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Reflection

This semester, for me, was really about figuring out my own kind of political position and how I could navigate that in a design context. While I initially wanted to investigate instagram’s culture of information sharing, I think the superficial nature of the platform left me feeling like I needed more. I got stuck down a bit of a hole of looking at, and collecting imagery, but not really knowing how to articulate what was interesting or important about it. I created an account which acted as an abstracted archive of imagery like memes, posters, infographics and quotes, which I hoped would spark some kind of conversation in the comment section. Taking inspiration from the @werenotreallystrangers account, I added questions in the captions of the images but it was hard to spark genuine engagement in a short timeframe, and I think the idea was too abstract/not specific enough. I struggled a bit with this because having a sense of ambiguity could have lead the account in an interesting direction but I felt like I was wasting time with this approach. 

I became quite interested in the idea of algorithms, and how the information we seek on social media creates a kind of echo chamber of similar kinds of material. How can we kind of break this cycle? Do people even want to break the cycle? I guess in some sense I’m happy that the algorithm keeps certain things out of my mind (like right wing politics and opinions), but can we form robust ideas when we’re only exposed to certain things? I was then thinking about the accessibility of information, in regards to projects like Dexter Sinister’s The Serving Library, and Ruben Pater’s quote from The Politics of Design “You are privileged. Just reading this sentence makes you part of the 85% of the world population that is literate, the 20% that understands English, and the 40% that has access to the internet.” My interest shifted from the visual form of information to the desire to create a platform for communication, with what I’d collected as a starting point. Stephen Willats’ Control magazine operated in this kind of way, but not everyone is able to buy a magazine, let alone contribute to one. The idea of online vs physical distribution came to mind, and I thought about creating a sort of pamphlet which would act as a starting point. There could be a supporting website, but General Idea’s approach to their work (using public modes of communication like posters and magazines in news stands, and their mailing of invitations to artists to contribute to the Miss General Idea pageant) was something that really appealed to me. The selection of contributors connected to concepts of the designer as editor/curator and the “politics surrounding which voices are designated for distribution and reproduction, and which are not” (Ella Sutherland).

While I’m aware my idea might be still be a bit abstract at this stage, I feel like this semester has been beneficial in figuring out what kind of practice I’d like to start engaging in. There was definitely more room for me to explore things formally but I think now that I’ve done a bit of legwork in the conceptual side of things, I’ll be well equipped to do more actual designing next semester. I plan on looking more into things like the differences between professional versus vernacular visual language, the agency and privilege that comes with self publishing, and how I can create foundations which can be built on by different communities, creating a space for certain kinds of discussion. One thing I’m looking forward to is having more of a conversation with Ella and seeing what comes from that - it’s such a cool opportunity to be engaging with someone whose work I’ve been interested in since first year. It’s been nice thinking about how my relationship to her work is developing over time.

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A bit of relevant stuff from art history, thinking about ownership and recontextualisation.

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“Control Magazine’s function has always been to provide a resource for artists to discuss their work and, in particular, to make connections with other disciplines such as social or computer sciences, technology etc. Its eighteen issues provide a unique record of a specific area of art practice over four decades and this non-profit making publication has had an acknowledged influence on the practice of artists.” (source)

The idea of having a physical (but globally spanning) site for people to discuss and make connections through their different practices is really interesting. In a way, I’d like my publication to work similarly but be more open to the community and I guess be more democratic. I’m envisioning something that can be widely and cheaply distributed, with content building on itself with each iteration. Kind of like how the newspaper publishes readers’ responses to articles, but instead of it just ending at that one response it’s more cyclical. I am also thinking about the serving library in this kind of context - could I reproduce articles and have those as the starting point for the conversation?

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Bill Gaver’s “cultural probes” were an attempt to engage elderly citizens of three different areas in research which would normally take place in the context of a focus group. Instead of being asked questions directly, the participants were given a package of items including maps, postcards, stickers, and a disposable camera. The intention was to open up the scope of what information could be collected from participants, and lent a sense of ambiguity and excitement to the exercise. 

In relation to my own project, I’d like to start some sort of conversation around the idea of communication (with “crisis time” being a sort of starting point.) General Idea’s mail art had me thinking about the idea of distribution, but I wasn’t sure what kind of things I wanted to be posting, or to who. These cultural probes gave me the idea to organise a group of images and texts to be used as prompts for responses which could be collected and compiled. This kind of relates to the idea of “the editor” - how would I decide which images to send out, who would receive them, how would I organise responses? 

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Design and Documentary

Design Thinking, Layla Tweedie-Cullen, 2017 (link)

This interview is a nice outline of Ella’s practice at that point in time, but the quote “By focusing on artefacts produced by independent organisations, counter-movements, self publishers and artists, I hope to discover modes of representations that connect to histories that have evolved outside of traditional historiographic practices.” felt quite relevant. I think this is what I was trying to do with collecting the images from instagram relating to corona. Was there something that tied the different kinds of material together? I’m interested in having the chance to dig deeper into the visual aspect of the kind of “re-sharing” culture that exists on the platform. “Creation of printed artefacts is hugely determined by the culture, technology and socio-political issues surrounding their creation.” Turning to the idea of my own output, I’ve been thinking about accessibility. Not everyone has access to the internet, a point brought up by Ruben Pater in The Politics of Design. How could content be interpreted differently if it was online vs in print? How does the physical form of a publication dictate the value of its content? Being able to publish something at all indicates a certain position of privilege, and the decisions to make things either quickly and cheaply or more “luxuriously” are loaded with different meanings. The risograph is something which I’ve sort of taken for granted but realised that it’s quite specific to Ilam. Would I want to print something more ephemeral and distribute it widely if I had studied at a more commercially focused school? 

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Critical Everything

Francisco Laranjo, 2017 (link)

“…the well-established market-focused and problem-solving orientation of graphic design is not new. The theorist Donald Schön proposed instead ‘problem-setting’ in the seminal book The Reflective Practitioner (1984). While problem-solving sees problems as a given, problem-setting tries to construct the reality in which designers operate.” Critical design reshapes the role of the designer, allowing more autonomy and a place to explore complex issues. 

“It is common to hear designers saying that they do not judge nor are in the business of criticising their colleagues’ work. This is good PR. It allows the always-tight circuit of graphic designers, clients, conferences and exhibitions to remain filled with smiles and polite, respectful nods. As a consequence, there is no generation of public debate, and the design press predominantly excels at what it does best: celebratory press-releases and descriptive news, peppered with some sentences by the designers themselves describing and validating their own work.” Initially I was frustrated with this idea, I like debate and questioning things because it can lead to something more interesting, but it’s hard to initiate something like that if the people who could have those conversations don’t want to participate. 

"In the age of surveillance and ‘The Internet of Things,’ it is unsurprising that there is a recurrent visual suggestion of camouflage, blurriness and a penchant to vaguely invoke the nefarious presence of technology in our lives with a cool, laid-back revivalism of anti-design with stretched typefaces, glitches, Photoshop brushes and abstract, morphed geometric shapes that leave little to no room for negotiation with the audience.” This was a really interesting view of why these aesthetic styles came about, referencing things like net art and vaporwave which I looked into a little bit last year. There’s something about it that feels kind of detached from “humanness” - it’s cold, visually dense, sort of standoffish? Like it represents a dimension that we can’t reach, or have no control over. There’s something about that which is alluring to me, but it doesn’t really fit with a democratic/accessible approach to things. 

“James Bridle appropriately exposed his concern about the limited aspirations of a mantra frequently used in association with work operating under the terms debated here: making the invisible, visible. In the conference Superscript (2015), he said that the role of art is to disrupt and criticize networks, but “the idea that visibility is a way of solving problems is troubling.” Design often brings visibility to certain issues - designers really love making posters (for example Strategy’s “Mate Act Now”, a “protest for the digital generation”) - but it’s like, okay we’re aware, what next? In my interview with Ella we talked a bit about this, design doesn’t really have the ability to directly change anything but bringing visibility can contribute to meaningful discussions surrounding these issues. And I think we should be okay with that, it’s slow progress but it’s still progress. 

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What Design Can’t Do

Silvio Lorusso, 2017 (source)

While thinking about how information is shared on instagram, I noticed more and more of a homogenisation of aesthetic styles, which we’ve spoken about in regards to the metahaven look or swiss style being coopted by people who don’t care about the ideologies behind them. In this text, Lorusso mentions the automation of design, where websites use technology to create designs based on algorithms and neural networks. Default templates became popular with the rise of technology like microsoft office, putting into question the role of the designer. Daniel Eatock’s grey and white poster template can be used for any kind of event and allows content to be created without the need for complex design decisions to be made - “say YES! to fun and function & NO! to seductive imagery and colour!”

“The fascination with everyday graphics, along with the historical rebounds of a growing number of designers, has deprived graphic design of any anchor.”

In a way, this reminded me of the kinds of accounts on instagram that aim to spread positive messages (link), gaining their followers through posts being shared in users’ stories. These images don’t really have anything unique about them, which I suppose makes them more universally appealing. (If you’re into that kind of thing). You could quite easily generate content for this kind of account using some kind of algorithm or AI because the content and aesthetic is super predictable.  I think the reason why these accounts get popular in some circles is the nature of social media - there’s a kind of pressure to be happy and positive and these images help users curate a nicely packaged online identity. “Influencing” is a strange concept to me but I think these images are a way into that kind of world without having to buy a specific product - people might see someone they admire share a post like that and be like “okay, this person holds these values and so I’m going to also post it because I want to be perceived that way too.”

Lorusso goes on to talk about how the democratisation of graphic design lead to schools intellectualising the practice, changing the role of the designer to something closer to “author”. “...the intellectual role of the designer is only recognized by other designers. There are exceptions, but as such they corroborate the general unsustainability of this kind of practice.” I think this is a problem many designers in this realm might experience, and something which is often on my mind. Apart from my own circle, who am I going to be making work for/with? Intellectualising the practice could lead to it becoming insular which is what I’m trying to avoid. 

Evgeny Morozov refers to "solutionism" as “the idea that to solve a "wicked", social problem, a technical solution is sufficient. However, such confidence in technology and science seems dubious when expressed within graphic design, a fundamentally humanistic field whose scientific basis appears vague. Perhaps, it would be better to speak of graphic design as a language, highlighting in this way its ideological component.” 

What I took from this section was the idea that graphic design itself can be the vessel for change? Rather than trying to design some sort of technological device or algorithm, language is efficient? Maybe I’m misreading that but I don’t feel particularly hopeful that we can rely on technology to save us. However, graphic design enables communication which could eventually lead to some sort of social change through the dissemination of ideas. (That’s also optimistic but I think worth trying?) My issue with speculative design and Dunne and Raby is that they’re often creating machines or systems which will still be manufactured, distributed and owned by people. These kinds of technologies (like self driving cars etc) could be useful in the future but they’re still going to be making money for someone, still part of a class system. 

“But if it’s true that, as Tony Fry argues, design “either serves or subverts the status quo”, it is legitimate to ask whether within certain instances of design education, the impetus to subvert the status quo is precisely what ultimately serves it.” It’s like punks trying to be unique and anti-establishment with their studs and hawks, eventually turning into their own stereotype. I think “subverting the status quo” is more efficient when it’s done subtly, or maybe not actually trying to subvert anything, or maybe just coming from an honest, genuine place? Not that affirmative design is necessarily dishonest, but it’s not really attempting to change anything. 

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Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis, 2016

This documentary was also very broad, linking a range of ideas together to provide a history of Neoliberalism. (Citizens are redefined as consumers whose democratic choices are exercised by buying and selling. Competition drives the market, rewarding merit and punishing inefficiency. This leads the rich to believe they are wealthy through merit, disregarding the economic advantages that got them to that point. The poor end up blaming themselves for their position, even though they can do little to change anything.)

“The word hypernormalization was coined by Alexei Yurchak, in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the image of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.” (source)

While there was a lot to take from this documentary, the main concept that stuck with me was the idea of perception manipulation. While movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring brought people together, it was hard for them to create tangible outcomes. Curtis outlines how governments attempted to create a more simplified version of reality, which would be easier than providing alternative solutions to structural issues that societies were experiencing. This, in theory, would provide citizens with a sense of comfort and stability - ignorance is bliss, right? This made me think about New Zealand’s response to covid-19 and the media coverage that came as a result. Ashley Bloomfield and Jacinda Ardern relayed information given to them by experts, directing New Zealanders on what we could and couldn’t do. Obviously there was going to be resistance to this from people who are critical of our current government, and I’m interested in how different groups of people manage their own realities through communication. 

This quote about Curtis’ critique of online activism sums up a lot of what I’ve been looking into: “His description of the weaknesses inherent in 'clicktivism' is convincing as he explains how in the 2016 US election liberals expressed their anger at Trump in cyberspace, where it had no effect because algorithms ensured their posts were only seen by people who agreed with them. And how these ubiquitous algorithms used by social media corporations mean that waves of mass public anger don't change anything any longer, because on social media no-one outside the group of fellow angry folk is even aware of the issue.” (source) With my work, I’m not aiming to directly change anything, but instead spark a discussion on the role of communication in regards to certain issues. 

One tangent - The film mentions Joseph Weisenbaum’s ELIZA program, which is a mock psychotherapist designed in 1966. The user can have conversations with the program, which basically rephrases the user’s input. “People feel comfortable when they see themselves reflected back to them” is a quote which jumped out to me, I think there’s some kind of thread there to the self-help instagram posts I’ve been looking at?   

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The Net, Lutz Dammbeck, 2003

This documentary was quite broad, but raised some interesting things for me to look into. Lutz Dammbeck studied graphic design in Germany from the mid 1960s, where he began creating films which were submitted to the East German state-run DEFA studio for animation film. He also served in the military, and created work which spanned a range of ideas, including the role of artists in the Nazi era, the effects of modern technology on the masses, and the links between politics and art. 

One of the first things that caught my attention in this film was the mention of Cybernetics. “The basic idea of Cybernetics is that complex systems – such as living organisms, societies and brains – are self-regulated by the feedback of information. By systematically analyzing the feedback mechanisms which regulate complex systems, cybernetics hopes to discover the means of controlling these systems technologically, and to develop the capability of synthesizing artificial systems with similar capacities.” (source) My thinking might be misguided, but this idea reminded me of the networks and algorithms employed by internet platforms to connect users to content they might be interested in. However, these kinds of algorithms make it hard to find or come across content that diverges from what you usually see, creating a kind of echo chamber of the same voices, information, aesthetics and opinions. Accessibility is something which is important to me - being a student at an institution has made me think about how information that I can so easily access might not be available to others. The politics of which voices are given a platform is interesting to think about in relation to social media - can we somehow use things like instagram as a vehicle for the dissemination of information? How do we decide what information holds value? Does the aesthetic presentation of information change meaning when displayed across different platforms (specifically online vs print?)

This line of thinking also relates to the topic of the Arab Spring - social media allowed protestors to gather and spread their message, as at the time, the authorities didn’t have an understanding of how to monitor this kind of activity. However, with the ability to spread information quickly, social media was also used to change perceptions of people and situations through the circulation of misinformation. In a way, I see links to Ella’s Carte Blanche - The yellow vests were a signifier of people coming together to demand change, and even though they were a different kind of vessel of communication than a tweet or a facebook post, the aim to gather and mobilise was the same. 

Another thing mentioned was how “1960s avant garde artists were erasing the boundaries between art and life”. This reminded me of people like Joseph Beuys who “used as his starting point the concept that everything is art, that every aspect of life can be approached creatively and, as a result, everyone has the potential to be an artist.” In some of our conversations, we spoke a little about where the line is between art and social effort (Is planting a community garden art? How? Why? Does it need to be? Why do we feel the need to apply the idea of art to it?) The blurring of boundaries between art and life is something which artists have been exploring for a long time and I’d like my work to sit somewhere in the middle. For something to exist as only art, there’s a lot of focus on the materiality of the object, which is often held in a space that attracts a certain kind of audience. I think design has the ability to exist in this kind of environment but also can easily sit outside of it.

“Would you like it if people lived in a virtual world?”  A quote from the unabomber, kind of relevant to the adaptations we’ve had to make in recent times... 

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Observer: Critical Omissions / Rick Poynor

In Observer: Critical Omissions, Rick Poynor discusses the 2007 exhibition Forms of Inquiry, curated by Mark Owens and Zac Kyes. This exhibition focused on work based in the realm of critical design, with Poynor questioning the purpose of this term - is design not inherently critical? In this sense, we can compare critical design to “affirmative design”, which does not attempt to subvert the status quo, but rather continues to act as a kind of marketing tool to “sell doodads”. For Poynor, critical design’s own desire to self reference is short sighted, asking if it is really as “new” as it makes out to be. 

This quote taken from the Forms of Inquiry publication, “But what happens when the designer assumes the role of editor, publisher, and distributor outside the constraints of the … client/designer relationship? Taking such a position challenges the … service-based model of graphic design, reliant as it is on supplied content, external requests, and the division of work-flow into discrete specialisations.”, is challenged by Poynor, who makes reference to work which had been operating in this realm for quite some time. As an example, Emigre magazine, created in 1984 by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, was a place for designers and artists to unpack these kinds of questions. The magazine initially explored ideas of boundaries, international culture, and design itself, creating a site for conversation and reflection of the discipline. While Owens and Kyes were presenting critical design as a contemporary concept, Poynor assumes the reasoning behind this when he quotes “the reluctance to acknowledge recent precedents is probably just a new generation’s desire to establish its own identity, combined with a cyclic swing in graphic taste”. This brought to mind questions of originality and newness - “art” has an acceptable and even encouraged history of referencing itself, building upon what came before. However, graphic design is often seen as a vessel for “something else”, so there is a (perceived or real) struggle for the discipline to gain validity within itself. I think individuality and uniqueness are qualities which would be difficult to explore through an affirmative design practice, so perhaps designers were wanting to distance themselves from the history to find a sense of autonomy? Cycles of taste would also influence these kinds of attitudes - not only do aesthetic styles change with time, but so do the motivations behind why people design. I do agree with Poynor in regards to the idea that “critical design can only gain from an explicit acceptance and conscious interrogation of its own evolving history.”

Poynor goes on to reference Dunne and Raby, from their book Design Noir: “Critical design takes as its medium social, psychological, cultural, technological and economic values in order to push the limits of lived experience, not the medium.” This reminded me of Clement Greenberg and his notion of painting using interrogation to solidify itself. However, in a design sense, the interrogation runs through the discipline. Instead of using formal processes to explore and define what makes something “graphic design”, criticality is directed towards other issues - research through design. Poynor makes note of Dunne and Raby’s clear political intentions for critical design, as well as bringing attention to the fact that in their exhibition, Owens and Kyes made no mention of the influence of Dunne and Raby in this field. Metahaven, a group featured in Forms of Inquiry, developed a project around the “Principality of Sealand”, which sat comfortably in the realms of both critical and speculative design, with links potentially being made to Dunne and Raby’s United Micro Kingdoms. The way in which both projects use design to develop societal identities with their own sense of agency speaks to the power that the discipline could have over real developmental issues. While Poynor describes Metahaven’s attitude of the designer firstly being a citizen as “energising”, he questions the value of this attitude if the projects are hidden in an intellectual realm. “If critical graphic design is more than an aloof intellectual pose, it should spend less time hanging out with artists, turn its intelligence outward, and communicate with the public about issues and ideas that matter now.” I do wonder how we draw distinctions between citizen/designer/artist, but I think Poynor is valid in this claim which I would like to explore further. 

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Speculative Design vs Critical Design

From the MoMA website: Critical Design is “a term first used by Anthony Dunne in his book, Hertzian Tales (1999), referring to an attitude toward design rather than a movement or method. It follows in the footsteps of other practices (like Radical Design in Italy and avant-garde British architecture of the late 1960s and early 1970s) that have regarded design as a way to pose incisive questions, challenge the status quo, and think deeply about the possible future consequences of present choices. Critical Design is speculative, conceptual, provocative, and can be darkly satirical. It does not always lead to usable products, but it does produce long-term thinking, a nuanced view of consumers as complex, contradictory individuals, and alternative solutions suggesting that change is always possible, even inevitable.”

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are important figures in the world of speculative design, popularising the concept in their book Speculative Everything. This page outlines the thinking behind this idea: “[Speculative design] thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.”

While I admire and appreciate the value of speculative design, I’m not sure if my brain works in that kind of way - I enjoy processing information more than trying to imagine things. I like a certain amount of tangibility I guess, but the idea of speculation isn’t something I’m completely closed off to. Critical design, however, is something that makes sense to my values and I guess has been on my mind since before I knew the term for it. My interest in Ella’s work has always stemmed from her using design as a tool to investigate and bring a different kind of visibility to social issues. I kind of started art school wanting to avoid those kinds of things and make work which was a relief from the heaviness of life - however, as I’ve progressed, I’ve realised that I really enjoy being able to use design to sink my teeth in deeper to the more ideological side of things. 

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Muriel Cooper, another one of Ella’s influences, was appointed as art director of MIT press through a recommendation from her mentor, Paul Rand. She was influential in bringing the Swiss style of typography to the press, designing the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas, as well as the monumental Bauhaus book. Cooper employed a grid structure as well as the newly released Helvetica typeface to create an English version of the book (originally published in German by Hans Wingler). This project is one of the most comprehensive collections of material surrounding the work of the Bauhaus. One thing that I enjoyed about Cooper’s approach was her decision to create a poster and a short film containing each spread of the book - it’s interesting to think about how even though the information is exactly the same, our reception of a book/poster/film will give us a different experience each time. 

Cooper was also interested in experimenting with programming, eventually founding the Visible Language workshop at MIT. The “information landscape” was a virtual space developed by Cooper where the user could “fly through” three dimensional textual spaces (bottom image). While Muriel never learned to program herself, she was able to explore these new territories with her colleagues and students, an approach which puts value on experimentation through collaboration. 

Cooper, when asked to provide a short biography, once quoted “Her concerns have always been with beginnings and processes. More with change and technology and their meanings to human communication than with rigorous design theory and style.” With her training and experience, Cooper obviously had a sound knowledge of theory and style but I appreciate her interest in exploring new territories and finding different ways of doing things. 

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Forms of Inquiry research

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The last paragraph reads “Their later work focused on activism related to homophobia and the AIDS crisis. General Idea appropriated robert Indiana’s LOVE logo, spelling the word AIDS with the intention of spreading the image like a virus. General Idea were faced with criticism for this, with a large amount of people feeling as though they should be facing the crisis with a more direct approach to activism, rather than trying to popularise their own work. “One day of AZT” deals with the medical realities of coping with AIDS, which Felix and Jorge both died of in 1994.”

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