Designing the Revolution II: Social Change
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. At the end of the week, I’ll publish the essay in its entirety, complete with feedback to any comments made.
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.
