Work Ethics
When we leaf through graphic design directories, we seldom wonder whether the work we see was paid or credited, or whether the designer was ethically, politically or religiously coerced in any way. Designers somehow manage to keep themselves above the harsher realities of their own society in a plane of abstract, neutral mediation – the very presence of graphic design in any given society may be presented as an index of freedom of expression – yet few people look into the subtle modes of restraint and control that permeate the magazine-lined white cubes of the design studios.
Designers tend to see their job as essentially value-free, ethically neutral. All they have to do to keep it that way is follow the rules, do the best job possible, regardless of beliefs and values, their own and their clients’, and the possible outcomes of their work. When designers want ethics, they generally turn to “outside” sources. In other words: design is ethical when it works for ethical clients (NGOs), uses ethical materials (recycled paper) or encompasses ethical subjects (peace demonstrations), while remaining neutral on all other occasions. The causes named above are undoubtedly worthy – that is not the issue – but we must wonder whether we are in fact objectifying ethics, limiting them to certain accepted practices, while forgetting that design itself is an industrial activity with specific internal ethics and politics that remain largely unobserved.
Websites, corporate identities or magazines are, more often than not, designed by surprisingly large groups of people structured in strict hierarchies. The fact that the task itself is creative only makes these hierarchies more tense and difficult to manage. As the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Negri demonstrates, there is an ongoing evolution from industries based on the mass production of commodities (material labour) to modes of production based on intellectual, creative work (immaterial labour). Naturally, this change requires the development of new ways to control a workforce that is radically different from the traditional factory worker. Some of these techniques of control are examined in the works of Edward Said (particularly the Reith Lectures) and Noam Chomsky (Necessary Illusions).
Obviously, these techniques of control have to be embedded in the discourse and methods of every practitioner at every stage of their career. During their formative years, designers undergo a “behavioural conditioning” of sorts that effectively blinds them to the industrial nature of their own profession. While at school, designers are trained to be creative loners who sporadically condescend to be part of a group, whereas in the “real world” they are frequently small cogs in complex corporate machines consisting almost entirely of designers employed in different capacities. Designers are trained to deal with clients who know nothing about design and who only want their problems solved but, in the “real world”, designers deal primarily with other designers; their employers are often designers, their co-workers are often designers. In other words: the client is often a designer. The myth of the designer as a creative loner is an effective way of diverting attention away from the middleman and in fact from the entire labour structure of the design profession that, far from being an abstraction, reproduces local – and global – social dynamics and restraints.
A valuable way of connecting design to local realities and problems would be to see it as a concrete job, produced by people who are part of their own society, and vulnerable to its pressures and shortcomings. A better knowledge of how design’s inner workings and tensions diverge locally would undoubtedly contribute to deepen the range of its overall ethical concerns. While it is comfortable to keep ethical, political and social concerns restricted to conveniently external goals, we tend to forget that design has internal ethics and politics. I’m not saying that we should forget the larger picture. My point is that the politics and ethics of the design workspace are part of that larger picture.
Mario Moura 2005
At last! An important word to say on this subject, which has been skirted around for so long but not articulated properly…
/Anonymous 17/11/2005