Designing the Revolution II: Medium, Message, and Community
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. Below is the third part of the series. You can the first part here, and yesterday’s piece here.
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.
