I’ve just finished an interview with a Slovenian journalist called Barbara Predan for Klik magazine. She contacted me because I was a jury member for this year’s Memefest. I found Predan’s questions about the politics of graphic design, especially logos and culture jamming, both informed and challenging. I’m posting the full, unedited, English version here with her permission.
Q. The Economist regarded Naomi Klein’s initiative for a world without brands as “the world of the old Soviet Union, in which consumer choice has little role.” On the other hand, it seems that, in capitalism, everything is part of a bigger advertising picture. In your film Behind the Screens, Hollywood Goes Hypercommercial you are pointing out that even movies are vehicles for ulterior marketing. Can we really talk about free choice in a world full of brands?
A. Through my prior experience as an ad man and now as a teacher of media studies I have come to believe that advertising is so successful precisely because it addresses fundamental human needs – to be popular; loved; desired. The problem is that the solutions it offers only ever have to do with commodities – the buying of things and services. So of course we exercise ‘free choice’ when we act as consumers, but there’s a great deal that gets overlooked in this process. For example, relationships with one another (friends, family, partners) that are not mediated by things we buy. I think Naomi Klein’s book No Logo has done so well internationally because it perhaps speaks to an underlying sense that there’s something profoundly unfulfilling about living in a world in which we are constantly and increasingly bombarded by commercial messages: logos, branding devices, ads, etc. When I worked in advertising, we were always on the lookout for places to put our ads that would set them apart from the clutter of other people’s advertising messages. Right now these include forcing kids to watch commercials in school classrooms; putting ads in bathrooms; pressing brandnames into the sand on the beach; and, yes, placing products in movies. (Hence my video Behind the Screens, and my new website Brand Hype.) Now, I should add that everything I’m talking about relates to my experience living and working in England, Canada and the US; I know relatively little about Eastern Europe. That said, having worked with the folks at Memefest, I understand that Slovenia, for example, has a very different history and that consumer culture as we know it here in North America is a relative novelty for you.
Getting back to the quotation from The Economist: as smart as this magazine often is, I think their suggestion that “a world without brands” would be “the world of the old Soviet Union, in which consumer choice has little role” is either unbelievably naïve or a deliberate attempt to avoid engaging with Klein’s argument. They seem to be suggesting that if we dare to question the hegemony of branding we’re somehow embracing Stalinism. (And since when has democracy been predicated on having access to twenty-five brands of toothpaste?) It’s a farcical assertion.
And where’s the citizen in all this? The person who keeps up with politics, thinks about real social and cultural issues, and goes out and votes? If the West had anything worthwhile to export to the former Eastern Bloc countries at the end of the Cold War, it should have been democracy, not Coke and McDonald’s. I’ll go further: if you and I are unable to imagine a democratic future relatively free of advertising and brands, that recognizes that we are all full-time citizens and only part-time consumers, I think we’re all in big trouble. For one thing, we know now beyond a doubt that the environment cannot sustain our present level of consumption.
There is a well known analogy between advertising and political propaganda. Both are trying to dictate the so called correct thinking among people by use of visual means. In your film, Mark Crispin Miller states that advertising is a form of propaganda. Why do we still tolerate so much advertising?
I think Miller’s specific point is that advertising, like propaganda, is about repeating the same consistent message over and over again, regardless of its value. The overall message of advertising, as critics like Jean Kilbourne and Sut Jhally have pointed out so clearly, is that we are somehow lacking; inadequate; incomplete as people. This may actually be true on some level, but in a consumer culture there is only ever one solution: identifying with certain brandnames; seeking fulfilment (love; happiness) through buying stuff.
Wally Olins said that brands are as manipulative as relationships among people are. That’s why our role as consumers is to recognize their intentions and avoid being manipulated. To me, this sounds a bit like: if everyone is doing it, it can’t be that wrong. We all know that lies are a part of our lives, but in our knowledge it is still wrong. By acknowledging the manipulative side of advertising, are we approving the right to lie?
Or maybe our role as citizens is to recognize self-satisfied marketing-speak when we hear it. On the other hand, it’s great to hear a branding guru admit that brands are manipulative (although in truth it’s the people behind the brands – like Olins – who are doing the manipulating). That said, there’s a vast difference when comparing relationships among humans and those that involve brands, and it’s sad that Olins can’t tell the difference. It comes down to context, motive and sheer scale: the owners of Starbucks and FedEx and Diesel jeans and whatever else spend many millions of dollars every year to get their brands to ‘speak’ to us; to become our best friends. How can this kind of power compare to, say, the fact that my son lied to me today about brushing his teeth? Is this really the same kind of manipulation? By ‘acknowledging the manipulative side of advertising’ we’re well on our way to finding solutions. Conversely, we ‘approve the right to lie’ every time we knowingly leave our kids in front of commercial TV for an hour (I’m guilty), or fail to speak up when advertisers take fresh liberties with our public and private spaces.
How important is the role of design in today’s society?
For better or worse, it’s vital.
[The architect Thomas] Maldonado once asked: Can we talk about the use or abuse of design in society? How would you answer?
As a practical question, sure we can. For example: take a look at the fight Ralph Nader had with the American automobile industry in the 1960s (see his book Unsafe at Any Speed); or, the way design is used as the key selling feature of grossly overpriced sneakers. On the positive side, Marcia Lausen, a principal at Studio/Lab and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has done some fabulous design work rationalizing voter systems – polling stations, booths and ballots. This is, of course, a very real design problem, especially in the US.
You’ve disagreed with the notion that the world would begin to change if ten thousand designers would finally decide to change the way they work. I’ve read that Canadian designers were thinking about going on strike, back in the seventies, because of their dissatisfaction with their status and working conditions. Croatian theoretician Goroslav Keller once wrote: “Can we imagine for all designers in the world to go on strike for indefinite time. How would this result in a world, would there be any damage? Cynics might even say that society at the end might even prosper.” Can you imagine a world without designers?
I think there are several questions here. For me, it’s highly unlikely that ten thousand designers would suddenly decide to change the way they work because, barring a real social or political revolution, that kind of thing simply doesn’t happen overnight. It’s an entirely different question to ask whether such a change would have any effect on the world. ‘Changing the way you work’ could mean using a computer instead of a pencil, or it could mean working exclusively for ethically sound organizations and actively working against all the others. To paraphrase a famous German philosopher, ‘we make history but not in conditions of our own choosing.’ This is true for designers in particular, but it’s something they generally don’t understand or don’t want to hear. Designers are middle-men; intermediaries. They generally mediate between their clients and the expectations of their clients’ audiences. In strict terms, they’re not producers or inventors or creators at all. I am a graphic designer, and I find it rewarding in some ways, but that doesn’t stop me being haunted by something my dad once said when I was choosing a career. Being an engineer, he told me that designers just make things look nice once the real work is done. It drove me crazy at the time, but I sometimes think he had a point.
On the other hand, Victor Papanek wrote that we are all designers and everything we’re doing almost all of the time is design. Maybe the whole planet should go on strike. This sounds utopian, but – in your opinion – are we able to change and start building a “brave new world”?
I think when it comes to consumer culture, we already seem to be living in Huxley’s Brave New World. The task is to find another way forward by working with what we’ve got, rather than fantasizing about beginning afresh with a clean slate. (Since I’ve never lived through a real revolution, it would be particularly foolish of me to suggest that we start one.)
In Slovenia, we can hardly speak of design theory. However, it is very interesting that many foreign theoreticians are writing about the same problem – the lack of theory. You’ve written that design needs “theory not merely as a design tool, but as a way to make it truly significant and consequential in the decades to come.” How important is design theory for design practice?
Essential. Terry Eagleton once said that ‘Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own.’ The mistake many of us make – especially designers – is in thinking that theory is somehow pretentious and irrelevant; external to what we do. I’m talking about theory as a phenomenally rich set of competing ideas that, in essence, seek to explain why the world is the way it is. But it’s not just homegrown design theory that’s important for designers: it’s every theory going – be it cultural, political, queer, feminist, media, etc.
According to François Burkhardt: “until the sixties, theory existed parallel to design, as did the method of applications, criticism and history, which worked alongside each other and collaborated among themselves, while today we are witnessing the phenomenon that people simply do what comes to mind and go on in all possible directions, but they don’t know why…” It seems that theoreticians need design practice. On the other hand, practice is operating just fine without theory. How big of a problem is that?
It’s a huge problem. Design practised without any conscious reference to – or reflection via – theory, is at the very least unthinking, and at worst irresponsible.
In one of your recent projects, Logo Cities, you’ve decided to map the logos and brandnames that dominate our city skylines. Why is it important to document / analyse this phenomenon?
There’s a growing awareness that we live in a ‘hypercommercial’ culture, meaning a culture in which every facet of our lives is increasingly mediated by commercial messages – logos, brands, products, ads. In a way this a symptom of the unprecedented media conglomeration that is going on around the world. Scholars such as Robert W. McChesney have argued very convincingly that, if four or five huge companies own the vast majority of media outlets, from newspapers to radio stations to cable channels, this has dire consequences for democratic process. How are we to make informed political choices, choices that affect our own communities, if most of what we get is programming produced remotely, geared to maximising profits for faceless shareholders, and delivering lucrative audiences to advertisers? It strikes me that we need better theories, better kinds of analysis, in order to understand and counter these tendencies. Culture jamming – the kind of stuff we see in Adbusters and in Memefest – is one way to respond. It’s also a great first step for someone who’s just getting interested in these issues. It’s also fun to do. For me, however, culture jamming is too often a fleeting reaction rather than a real engagement; about taking one instance of a logo, changing it, and then disappearing. I’m trying to find other ways into the problem by drawing on cultural theory and graphic design.
An ongoing project of mine is to try to facilitate a debate about product placement in movies, a practice that is a direct effect of hypercommercialism. The site traces the connections between movies, brands, and studio owners. Logo Cities is another, more speculative project, which started out as an attempt to map the highly visible logos in just one city (ie Montréal). They’re not quite advertisements and they’re not really buildings, so they tend to get overlooked in the debate. The designer in me also finds them fascinating as graphic signs; as examples of ‘public lettering’. The first, basic version is up on the web and the next version is currently being built. It will include audio testimony from people living in the city who have some connection to these signs: city planners, architects, downtown workers, designers, signmakers, residents, and so on. The idea is to build up a fairly nuanced picture of the way these huge logos become part of our everyday, branded lives. They’re not evil, they’re not sublime; but they’re there.
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