Control and Chance in Design: or from thought to action
Sometimes the connections we make between different objects or events, in space and across time, seem wholly coincidental and circumstantial. As we move through the world, leaving trails of thoughts behind us, we accumulate a store of memories and loose associations that have emerged through contact with speech and things. Some connections just fall away and are lost forever, submerged under a host of privileged moments and pressing engagements. However other connections are merely dis-placed, sidelined by the same moments and engagements but preserved as a latent memory. The latter is merely put to one side in anticipation of future action, subsumed under the social schedule of work-and-play.
This is the story one such memory, first generated and then laid to rest at the conference Repositioning Graphic Design in October 2005. It was finally remembered – or recuperated - at the exhibition Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World in June 2006.
During a presentation led by Paul Stiff entitled ‘Designers Take Command: Control through Specification’ the routine activity of designers sending work to printers was explored in relation to notions of authorship. It was suggested that the designer’s notes, which accompany the final mock-up, might rightfully be conceived as the final outcome of the design process. Rather than a book or poster in-and-of itself, it is these notations, in conjunction with the associated visual materials, that constitute the designer’s finished piece.
Lacking the knowledge and ‘device-dependent languages’ associated with printing technologies, Stiff highlights how designers have not always been in control of the final outcome. Their line of command has often ended with the print specification and, hence, at the studio door. In this way, it is the anticipated design or the design-in-waiting that retains a strong sense of authorial presence and remains within the designer’s control. All that lies beyond operates within the realms of another practice.
With the advent of the Apple Mac and DTP in the mid to late eighties, many believed the designer would overcome this ‘shortfall’ in production. The designer could now assume full control of the total package - from concept to output – and achieve the status of auteur (over and above one of entrepreneur). However, according to Stiff, specification is still needed. The languages of production are still device-dependent and ‘mistakes’ can still made in the final hour. For this reason, if the history of Graphic Design needs to be recounted in terms of the designer taking control of his/her craft (in line with the Rise of the Author trajectory), then the realization of this goal is clearly dependent on the production of detailed job specifications. Indeed, the latter should be viewed as an integral part of the production process and an area where many designers are yet to assume absolute command of the creative process (should it be so desired).
A key example on offer was the work of Kinnear and Calvert who, according to Stiff, designed a modular scheme for the production of road signs. They did not make the finished products themselves but issued specifications for others to follow. In this respect, the work comprised a set of operations and detailed plans that, despite every effort, would inevitably leave spaces for interpretation and initiative (however small). Stiff reminds us that this has been the case since the days of typesetting when, as mentioned above, many makers left design decisions to their printers and compositors. Stiff makes us consider whether these social relations of production have changed, and the question seems important in the context of aforementioned debates around ‘the designer as author’.
It would seems that Stiff’s presentation serves as a useful corrective to parallel discussions around ‘self-expression’ and the significance of a new generation of graphics’ practice. As such, the points raised by the lecture might contribute to the undergraduate curriculum as a research topic for third years, one focussing on the collaborative nature of the design process and utilising an existing distinction (within cinematic accounts of Auteur Theory) between metteurs-en-scene and authors ‘proper’. According to Helen Stoddart, for instance, metteurs-en-scene demonstrate high levels of technical competence but do not share the auteur’s drive to achieve consistency. The work of the former does not set out to accumulate a strong sense of personal presence across an entire body of design products - in the form of a ‘signature style’, for example. In a way, the concept of metteurs-en-scene is more in accord with the contingency approach, (otherwise known as the ‘problem-solving’ model), within Graphic Design.
At least, these were some of the thoughts I was having at the time. And then I met a friend for lunch, the conference ended and eventually we all went home and that was that.
Eight months later I am wandering around a Moholy-Nagy exhibition at the Tate Modern. Among the wide range of work on display is Bauhaus Balconies (1926), a framed gelatine silver print which is 49.5 x 39.3 cm. I’ve seen this image so many times before but I have never encountered it like this: as an original photograph. I had only ever seen this image in the pages of books and somehow, captured behind the glass as it was, the dramatic ascent of balconies failed to carry the dynamism of Modernist lore. Sepia toned (or possibly merely aged), the image was not how I remembered it. It was ‘just’ a photograph and no longer an image in support of Graphic Design History. Bauhaus Balconies (1926) seemed to be missing the power of representation. It was now a piece of light-sensitive paper that had captured a moment (from Germany in the late nineteen twenties) and no longer spoke with such immediacy of the experiments of the ‘great’ design pioneers. A gap had opened up between past and present, or rather, between cultural memory (History) and contact (personal history). Was it the shiny gloss and heightened contrast of its subsequent manifestations, spatially arranged according to varying aesthetic criteria that had created this schism?
The print specifications of subsequent designers had occluded the work of Moholy-Nagy. In the words of Paul Stiff, Moholy Nagy had lost ‘control’ of his design.
Whilst standing in a gallery, one Saturday in June, I made a connection between disparate memories, in a way that affected my interpretation of Bauhaus Balconies (1926). This photograph succumbed to the vagaries of thought and, as an image of Modernism, fell from the dizzy heights of its very own balconies. As much as offering a reading, in the light of Paul Stiff, about the role of print specifications in the finished piece of design (and hence the limits on authorship ‘proper’); I hope to have indicated my own reservations about acts of criticism. Sometimes I wonder about the apparent arbitrariness and shared value of critical observation. At times like these, I imagine that only those who follow similar pathways through culture and accumulate similar kinds of social memories can share in the relevance and resonance of these types of question. Ultimately this is a piece about interpretation as acts of memory and a suggestion that these are embraced as part of the methodological horizons in histories and theories of Graphic Design, as they have already within the field of Photography.
As Marianne Hirsch states in Family Frames: photography, narrative and post-memory : ‘I will suggest that theory as a form of reflection and contemplation emphasizes mutual implication over domination, affiliation over separation, interconnection over distance, tentativeness over certainty’ (Hirsch 1997: p.15). She speaks of a ‘composite practice’ where theoretical and critical concerns meet the autobiographical. In this way, she suggests, the practice of theory remains one of challenging common-sense understanding with a ‘counterpractice of interference’ (Hal Foster quoted in Hirsch 1997: p.15). Perhaps it is time to turn theory on itself, and aside from evaluating the practice and products of the profession, to re-evaluate the direction of critical debates within the field of Graphic Design.
Julia Moszkowicz
Julia, your thoughtful observations made me realize something about my own practice as a communication designer that I hadn’t really considered in this way before. Which is that it’s a long time since I saw the ‘outcome’ of my activities as a *thing*. In common, I suspect, with many communicators working in the commercial area, what I actually ‘design’ are impacts - encounters that ‘audiences’ have with ‘messages’ (to use the marketeers’ jargon). The ‘means’ by which this is achieved is by and large secondary - it could go in many different directions and still have a similar result. What I’m paid for is to effect some sort of noticeable (and hopefully even measurable) change in a group of people’s attitudes and/or behaviour, to the benefit of a client’s organisation.
I begin to understand a bit better now the gulf that is opening up in graphic design between those who see it as a cultural activity and those who see it as a commercial activity. The issue really seems to be about what you believe is designed - whether you focus on the object or the interaction, the structure or the process. So in your example of Moholy-Nagy, he can be considered to have ‘lost control’ of the design if you look to the image to go on preserving its original ‘meaning’. But if you look at the image simply as a means of provoking an experience - and the experience as the primary factor - then whether he achieved what he set out to do in the way of touching other people becomes a quite different question. From this point of view graphic design becomes a much more transient activity - more like cooking a meal than creating a monument. And to judge the designer’s ‘control’ one has to compare the effect that her or his activity has with his or her intention. Did Moholy Nagy really want his work to have the same effect in 2006 that it did in 1926? I don’t suppose he had the slightest interest in 2006 - he wanted to make an impact at the time.
And actually, is this kind of design about ‘control’ at all? The desire to *make* people think or feel certain things, in response to our work, is not a particularly creditable one. Nor is it really possible to be so coercive or directive. Good communication design *invites* people to give their attention to certain things. People can react to them in many different ways, or not at all - but if their responses are positive and satisfying, and they engage with what you are trying to communicate - that is often success enough.
/james souttar 31/08/2006