Matt Smith
Design Philosophy Assignment
Graduate Design Seminar
Spring 2014
My philosophy: Design Takes Practice
It is my opinion that a theoretical contemporary design practice is the most
important part of the wider field of graphic design. As designers, we often have
no choice but to pursue commercial, paying, commissions. Pursuing such paid
work can be described as a design profession, or a design business. Business
notwithstanding, however, the most important design being done today (again,
this is just my opinion), is supported by a corresponding, parallel, and
alternative, critical practice. Designers working on regular, ongoing, speculative,
and largely self-initiated work are necessary for informing a field previously
defined almost exclusively by commercially-derived commissions. Strictly
commercial, client-oriented work is necessary but insufficient for defining the
field. Designers, in my opinion, must also operate as cultural generalists.
Why? Because commercial design work is increasingly limited to little more
than support staff for employers and clients. In commercial (paid) design work, it
is increasingly rare that we are expected or encouraged to function as
independent, collaborating contributors to the process of product development,
design, production, distribution, and communication. As Stuart Bailey puts it in
the Design Dictionary:
Through a complex of factors characteristic of late capitalism, many of the more
strategic aspects of graphic design are undertaken by those working in “middlemanagement” positions, typically within public relations or marketing
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departments. Under these conditions, those working under the title graphic
designer fulfill only the production (typesetting, page makeup, programming) at
the tail-end of this system. On the other hand, in line with the ubiquitous
fragmentation of postindustrial society into ever smaller coteries, there exists an
international scene of graphic designers who typically make work independent of
the traditional external commission, in self-directed or collaborative projects
with colleagues in neighboring disciplines. Such work is typically marked by its
experimental and personal nature, generally well-documented, and circulated in
a wide range of media (source: “Graphic Design,” in Design Dictionary:
Perspectives on Design Terminology, 2008, Board of International Research in
Design, Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 198–99).
What is a contemporary design practice?
Whether it is pursued from inside or outside the university, a contemporary
design practice can be understood as critical, or post-creative.
Art and design students taught according to the academic system most
prevalent prior to World War I, were encouraged to develop their talent through
technique in a specific discipline. Later, at the Bauhaus, artists and designers
were trained to apply creativity (or inventiveness) to a particular medium.
Academic talent and modernist creativity, however, have both undergone
crises of faith. By the 1960s, many artists and designers no longer believed in
either the academic model embodied by Sir Joshua Reynolds, or the Bauhaus
model represented by Walter Gropius. Located somewhere between (or against)
both academic tradition and modernist creativity, today’s most familiar model for
art and design is the development of an artistic practice. The terminology used
here is derived from Julia Kristeva’s description of a “signifying practice, where
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practice is taken as meaning the acceptance of a symbolic law together with the
transgression of that law for the purpose of renovating it.”
A design practice is generally understood as the ability to produce work
that simultaneously embodies and expresses a knowledge of history and the
current structure of the field. As Howard Singerman puts it: “consciousness of
the field is what is now taught as [design].” Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu: “In the
present stage of the [design] field, there is now no room for naivety. Never has
the very structure of the field been present so practically in every act of
production.”
What happened to creativity?
Creativity is gone. It’s been co-opted. “Creativity” and “innovation” as ideas have
migrated from the fields of art and design to become terms of art for business,
management, marketing, and public relations. Since the 1960s, as historian and
cultural critic Thomas Frank has shown, what passes for “creativity” is produced
by the very faction it’s supposed to be rebelling against: boring, safe, established
expertise and conventional wisdom (see “TED Talks are Lying To You,”
Salon.com, October 13, 2013; and The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture,
Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997).
A designer’s designer
One potential outcome of a post-creative design practice can be described as
becoming a designer’s designer. Such a design practitioner can be compared to a
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“musician’s musician,” or an “artist’s artist.” If a designer’s goal is to be
commercially “successful,” he or she will make familiar, conventional, and less
challenging work that will sell to as many customers and clients as possible.
Similarly, if a designer’s goal is to work within a highly specialized, strictly
scholarly field, he or she will need to write a lot, while designing less. However, if
a designer’s goal is to do both, chances are that other working designers and
practitioners will recognize, identify with, and appreciate the increasingly rare
combination of theory, criticism, and historical reference with formal production.
Too often commercially “successful” designers are unaware of what’s
happening at the critical edges of the discipline, much less why it’s happening.
The strictly theoretical “academic” designer, on the other hand, often risks being
aware of what’s happening on the critical margins of the field, but only at secondhand, according to what Simon Critchley has called “philosofugal” categories
(applying ideas derived from outside the actual work, rather than allowing for
ideas to emerge from doing the thing). A designer’s designer, however, occupies a
space between design theory and commercial practice—a space I have been
describing here as design practice.
Graphic design in the academy
Author and educator Howard Singerman points out that artists, writers, and
designers in the university are not retreating from the “real world.” We don’t
need to make school resemble the “real world” (with simulated business
situations, projects, and classroom assignments), because the university and its
practices are already “woven into the economic, social, and signifying structures
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of the ‘real’ world.”
The university is a site in the world.
Graphic design done in the university, in other words, is done in a real world, but
what kind of world is it?
The parameters of what we might call theoretical, speculative, critical, or
academic design are distinct from corporate, business, and other “professional”
practices. A “university design” environment has its own histories, practices, and
specialized, professional knowledge and skill sets.
For the purposes of my own personal design philosophy, university design
settings properly so-called are roughly comparable to self-initiated, critical, and
contemporary (historically informed, and situated) design practices.
Education means helping student designers find their way into their own
practice. The goal is to help them imagine something that can be implemented
now and later, not just later. We have to listen to them as they figure out what
will “work.” Education is not about officially sanctioning excellence, hazing new
pledges, or merely schooling and credentialing.
Andragocical design education
The term “andragogy,” when opposed to the more familiar “pedagogy,” describes
an educational environment that emphasizes self-directed independent learning
with teachers in the role of facilitators.
The hugely influential graphic design educator Karel Martens describes his
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experience with non-pedagogical eduction: “From my own experience as a
student, I learned that teachers, such as Adam Roskam and Henk Peters, who
stand beside you, and not above, were the most inspiring people. They gave me
their trust and were very concerned with what I was doing.”
And Norman Potter: “It is too much to say outright that design can be ‘taught.’
As with any other creative activity, it is a way of doing things that can only be
grown into, perhaps—but not necessarily—in the context of a formal design
education.” “Ivan Illich reminds us that it is easy to confuse schooling with
education.”