CAPS LOCK (excerpts)

It is great to be passionate about being a designer, but beware that making your hobby into a job has become a strategy for clients and employers to demand work situations that would be unacceptable elsewhere: unpaid internships, pulling all-nighters, working weekends, and unpaid designs competitions. These are all common practices in design because there are more designers than jobs, and secondly, people assume that because designers do what they love, they will happily accept any working condition no matter how problematic.

What doesn’t help is that this work culture is promoted, even celebrated by designers themselves. In the well-known book for beginning designers How to be a graphic designer, without losing your soul, designer and writer Adrian Shaughnessy kicks off by saying ‘always remember there are millions of people who’d swap jobs with you if they could’. He continues with ‘Design is about commitment : if you want to have a nine-to-five existence, go and get a job in a government tax office’.

Passion is what makes designers the ideal workers in this stage of capitalism. Designers are flexible, always available, dress up, don’t strike, don’t unionize, and are inspired on demand. Designer Daniel van der Velden warned designers not to become the working class of the creative industry. In his article ‘Research and Destroy’ Van der Velden quotes a Dutch politician saying: ‘We are making a turn, away from the assembly line to the laboratory and the design studios, from the working class to the creative class.’

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The Happy Show

Design is obsessed with positivity. A big part of graphic design is making companies, events, and objects appear more joyful using positive associations. Design studios are the example of ‘fun’ workplaces with football tables, colourful knickknacks, and inspirational posters. Designers are also expected to project a sense of happiness themselves at all times. ‘Niceness’ is considered a necessary quality in the creative industries today, as Silvio Lorusso comments. In order to find work, designers are expected to keep developing, improving and optimizing personal and professional profiles. To stay hireable and competitive, designers have to exhibit positivity and personal growth using frequent social media updates and networking events. Forcing oneself to exhibit positivity and success for long periods of time takes its toll. In the UK depression is now the most treated condition by the NHS. The Designers’ Inquiry by Brave New Alps from 2013 among Italian designers mentions that 44 percent experienced stress, 30 percent had anxiety or panic attacks, and 73 percent suffered from depression. A survey of 767 designers is not representative for the entire design discipline, but the rates are still alarmingly high.

The philosopher Mark Fisher pointed out that the rise in mental health issues is a result of capitalism’s demand for workers to continually self-improve. He observed ‘that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough’, and ‘if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame’. Mental health programmes at work are mostly focused on alcohol and drug addiction, and are only focused on employees’ individual mental health as long as it boosts their productivity. The individual is supposed to cope with the stress in a labour market where flexibility and confidence are seen as necessary qualities.

Unattainable productivity benchmarks have created a culture of efficiency aimed at economic growth at the expense of the well- being of workers. With smartphones the concept of downtime is disappearing. We are expected to always be available for employers or clients. As a Dutch business expert boasted: ‘Stress is not a matter of not having enough time, it is a matter of prioritizing.’ The design world should be more alert and responsible about rising mental health issues, as they remain largely undiscussed. After the barrage of criticism presented in this chapter on the working conditions of designers, it’s about time we take a step back and keep in mind that work in its current structure is not likely to disappear overnight.

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Desktop computers and graphic design software changed the access to graphic design production completely in the 1990s. Even though computers and printers were expensive at first, soon every person with a computer and (bootlegged) graphic software could achieve the same technical quality as professionals, much to the dismay of many designers who feared to lose their status and livelihood. ‘By making our work so easy to do, we are devaluing our profession’, warned design historian Steven Heller. ‘With everything so democratic, we can lose the elite status that gives us credibility.’ That hasn’t been the case, as Ellen Lupton points out in her book on DIY design, seeing that ‘the field got bigger rather than smaller’. The democratization of graphic design, print production, and online publishing has allowed people without prior access to media to claim their space in the production of knowledge and culture.

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The Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius believed socialism was better achieved through industrial mass production. Design education at the Bauhaus was based on the pre-industrial workshop model, and divided along lines of materials such as stone, wood, metal, textile, clay, and glass. Each workshop was fitted with the latest industrial machines, so students could become acquainted with industrial production techniques. In these workshops the school would ‘create a new guild of craftsmen’. The Bauhaus wanted to get rid of the ‘classist’ division between the arts and crafts, but this time with the most modern techniques available, using the slogan ‘Art into Industry’.

The pedagogy of the Bauhaus was influenced by the new education movement in Europe. Educators such as Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner believed that children’s development would benefit from more freedom. They integrated arts, gardening, games, and gymnastics in education, while discouraging standardized textbooks and strict attendance. The Bauhaus extended this more holistic vision to higher education, with the belief that every human is talented, and talent could be applied to all disciplines. Following the new educational principles, gymnastics and theatre were integrated in the Bauhaus curriculum.

Despite its socialist ideals, politics at the Bauhaus would not get in the way of individual artistic expression. Gropius and many teachers were careful not to be overtly political. Only under director Hannes Meyer the Bauhaus briefly turned ‘red’. After three years he was fired, and commented: ‘A training centre for socialist architecture is impossible under capitalist conditions.’ His successor Ludwig Mies van der Rohe shied away from politics, and right before the Nazis closed the school, Gropius defended the school’s existence by claiming there was no subversive political intent at the Bauhaus.

During the existence of the Bauhaus, few of its designs were mass-produced. Partly because of the technological limitations of the time, but also because the working class wasn’t very enthusiastic about the aesthetic that was envisioned for them. Bauhaus had its biggest impact after it closed. Bauhaus professors Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Mies van de Rohe fled to the US, and found employment at corporations. Thanks to post- war US economic and political influence, the modernist Bauhaus aesthetic spread across the globe, albeit mostly stripped of its socialist ideals.

In search of a more socialist role for design, the Bauhaus found an effective way to merge art and industry. This in turn created the blueprint for a design method that flawlessly connects with the needs of industrial production. With its emphasis that politics should not get in the way of creativity, its apolitical appearance has made the Bauhaus the ideal model for design schools for industrial production in capitalism. Precisely because it centralizes objects and production, and not the social relations under which they are created.

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Education can be expensive. Not just because of tuition costs, but students need to pay for study materials, housing, food, and clothing. Even if tuition is free, most design education is time-intensive, and not every student can combine studying with a job that covers living expenses. Students will either have to loan money or receive financial aid from family or friends. The cost of education and the dependency on external financial aid has made it harder for students from lower income backgrounds to study design.

The problem with unaffordable education is that voices from lower income communities are less represented in society. The voice of the uneducated, the poor, and the marginalized are mostly absent from history books, for this very reason. An expensive design education could lead to a wealthy class of designers who assume their audience is also well-off, which can obfuscate some of the most important social issues in society such as inequality and privilege.

Viewing education as a monetary exchange overlooks the possibility that education is perhaps not only about preparing for work. The German word for education is Bildung. It means a process of personal and cultural maturation, both in a philosophical and educational sense. If we see education not merely as a commodity but as a familiarization with public culture and knowledge, then it is logical that everyone should have access to it. Education is therefore also a commons, a public source of knowledge exchange which has become more and more enclosed by capitalism for the purposes of profit.

Curricula and school structures has been largely shaped by those who supply its funding, which is why we are faced with an educational system today that mostly serves the needs of capitalism. Fortunately, there is no lack in ideas about alternative education, which can provide useful perspectives for a different kind of graphic design education.

One of the pioneers of alternative education was the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). Written during the military dictatorship, Freire found that existing educational forms were unable to empower those who were oppressed. The problem with education is that it does not invite critical thinking. Students are simply asked to copy and memorize the knowledge of the teacher without question, which he called ‘the banking model’ of education. Instead, he proposed a ‘problem-posing’ method of education, where the teacher is no longer dictating but exchanging knowledge with the students. The teacher presents the material and the students critically reflect, allowing them to challenge the ideas of the teacher. While the banking model becomes a form of indoctrination, the problem-posing model invites critical consciousness. He argues that an oppressive regime will never allow problem-posing education, because the very foundations of the regime would be questioned.

Ivan Illich was a contemporary of Freire, and introduced the idea of the ‘hidden curriculum’ mentioned earlier. As an alternative he suggests that everyone should be a student and a teacher. Radical pedagogy should not limit the education to teachers, or limit the spaces of learning to classrooms. He proposed that all knowledge should be accessible, and every space, every factory and institution should be a space of learning. It would certainly be a radical idea that anyone can walk into a hospital, a space engineering lab, a farm, or an artist studio and learn all there is to know without restrictions.

Illich’ ideas about ‘deschooling society’ were written when the internet was in its infancy, but today his ideas could almost sound like a call to abolish schools and use the internet to facilitate a libertarian form of education. This would sound like music in the ears of Silicon Valley tech companies, who aim to ‘disrupt’ the often state-controlled education market by further privatizing education and who would benefit from facilitating courses via digital platforms. In her article about remote teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic, Naomi Klein writes that this would worsen education for children who are in abusive, crowded, or noisy homes, with limited or no access to internet. This would not mean a democratization of knowledge, but a total enclosure of education as a commons, ensuring that tech companies can profit from education.

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In response to the privatization of education, there have been many alternative ideas to transform design education from different sides. On one side there are those who are tired of design education being expensive and business-oriented, and wish to change it towards a more affordable, inclusive, and socially oriented education. On the opposite side we find educators who are pushing for more collaboration with businesses to ensure more employment options for designers. More focus on UX design and design thinking, where design education tends more towards a hybrid between design and business.

The first, more social view of design education has brought an abundance of small-scale educational initiatives.

The second, more market-oriented view on design education comes from the notion that design education is not preparing students enough for market demand. The rising market value of subdisciplines such as UX design, design thinking, and service design are still underrepresented in many design schools. There is the ‘Future of Design Education’, a recent call to change design education to better face the problems of the twenty-first century. Design theorist Cameron Tonkinwise points out that its founders are from multinationals such as IBM, Proctor & Gamble, Philips, and JP Morgan Chase, which begs the question which ‘twenty-first century problems’ they have in mind.

The model of the European design school, which originated in the 1900s, is still firmly in place but under increasing pressure from neoliberal economic thinking and a diversifying discipline. Debates about the future of education mostly focus on what designers should be learning, rather than how and where. What the radical pedagogies by Freire, Illich, and bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress (1994) reveal, is that capitalist education is not just about training people for work; it is the system of learning itself, the disciplining structure, power structures, and the student-teacher relation that block radical changes in society.

If graphic design refuses to only serve the interest of capitalism, a radical transformation of design education is necessary that questions the very nature of how knowledge is produced and commodified in society. That means abandoning the idea that graphic design can only be taught in school, and acknowledging that everyone can be a teacher, everyone can be a student, and the classroom can be everywhere. It would be wrong to interpret this as a call for a ‘flexible desk university’. Nomadic universities have been around, but inevitably lead to a socially alienated form of education with high carbon emissions.

Meaningful design work exists by the virtue of strong social relations that are locally rooted. Colleges and universities can play an important role in fostering social relations and preserving local cultural specifics. Institutions also harbour a lot of knowledge and have important public facilities such as workshops, libraries, and lecture halls. But institutions need to be subjected to far-reaching forms of democratization and de-financialization. Education needs to avoid spending its time and energy on disciplining students into embodying capitalist values of efficiency, productivity, and obedience. If we regard education as a fundamental public service that should be accessible to everyone, education is a commons. As any other commons, education should be protected and defended against the pressures of capitalism to privatize, own, or influence the exchange of knowledge in society.

‘We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society’, said Ivan Illich. A design education that wants to produce creative and critical thinkers should start by listening to the needs of people, rather than the needs of industry.

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