You wouldn’t know it from looking here at the front page, but there’s trouble brewing in the Book Club. A gauntlet is on the floor, having been thrown by Mr. Rudy VanderLans, proprietor of Emigre and of course editor of “Rant,” who writes:
“Where are the designers who align themselves, through their work, with their ideologies? The discussions on Speak Up often rage about the big political issues of today, such as media consolidation, corporate scandals, American imperialism, war, the environment, etc. Opinions galore about important issues. But they always seem to be separate from the work that designers create. … Why is no one willing to ask the tough questions?”
What I want to know from you the general readership is, what are the tough questions? What are the questions that you ask yourself on the drive to the office? Are they political questions, creative questions, pragmatic questions, ethical questions? How do you make the tough decisions—do you have any kind of political/ethical/practical guidelines or principles thought out beforehand, or do you confront situations as they come along?
I don’t believe that there are no tough questions. Nor does the likelihood that the answers are complicated or vague or unsatisfactory make the questions any less important. (As James Thurber said, “I’d rather know some of the questions than all of the answers.”) But I also don’t believe that the tough questions are solely political. The best way I can think to put it, in good old Jeffersonian everyone-be-free-and-also-accountable terms, is: What do you choose to be responsible for?
In other words, what are your values as a designer? And—I think this is a little what Rudy is getting at—are your values as a designer separated from your values as a citizen?
Not your usual Friday fare, but someone’s gotta pick up that glove. Several more paragraphs of my own ranting, which you’re all free to disregard, are in the link below:
I do not agree with Rudy’s characterization of the Speak Up discussions. Most of the raging seems to me to be about design issues (esp. branding), design politics (the, uh, AIGA), design software (aka the Shoot Me Now debates), design culture (Who Wants to be a Rock Star), and design taste (in which someone, ahem, actually defended the Dunkin Donuts logo). No one is wondering when Kenneth Lay or Ari Fleischer is going to show up and weigh in with their views—discussions are pretty much about design and designers’ lives.
But more to the point, I don’t agree with the implication behind Rudy’s comment: that designers don’t very well put their money where their mouth is (a rather ironic metaphor, since what a waste of money), that we talk an ideological line but don’t walk it in our actual production.
The implication is that designers are hypocritical. I don’t agree because I don’t think it’s a question of hypocrisy. Some form of idealism is at work to think that political ideologies and design practices should be harmonious. I leave it to you all to define more precisely that form of idealism is (pie-in-the-sky, optimistic, foolhardly, compelling, etc).
The hypocrisy game is an easy one. It’s easy to demand that a designer with a poltical opinion should be making anti-Bush posters on their own dime (because of course if you’re a designer you’re definitely anti-Bush, right?), or that if you have a shred of feeling about forests, you should be spec’ing only recycled paper. Remember when you were in school and were supposed to decide if you’d take a job designing cigarette packaging? Quelle facile dilemma!
These are pretty easy and almost always polarizing shots to take and prove nothing about the real moral ambiguity of design practice. But the presumptuousness behind them (that designers are liberal, or always in charge of budgets and therefore production decisions, or that designers even feel professionally obligated to care about politics) is transparent. It seems to me simplistic (in a bad way) and kind of absurd to argue that if a designer cares about politics, they should produce poltical work (only polticial work? mostly political? 38% political? Who’s setting the standard, by the way?). It’s simplistic on the level of the reality that many designers are not in a position to do a lot of picking and choosing of clients. It’s absurd because who has only one or two or five things they care about? I could list about fifty things that I care about and want to design for without taking a breath—am I therefore professionally obligated to go out and work only in those areas? I do not much care for religion—does that mean I should never do any work for a religious organization? (Maybe I’d learn something from such a project, which would be good fo my black little soul.)
And who exactly am I to say what you should care about and what kind of projects you should be producing? It’s rather an evangelical position (not to mention undemocratic in the generic sense), but then I always thought the worst kind of evangelicals were the political ones.
i love it when Sam gets all uppity.
Maybe this is the right place to suggest that the Speak Up community, editors and plebes, consider offering some kind of pro-bono outlet?
On Jun.13.2003 at 09:50 AM