This article reflects on critical design education, authorial and collaborative ways of working, and how the process of designing personal projects can be safety-netted. I would like to make a disclaimer that this is not a direct criticism of the teacher-practitioner, who are often as precarious in their work conditions as the student-practitioner. It is also not an attempt to villainise any design institution, as they are usually responding to the market. Throughout this reflection, I have been trying to collect authors who have been talking about contemporary design education and hopefully bring some additional thoughts and examples that are highly informed by my education in communication and information design.
A Very Brief Historical Framing of the Author in Design
In an avant-garde fashion, European critical design education is a space where student-practitioners are invited to challenge established norms and traditions and develop their authorial practices. In the 1998 article Designer as Producer, Ellen Lupton talks about the concept of the designer as author, saying: “The word author suggests agency, intention, and creation, as opposed to the more passive functions of consulting, styling, and formatting. Authorship is a provocative model for rethinking the role of the graphic designer at the start of the millennium; it hinges, however, on a nostalgic ideal of the writer or artist as a singular point of origin.” There is a growing discussion about this nostalgic ideal between student-practitioners as we are asked to define our singular point of origin and its cultural significance. In Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China, Lily Chumley brings up an exercise of self-styling that students are asked to do, which echoes perfectly the experience I would like to describe: “They are told to ‘look for self’ in their memories, their traumas, their hearts, and their bodies; but they must also find a way to discursively embed this self in particular, recognizable, stylistic elements of their artworks, and at the same time to use these stylistic elements to link themselves to other artists and designers. Simultaneously, they must develop a form of self-presentation that can serve as an appropriate context (or para-text) for their work, a personal style that can mediate between their interior self and their externalized work.” This methodology goes far beyond the provocation to embrace subjectivity from the renegade modernists in the history of graphic design education in the 70s and 80s (e.g. the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s design program lead by Katherine McCoy and later by Lorraine Wild, more here) that started as a way to break open the formal constraints of “good design” and introduce personal content and gesture as valid. To question what we are doing and why we are doing it became accepted and encouraged. This was a behavioral shift that was interested in the individual logic, political positioning, intimate conversation, and the general messiness of the design process as opposed to the depersonalized endpoint of modernism defined by rational problem-solving. This rejection of purity was enhanced in the 90s with the availability of the desktop computer and the never-before-seen digital tools. At this stage, design education called for a re-orientation of the profession, its zones of operation, and its outcomes (with researchers-practitioners like Gui Bonsiepe more here). Simultaneously, the cult of the ‘Masters’ was growing stronger with the brandification of the authorial design (for example, the designer this blog is named after).
As Elizabeth Goodspeed has profounded in her article Posting and Practice, with the rise of reality TV and social media platforms in the 2010s that monetarily reward visibility, personal disclosure became parasocial currency, and the design field was not impermeable to this phenomenon. Instagram went from a window for self-exposure and people-watching, toward an informal alternative to the website portfolio, and became the main room for design discourse. The initiative and diligence to develop an online platform have become part of the aesthetic dimension of the work ethic in design. Work itself is no longer enough; the designer must now perform. The school, in an adaptation to these times, sells the promise to help the student-practitioner do so: as an author.
The Process of Author-ification
The critical design school is not only a space that aims to help student-practitioners critically find the methods and tools to work on their topics of interest, but also to discover what those very topics are. To do so, student-practitioners are asked to define their positionality, as an exercise to understand where we come from, the way we were raised, the spaces in which we were educated, and the economic means through which we have been navigating the world, which have been shaping the way we see and act upon it. Creating a space to talk about positionality is an invitation to discuss identity politics: the systemic concerns and perspectives tied to one's culture, race, gender, religion, or social class. It is a fundamental conversation for a professional to consider: What do I want to work on? Why is it relevant? Where does it make sense to develop it? These questions have to go through the sieve of a more fundamental one: "How can I afford this?" which Afonso Matos has gone into depth in his book Who Can Afford to be Critical?
Then there is a different way to frame the question of positionality in critical design education, one that promotes a perception that our identity politics corresponds to our professional value. This added to the encouragement to engage with urgent political events, more often than not, turns the problem-solver very easily into the designer of problems. What I mean by this is that, even though these are the political topics of concern that we, as a society, should continue to educate ourselves on and talk about, there is something disconcerting in turning a humanitarian and systemic problem into a design problem. A crisis into an opportunity. The more tragic, the merrier. This does not happen because of a lack of care (on the contrary) or as a form of cynicism, but it seems to be a conflict of interest that a journalist could experience, of having to treat topics like assets. In this exercise, individualization and alienation can be reinforced, not to mention the exoticism of the ‘different’. Deconstruction starts looking like creative self-destruction, and tutorings become therapy sessions.
Silvio Lorusso expressed it concisely in his book What Design Can’t Do, where he says:
“Positional maieutics is a valid and useful means, but the dilemmas and wicked problems that it engenders should not be merely outsourced. Furthermore, schools shouldn’t use those dilemmas either as formal or informal evaluation criteria. It is a risk for an educational organisation to engage with biography, especially in a time when individuality is forced upon individuals. Not every facet of biography should be scrutinised. And the ones that deserve attention shouldn’t be personalised. To manage this complexity, schools should be able to navigate intimacy, privacy, and confidentiality. Most of all, they should avoid flattening a life story into a project-practice surface for evaluation or promotional purposes.”
In the particular case of my master's education at Design Academy Eindhoven, all tutors took time for intimacy, privacy, and confidentiality, to help create a safety-net to support this complex process of self-questioning. Yet, the fact that a lot of them were not there physically created a layer of distance that student-practitioners have to overcome when they are in need of guidance. The reason for this is simple: tutor-practitioners, who are based all over the world, are employed on a freelance basis, and there is no budget to fly them in bi-weekly (nor is this the desired solution). I am beyond grateful for the tutors I’ve had the chance to meet and work with remotely. I simply wonder if, with an educational model that asks students to develop such a personal methodology, a situated community of teaching staff can provide a stronger safety-net?
We (students-practitioners) often joke between us that critical design projects, at a first glance, often sound like the titles in @charlieflynnnn caricatural videos called The papers I wrote in my liberal arts degree, thinking I was saving the world. With their ambiguously abstract titles and problematizing subtitles, they reflect an attention to wording that is often the primary matter of discussion in the moments of presentation. After all, presenting is an exercise to improve through practice how to best explain one's project to an audience of experts and non-experts, in hopes they’ll engage with it. But often feels like this focus on the outward effort subtracts time and energy from the process of creating, when, beyond recurrent formal presentation moments, even day-to-day meetings are filled with keynotes of the process (often self-imposed and peer-pressured).
In this process of ‘author-ification,’ any form of gatekeeping that happens is just a form of protection of the “self-brand” in development. People are very rarely against sharing knowledge and working together (and some insist on it <3), it is just easy to lose the point in doing so, considering the goal is to shape their authorial self. One realizes the benefits of cooperation just when faced with the necessity to achieve something outside of one's competencies. Sometimes, the answer to this realisation is to outsource the production, thanks to economic capacity and because of the prioritisation of the idea over the product.
Students-practitioners are simply absorbing the rules of the game, in hopes that, with time and experience, they will still be motivated to change them and will then have the resources, contacts, and funds to do so. There is little space to revolutionise the school in this race towards authorial success. There is a necessity for structural spaces where there are honest conversations: about the very real constraints of making authorial work, like lack of funds, increasing academic fees, rent exploitation, and visa constraints, as well as a very sincere questioning of the vulnerable process that is developing authorial works on identity politics.
Contextualising the Author
It is not my intention to discourage anyone from addressing their own positionality through their practice; it is my intention to reflect on ways that the process can be better safety-netted in critical design education. For this, I collected some alternative ways of working within institutions that can provide a different structure to tackle the same issues. I ask for a reflection on a quote of Aggie Topping that I came across while reading Ruben Pater’s CAPS LOCK, which says: “Individual creators are, to no small extent, historical fabrications. Let’s suspend the cult of hero worship to reflect on this myth.” Let’s contextualise the author.
One interdisciplinary team that develops both scientific and creative forms of communicating politically relevant topics to a general audience is Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths. Through visualizing evidence and building artistic installations, they make their investigations on humanitarian crises accessible to different publics. Still, I am intentionally avoiding framing the work of the architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers that Forensic Architecture does as a design project. It is in this richness of expertise that the designer gets the content to communicate. In this context, the design-research starts by investigating the forms of making information legible whilst maintaining its integrity. How information has been, is, and can be translated into visual language in each context is part of this research.
Another example is the Visible Language Workshop, founded by Ron MacNeil and Muriel Cooper as part of the MIT Media Lab in 1974. The goal of this workshop was to research how graphic design could filter the complexity of information brought about by emerging technologies. They did so by bringing together computer scientists and designers, both students and professors, to experiment with the latest ($250.000) computer available at MIT and examine how the electronic environment redefined contemporary graphic design. The individual outcomes of these experiments are part of the Information Landscapes project, which includes early forms of 3d animations, motion graphics, and information design. In this example, what was being researched was how the media could develop cognitive and perceptive visual models of information. This example shows that cooperation and individuality are not mutually exclusive, that one can work towards an individual goal while sharing their processes, methods, tools, knowledge, and so on.
In my master's, in particular, there was a Research Lab that incentivised this type of collaboration, where the individual is informed by the collaboration. The Parametric Truth Lab, shaped by Simone Niquille, is a space where student-practitioners come together to work towards a common goal: building a library of software reviews. It is open-source not only in the outcome but especially during the production, where ideas, knowledge, skills, economic possibilities, and desired experiences were shared and discussed openly. The effort to bring designers together to work on relevant matters for the field, but less urgent for society, shifts the perspective on collaboration, in the sense that it becomes less of a necessity to actually accomplish an impactful, measurable result, but a way of enriching the discourse on a topic.
All these examples are a shift in the role of the designer from the 'singular point of origin', to see the designer as a part of a whole. Still, they are not achieving the desired systemic change, but these examples show that a collaborative focus on enquiries specific to the practice (that has never been impermeable to its context) can generate alternative ways of thinking about design, and most importantly, producing it. I wonder how they can serve as an example for a different structure in critical design education. I wonder if modes of cooperative learning and creating can be implemented beyond the laboratory format. I wonder how the cooperative can inform the authorial. And vice versa.
P.S.
Felix and I met in 2021 in Amsterdam, where we shared a house for 4 months, and in the evenings, after returning home from our respective internships, shared our thoughts on what kind of designers we wanted to be, where we aspired to study, what work we wished to be able to do.