Archive

In this issue of Other Worlds, designer and design historian Michele Galluzzo speaks with Brockett Horne and Briar Levit, co-founders of the People’s Graphic Design Archive, about messy history, bottom-up participation, institutional support and the awe that archival material can spark.

Local sign painting in Dominican Republic, Mural, PGDA – Added by Louise Sandhaus. https://peoplesgdarchive.org/item/5399/local-sign-painting-in-dominican-republic.

In 1994, Martha Scotford introduced the adjective ‘messy’ to define a novel approach to the historical narrative of graphic design. With her seminal essay Messy History vs. Neat History, published in the U.S. journal “Visible Language”, the American historian proposed to shed light on the contribution of women to the evolution of visual communication. In order to have a more inclusive, anti-heroic and anti-canonical history – Scotford argued – it was necessary to adopt a ‘messy’ perspective on historical events, one capable of embracing a ‘bottom-up’ gaze, through the lens of social history or, in other words, people’s history.

In this issue of Other Worlds, Netherlands-based Portuguese designer and researcher Afonso de Matos looks back at his educational journey which led him from having no idea about design to believing that everything is design and design is everything. This journey urged de Matos to come to terms with a series of contradictions about the role of a critical attitude in design, its effects on the world and its relation to uneven professional opportunities.

Among a small but significant number of design institutions (mostly located in Europe, the US and the UK), a certain outlook upon the field has been taking shape. It has been given many names, but here we’ll call it “Critical Design.” This outlook perceives design as more than a market service: it aims to show that designers can be agents of powerful social and political change, beyond the boundaries of the commercial client-commission setting. From this perspective, designers are no longer meant to solve problems, but rather frame them. We are asked to shoulder the responsibility of raising awareness about the world’s issues. We are encouraged to become provocateurs.

These apparently productive developments beg, however, some further investigation. Who can afford to do this type of critical work? What standard does it set for the remaining 99% of designers who must work for clients in order to pay their bills, many times bound to unregulated working conditions? Or is that even those who do critical work are sometimes equally precarious? And that’s not all. Beyond asking what the criticality discourse does to us, designers, we must also ask: what can it really do to the world? Are our critical projects changing anything or are they, ironically, doing the opposite and keeping the status quo? What are the limits of awareness-raising? Whose awareness is actually raised? By which visual and material means, and within which spaces?

In her book The Circuit (available here), graphic design writer, researcher and educator Hannah Ellis investigates the actual meaning of design when it reaches the scale of fairs, festivals and biennials, as well as the effects of these events on people and places. Here, we publish, with permission of the author, a short excerpt about the political and economic genealogy of these manifestations. The Circuit is the the first title in the ‘Design Capital’ series, edited by Francisco Laranjo, Luiza Prado and Silvio Lorusso.

Common sense suggests that ‘design events’ are obviously and exclusively about design. But a more complex conclusion of what they do or are or how they exist in the world is slightly harder to pin down. They are slippery things, tricky to articulate precisely because of the fundamentals we take for granted, and subject to unofficial precursors — like ‘promotional’ — that change their meaning entirely.

‘Events’ is too big a category to file under, a cluttering of festivals and weeks and biennials, piling together the exhibitions that take over a city for days, weeks, sometimes months. Flags are planted overnight and lay claim to a place that has been conquered by design. From the outside, beyond the length of time that they stretch out and over a city for, they behave largely in the same way, or at least appear to. Differentiation requires a bit of etymological digging: take, for example, the meaning of ‘festival’ – a day or period of celebration, usually religious. For the most part, design festivals are annual, celebrating the subject with Gregorian predictability, much like the dedicated Weeks that block out one fifty-second of the industry calendar. Language puts ‘design’ next to deities and, traced back far enough, ‘festival’ can be followed through iterations of Old French and Latin – festivalis, festivus – to the root of festa, for feast. A day of dedication or a celebratory meal; in this case, what is gorged upon is not good food and wine, but an overabundance of design with the capital D. (They should not, I realise later on, be confused as moments for close examination or interrogation; further backwards still, festa is one step removed from festus – joyous.)

In this issue of Other Worlds, Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente, founders of the F/LOSS-oriented design studio Manufactura Independente, rigorously dissect Stayaway, the contact tracing app launched in Portugal during the Covid pandemic. By analysing both the technical limitations of the app and its misleading visual metaphors, they prove that a grounded criticism of public health monitoring systems is possible. Reconsidering the app after its demise, they warn us against a novelty bias in the public discourse, which is too focused on promotion and expectations rather than consequences and effects.

The persistence of the pandemic has motivated many proposals for digital solutions to fight Covid. Contact tracing apps are one of such endeavours: by measuring how close smartphones are and how long they stay so, their purpose is to warn people of potentially dangerous contacts with infected people. As part of our work in Portugal’s digital rights association D3, we’ve dedicated a good amount of time to the analysis of the evolution and failure of Portugal’s contact tracing app, Stayaway Covid. As a result, we published a lengthy public report highlighting the shortcomings of this experiment. In this brief text, we offer a design perspective into the app’s interface and communication strategy, in order to outline the less evident pitfalls in rapidly deploying untested technologies as public health measures.

Failure

In this issue of Other Worlds, Pernilla Manjula Philip reflects on the various practices of care revolving around her illness. A complex scenario emerges: the safety procedures regulated by the official healthcare system limit the well-being allowed by do-it-yourself technologies developed by independent communities of makers. The approach of these makers is, in turn, often too technical and masculine to include most users. With her artistic work, Pernilla mobilizes empathy to counterbalance this state of affairs.

Care

I did not care that much about the medical-industrial complex before I found myself in a hospital trying to wrap my head around the fact that I will never leave again. I would eventually go home, but I would bring my diagnosis with me. And with that, bring the hospital along. My brand-new illness has attached me to a world of care that I will always depend on. A lifetime of needing care.

In this contribution, Silvio Lorusso examines various ways in which designers have conceptualized, expressed and exerted their power. Furthermore, he looks at how such power overlaps with notions of authority, hierarchy, prestige, responsibility and ethics. The goal is to provide a specific set of categories to map the power relationships in which the field of design operates beyond both subjectivism and determinism. On the 27th of September, Lorusso presented this work at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology of Lisbon and discussed it with design critic Francisco Laranjo, director of the Center for Other Worlds.

An interview between Silvio Lorusso and @wdka.teachermemes

French designer Anaëlle Beignon recently graduated from the Interaction Design department of Malmö University. In this excerpt from her master thesis, Beignon shows how obsolescence is not just an internal quality of a device, but a dimension that emerges from the relation between such device and the broader sociotechnical ecosystem.

“My computer is too old, I’ll have to change it soon.”

In his new book CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape From It