The Designer as A Social Critique & Practice as Social Comment

The Designer as A Social Critique

Historical Background

Social activism in design became popular during the Modern era where the hippie positivity flourished; everyone thinks that everything can be solved with peace. Artists becomes aware of the revolutionary power of design, and many of them grouped together, formed a collective, and created the First Thing First Manifesto in 1964 written by Ken Garland. Basically, they decided not to waste talent in representative culture. In 2000, the manifesto is enforced by the AdBusters. They are a collective of artist who believe in the anti-capitalist ideology in their pursuit to attack capitalist giants.

Ethical Dilemma

As a result, it becomes a polarising factor which classifies designers as either supporting or against the consumerist system. However, I reckon that the real problem is not on this matter. Instead, there is an ethical dilemma between earning money for a living and giving a humanist view on social issue. While it is easy to say that when one is a successful designer, that is actually a hassle for fresh graduates who just entered the industry and so most of them choose to start their career in advertising companies. Victor Papanek is one designer who took a different approach in design. To him, things designed are not necessarily needed, they exist for the manufacturers to earn money. Instead of making anything fancy, he design things which is functional by recycling scrap materials to solve real social problems like poverty in third world country by offering designs allows them to be self-reliant so that they do not have to be ripped off by the western world capitalist manufacturers. This brought up the question to the capitalist nature of the commercial design practice: Why making money for other people when the world is falling apart?

Practice as Social Comment

In practice, it is common for designers to put symbolic details to their artwork which represents their view to the society. The Charlie Hebdo incident, however, has brought a valid point that we, as designers, should be more cautious of disseminating the message in the work that we produced. We should take into account the social conditions at an instance to produce content which is relevant and does not create social tension. On the other hand, I think that creators of subversive designs are not the one to be blamed for social tensions because the audience is the one to judge and react to a design content. 

Anthropomorphism is a technique commonly used by creatives to conceal subversive ideas in their works. Jan Svankmajer is famous for using a many visual metaphors to give an account of the situation in the Iron Curtain during the Cold War in his animation regarding freedom of speech, control and surveillance to avoid getting involved with the authorities. In the novel Animal Farm, George Orwell also used anthropomorphic animals to get his political idea into the world. These evidenced that back in the day freedom of speech is non existent unless one can implicitly get the idea across.

It is so much different compared to the present situation mainly because of The Internet. We can remain anonymous and state our ideas of the world. Although, in most cases, opinion will remain insignificant due to the plethora of information uploaded to The Internet. Getting enough publicity is really important for present day designers, and therefore it is essential to build a good body of work in our portfolio and maintaining our commercial practice. In the end, we, designers, need to balance our work for social commentary and commercial practice to get the best of both.