II
Toward
Toward
- And while the wheels of neoliberal capitalism continue to turn with us at the cranks, it’s left me thinking about what’s next. What is design when it's not only a utility, or an influencer of perception, or tied to a sale? When its power of communication is used to create belonging, or excitement, or inspiration, or doubt, not in service of a brand or product, but something else? What is it that we’re really doing here?
- These questions have been asked, or at least alluded to, by many contemporary critical designer-writers—part of an emerging wave of design criticism that interrogates the discipline's complicity, limitations and contradictions in capitalist structures. This growing body of critical design theory has produced several influential texts in recent years, such as What Design Can't Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion by Silvio Lorusso and Caps Lock by Ruben Pater.
- Lorusso argues that design — despite being sold as a world-changing discipline — is constrained by economic, political, and cultural structures; and pretending otherwise only sets designers up for burnout and disappointment. Pater, on the other hand, offers a historical perspective on design’s entanglement with capital, power, and commerce, while suggesting ways this relationship might be redefined — or even broken. Although each explores various facets of the larger system, both Pater and Lorusso seem to agree on the inescapable truth that design has become so tightly ensnared by capitalist ends that we can no longer comprehend who we are, and what we do outside the system.
- Even when we do attempt to step outside, we rely, as Pater does, on some qualifier to help us clarify our identity: Designer as Poet, Designer as Activist, Designer as Journalist, Designer as Filmmaker. While these titles certainly help us to anchor our work outside the traditional framework, in a way, they also shortcut the wider suggestion: if we don’t have capitalism (or at least the capitalist ends set forth by a brief), we don’t have design.
- Nowhere has this truth felt more apparent than in the halls of RISD’s MFA graphic design department, where a version of design unhitched from the motivation and guidance of the client brief is playing out. Spend an hour or two with us in a studio crit or seminar, and you’ll encounter recurring questions: What is or isn’t design? When does a work cross into ‘Art’? and whether each of us is really more of an artist or designer, are likely to bubble up. With some consideration, it's really no surprise. MFA design programs (at least at RISD, I can’t speak for other schools) represent a perfect case study of the state of graphic design outside capitalism. We’re asked to find a topic of interest, define our audience, author our content, and produce a work in response — all but the last of which are typically handed to the designer in the “real world.”. And for a while, a large majority of us floundered in these conditions.
- In contrast, a trip across the building will reveal painters, photographers, and sculptors (read: traditional fine artists), deep in the process of answering these questions with markedly less uncertainty. Even when asked to describe our works, it’s not difficult to feel the distance both in mode and meaning, between the artist and designer. The distance in certainty between containing oneself in the work, and the discomfort — or perhaps inexperience — with trying to do so. As designers, we’ve allowed design to define our identity, rather than using design to tell the world who we are, and what we believe in.
- At the end of the day, it’s not really the designer’s fault. We’re products of an industry that defines our value on metrics of profit — be it sales, clicks, interactions or votes. And despite countless efforts to separate ourselves from the motivations of profit, our work nearly always continues to exist in relation to the system.
- So how do we create the space to imagine our field beyond that which it’s always been defined? In Ed Whitfield’s essay, What must we do to be free?, Whitfield argues for the creation of “liberated zones”, spaces where we “build freedom.”. Spaces where we can dream of a future free from the constraints of existing structures. Referencing the famous Audrey Lorde quote, “...the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” He suggests that while the tools you have, and how you use them, matter, “...the real problem is that it is difficult to tear down the master’s house while you live in it.”
- As designers, we’re still in the master’s house. We rely on it to hold our work, and defend its meaning. I’m not sure we’re meant to, or even able to dismantle the system, but I’d like us to define graphic design beyond the terms of capitalism. To bring the same critical eye and knowledge of trend, the ability to communicate, or excite, or question. To bring the sensitivity to people and cultures, the sensitivity to the way we interact with one another. To apply the same skills we honed within the master’s house — free from the constraints of what is or isn't, what’s profitable or popular — to engage freely with our passion and voice as people, and share that with the world.
- It’s an admittedly lofty, and perhaps unrealistic hope for design. After all, the reality of our market dominated world is that to exist you must play, and relatively few of us have the privileged position to step away from the game to explore a future without it
Selected commercial works done before coming to RISD, collaged with images of Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci.
The answer came to me slowly, and even now, is still in flux.
I followed the path many designers take, from my undergrad program, into in-house and studio settings. I worked across brand identities, campaigns, publications, and products. I collaborated with photographers and illustrators, working with clients across a wide range of industries — from sports to municipal energy. I grew as a person and designer, but I also came to realize the designer’s limits within the system, even in the most well intentioned projects. I saw carefully conceptualized and created work reduced to content — and watched on as client meetings devolved from conversations of true sustainable action, to virtue signaling.
What was I really doing here? What was my energy as a person used for?
I put this question to a friend and art director I worked with closely at the time. His answer fascinated me —He said we were fostering a sense of community, creating a space where people felt seen through a brand that reflected their values and aligned them with others who felt the same. I simultaneously wanted to call it out as bullshit, knew it was true, and felt it contained something much more profound. It was a simple explanation of brand tribalism, but offered a concrete way in which design and storytelling might connect people across places, cultures, times, and ideologies. An idea which in our ever more polarized world, intrigued me. I began to consider how the tools which produced the concise, consumable, inspiring, and unifying stories in the context of brand, might be applied beyond the market. How design’s power to attract and engage might aid in unpacking the complex histories which have produced the world we live in today. But still I struggled to break myself from the “role” of the designer, to understand my identity as a maker beyond the traditional structure.- During my first semester at RISD, I came across an interview with the Palestinian-American academic and literary critic Edward Said. Speaking about Orientalism, Said referenced philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s writing in The Prison Notebooks saying,
“...history deposits in us our own history, our family's history, our nation's history, our tradition's history, which has left in us an infinity of traces, all kinds of marks, you know, through heredity, through collective experience, through individual experience, through family experience, relations between one individual and another, a whole book, if you like, on a series of, an infinity of traces, but there is no inventory, there's no orderly guide to it. “Therefore the task at the outset, is to try to compile an inventory,” in other words to try and make sense of it. And this seems to me to be the most interesting sort of human task. It's the task of interpretation. It's a task of giving history some shape and sense, for a particular reason, not just to show that my history is better than yours, or my history is worse than yours. I'm a victim and you're somebody who's oppressed people or so on, but rather, to understand my history in terms of other people's history, in other words to try to understand, to move beyond, to generalize one's own individual experience to the experience of others... To transform itself from a unitary identity to an identity that includes the other without suppressing the difference... That would be the notion of writing an inventory... which would try not only to understand one's self but to understand one's self in relation to others and to understand others as if you would understand yourself.”
Finding this idea from Gramsci, via Said, was a watershed moment for me. It gave purpose to my previously murky understanding of what it was I was trying to do — suggesting a form and purpose to my interest in documentation and storytelling through a trajectory of traces.- It asked how we might link the various scales of human experience (personal, familial, cultural, geopolitical, global, etc.) to create deeper understanding of one another, to build understanding vertically within communities. It asked how we might link across the gaps between these channels, to build an understanding horizontally from community to community. And lead finally to the wider question of what a more empathetic understanding of one-another might ultimately provide.
- As I’ve begun to explore this idea, I see this as the responsibility of the space and privilege afforded to me by my family, community, and fellow person. To use my skill set forged by design to untangle, contextualize, and communicate the realities of our world. To use design to bring others closer to a story, and encourage them to ask new questions about why things are the way they are. To create, and interpret a record.
An Image of Audrey Lorde overlaid by various readings done in the first year seminars at RISD.
- But the question fundamentally always leads back to practicalities. It’s nice, and much easier to speak without specificity in these spaces, to claim a grand vision without a concrete plan of how we might get there — if indeed we can even define where “there” is.
- The reality is with a structure as large as globalized neoliberalism — and its resulting conditions — it’s difficult to see around it without getting tripped up in the contemporary realities which keep us from even trying to take a peek.
So what’s to be done?
At the outset, as Gramsci/Said suggest, we must make an inventory. We must understand where we’ve been, who we are, what we value, and how all of that exists in relation to others. To create a deeper, more interconnected value system and community within design. What does design do? How would we like to contribute to its operation in the world? If the first thing we’re asked when sharing that we’re graphic designers is, “Oh, so you make logos?”, what question would we like to have asked? If indeed our work defines us, what would we make? - Next, we must redefine our understanding of time and scale. While I don’t think the world-changing promises our field makes to many fledgling designers is entirely wrong, the reality is meaningful change likely won’t come in my lifetime, or even the next. Progress is, and will continue to be, a painfully slow process.
- With this in mind we must adjust the way we approach such conversations. As I’ve thought about this reframing, I’ve returned to the idea of “Toward.” So often we plot a course “To”, we identify a destination with specific intent and act to reach this end. And while this specificity serves some goals — particularly when applied to shorter term vision — its application in the long term often results in disenfranchisement and despair when the journey drifts beyond its planned course. When our planned futures collide with actual outcomes. Today, rather than pretend we know what the future will hold, or try to exert our power to produce it, we should think about moving “toward”. What direction would we like to go? What actions can we take which will foster the growth of this direction in the future? How can we move together, while maintaining the flexibility for new limitations, new ideas, and new visions? How can we hold the door open behind us, and foster the new voices and new generations to carry on the work?
- And finally we must act. I can’t pretend to know you, the reader's interests, background, or opinions on any of this. And telling you concretely how to enact these ideas feels, at best, like a shot in the dark. But in a way this illustrates the exciting possibility of our position today. Each of us holds the power to show one another what design is – so show us! Find time within our contemporary limitations, with whatever energy you may have, to make the work you feel most passionate about. I’ll be here, ready to back you up, and cheer you on.
A Note
Written in May of 2025, Toward marks the mid-point of my thinking and development of process culminating in this book. Though I still relate to many of the ideas and motivations expressed in this piece, it’s included here as much to inform the thrust of my current inquiry and demonstrate the moving target of practice, as it is to act as a document of time, a record of the process that delivered me to my current understanding.