Design writer and critic Rick Poynor is someone MEAT Magazine has been following for several years. His writing for EYE magazine and his collections of essays have provided a steely critical eye on the ethics and phenomena surrounding the development of our visual culture.
Interview by James Pallister
As someone who makes his daily bread from graphic design and visual culture while seeking to maintain some integrity, we thought he was worth quizzing on how to walk the tightrope of maintaining principled beliefs whilst getting on with living your life…
The discussion of ethics in design can seem like the perennial soul-searching that the design community indulges in with no tangible result. You were involved in the publishing of the ‘First Things First 2000’ manifesto. Seven years on, how have things changed?
Perennial soul-searching seems like a positive thing to me. Shouldn’t thinking people examine whatever situation they are in? Why should design be any different? Design has a huge shaping effect on the things we use and the way we experience the world and communicate with each other. The notion that creative people in this crucial position wouldn’t be thinking about why they do what they do is pretty alarming. In practice, though, it seems that many people working in design still don’t think particularly hard about the larger picture. We could do with a bit more soul-searching.
‘First Things First 2000’ was a 400-word statement about designers’ priorities and responsibilities intended to prick consciences and provoke discussion, and it certainly generated a lot of debate at the time. Seven years on, I still receive emails from students about it and so do the other signatories. I have a box of FTF reprints, translations of the manifesto, and articles about it from around the world. It was never likely to lead to statements of policy change from design organisations, let alone from industry and business. Its main impact was in design schools where teachers used it as a handily compact statement of issues that need to be considered as part of a rounded design education. If it had an effect – and, from what some young designers told me, it did – it was at a more personal level. It was about what kind of designer a person wants to be.
If a designer is a conduit that best realises the client’s message are they under an illusion to think they can act with autonomy in their professional life? Putting it bluntly: in the environment of commerce, designers are artisans, not artists, fulfilling someone else’s brief – the message isn’t theirs, the purpose isn’t theirs, so what room is there for putting forward their agenda?
This is an issue that has been debated for years by designers. It’s funny how we constantly seem to be in danger of forgetting what so many earlier designers have achieved. The most original and compelling visual communicators have generally brought something personal to the messages they deliver. They were more than just artisans. I believe that design is a form of cultural expression and the design that has attracted me most as a viewer has always had an additional personal dimension of some kind. I respond to the designer’s voice, to the sense of an individual speaking through the material, even when it’s supplied by the client. Sometimes this is a matter of stylistic inflection; sometimes there is an opportunity to develop or create the content itself.
You can see the problem of voicelessness in its starkest form in advertising. Ads have been made by someone, but who is actually speaking? Here, the designer – most ads are designed, after all – becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy for the client’s voice. However much this voice tries to disguise itself by pretending to be cool, in reality it’s the wheedling sound of a salesperson desperately attempting to persuade you to buy something. Earlier advertising, created by commercial artists using paint brushes and hand-lettering, was more generous. It promoted the product, but offered intimacy and warmth as well as the visual satisfactions of craft. That’s why museums display it many decades later as art. It possesses an aesthetic richness that transcends its commercial purpose. Very little contemporary advertising is going to survive in this way.
Is ‘being political’ a privilege for designers who have already gained a reputation? For a designer leaving university, the majority of roles on offer are sunk in commerce and marketing – the graduate wants to stay true to their critical beliefs but also to not waste their talent and education. Is the choice as stark as accepting the adman’s shilling or choosing a new career?
No, it isn’t. Creative professions are a privileged form of occupation. It has always been a struggle to make the work you want to make – how could it be any different? It might be getting harder to be a designer with a critical, personal point of view because marketing exerts such a tight, instrumental grip on design and on the way that clients perceive it. Even so, it’s still possible to carve out your own space as a designer if you have the talent, self-belief, persistence and vision to do it. Beyond this, we could do with a few more overtly political designers. There are amazingly few in Britain.
It’s perhaps more interesting to pursue something you have talked about before and which seems really relevant to this debate: relativism. The lack of willingness to come down on something firmly as being Wrong or Right (apart from a few sanctified subjects like paedophilia) seems to be a symptom of my peer group. All the key ideological battles (left/right) have been fought and won. Irony has a lot to answer for; where we are at advertisers can use the ‘knowing smile’ to mask a multitude of sins (something you brought up in ‘Obey the Giant’ with those Diesel ads). How can we be shaken out of our lassitude!?
Look around. Question what you see. Read as widely as you can. Examine your own behaviour as a consumer of products, images and experiences. Ask yourself why certain kinds of media predominate. Think about what gets left out of the picture and why. Take some time to wonder whose interests all these phenomena serve. Ask yourself what you really care about and what you don’t, and whether the choices you think you make freely are entirely your own. Is the battle really over? Are we living in the best possible system, or could it be improved? Is there common ground with other people who are concerned about the same issues? When you know what you stand for, get organised.
Digressing onto a subject less rooted in design; many people have recently pointed to growing trends in ‘softening’ capitalism. Fair trade has emerged from the obscure alliance of hairy environmentalists and the unfashionable religious of the late 1990s to become a well recognised campaign supported by Bono, Thom Yorke and the like. Innocent Smoothies are held up as examples that capitalism is getting kinder. Is consumerism in the UK getting kinder or is it just getting savvier?
I’m all for fair trade, but any changes in consumerism to date are largely cosmetic. It’s often been said that capitalism doesn’t care what we believe in. As commentators such as Thomas Frank have shown, with his analysis of the assimilation of the 1960s counterculture, capitalism co-opts and repackages all kinds of dissent. All it wants is for us to keep buying the stuff and it will make whatever operational and stylistic adjustments are needed to keep us doing that.
I’m a consumer like everyone else, so I enjoy many of the benefits that a wealthy capitalist economy has to offer. But I would be happy to live in a society where we had considerably less for the sake of a fairer, more sustainable way of life. I don’t believe that all these things we are trained to think we absolutely must possess to make us attractive, successful people are the ultimate sources of happiness, fulfilment, mental well-being, or meaning. Personal relationships, commitment to community, cultural expression in all its forms, and even religion – though I’m not personally religious – are much deeper sources of social stability and contentment.
It seems that with MySpace and what some people call web 2.0 the chances of young people in the UK being united by one single matter or cause is ever less likely. Does this matter?
If there is a crisis, then people will unite. It isn’t going to happen without one. The disengagement from the political process that we see is the inevitable result of decades of peace and prosperity in Europe. But what if miraculous consumer technology, with its promise of seemingly unlimited personal empowerment, is part of the problem? Back in the early 1970s, the architecture critic Martin Pawley wrote a highly perceptive critique of consumer society called ‘The Private Future’, in which he argued that people were withdrawing into the protected, personal cocoon of the electronically serviced home. If anything, the situation is more extreme now than Pawley predicted. According to the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, gazing into her crystal ball in her book ‘Tomorrow’s People’, social disconnection will become the norm and people will live almost entirely within their own physical and mental space. If this comes to pass, we’ve had it.
The independent press seems to be thriving in the UK at the moment. Have you any thoughts on this? Is it? Why is it? Does it matter?
It matters a great deal. An independent point of view is vital for a healthy press and a healthy culture. There are always thoughtful people around who understand this and who react against received opinion, media conformity, and all the bullshit. It’s encouraging to see a new generation of independent publications such as MEAT and DIPLO keeping the flame burning.
And of course . . . do we need a new manifesto?
These things have their time and place. What we always need is thinking, argument and impassioned communication using whatever resources make the best connection right now. Technology can be used to activate people as well as to stupefy them.
Quick mention to those out there who you think are doing really good work (examples could be illustrators, writers, newspapers, mags, designers – the lot).
Where to start? I’m writing something about the Iranian graphic designer Reza Abedini, who I met recently in Amsterdam. His work is a kind of graphic image-making you don’t see in Britain. It has a tremendous spirit. I’m about to interview the German designer and comics artist Henning Wagenbreth whose work I admire a lot. I read a fair number of novels, but the medium that still excites me most is film. In recent weeks, our domestic digital cocoon has seen screenings of films by Jean-Luc Godard – one of the great 20th-century artists, so far as I’m concerned – Michael Haneke, the Brothers Quay, and Wes Anderson, currently my favourite hipster auteur.
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