as innovation inherited from the avant-garde, where newness is next to Godliness. The work is interesting to me because it represents both a form of corporate cultural appropriation and subcultural invention, and it achieves this using the latest tool of graphic design, the personal computer. Unlike the photocopier aesthetic of the punk graphic, the rave graphic gains its legitimacy, its threatening posture to professional design, from

the computer’s ability to sample images and seamlessly integrate the results. Gone are the mystifying processes and technical skills that supported graphic design’s professional autonomy and what remains intact are the designer’s claims to originality and innovation. These claims seem to be the last defense against professional collapse. The availability of the personal computer enables the maker of rave graphics to have access to the means of producing graphic design and carries with it the residue of its making. That is to say, the multitude of rave graphics carries the signature of the computer—its “information texture,” to borrow a term from April Greiman. Suddenly the distancing of the designer of the rave graphic as

somehow outside the profession becomes problematic when we are confronted with the highly celebrated designs of a professional graphic designer like P. Scott Makela, whose work carries much of the same technological residue. Makela as a self-described “hacker”(21) certainly toys with the distinctions and refuses the boundaries of a graphic designer with his work in other media. The creation of the rave graphic produces another code, another style. The unfortunate consequence of subcultural resistance is pop cultural commodification; as Dick Hebdige notes: “Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions; by

creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones...”(22) The subcultural, as a code, becomes incorporated or assimilated into mainstream culture through commodities where any subversive power is lost. The circulation of rave graphics into the space of popular culture creates new effects on other designers. For the professional graphic designer, the rave graphic becomes a vernacular form, an oddity on the mundane visual landscape of cultural life. It comes to represent a challenge to mainstream society and visual culture, it has the currency of the “code.” It becomes the representation of a prevailing style used to articulate a subculture’s difference and the professional sees

this as an available language with which to engage others. Thus, the language of the rave graphic is employed by the designers of ReVerb to promote a fund-raiser for the literary and art journal Now Time. For the designers of ReVerb, the rave graphic is but one more style available in the heterogeneous cultural milieu that they ascribe to Los Angeles.(23) For ReVerb the resulting mixture, the clash of styles, is to be prized for its inclusive approach, rejecting the exclusivity of modernism. The hybridity that results from this clash of styles generates new forms and new meanings. As Lorraine Wild, a partner in ReVerb, states: “We use styles like maniacs but we never use them lock, stock and barrel...We would usually manipulate

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part II

them to create some kind of tension. No style is good or bad, it’s just another style—whether you use it wholesale or not.”(24) Authentic culture is gone, if it ever existed, and what is left is the material of invention. Ripe for quotation and parody, the styles of multiple cultures are presumably available to all. The graphic designer, seeking to speak to different pockets of culture, draws upon a range of styles supposedly denied it under the guise of modernism or the rules of professional practice. If the multiple cultures of Los Angeles represent a vernacular language, then a case could be made for ReVerb’s work responding to the unique conditions and particular circumstances that are endemic to L.A.—a condition Kenneth Frampton labels “critical regionalism.”(25) A much larger cultural space of appropriation is envisioned by the Designer’s Republic, who would go as far as another planet for inspiration and certainly as far as Japan, without ever leaving Sheffield. In the Age of Information, firsthand contact seems potentially corrupting for designer Ian Anderson: “In some ways [a trip to Japan] may mark the end of an era, as I would loose my isolationist naiveté about the Japanese culture.”(26) In an interview with Rudy VanderLans, the Designer’s Republic sets itself up as thoroughly postmodern, in tune with pop culture and reveling in the contradictory stances that are indicative of graphic design’s

anonymous social status and the celebrity status that comes with an identifiable style. Anderson describes the appropriation tactics of their style as it relates to the bigger social framework of contemporary life, where everything is up for grabs: “If there’s something which suits our purpose, we’ll use it, but we don’t discriminate when it comes to inspiration. There is no hierarchy in the age of plunder, there is equality; from the humble sweet wrapper, through the billboard on the side of a bus right up to sacred texts of Bradbury Thompson and Weingart himself.”(27) In this way, the potential subjects of appropriation are equally available for reuse, while all other hierarchies are preserved, especially the role of the designer. In a particularly telling passage commenting on someone who appropriated a Designer’s Republic design, Anderson states his conditional approval: “I don’t really have a problem with it as long as it doesn’t detract from what we do, as long as it is used to create something new, something more than it was before and providing there is a reason for it beyond lack of imagination.”(28) The values to which they subscribe are precisely those that are used to sustain professional graphic design: originality, innovation and rationality; and these are, ironically, the virtues we associate with modernism, not necessarily postmodernism. Anderson, however, does not wish to change the social status of graphic design itself and does

In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures, Part II

not believe that he is in a “position to improve [society’s] condition,” and will continue “to enjoy the game I find intriguing.”(29) Part of that game is establishing a position within graphic design that simultaneously tries to defy it - extending beyond the confines of the profession and into the global flow of images. In what might be an emblematic image for this position, the Designer’s Republic has merged the icon of ‘70s pop culture, the smiley face, with one of the icons of “good design,” Paul Rand’s Westinghouse symbol of 1960. In a gesture indicative of cultural genetic engineering, the Designer’s Republic has created a symbol of the hesitant space between a highly protected corporate image and a highly marketed cultural image, effectively fusing pop and corporate culture’s underlying sameness: the ubiquity of the mantra “good design-is-good business” with the banality of “have a nice day.” Makela, ReVerb, the Designer’s Republic and others distance themselves from graphic design proper in their respective ways: by transgressing professional boundaries, rejecting professional standards, or denying that you’re a designer at all.

What Goes Around, Comes Around The circulation of signs comes full circle, weaving its way from the corporate culture of the anonymous design found in the mini-mart to its subcultural manifestations in the rave graphic back into the public space of urban culture and to the institutions of high culture - filtered through the professional culture of graphic design proper where it can be dismissed today and copied tomorrow. It is the public sphere where graphic design circulates and it is this space that is highly contested, regulated and protected. Dominant cultural interests favor the exchange and circulation of symbols and images to take place in the marginalized spaces of youth subcultures, artistic

enclaves, and design avant- gardes. As the artist Keith Piper laments: “... in this mass media, mass broadcast age, it has become easy for the artist to siphon information and images off for our own use, it however remains almost as difficult as ever, to find a space to return and distribute the results of our activities within that mass media. Access to the existing channels of mass communication still remain firmly in the hands of the enfranchised and empowerment within those channels remains their closely guarded preserve.”(30) The invention of style, whether on the street or on the screen, will continue in spite of the forces of homogenization, because it is thought to reflect the heterogeneous quality of life. Style could be better understood as a manifestation of culturally specific communications rather than a byproduct of some nebulous cultural “fallout” or an exotic language of difference. The designer needs to consider his or her role in a society that is increasingly stratified and culturally differentiated. Perhaps this is what Lorraine Wild had in mind when she says: “We need more graphic design particular to the tribes, not less.”(31) Any attempt to understand design as somehow fixed in a hierarchy of cultural spaces (high or good design versus low or kitsch design) or in a historical linearity of precedent and influence (originators and impostors) seems futile. Design should know that its place is not fixed, that design resides in all spaces. The traffic in signs that design produces circulates among these spaces, negotiating the differences of multiple positions of social and cultural identities. The privileged space reserved for the professional designer, either real or imagined, has been perforated by the historical and theoretical demise of modernism as well as by the technological democratization of the means of producing graphic design. The resulting trauma of this violent perforation in the social fabric of design culture allows us the opportunity to discover our own precarious position, both in and around.

...design resides in all spaces.

sustainable consumerism

Chris Riley

I’m an advertising guy. I wanted to make that clear as we engage in this conversation about sustainability. Advertising is intrinsic to consumerism and, as you all know, consumerism is about creating desire. Now, I am very happy in this environment. I like advertising. I enjoy helping create it and I enjoy being associated with strong businesses that are growing. Strong businesses are important. I grew up in Manchester, England in

the seventies. Let me tell you, you learn a lot about the importance of strong businesses when they are in short supply. So I come at this question of “sustainability” from that place. I am not an “environmentalist” in the classic sense. I have not dedicated my life to protecting our environment, though I have huge respect for those who have. One of the big inventions of consumerism is the “brand.” You all intuitively know what I mean

when I talk about brand. Yet there are as many different perspectives on what brands are as there are brand owners. It may help if I share with you the way I think about brands. I think of brands as business ideas that have achieved cultural influence. Big brands influence culture in a big way, small brands in a small way. What interests me about this perspective is that it hinges on two huge ideas. The first is

Sustainable Consumerism

that a brand is a “business idea” and the second is the notion of cultural influence. Let’s talk first about a business idea. There has been a lot of work done on this subject. On the one hand you can focus on the business “model.” The business model is all about the way a business creates wealth. For the last few years, many young technology entrepreneurs have been presenting their business models to venture capitalists for investment. The VC looks at their presentation and asks two questions: Is this a good business model that will generate a return on my investment and is this person likely to do it for me? The business model is about Capitalism. It is about Return on Investment (ROI). It is about the Commodity. In one of its most refined forms, the business model’s effectiveness hinges on the financial value ascribed to relationships. This is the way capitalism renders everything as a commodity, to be bought and sold. For example, the value of AOL exists within the relationships created by the service. These relationships are then exploited to create wealth. The problem with this way of thinking about business is that it under-represents the social and cultural role of business. When Time Warner merged with AOL, what kind of business would be created as a consequence? Is AOL’s commodity its relationships with people, like my daughter at her iMac in her bedroom, to be traded as, well, just any other stuff? I understand that the contents of an oil field, for example, are an easy commodity to understand, or

Sustainable Consumerism

the value of owning land, or the ability to make a fine automobile or... but wait. Things are looking harder as I go through that list. In the film Wall Street, we are introduced to Gordon Gecko—remember “lunch is for wimps”? The film reveals the way business commoditizes everything within a capitalist system. The futures of the workers’ lives are in the hands of traders who care little and understand less about them. The young adventurer ends up in a limo with a beautiful woman who informs him that he has earned a reward from Gecko—her. The film uncovers the ugly truth of pure capitalism: the human experience is simply another commodity to be traded for financial gain. It need not be so. In fact, other work in the field of business analysis suggests that a pure focus on the capital aspects of business is a deeply flawed way of thinking about how business works and how businesses can succeed in the long run. Some early pioneers of consumer businesses seemed to understand this: Ford, Kohler, Cadbury and Lever to name a few. In their world, business was an integral part of society. The role of the business was not only to generate wealth for the business owner, but to create opportunity for all who engaged in the business transaction, from the entry level employee to the most distant customer. Business is a process, not an entity. It is entirely the product of relationships. As capital became more and more powerful, primarily as technology enabled businesses to scale to the global level, so the human relationship factors that underpin business were eroded. This is where we find ourselves today. The emergence of corporatism as the dominant ethic of business analysis is recent and will be transient. As Kees van der Heijden has pointed out, in his book Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation: “We define structural profit potential as an attribute of a system capable of creating value for customers in a unique way that others find difficult to emulate.” In other words, profit is an outcome, not a sole reason, for business. Many who have

Sustainable Consumerism

started small businesses or are part of family enterprises understand this deeply. Those who have lived through harsh times in Flint, Michigan or Liverpool, England are also aware of this simple, human truth. What seems to be happening as we enter the next phase of our economic evolution is that many of these chickens are coming home to roost. Businesses that focused solely on maximizing financial ROI seem to have become disconnected from their customers, their employees and their shareholders. This powerful alliance—with many individuals participating in all three experiences—can be credited with driving a fundamental change in the environment for business in the 21st century. I wonder why? Information technology has stimulated the creation of a culture of knowledge and it is sweeping the world. In the culture of knowledge everything seems knowable but also everyone wants to know. From the vicarious experience of survival to a basic understanding

of the capitalist system and its attendant marketing habits, people feel smart and informed. And guess what? They are. The world of marketing and the world of brands have been rocked by these changes. Nothing seems to work quite as it did. Which brings me to that idea of “cultural influence.” It turns out that the degree to which businesses engaged with their public, creating relationships that either sustained, evolved or eroded value was linked less to their ability to create powerful business models and more to their ability to create valuable relationships. This is news to many in the MBA-riddled world of US consumer marketing but is an unquestioned fact of life in Asia and Europe. Here’s what happened: As marketing mechanized the process of relationship management, the consumer got less emotional value out of the relationship. If money is a symbol of the value of a relationship, they simply reduced the amount of money they were willing to pay for the

Sustainable Consumerism

relationship they had with amoral marketing companies. These companies are not bad but they are sort of culturally autistic. By remaining unable to engage with consumers as human beings with rich cultural lives and complex social environments, businesses were unable to communicate. Thus, they tended to scream and become abusive the more they craved and needed consumer attention. We see the results of cultural autism on our screens everyday: persistently aggravating advertising sending manifestly corrupt messages into our homes. But in the culture of knowledge the consumer knows. And is rebelling. Recent research that I have been involved in at Wieden+Kennedy has begun to highlight what is going on. We were interested in the evolving relationship between the consumer and big business. We had already come to the view that the brand was a surrogate for the business idea and that if we were to evolve and grow the brands we worked on, we needed to understand more deeply what they symbolized and how people were relating to them. As part of one study, I was in Tokyo talking to a producer of Japanese Hip Hop records about the idea of being â&#x20AC;&#x153;modern.â&#x20AC;? I mention this because in some ways the transcendent themes of the modern experience were there to be witnessed within that conversation. He was twenty-six. I was forty-two. He was from Tokyo. I was from Manchester. Yet we were both intimately aware of and engaged with the work of Ian Anderson and The Designers

Republic. When I asked him (through our excellent translator who herself had lived in Kensington, London only three blocks from my old home) how he perceived the idea of modern and where he saw culture evolving, he said: “To a more mental place.” He went on to discuss in depth the fact that products have narratives as well as benefits. We know everything about these products. The whole story. From the vantage point of someone born in 1975, business had to engage with the whole truth of consumerism. That involved two important and related realities: Firstly, that non-sustainable consumption would destroy everything we have and could have, and secondly that the consumer experience was deeper and richer than is ever acknowledged by mainstream marketing. As we at Wieden+Kennedy travel the world and talk to people for all types of reasons, these themes emerge. Big Business is not perceived to be a de facto problem: it is the lack of imagination, creativity and responsibility within the idea of corporate business that sucks. Brands are seen as manifestations, as surrogates, for the business people who create them. The consumer wants—no—demands, a relationship with those people. From Brazil, a young media entrepreneur asks: “I just have one question: Who are you?” And who can answer that simple question? The emergence of a culture of knowledge that is global in scale, due to the attendant networking that now defines communication and social interaction, has

Sustainable Consumerism

brought the real issues facing our Post Industrial Age culture to the fore. Brands can no longer survive on a diet of artificial benefit creation (remember the Tense, Nervous Headache?) or the assumption that somehow we are dysfunctional and need to be “fixed.” We, the individuals who consume, whose money oils the wheels of corporate capitalism, are not broken. We don’t need to be fixed. We, to paraphrase an old Subaru ad I was involved in, don’t need to use what we consume to increase our standing with our neighbors. We can relate to the size and shape of our bodies in a way that helps us enjoy the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness promised in our Constitution. We do not need products to be symbols of empowerment; we have power. We do not aspire to manufactured dreams that reduce our capacity to feel individual. In short, nearly every branding tactic of the past will fail in the future. Because the nature of transaction between consumers and businesses has moved on.

The cultural role of brands is to respond to the spirit of the times. In the early 1930s, when Coke employed Norman Rockwell, the company transcended its role as a purveyor of refreshment and became deeply embedded in the emerging identity of American consumerism. These values were to sweep the world: Optimism, faith in the possibility of harmonious diversity and egalitarianism. In an era when students were being shot at Kent State and carpet bombing was destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people on the South East Asian peninsula, Coke tried to “teach the world to sing... in perfect harmony.” Like it or hate it, it was an attempt to project more than the benefit of refreshment. Its power lay in the confidence with which it voiced a perspective. If we were to respond today, we would respond to the culture of corporate repulsion. By which I mean this: The transcendent themes of new consumers emerge from their experience as the progeny of the Consumer Age. They have known little else.

They have engaged with and then experienced the emotional hollowness of the consumer promise, that what you buy dictates how well you feel. They still felt bad when things didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go right. They have learned through experience that promises are shallow and that there must be an ulterior motive for everything. Some would say that they are cynical. But I do not believe that they are. I believe that they are aware. As they view the world they are aware of how it is all linked. They did media studies in elementary school; they watched Sesame Street and learned about ecology from Ferngully. What seems to be the case is that they have a different narrative than previous generations of consumers. Their narrative embraces their position within a complex and interlinked world. As millions of the young swap banalities yet create networks of relationships on AOL Instant Messenger, they understand only too well the power of causality: that what you do has an effect, somewhere.

They are translating that experience to their life as consumers. In fact, they are rethinking the way they consume. Rather than becoming trapped within the manufactured aspirations of the mass market, they are seeking to create experiences that connect them in a meaningful way to ideas and ideals that are worth something. They take control over their futures by taking control over their expectations. And, talking of futures, they are very concerned about the legacy of wanton excessive consumerism as practiced by the previous generation. In their view they have inherited the consequences of consumption for consumptionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sake with scant regard for the long term future of either themselves or their children. Or, to put it another way, scant regard for meaningful human relationships and responsibilities. Surveys such as those of the Yankelovich Research Company have directed our attention for years to the evolution of a fresh perspective on consumption among the young. Well, it seems to

Sustainable Consumerism

be here and if you are in any doubt you only need to look at the fortunes of the Fortune 500 and the near total collapse of the great marketing brands as they surrendered to the ultimate commoditizing business: Wall Mart. What happened to Kellogg, McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, P&G, Coke, Oldsmobile and a host of others is that they ceased to maintain and develop a dynamic business idea that intersected with the values of their customers. The brand is the manifestation of that relationship, as I have said, its surrogate. Van der Heijden would refer to this as a squandering of two things: distinctive competencies and a dynamic relationship with customers. Over time, the values of our consumers evolve and competitors emulate our core competencies, delivering them for less cost and reducing distinctiveness. There are two distinct developments, one in the realm of competencies and one in the realm of consumer evolution, that threaten established brand owners who fail to create a dynamic model for brand and business development. First, we need to acknowledge that the singlepointed pursuit of capital growth has thwarted attempts at creating a sustainable model of consumerism. Technology has been evolving at a hair-raising rate but business models have not. Detroit and the oil industry remain locked in a death grip grounded in the idea of exploitation for enrichment. The consequence: a pathetic response to increasing anxiety regarding all forms of pollution

and near indifference to the issue of gradually disappearing resources. The automobile industry has been the bellwether of all consumerism but seems intent on donating that leadership to other categories that more effectively respond to the spirit of this age. At a time when technology is delivering the means to reduce the impact of the car on our environment, Detroit is marketing machines that speak to the command and control exploitation culture of the past. The Lincoln Navigator, the Chevrolet Suburban. This is 1970s technology but more important this is 1970s culture. It is about dominance, power, exploitation and it is deeply masculine, or rather a kind of warped version of masculinity that finds an echo in the corruption of sport at the hands of capitalism: the NFL, the NBA. This is how the new consumer sees the old brands. Secondly we need to accept that things are different now. The world in which our children have developed has taught them much. We have taught them much. They are individuals existing in complex cultural systems. They have transcended vague notions of monocultural national values and the politics of supremacy. They do not trust us. Their version of leadership is not command and control, it is not JFK, LBJ, Churchill, Thatcher or Reagan. If the Clinton presidency taught us anything, it was surely this: leadership is about acknowledging uncertainty rather than manufacturing certainty. We are all flawed and it is how we respond to that fact

It is about keeping what we love, not losing it

Sustainable Consumerism

that defines our future. This sensibility is endemic among new consumers. The Cluetrain Manifesto reflected this as its authors indicated a way forward: Markets are conversations. Absolutely, and so are brands. The question is, what do we want to discuss?

The answer is kind of everything. At the top of the list is the identity question and the values consumers wish to be associated with as they engage in transactions with companies. Deeply embedded in this question lies their relationship with a world they feel increasingly connected to and in a small way responsible for. They no longer accept the cultural autism of corporate brands. They want a conversation about where we are together. What we are doing and how can we do it better? They want to enjoy the benefits of a healthy economy (don’t we all?) without the guilt of screwing it up for everyone else. How can you enjoy your smart new shoes if you know there are unhappy people living in dangerous conditions so that you can have them? This was never part of the promise but it was always part of the reality. Now that reality is visible and the new consumer is aware and engaged. This means we have to be also. The sustainability question is intrinsic to the identity question. In a culture that has rejected exploitation, has confronted inequity and is striving for a utopian ideal of life liberty and happiness, sustainability has huge cultural value. Within the semantics of the word is the resolution of a

paradox: it is about keeping what we love, not losing it. This means everything. When you talk to new consumers, the idea of impact, or the idea of sustainability, is right at the front of their minds. It is in lock step with a variety of other humanitarian issues. It may be part of a mystical or spiritual value system. It may be part of a reality check and related to their immediate urban environment. It may simply be a part of their general awareness of the world in which they live. Whatever the reason, it is there. It is part of their response to the disappointment of mass consumerism, particularly the mass consumerism created and fueled by the growth of television. “While our cars may be shiny, and our stocks may be booming, there is another story to be told. There is an emptiness inside, a void in the soul of America. The TV functions as a conduit for the lowest common denominator of public dialogue. Whether it be Regis Philbin or Beverly Hills 90210, the world learns about America by the cotton candy that we call Must See TV. And it works. Only 25% of teenagers between the ages of 13-17 can name the city where the US Constitution was written, but a full 75% know that you can find the zip code 90210 in Beverly Hills, California.” — Adam Werbach, The Thin Green Line I quote Adam Werbach because he is a particularly eloquent representative of the new consumer generation. Passionately committed to the Environmental Movement, he was the

Sustainable Consumerism

youngest-ever president of the Sierra Club (at age 26) and now propels his agenda through a video production company and web site called “The Thin Green Line.” As a media sophisticate, he understands the relationship between the issue of environmentalism and what he would consider to be the insidious actions of mass marketers in concealing the truth of consumption from the consumer. Of equal importance is the connection he draws between the feeling of loss that exists within our mass consumer culture and the explosion of environmental concerns. This connection is the critical link between the future and history of brands. Consumerism’s great contribution to Maslow’s hierarchy is desire. In many cases branded goods are promoted as a means of self-actualization. The notion is that, fully empowered by access to the right stuff, an individual can get a grip on his or her own reality and project a kind of instant individuation, a personality that is both unique and yet belongs to a larger group. The trick is always, as we know, for the brand to influence the idea of the group to which people aspire. And people seem to like this. It turns out that buying stuff because it satisfies desire is OK. In fact, it is rather pleasing. There are many people in the world today who would love the opportunity to get stuff because they want it rather than be restricted to only satisfying their needs. And before we run off in an apoplectic rage about

Sustainable Consumerism

the sinfulness of desire, I am afraid to tell you that it is a basic human truth. We want as well as need. The experience of desire is nice! We love it! In my view the crisis of consumerism is not that it creates desire but that it fails to satiate. Most critiques of consumerism and the advertising industry it created seem to focus on how bad creating desire is rather than asking if we can create desire for, well, something else. This turns out to be on the minds of the new consumer: I want to want but I want to want what will actually satisfy me. So imagine if we, as the creative fuel of an evolving consumerism, were to shift the focus of desire from something we can never satiate to something we can. To me that is the essence of the new consumerism. It has all the thrill of the old but this time it actually delivers. This is where we can begin a serious conversation about sustainable consumerism. This is when we can look brand owners in the eye and talk honestly and openly

about the challenges they face. The ability to create great stuff is not necessarily correlated to the ability to create great relationships. Within relationships that thrive, all parties are able to enjoy the experience. The brand owner who ignores the consumer values part of the equation fails to acknowledge the human dimension to the relationship. As we proceed into a consumer world within which many different versions of the same stuff offer marginal differentiation for the consumer, we will become ever more reliant on the quality of the relationships we create. While the Internet utopians of rationality argue that information technology will reduce everything to price value based comparisons, the consumer is mourning the loss of human contact. The loss of valuable relationship. Just look at the mourning ritual of the recently bereaved Oldsmobile franchise. In a recent speech to a conference hosted by Metropolis magazine I put up the following slide: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The modern consumer adds environmental impact to the

Sustainable Consumerism

perceived cost of consumption and is attracted to companies who acknowledge their responsibility by embracing incremental improvements in environmental impact.” This observation was grounded in conversations we had with consumers in the research I have been involved in at Wieden+Kennedy. Here is what seems to be going on: The sustainability question has become a flash point for the anxiety that permeates the relationship people feel they have with business. The continuing lack of interest expressed through brands by business in this question is seen as symptomatic of the corporatisation of the consumer experience. The profit motive is seen to have trumped basic human decency. Carl Pope, of the Sierra Club, once told me that the environment was the issue that almost guaranteed a young voter turnout. It has become a focus of their fear that they will lead meaningless lives in servitude to massive businesses whose sole concern is shareholder value. It signals the threat they feel: that they have little control over their lives and that business cannot be trusted. The upshot of this is that “sustainability” has become their issue. The new consumer owns the new consumption and their values will dictate which brands succeed and how. There is no barrier being put up by the consumer to the idea of sustainable consumption. I was discussing these issues with a designer called Alex Gajowskyj. Alex had designed the “world shoe” for Nike. The idea was to create a product with minimal waste, designed for manufacture and usable by the people who made it. In a deep way the project reflects the response a good company like Nike has when confronted by this issue. Nike has started to move towards sustainable consumption as it acknowledges the feelings of

both its consumers and it employees. Alex’s experiment was a central part of this evolution. In his words this is what they learned: “Tradition, natural opposition to change, and a reliance upon ‘tried & trusted’ business practice represent the biggest obstacles for any business seeking global growth.” In other words, if the consumer is not the barrier, then the business is. Part of the dynamic evolution of distinctive competencies, to use Kees van der Heijden’s idea, is to evolve away from the traditions and practices that hinder the ability of the business to engage fully with the consumer. Evolving consumer values demand that modern brands rethink the transactions they rely on for consumer attention. This is why brand owners need to care about the sustainability question. It is a cultural phenomenon as well as a real issue. If brands are to respond to the spirit of the times, they need to respond to this most crucial element of contemporary culture. Furthermore, they need to acknowledge that, as a symbol, it is also a

symptom of a deeper dysfunctionality between brands in general and the consumer. The relationship between consumer and mass brands has decayed to such a point that the days of premium priced high margin branded products seem to exist only in our fantasy world. We need to change that; people want more! But now they want more from us as people rather than more of our stuff. Here is a comment by Clive Whitcher, who oversees Strategic Planning for Saatchi & Saatchi on their Toyota business: “Prius buyers are ecstatic about the car and what it says about Toyota. Toyota’s their hero for finally doing something tangible about the environment - one guy came to a group with a collage featuring evergreen sprigs and a rose stuck to (recycled) paper! The love is akin to what people felt in the 70’s when Toyota was their savior - saving them from bad gas mileage when prices went up and there were lines at the gas station and of course from bad domestic quality and ridiculous domestic ‘downsized’ compacts.”

Sustainable Consumerism

The movement has started. There are companies, like Nike and Toyota that are responding to their consumersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; deeply felt issues. But on a broader scale my question is: Where are the designers? Where are the ad guys? How can we develop skills and practices that respond to this evolution? How will we determine the effectiveness of what we do when the entire industry is trapped in an unevolved capitalist paradigm? How can clients trust that the advice they are being given responds to the reality of consumer culture when that advice remains locked in process-based thinking from the 1970s? It is time to challenge these traditions, as Gajowskyj has stated. We have in our midst the most well informed talent in the history of our young industry. Coupled with mind-expanding technology that helps us learn and execute ideas better and faster than ever before, we have no excuse to fail the people we create our work for, both clients and consumers. Sustainability is just that: it is about sustaining, providing nourishment, keeping going. Brand owners who nourish their consumers with meaningful ideas and representation, designers and advertising people who take a similar approach and help their clients keep going will recognize that consumerism is, like everything else in our world, about evolution. In this case, evolution away from the self-destructive impulse of mass commoditization and towards a sustainable consumerism that satiates our desires for strong relationships grounded in our common humanity.

sustaining, providing nourishment, keeping going

Sustainable Consumerism

notes In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Culture, Pt. I 1. The now classic example drawn from work of popular culture is Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas, first published in the Netherlands in 1982. Ang gathered responses from women by placing an ad in the Dutch woman’s magazine Viva, addressed to those who either liked to watch the American soap opera Dallas or disliked it. Ang discovered three general positions toward the program: one group of fans, a second set of viewers who watched the program ironically and a third group who hated the show. Ang’s work demonstrates that the consumption of cultural artifacts (in this case watching t.v.) is a complex negotiation involving sometimes the wholesale acceptance of the show’s message (by fans), sometimes an outright rejection of such debased messages and meanings (by haters) and sometimes an inverted rereading of the show’s message and meaning (by ironists). Ang’s work is important because she examines how pleasure is produced through consumption, in rather complex ways with contradictory value systems, rather than seeing consumption as simply an end in and of itself. 2. “The Battle of Proper Names,” from “Part II: Nature, Culture, Writing” in Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida, 1976, p.107. Derrida’s comment is in context of a discussion of the “Writing Lesson” by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The linkage between violence and representation is fully present in this allegorical image of “America” by Philippe Galle in the late 16th century. The New World is rendered as a naked, violent woman. Why a naked, violent woman? 3. The advent of “multi-culti” advertising has produced a bewildering amount of information on the consumptive preferences and buying patterns of various ethnic groups. For example, we now know that Korean Americans consume more Spam than any other ethnic group or that Chinese Americans drink more Cognac. In the words of one executive, “Today’s marketing is part anthropology.” 4. The most visible of these campaigns is the on-going “United Colors of Benetton.” A critical analysis of Benetton is made by Jeff Rosen in his article “Merchandising Multiculturalism: Benetton and the New Cultural Relativism,” New Art Examiner, November 1993, pp.18–26. The critical difference lies in how the concept of multiculturalism will be allowed to exist as a force in society. Will multiculturalism act as a force for substantive change in how we deal with other cultures? Is it to be seen as a form of marginalized pluralism? Or is it simply a relative concept perfect for the marketing of our times? In the reported words of Benetton’s creative director Oliviero Toscani, “Products change, images capitalize.” Or as Rosen notes, “Toscani has it backwards: Images change, products capitalize.” 5. “The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” - bell hooks from “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992, p. 21. 6.

“The Talking Machine,” in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses by Michael Taussig, 1993, p. 198. 7. For an extended account of what he calls the “pseudo-photograph,” see William J. Mitchell’s book The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992); in particular, the chapters “Intention and Artifice” and “How to Do Things with Pictures.” 8. For a critical account of the use of photography in the service of documenting criminal activity, see “The Body and the Archive” by Allan Sekula, reprinted in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, 1989. 9. This thought parallels some of the conclusions of Ien Ang (see note 1), who argues that fantasy and fiction do not “function in place of, but beside, other dimensions of life (social practice, moral or political consciousness). “It...is a source of pleasure because it puts ‘reality’ in parentheses, because it constructs imaginary solutions for real contradictions, which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of existing social relations of dominance and subordination.” (p.135) 10. “Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality,” by Jacques Lacan inFeminine Sexuality, edited by Juliet Mitchell, 1982, p. 90. 11. “‘The Indignity of Speaking for Others’: An Imaginary Interview,” by Craig Owens in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, 1992, p. 262. 12. The comment is from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire in a discussion of the French peasantry. This is discussed by Owens (see note 10), who adds: “Here, Marx uncritically assumes the traditional role of politically motivated intellectual - or artist - in bourgeois society: he appropriates for himself the right to speak on behalf of others, setting himself up as their conscience - indeed, as consciousness itself. But in order to occupy this position, he must first deny them (self-) consciousness, the ability to represent themselves.” (p.261). 13. Michel Foucault, “ Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977, p.209. This statement by Deleuze about Foucault’s work comes from Craig Owens’s essay (see note 10). 14. Undoubtedly, designers are discovering that issues of cultural diversity and social responsibility can be found in their own back yards. As I write this, the premiere issue of Sphere has arrived at my door, a publication by the World Studio Foundation. The stated intent of the Foundation is threefold: to “examine the role of cultural identity in the design disciplines,” to “collect and disseminate information about social projects in the global creative community” and to “encourage projects that empower individuals and communities to participate in the shaping of their environment.” While their intentions are laudable I am left with an uneasy feeling. Perhaps it’s cynicism, maybe it’s the Colors-like design that makes me suspicious, or maybe it’s the $50 subscription price. See the brief report on World Studio, I.D. magazine, November 1993, p. 26. 15. It is easier to see the work produced by artists as instances of “others speaking for themselves” and in the process enabling another voice to be heard. I think of Carrie Mae Weems, and African-American woman, whose photographic series “Ain’t Jokin” with titles such as “Black Woman with Chicken” or “What are the three things you can’t give a black person?” or of

the Native-American artist Jimmie Durham’s work, both of whom undermine the prevalent stereotypes produced by and for dominant culture. It is harder to see this activity in the realm of graphic design proper, much of which is produced by and for dominant cultural interests.

In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Culture, Pt. II 1. I subscribe to the notion that style carries meaning and is neither simply a meaningless ornament attached to nor separable from some truer, deeper, or purer structure. This dichotomy is argued by J. Abbott Miller, who makes a case for such an opposition between style and structure, in his essay “The idea is the machine,” inEye, Vol.3, No.10, 1993, pp.58-65. 2. Andrew Howard, “There is such a thing as society*,” in Eye, Vol.4, No.13, 1994, pp.72-77. 3. These terms are borrowed from Steven Greenblatt as exemplified in his bookShakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 4. The trickle-down theory of stylistic diffusion, a sort-of supply-side aestheticism, is typically attributable to certain modernist sensibilities borne out of elitism, while the trickle-up theory of stylistic diffusion is of a more recent vogue, as exemplified by the MoMA exhibition, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture. Corrective variants exist for this model including Ellen Lupton’s critical examination of the graphic designer’s love affair with the “vernacular.” See Lupton’s “High and Low: A Strange Case of Us and Them?” in Eye, Vol.2, No.7, 1992, pp.72-77. 5. The modern drive to collapsing the boundaries between nations occurs both verbally and visually through utopian projects like developing an Esperanto, or common verbal language, or in the development of pictographic systems such as ISOTYPE. Modernist qualities of objectivity and rationality reign in Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE system, which adopts the abstract, reductive forms we now associate with signage programs meant to facilitate our movement through places like airports or the Olympic Games. 6. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, “Critical Way Finding,” in The Edge of the Millennium, Susan Yelavich, ed., New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1993, p.223. 7. Henri Lefevbre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, p.56. 8. Nancy Princenthal in an introduction to an exhibition catalog for Matt Mullican,Untitled, 1986/7, states: “[Mullican] likes to place his work in public places, but its status there is subversive. He does not endorse standard stick-figure/ plane geometry signage, but instead returns it to aesthetic consideration.” (p.5) 9. Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 224. 10. The original statement was published in “Sign Language,” Peter Clothier,ArtNews, Summer 1989, p.146. 11. “Theft, Coincidence, or Art,” in AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Vol.12, No.2, 1994, p. 48. 12. The foundational text promoting this idea is Wally Ollins’s

The Corporate Personality, London: Design Council, 1978. For an excellent critical analysis of Ollins’s text, see: Steve Baker, “Re-reading the Corporate Personality,” in Journal of Design History, Vol.2, No.4, 1989, pp. 275-292. 13. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981. 14. The abstract, reductive forms of modern art that were favored by David Rockefeller, CEO of Chase Manhattan and an officer of the Museum of Modern Art, go hand in hand with the design of the Chase Manhattan Bank symbol, which Philip Meggs describes as “an abstract form unto itself, free from alphabetical, pictographic, or figurative connotations” that “could successfully function as a visual identifier for a large organization.” In this way the “free” symbol can stand in for the corporation. Haacke trades on this substitution, “grounding” the symbol in the history of Chase Manhattan policies and corporate ideologies with its use of seemingly neutral art. 15. Most, if not all of Haacke’s projects meet with controversy and a few with censorship, including his Hans Haacke: Systems exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971 and his Manet-PROJEKT ‘74 in Germany. 16. Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDS DEMOGRAPHICS, Seattle: Bay Press, 1990, p.14. 17. Stuart Marshall, “The Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich,” in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, Seattle: Bay Press, 1991, p.89. 18. This phenomenon is by now widespread including the appropriation of terms like “queer” and “fag.” Historian Stephen Greenblatt describes the first act of appropriation on the part of colonizers is the abduction of natives to serve as translators. See “Kidnapping Language” in Marvelous Possessions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp.86-118. 19. See Michael Dooley’s essay, “Frequent Flyers,” in Print, XLVII:II, March/April 1993, pp.42-53+. 20. Jeffrey Keedy, “I Like the Vernacular...NOT!” in Lift and Separate: Graphic Design and the Quote/Unquote Vernacular, New York: Herb Lubalin Study Center of the Cooper Union, p.9. 21. Michael Bierut, “Sampling the Candy: P. Scott Makela,” in I.D., Vol 41, No.1, January/February 1994, p.55. 22. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen, 1979, p.96. 23. Anne Burdick, “A sense of rupture,” in Eye, Vol.4, No.14, 1994, pp.48-57. 24. Ibid, p.53. 25. Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti- Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster, ed., Seattle: Bay Press, 1983, pp.16-30. “The fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place....But it is necessary...to distinguish between Critical Regionalism and simple- minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.” (p.21) 26. Interview with Rudy VanderLans, Emigre #29, 1994, p.16. 27. Ibid, p.18. 28. Ibid, p.11. 29. Ibid, p.19. 30. Keith Piper, “Forty Acres and a Microprocessor,” in Place, Position, Presentation, Public, Ine Gevers, ed., Maastricht, the Netherlands: Jan van Eyck Akademie, p.263 & 266. 31. Laurie Haycock Makela and Ellen Lupton, “Underground matriarchy,” in Eye, Vol.4, No.14, 1994, p.46.

Notes