Sister Corita Kent, X Give a Damn, 1968
I write this from upstate New York where the dissonance between our political reality and the reality of the lush countryside outside my window raises a troubling question. It’s one I’m sure people have asked for millennia: “How could the world be going to hell in a hand basket while the sun still shines?”
And when the sun does cloud over, another question follows:
“What are we doing about it?” ‘It’ being the disappearances, the genocides, the rewriting of history, the withdrawal of care, the willful exploitation of the environment by AI tech bros and fossil fuel robber barons, and the myriad of other poisonous erasures made in the name of power and money.
But before getting to specific actions, I think it might also be worth asking a more fundamental question vis a vis design. Namely, where is design energizing socio-political currents today? Design virtually co-authored the hopeful visions of the future after World War II. Think of the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate in 1959 (held in the midst of an exhibition whose head designer was George Nelson) when design was integral to building post war economies.
True, corporate ambitions were more modest and designers were more in synch with their aims for what, in hindsight, was an inevitably compromised form of improvement—compromised, given it’s emphasis on consumption as a solution to all ills. (Remember George W. Bush exhorting people to shop more after 9/11?) Still, design seemed more relevant, more integrated into many of societies’ peacetime ambitions.
Decades of disenchantment later, the energy of design is shifting away from the production of goods and novelties toward research and methodologies. Not a surprise to most of us but still worth discussing.
In terms of research I’m thinking of work like that of Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Italian practice Formafantasma—specifically, “Cambio,” their 2020 exhibition about wood at the Serpentine in London. It looked at the uses and sources of wood globally by drawing on historic and contemporary cultural and technical perspectives. Here, design is invoked as a study of materials. In a different way, Paula Antonelli’s R&D Salons also come to mind with their emphasis on “R.” Brilliant though they are, and I have attended many, they tend to eschew specificity for broad themes like “Cold,” “Bullying,” “Taboos,” “Philanthropy,” and so on. Design is not necessarily presented as a catalyst.* Fair enough, design is, in fact, relational, but the question remains: whither go designers?
By citing methodologies as a current design preoccupation, I mean, methodologies of inclusion, often found in practices ranging from community governance to individual craftsmanship. These methodologies are often adopted and adapted from indigenous peoples, and more broadly from marginalized communities. I welcome this kind of examination of conscience that explicitly integrates other kinds of experiences and other values into design. But can these quiet challenges to capitalism and power structures affect hearts and minds on any kind of scale when they’re only ever published in academic forums? Even attempts like that of the Cooper Hewitt’s Triennial are challenging to most viewers. There, design’s role seems to be the staging ‘the other.’
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s vital that designers are questioning their own hierarchies and values. But in the process of resisting complicity with forces behind social and environmental harm, has design become too inward facing? I see much of this work as a self-critique, which risks ignoring our immediate political crisis. I think it’s time for design to go into triage mode, taking emergency patients, like democracy, first.
Of course, the two directions—one that is directed against pervasive socio-economic structures and the other that is directed against present-day fascism—can exist side by side. Long-term and short-term ambitions needn’t overwhelm the other. But they both have to be present.
So at the risk of sounding hopelessly nostalgic, I’m wondering where today’s Sister Coritas are? Where are the Frank Cieciorkas, the man who designed the Black Power fist in 1965? Where are the Gerald Holtoms? (The British designer of the peace symbol.) Or the Gilbert Bakers? (Baker designed the rainbow flag in 1978.) I’m pretty sure they’re out there somewhere, though I see little evidence of it. This, despite the fact that I’m also pretty sure that most designers can empathize with Holtom’s state of mind, when he described his design process:
I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.
Since its earliest adoption by peace workers in Britain, Holtom’s iconic symbol has weathered the vagaries of fashion and still retains legitimacy, albeit feeling a shop worn. Today there is no shortage of demonstrations where designers’ work might be just as vividly present.
And not only the work of graphic designers. At the same time we’re searching for literal signs of hope, we also need gear to protect demonstrators’ bodies. Could this be a job for product designers? At the risk of sounding naïve, we need apps or something like the Life Alert necklace that can be pressed in an emergency. Wouldn’t you want to trigger an ear-piering siren if someone’s trying to abduct you?
I realize that each of us is resisting in the best way we know how, whether by giving money to progressive causes and candidates, writing editorials, by showing up at protests, or by hanging Ukrainian flags from our homes, as my husband and I have done. Though I admit I’m a bit afraid to hang a Palestinian flag right now, as much as I’d like to.
I also admit that fear is not to be belittled as a reason for caution. Two of my nieces in Massachusetts have been affected—one by Doge the other by ICE. Of course, upstate NY isn’t exempt. Recently, there was an ICE raid in a neighboring town. The agents went to a home that had both a Trump banner and an Italian American flag hanging on its porch, which ICE hilariously mistook for a Mexican flag. So there is no limit to the idiocy and evil at work in our neighborhoods even if it isn’t always in plain sight. (P.S. The home owner is still a Trump supporter; she just blamed the agents.)
As I write this, I am less interested in our individual actions than the possibility for a larger collective presence. In the words, of Ras Baraka, the Mayor of Newark arrested for trying to inspect an ICE detention center: “We’ve seen a bunch of disparate, spur-of-the-moment acts by individuals and smaller groups, but there’s no collective offensive strategy.”
Designers and artists need to do more than parody Trump and his minions, as much fun as that is. (I imagine the People’s Graphic Design Archive as the site for all the brilliant bottom-up protest signs, especially the Abducted by ICE posters coming out of LA.) Still, the advice that Ras Baraka and others have given to Democrats holds for designers as well. Namely, there has to be an alternative vision. Vision may be only one dimension of design, but it’s one that still has potential. (Shepard Fairey comes to mind.) We could also use some leadership from strategic designers. Decades ago, Ralph Caplan wrote about the sit-in as a form of design. Could that be expanded upon to widen non-violent resistance?
This short litany of visual, aural, and spatial practices isn’t offered to fracture our responses yet again, but rather to suggest realms from which a strong signal might emerge. Whatever emerges needs to be compelling enough to galvanize the public imagination—be it in protest (e.g., the raised fist) and/or in hope (e.g. the rainbow flag). It needs to bring together the resistance bubbling up from town meetings, from the streets, from campuses, and from the less visible grumblings at the proverbial kitchen table.
These many streams of resistance need brought together to make our interdependence palpable. We can’t wait for messiahs to lead us out of this mess. We need to pave the way for their coming.
*To be fair, Paola Antonelli’s “Design Emergency” podcasts with Alice Rawthorne do deal with social and environmental issues, though I haven’t seen any related to the US political crisis.
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