The Failure of Brand
Massachusetts College of Art President Dawn Oxenaar Barrett on identity, speed, and meaning.
This is the first in a series of interviews with leaders who have a lot to say about brand. The word gets bandied about quite a bit, and through these conversations I hope to offer a grounded definition and some strong perspectives on how we can use brand to create and manage the change our world needs.
Dawn Oxenaar Barrett could easily rest on her laurels. She began designing 25 years ago, and during that time has worked with major institutions like Duke University, Royal Dutch Telecom, and the Royal Post in Denmark. She maintains an active design practice, and most recently took the helm as MassArt’s president after heading up RISD’s Architecture and Design divison as dean for over ten years.
But her views on design and branding are quite challenging. She is the rare breed of designer who never stops questioning the fundamentals of our work, making her an ideal visionary for the country’s only public art and design college. We talked for over two hours about the state of brand today and how to prepare students for it. Below are three key ideas from our discussion; all quoted portions are paraphrased for clarity and brevity.
Why “Brand” Fails
Ms. Barrett rejects the word “brand” as too small and denotative. She recalled the word’s origin as a means of burning—brandishing a mark of ownership onto the hide of cattle. That metaphor falls woefully short of describing the complex, mutualistic interactions of today’s hyper-connected marketplace.
If there has to be one word, for me it’s “identity”. It’s the manifestations of identity in various realms, from the visual—logo, mark, simplistic, symbolic—to the complex sets of behaviors that include how you act, what you say, how you look, and how you appear. It has more to do with the understanding and perception of behavior: how you act on the phone, what’s the first thing you say, or how you identify yourself. But the core is identity.
The word “brand” came from the business community and abandoned the humanistic notion that you’re dealing with somebody’s identity. And when you say the word “identity,” not far away is identity politics, the politics of representation, of what it means to have power over identity, of inequities of identity. Identity has a user-centered, humanistic understanding of the power of emanation, propagation, and dissemination that doesn’t assume property, ownership, class, or power.
I think designers tend to think that way, but it doesn’t mean we should take it for granted as design becomes colonized by business and industry. People don’t enter business because they have an interest in humanity per se. They have an interest in profit.
I agree with Ms. Barrett’s position and I embrace her approach. As professionals we adopt the terminology which is handed down to us, often without question. As interrogators of society, we must also interrogate ourselves, one another, and the sources of our practice. There is a tendency towards group-think with professional expression, and her wholesale rejection of a highly standardized term like “brand” is a gust of fresh air.
Behaving at Speed
When you’re trying to assert a collective identity with large, complex organizations, the old-school thought was “get your brand on everything.” They’d have a logo, the sticker that goes on everything. As long as that sticker is in the right size, right color, right font, right spacing, right location, you’re good. Well, guess what? That’s not enough. A static visual identity doesn’t do you any good on the phone, so you have to deal with behavior.
As surfaces and devices (paper, smartphone screen, television) diminish in prominence in service of universal content, the fixed permanence of a logo also falters. We discussed a post-logo brand landscape in which behaviors rise up to fill this identity gap. In the absence of a static graphical display, it is the behaviors of an entity which will create that entity’s relationship to the world—it’s identity.
Furthermore, this melting away of surfaces and devices gives rise to shifts in our perception which are at once global and individual. Because we’re all zooming around together, we each end up perceiving vastly different, highly personal relationships with brands. Identity evolves from something fixed and static into something based around action:
When you’re on a social media site, you click on a logo to engage and participate. So you look at hundreds (maybe thousands) of logos a day. What matters is the perceptual connection being made. The visual that’s in that little icon, we don’t think of it as a logo—we think of it more like a button or a tag, a tool for action.
For example, let’s say a student creates a Twitter account called @massartsomethingorother. Fair enough, they belong to MassArt, you don’t want to deprive them of that. But in this instance MassArt is more like a tag—it’s no longer an official representation of the school. If somebody just types out the letters “MassArt,” it doesn’t have to be in our type style. Or they take a photo of our sign. Is it an official communication of the institution? The answer has to do with your perception—it doesn’t have anything to do with what was designed.
The Responsibility of Making Meaning
Our conversation turned to the future, and Ms. Barrett talked about craftsmanship versus cognitive ability. For centuries, it has appeared that designers take responsibility only for the visual—a logo, the design of an annual report, a color palette, etc.
To be an effective designer, you had to understand something about cognition. We might not have called it “cognitive,” we might have called it “understanding what people respond to,” or “people like it.” But you had to understand that red against white is more optimistic than red against black. You might not have had it in a psychology class, but you would have understood it from your study of color relations. So, it might have been conceived of as formal at the time, but there is no formal without conceptual.
As we move forward into an accelerating world, this philosophy reveals itself in many ways. In order to deliver value, one must understand the factors that drive human consciousness and unify them with formal practice to create meaning.
Which begs a gargantuan question: if we acknowledge that the capacity of a succesful designer is to create meaning itself, then what’s the right way for designers to use that power? Are there morals, values, or personal aspirations that the designer must confront in selecting their work? Conversely, this is a question that organizations must also ask themselves: if we have a good idea and the technical ability to create an enterprise, what meaning does our work have?
For Ms. Barret, the answer is education, education, education—and not just in traditional terms.
As an operating principle, education is what humans do 90% of the time. It’s my value as a president, it’s my value as an administrator, it was my value as an academic dean, it was my value as a teacher, and it was my value as a designer. I operate from the point of view of being an educator. I started teaching very early. I taught anything I could, anything I knew. Then I learned design and most of what I taught was design.
Furthermore, you can’t be a good teacher unless you’re an avid learner. I feel very strongly about one principle: MassArt must be a learning institution. And one thinks that educational institutions are by nature learning institutions, but that’s not always the case. A learning institution is a place where learning is paramount, and that includes being a teacher and a learner all the time, and my philosophy for this institution is “everybody gets to be a learner, all the time.”
So much of my own work involves educating my clients and partners—about my vision for their industry or institution, the trends I see emerging in our culture, and how I think we can succeed in the future. For MassArt’s students, the opporutnity to teach their teachers primes them for this reality in ways that simply absorbing information never could. Furthermore, it abandons the assumption of unidirectional information transfer in favor of how our world truly functions: though co-creation.
In my next interview I’ll talk to Max Kaye, the student CEO of IDEA, Northeastern University’s on-campus startup incubator. I’m eager to share what a student—and someone from outside the world of design—has to say about the future of brand.
