It's a major challenge to find something
new to say after so many mind-blowing people
have already lifted their voices and shown
us their work. As person with no graphic
design background would be an IDIOT to try
to create visuals. So here I am, media-free
and naked under my clothes.
To begin with the mundane, let me tell you
a little about my current work.
For the last two years I've been working
at Art Center College of Design. Initially
I was hired to help develop a new curriculum
for the graduate Digital Media department,
then asked to carry on as a faculty member.
We've renamed the program Media Design and
put a new curriculum in place to accomplish
a new set of goals. I mean, what's new media?
What's digital media? Like turbo and cyber,
these terms no longer mean much.
As we look at the professional landscape
that awaits new designers, we see a growing
trend in both branding and in the design
of products and services toward transmedia
strategies. Increasingly, design involves
many different media types that are integrated
into a coherent whole, employing various
combinations of web, wireless, print, video,
audio, and objects. We want our students
to become media strategists who understand
how to orchestrate these various media in
ways that take advantage of the unique powers
of each, and to achieve coherence and relatedness
among them. Tomorrow, it will not be enough
to be a Flash cowboy. Our goal is to produce
designers who can become thought leaders
in the emerging discipline of transmedia
design.
In keeping with this new mission, we have
designed a new studio course, called Super
Studio, that our first-year MFA students
take for three terms. I teach the studio,
with the help of a visual design faculty
member - this year, Allison Goodman, who
has just published a wonderful new book,
The Seven Essentials of Graphic Design. When
students first arrive, we give them themes
to think about. Their job is to come up with
a grand strategy, strategy, and tactics for
addressing those themes. That includes articulating
what their particular project will be and
identifying the target audience. They must
employ at least three media types, and at
least one of those must be computer-based.
Last year, we gave students the theme of
the Human Genome. After several weeks of
research and field studies, they arrived
at the grand strategy of helping young people
become informed citizens who will be able
to understand crucial issues regarding human
genetics as they become first-time voters.
The strategy was to create a suite of products
directed towards the high school education
market, to provide tools for understanding
the science, policy, and ethics involved
our growing mastery of human genetics. The
project, named CODE23, utilized video, web,
and print in the form of a wonderful hybrid
between notebook and magazine formats.
This year we began by thinking about energy
conservation. Then 9/11 happened and our
topic suddenly screamed for rethinking. We
changed our themes to energy, entitlement,
and brand and asked students to look at the
intersections among them. We felt that the
petroleum economy and the global environment
were more important issues than California
blackouts following the attacks.
The students arrived at the grand strategy
of improving the environment by reducing
auto emissions and petroleum consumption.
Searching for something practical and do-able
in the near future, they arrived at the strategy
of promoting the adoption of hybrid vehicles
in the United States. We discovered that
most people don't know anything about them
- in fact, most people think you have to
plug them in to charge. The ones that are
currently available - the Toyota Prius and
the Honda Insight - strike many as, in the
words of one interviewee, "butt-ugly."
We learned that many new hybrids will soon
enter the U.S. market - from a hybrid BMW
motorcycle to a hybrid Honda Civic, a hybrid
Ford Expedition, and eventually even a hybrid
Humvee - enough variety to meet almost any
customer's criteria.
The students have designed a business that
offers value to manufacturers, dealers, potential
customers, and drivers of hybrid cars. Their
business strategy will migrate easily to
fuel cell vehicles as soon as they become
available.
So far the students have done field research,
home visits, and research on the web. They
have developed a business plan and media
strategy for the program utilizing web, wireless,
print, and video media. They've done all
kinds of design explorations. They have just
completed audience testing of visual branding,
features, and positioning concepts. By the
end of this term, they'll have nailed down
the feature sets and design direction that
are most appealing to their potential customers.
By the end of the third term, they will have
produced working prototypes that will allow
us to present the program publicly. We have
named the project "Upshift." If
it were a real company, by the end of the
third term we would be ready to pitch it
to investors and partners. In fact, we may
just do that.
You probably notice that we are addressing
socially and politically charged issues in
the Super Studio. Often, our students come
from an undergraduate graphic design education
where they do work that is typically not
personally relevant. We want them to find
their own voices as designers, and socially
positive materials engages their emotions
and their passion. My personal grand strategy,
by the way, is to graduate students that
have become elegant activists.
I want to share something that happened in
the studio last term that I thought was quite
wonderful. One of the students said sadly,
I wish we could put our values in our work
all the time. But as professionals we will
have to do work for clients that are only
looking to make money. I thought about that
for a few minutes. Throughout the term we
had been talking in terms of grand strategy,
strategy, and tactics. So I reasoned that
a client, say a manufacturer of athletic
shoes, hires a design firm to help achieve
their strategy: to sell more shoes. The client's
grand strategy, based on traditional business
principles, is to "maximize value for
their shareholders."
However - and here's the fun part - the designer
is free to invent their own grand strategy,
as long as it serves the strategic goals
of the client. So then, one strategy can
support two grand strategies. And although
your client wants simply to make money selling
athletic shoes, you can formulate a socially
positive grand strategy for your design -
for example, lifting up the value of fitness
and athletic ethics, or offering alternatives
to gangs for social affiliation. And if you
do a really good job, you can accomplish
your own grand strategy in a way that gives
you your voice.
Then later, in the dead of night, you can
rat out the company's nasty offshore labor
practices.
Denise Crisp, the brilliant designer of my
new book, has told me many a tale of how
female designers have managed to work feminist
and humanist values into commercial design.
It seems to me that this technique begins
to redefine voice and its value in commercial
as well as personal terms.
I intended my new book, Utopian Entrepreneur,
to be a field manual for doing socially positive
work in the context of business. I try to
get at the structure and politics of business
as it affects designers, and to offer some
strategies for subverting them into something
more humane.
I've been a designer of interactive media
for over 25 years. In 1996 I founded a company
called Purple Moon to make socially positive
interactive media for girls. I was there
from cradle to grave and have many a tale
to tell. Much of what I have learned is cast
in my book as advice for designers and entrepreneurs
about how to bring their values to the front.
One thing to notice is that it's okay not
to be rich. My father was a social servant;
my family was middle-class and happy to be
there. Earning a living wage is probably
a better and more realizable goal than making
millions.
Another thing to remember is that there is
no good reason to consider business the exclusive
tool of, you should pardon the generalization,
rich old white guys. There are many things
that can be redefined about business by determined
people. For example, let's look at the state
of design and content on the web. Right now,
diversity of content and design has withered
as the result of recession, the Wall Street
"free money" frenzy, and failed
business models. Massive consolidation under
huge publishing companies has been one result.
Here's a statistic. Jupiter Media reported
in 2000 that their surveyed audience spent
60% of their time on sites owned by 119 companies.
by 2001 that number had dropped from 119
to 13. 13 content sources on the web. Makes
the library look pretty juicy, doesn't it?
Healthy cultures, like healthy ecosystems,
require diversity. It's not acceptable that
cultural diversity on the web be supplied
gratis by devoted designers or artists or
journalists in their spare time. Yet it seems
that is what we have allowed ourselves to
come to expect. Without the ability to earn
an honest living through content creation,
diversity is inherently limited and independent
content production is permanently marginalized.
The philosophy of the "free market"
suggests that those who produce work which
others value should be able to receive value
in exchange. This theory headed south when
the idea that the goal of business was the
creation of value mutated into the idea that
the goal of business is the production of
money. It's time to turn our attention to
fixing the apparatus behind the curtain.
Direct economies of value provide promising
models for funding cultural production while
sustaining diversity. Alternative business
ideas like micropayments, peer-to-peer commerce,
request marketing and modest subscriptions
on the web have the potential to support
more nearly direct transactions between creator
and audience.
We can obviously no longer duck and cover.
These times require designers and content-creators
to become involved in the economic context
of our work. Of course economics turns out
to implicate culture and politics as well.
Poisonous ideas can be found lurking in the
mightiest global institution of all - consumerism.
Here's what I want to say. Consumerism demeans
us. Nobody wants to be a consumer. The power
relationship implied by the term should be
unacceptable to everyone, if they were able
to understand it. I picture a "consumer"
as something like a giant slug, a simple
tube through which stuff passes from retail
to landfill.
As Paul Hawken and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins
exhort us in their book, Natural Capitalism,
environmental and geopolitical realities
demand that we broaden our understanding
of business to include the costs - human,
cultural, environmental, and ethical - of
what goes into the slug and what comes out.
Consumerism is not only not sustainable,
it's a planet-killer - both environmentally
and culturally. When you understand how it
actually works - including both campaign
financing and entrainment - you begin to
realize that it undermines the principles
of freedom and justice that once animated
our democratic republic. The spectacle is
a formidable enemy - and it is winning, and
it relies on consumerism to make us stupid.
In the 18th century, 80% of the populace
read Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Today,
we do a better job of teaching kids to be
consumers than citizens. And so there are
fewer and fewer young people who believe
that their votes can make any difference
the gross malfunctioning of our government
the underlying dismemberment of our Constitution.
Many, like I, are ashamed of the dim, corroded
lamp we lift as we hold up our way of life
to the rest of the world.
But back to business. Obviously, an all-out
revolution against consumerism would be,
shall we say, resisted. But a serious head-change
is definitely in order. I propose that each
of us actively redefine the success criteria
for business to include the cultural and
material costs and benefits of the product,
as well as what we currently think of as
"the bottom line." I'm suggesting
that we find ways to help both kids and adults
have access to this material and the means
to understand it. I want every person in
this country to know the unauthorized biography
of every single thing they buy.
People who start companies can look for socially
positive investors. They're out there, and
working together we can make some big changes
in how business works, regardless of the
unwillingness of our government to control
its ill effects on the public good.
At its best, commerce can be sustainable,
if it is based upon the free and fair exchange
of value with respect and common sense. By
contrast, consumerism consists in the creation
and fulfillment of desire, regardless of
the actual value of the product to the individual
or to society. And who decides what value
is and which values are to be put forward
in the design of experiences and things?
Designers do. We do.
Design gives voice to values. Design suggests
what is useful or beautiful or pleasurable
or good or true. The affordances of a design
suggest desirable actions. A design that
has not engaged the designer's values may
speak, but with a hollow voice. We know the
rules of good design. But it often comes
as a delightful revelation to young designers
that brilliant design not only permits but
requires the designer's personal voice.
And so we arrive at the happy confluence
of responsibility and power. We are only
the victims and servants of business as usual
if we choose to be. This work of transformation
- which I have come to think of as "culture
work" - must be approached mindfully
and with great conviction and effort. The
strategy of culture work is not straight-ahead
revolution; rather it is to inject new genetic
material into the culture without activating
its immune system. By intervening in the
present, we are designing the future.
I wish us all a great deal of courage, self-discipline,
and clear-eyed hope.