James David wrote this post at 9:50 am on March 29th, 2008.
NOTE: This week I will be posting a series of follow-ups to Designing the Revolution, my initial response to Alix Rule’s The Revolution Will Not be Designed. Here is the essay in its entirety.
In the time that has passed since originally publishing Designing the Revolution, I decided to write a more reasoned, methodological plan for how we as activist designers should be pursuing social justice. It is an editorial that I hope causes some controversy, and stirs our thoughts a bit. As with Part I, the founding premise is that:
Our role as designers demands of us social change solutions.
There is a growing trend toward social responsibility in design circles, and much of what we write here lauds that change. However, not all of us are on board. As Rick Poynor put it to listeners at the 2001 AIGA conference in New York:
“The problem for design is that it almost dares not open its eyes to what is really going on, to its own complicity, and to its manifest failure to face up to its own responsibilities and argue convincingly that design might be anything other than a servant of commercial interests.”
“For anyone with the stomach to be a critic, there is certainly no shortage of targets, causes, issues or places to start.”
To be sure, these words foreshadowed the current success of socially responsible design: harnessing a formerly money and goods driven industry and turning its focus towards social justice. While this is a positive change, and one that took significant effort to orchestrate, I have previously argued that we need to be be more holistic in our approach to social responsibility. By “holistic,” I meant to suggest that our solutions should get at the root of social issues, rather than address symptoms. We are uniquely poised outside the politics that are faced by activists. We don’t suffer from being too academic - what I jokingly refer to as Ivory Tower vertigo. We are trained to be innovative, and trusted by others to fulfill that role. We should move past social engagement and enact social change.
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.
The above words can be found in the GNU Manifesto. Author Richard Stallman’s statement also undergirds the kind of perspective that we as activist designers ought to take. While we are fortunate enough to innovate and problem solve outside the usual activist confines, we frequently miss the point when we limit ourselves to design thinking. While the pragmatism that Alix Rule recently critiqued is enabling us to redress problems that are too marginalized for public discourse, we’re sometimes too focused, and lose the big picture of how those small problems are the result of an overarching, systemic problem.
The problem is a lack of direct democracy.
Nate Burgos outlined the potential for design thinking in his manifesto “Innovation: More than a New Year’s Resolution.” In the context of natural disaster (especially Hurricane Katrina) he aptly outlined the problem of systemic failure. Burgos asked: How do we begin to build more just, and more stable systems, especially after such catastrophe? The answer is through participatory approaches and community problem solving.
Designers aren’t politicians, this much is true, but that’s to our benefit. We can be a conduit, and best create solutions that skirt the system if we serve not only as community advocates (social engagement) but as community organizers (social change.) Here are three steps to achieving this:
- Ditch the traditional clientèle.
- Work with social change agents and organizations, especially within your community.
- Ensure that the community served has direct input in each new venture.
I will elaborate on these three points, in order, in posts later this week.
The Revolution Will Not Be Commercialized
Recently, Alix Rule aptly critiqued the sharing of beds between designer activists and corporations. Their alliance leaves ample room for greenwashing and other such aliments. Working on behalf of General Electric, or, worse, co-opting and mocking important issues through design for the likes of Diesel (see Osocio’s Diesel Advertising Global Warming Ready) severely hinders social change. We could instead find guidance in Norman Douglas’s famed quote, “Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty.” Further, our approach should be a lived protest, and we should more literally apply the old anarchist adage that we must “build the new world in the shell of the old.”
Leonie ten Duis, et al., set forth a brave argument with An ideal design is not yet that furthers this point. I agree with the authors on their assessment of communications while admitting that a) it was written nearly a decade ago, and b) that their proscription doesn’t sit absolutely comfortably with me, so it serves only as illustration here:
Designers must once again realize that their ultimate task is neither to order information nor simply to decorate it.
The designer can inject his own attitude into this ‘navigation’ between pieces of information.
Every design, in essence, is a criticism of the context for which it has been produced.
A good design ‘activates’ those contexts by offering an understanding of, a comment on, or an alternative to them.
A [good] design [is one] which questions the one-dimensionality of things that are taken for granted – however politically correct they may be .
Given the above comments, how we can do as Richard Poynor challenges, and force design to “face up to its own responsibilities and argue convincingly that design might be anything other than a servant of commercial interests,” without challenging the setting into which we broadcast our own message? Even ten Duis and the other authors admit that:
Attitudes have also changed towards that ‘voice of capital’, advertising: today even political dissidents see advertising as a powerful channel of communication along which it is also possible to disseminate ‘good’ messages.
“A good design,” then, “‘activates’ those contexts by offering an understanding of, a comment on, or an alternative to them.” If we ditch the traditional clientèle, and continuously challenge ourselves to be self-critical about the medium that carries our message, we can succeed in seeing that the “revolution” is not commercialized.
It’s about the role of design in the community and how you participate in constructing society.
The quote above was offered by Lebanese designer Zeina Maasri in GOOD Magazine, when discussing her work as a designer in a post-conflict society. Her words challenge designers to assume proactive roles within their community - lead roles that enable democracy. In order to actualize Zeina’s words, and broaden our focus to enact systemic change, we will need to recognize overlapping injustices and address many at once. Different people are affected by injustice in different (sometimes many) ways. The notion of overlapping injustices serves as a critique (or a condemnation, depending) of an unjust system. It’s a recognition that social and power dynamics are asymmetrical, and that social justice is a thornier problem than it may appear on the surface. This truth drives the need for direct democracy in what we do.
Through working with many and disparate groups, we can recognize these patterns, and share ideas and best practices. For example, Groundswell is currently working pro-bono with two organizations, one that promotes democracy in Africa, and an anti-racism outfit working here in the United States. Our latest commitment was to ourselves, to create at least one campaign per month that would have a public impact. We decided to play this role as activist designers, and to take direct action, rather than only facilitate causes. We believe firmly (and act accordingly) that the designer-cum-activist can have his or her hands in multiple aspects of social justice work.
John Moorehead, a fellow designer and loyal Groundswell reader, offered us this inspiring comment:
I have seen firsthand the impact design can have and I know the effort is not wasted. If there are people who commission us to help communicate notions of any kind through design, we must be “thinking designers” and carry the task in the best way we can.
In order for design to have this kind of impact, I believe we need to approach these problems by thinking systemically.
So far, we’ve seen that we can ditch commercial clients and work for the betterment of livelihoods around the globe, and that if we work on multiple fronts at once, we’ll see that the issues we are concerned with are connected in complex ways. What, then, is the next step for concerned designers?
Always a problem, always a solution
Activist design can change not only the social role that designers play, but if we involve the community in our work, we’ll have a strong and direct impact. Our job is not to repair unjust systems, but to disrupt them and hand out the tools with which to skirt or dismantle them.
Socially conscious design is an phenomenon for activists to consider. Decentralized, organic, and social justice oriented, it has all the markings of a successful grassroots movement. One facet of design thinking that deserves particular attention is the small (but growing) area of participatory design. Particularly in the field of architecture, firms and design/build programs, have been joining hands with community design centers and service-based organizations to directly meet the needs of the communities they serve.
Architects achieve this level of direct input through town-hall style meetings, but other artists demonstrate that the approach doesn’t have to be nearly as pastoral, or even as orchestrated. The alternative reality game WorldWithoutOil.org imagined “the actual events of an oil shortage,” and challenged players to “document them and innovate solutions.” Of The World TV offers indie film and video promoting progressive activism, eco-consciousness, and humanitarianism through a personal and participatory framework. The upcoming and much talked about Pangea Day offers a similar platform.
These examples demonstrate that story telling and problem solving are almost always done best when whole communities are engaged, and this should appeal to the pragmatist designer and the idealist dreamer in all of us.
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