II
Toward
Toward
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.