Design Against Design: Introduction — from Beyond to Against
The following text is the introduction to our forthcoming book Design Against Design: Cause and consequence of a dissident graphic practice. The book is scheduled to come out in Fall 2023 with Set Margins’ Press in Eindhoven, NL. Please consider supporting its publication if you can by donating to our fundraiser here.
Graphic design that engages with the political often historicizes and commodifies itself; to be consumed as art in a collection of dusty Cuban posters or one more exhibition of punk graphics. In competitions and awards, it presents itself as innovative green packaging for organic products alongside government PSAs to “Get Out the Vote,” unable to understand the political beyond consumer behaviour or the operations of the state. The messiness of actual social struggles and their material conflicts are smoothed over and left as fodder for Instagram carousels. In my practice at LOKI—a design studio that works at the intersections of graphic design, cultural production, and social change—design politics are lived, negotiated and fought for in the present. LOKI is a feminist, antiracist and antifascist studio. We strive towards ideals of anticapitalism and anarchism. We believe in mutual aid and direct action. We love dogs and hate the cops… Beyond the choice of who we work with, these values guide how we work and the aesthetics we develop and employ. Designing politically is challenging, deeply emotional, and full of contradictions, and it is urgently necessary. Design Against Design draws from the working practice at LOKI to critically question what designing politically might mean today.
The title of this book is directly inspired by the conference, exhibition and publication design Beyond Design which was a project hosted at, and published by, the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 1997. Organized by the late Dutch graphic designer and educator Jan van Toorn (1932-2020), the conference brought together an international (if Eurocentric) group of designers and educators to investigate “the discrepancy between the socio-economic and symbolic reality of the world-wide information and consumption culture and the prospects for the democratisation of the media.” With an impressive roster of contributors, design Beyond Design stood at the forefront of broader discussions on design’s social responsibility in the public sphere. Van Toorn unapologetically critiqued communication design’s complicity with neoliberal capitalism and its central role in shaping a culture of conformity and consensus. He did this while articulating and asserting design’s dialogic and emancipatory potential. Through design Beyond Design, van Toorn called for designers to take up their roles as practical intellectuals, to take seriously the politics of visual mediation and contribute to “a revitalisation of argumentative, non-consumptive forms of visual communication [and] the renewal of communication design as a reflexive public practice.”
In the publication design Beyond Design there is a quotation cited from a lecture given by bell hooks to students at the North Carolina State University School of Design:
“I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose, to give up, or surrender as part of moving into the center, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”
Drawn from her essay Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, this quote frames the agenda of the design Beyond Design project. It runs throughout the publication in typographic fragments and works to situate the featured dissident and alternative design practices as “literally and metaphorically on the periphery of society, on its social and economic margins.” Van Toorn and his co-curator Els Kuijpers both lament how few examples they could find of truly alternative visual communication within the “official” commission-related design profession. Given the unique economic and social power dynamics at play between the client, the designer and the public, they saw this lack as a reason for more pointed interventions and critiques of visual communication. Inspired by hooks’ quote, they shifted their focus from centre to margin; towards educational spaces and design-adjacent artistic and activist practices, seeking emergent opportunities elsewhere with the hope of influencing, and perhaps even redefining, the profession of design.
bell hooks’ quote has also long guided my own practice, pushing me to stay within and nurture the social and political margins. 25 years later, reflecting on the frustrations in design Beyond Design, in all humility, I can see LOKI (amongst others) offering the beginning of an answer. Our practice is still marginal, and proudly so, but as a commercial studio, our entanglements with capitalism are real. Market forces impact the financial viability and sustainability of the studio and influence the ways we engage with our clients and the designs we create for them. And despite shared values with our clients, the commissioning process still involves negotiations with power dynamics (both internal and external) alongside the necessity to understand and advocate for their publics. Needs are not always aligned, projects do not always go smoothly and money is always tight. Though these complexities might seem painfully banal to many business owners, they are layered on top of the ethical and creative challenges of communicating for social justice and social change. If we are to understand graphic design as a discipline with socio-cultural responsibilities, one with a radical transformative potential, these entanglements must be examined with the same critical depth as the images we produce.
The definitions of design, including graphic design, have greatly expanded in the decades since design Beyond Design. Everything is designed, design is everywhere; there is no “beyond” anymore. Like capitalism, there is no outside. We now have many qualifiers to put in front of design; participatory, service, human-centred, social-impact, transition. And yet, despite the expansiveness of design’s many definitions, the basic premise of design as a forward-looking, problem-solving activity remains central—of moving existing situations into preferable ones. Sadly, it seems the modernist legacy of design’s innate neutrality has withstood countless redefinitions. And although the question of to whom the designs are preferable is being asked more frequently (though still hardly enough), this progressivist notion of a design excludes other means of social change. It ignores the role of social conflict, of antagonisms, of political struggle in favour of incremental change and a utopian ideal of social consensus. It denies the power and agency (and I would argue beauty) of the protest, the strike, the blockade, the occupation, the riot. As such, design abdicates its responsibility of resistance, dissent and refusal. Whether this is due to historical blindness to the gains achieved through protests and direct action, an inability to recognize the urgency of the multiple social, political, and environmental crises we face, or a willful and self-serving disciplinary ignorance, remains open to question.
Design Against Design is organized into four interconnected thematic sections. Critique presents a political economic analysis of graphic design in relation to neoliberal capitalism and considers practical ways to resist it. Through semiotic case studies of hipster nostalgia and Pantone’s appropriation of subcultures, this chapter asks us to take visual culture seriously, to take the trends we create seriously, and consider their real world impacts. Practice looks critically at how designers work towards (and sometimes against) social change within both a professional studio context and alongside social movements. Two interviews, one with Philippe and Nancy Vermès on the student protest posters of Atelier Populaire during May 68 in Paris, the other with Sandy Kaltenborn, founder of the Berlin-based visual communication studio Image Shift, frame these types of design practice in an attempt to position them as complementary. Materiality focuses on the craft of graphic design, on language and typography, legibility and illegibility, on the acts of speaking and making. It attempts to make evident that this book in your hands is a book, and argues for why that might matter. Conversations with the poet Kaie Kellough and our Montreal-based printers, Kata Soho, bookend the section as a metaphor for the design process, from poetic conception to material production. Autonomy considers the emotional and relational aspects of graphic design, understanding that interdependence is intricately bound to any possibility for self-determination within and beyond the discipline. I speak to design student Sarah Auches, and our client Jenn Clamen of Stella, to deepen the understanding of these relationalities.
Projects, artworks and images by LOKI are featured alongside the essays and interviews. They serve less as illustrations or case studies but, instead, as assemblages and collisions that provide a visual environment and social context. They act as material representations of the wide diversity of collaborations and social struggles we have been engaged in over the years, their successes and failures, and of all the relationships built and lost. I hope that they also make their own arguments and show that despite there no longer being a “beyond,” there can still very much be an “against.”
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