We Have Always Been Citizens First
To contribute the resistance, sometimes it is useful to be part of the aesthetically disorderly citizenry.
The idea of the design community sometimes seems like a capitalist illusion that perverts the idea of community by tying it to how you make money. Your job becomes a cornerstone to your identity. We come to think of ourselves as designers first and foremost, humans in a community and participants in a democracy (in the U.S.) second. Factoring in the prospect of being a woman and/or a person of color muddles the idea of uniformity of thought and perspective. But the identity of designer first creates a notion that flattens our multitude selves. The danger revealed itself after our last election, the results of which spurred trade organizations such as AIGA to lay out plans for how to be a “Citizen Designer” as if we had, up until now, not been citizens at all but designers only.
What’s great about design is not being a Designer™ but having lots tools from which to draw. We have a set of skills that muddy the binary notions of creative versus technical skills. We know how to push people’s buttons by combining text and imagery. We guide people through digital, mobile applications and nudge them towards making decisions. We create directions and can literally illustrate a point. But it isn’t a magical ability that makes us designers. These are learned skills we should direct towards social and civic engagement.
Design is utilized most obviously as the traditional tool it is, and not the lifestyle and brand it has become, when wielded subversively. Recall design’s official early days when artists such as John Heartfield used then-modern techniques of the photomontage to challenge a fascist regime. Taking these tools honed for capitalism and utilizing it to support advancement of social struggles undermines the wheel of capitalism in the machine of white supremacy.
Print is particularly intertwined with causes of social, economic, gender equity. The relationship between the press and fighting oppression is alive in the work of artists of the Just Seeds cooperative who have continually utilized their skills towards spreading messages of social equity. An exhibition last year put on by the Interference Archive made obvious that relationship through the retrospective work of the Havana-based Organization in Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, whose work from the 1960s through the present which “highlight[ed] the intersection of graphic design and political solidarity work in post-revolution Cuba…” The Yes Men’s distribution of spoof copies of the New York Times declared the end of the Iraq War. James Victore, also, has built a career balancing a profession with a personal, deeply political voice.
We wrestle constantly with the question of how designers can be change-makers, how design can save the world. But so far, the world remains decidedly unsaved. To me, Citizen Designer Pledge is an acknowledgement of that civic responsibility to each other we let slip while we were busy designing global salvation elsewhere or thinking that doing our jobs was enough. Design-minded individuals have a lot of tools to offer towards the organizing efforts going on right now but we should not expect it to be a glamorous undertaking. It is not a “design problem” meant to be a great portfolio piece. We should contribute but we don’t need to trumpet our presence as designers but as citizens and humans.
