Ampersand Vol 2, issue 3. Summer 2007. D&AD

THE DESIGNER IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE DESIGNER
The power structures on which designers have built their professional authority over the last one hundred years are fast being eroded. Now the users are having their say. One route for survival is for designers to become familiar with the concept of co-design. Nick Bell questions whether that is ever likely to happen without a fundamental shift in professional identity.

The graphic designer is an artist whose self-expression is pressed into commercial service. The practice known formerly as commercial art carried the signatures Cassandre, Zero, A Games and Ashley among others. The same has been true more recently. Seen through the signature styles of Anderson, Amzalag, Augustyniak, Barnbrook, Gelman and Toffe. The graphic designer is also a modest, sometimes ‘invisible’, mediator of information; take Spencer, Hollis, and Kinneir for instance. Also an interpreter encoding commercial and cultural messages; say Friedman, Martens and Van Toorn. A visual communicator; Weingart, Bernard and Bubbles. A problem solver; Rand, Glaser, Holt and Muir. An information architect; Vignelli, Aicher and Spiekermann. An art director; Pineles, Fleckhaus and Wolsey. A creative director; Crouwel, Kalman and Saville. A design consultant; McConnell, Wolff and Dumbar. And these days especially, a design star; Mau, Maeda and Sagmeister.

Every one of these types of graphic designer still exists, the ranks of each doctrine swelling further year in year out. Competition necessitates professional differentiation, yet many of us are keen to present ourselves as generalists so the varied avenues for opportunity remain as wide as possible. We view ourselves as having a particular approach applicable to many situations. Design education may have brought us the compartmentalisation of skills but designers remain wedded to the dream of design as a way of life. Designers are however a peculiar breed – their vision for life very rarely being shared by anyone else.

Now that everyone has access to the communication tools, design is becoming a general activity. The impetus for its creation now being more psychological than aesthetic. The basic human urge to communicate much less inhibited by any concern about what things look or sound like. Consequently, designers who care passionately about the quality of such things, are in danger of becoming detached in a world tilting in favour of universes of connected amateurs where powers are truly distributed. Witness the Master of the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry Mike Dempsey’s rant in 2005 over the appropriation of the title ‘designer’ by Hilary Cottam the winner of ‘Designer of the Year’, whom he pejoratively labelled an ‘organisational impresario’.[1]

The gatekeepers to whom we like to keep close are losing their grip to the advancing hordes. Control, which designers traditionally like to have in spades, is becoming an extremely rare commodity. Instead what is now becoming most important is participation. Active engagement in a world of myriad complexity, interconnected cause and effect, that to succeed in you give yourself up to and embrace just like those before us have always had to at the beginning of any new era. Immersion is not the way of most designers who, like artists, have traditionally preferred to observe and record from a safe distance and then in the shadow of a client.

If there is one principle that will distinguish all present and future generations of designers from the ones listed above it is likely it will be that of co-design and with it no doubt the gradual erosion of the boundary between designer and user by the user. The distance between us and other mere mortals is narrowing. We must take some of the credit though, designers are already looking to apply their skills in ways that are more conducive to sharing the creative process with those usually on the receiving end of it. Those crossing the divide first have been product designers (already more familiar with measuring end-user data than graphic designers) in the emerging field of service design.

We like to think of design as a way of improving the quality of life but this is made difficult to achieve since design has traditionally taken place on the threshold of a power imbalance. Between a controlling and cautious provider who metes design out and a suspecting though stoic public that design happens to. Stoic is sooo like… twentieth century. Best we prepare for the ‘user revolution’[2] whether we like it or not.


1. Mike Dempsey: From Cave Man to Spray Can: A Graphic Journey. 17 November 2005, RSA, London. www.rsa.org.uk/acrobat/inaugural_rdi_address_dempsey.pdf

2. The ‘user revolution’ – Charles Leadbeater.
See We-think: why mass creativity is the next big thing. www.wethinkthebook.net


© Nick Bell 2007