Introduction
The concept critical design first occurred in Anthony Dunne’s[1] book Hertzian Tales in year 1999 and later was popularized in Design Noir in 2001. Since then many other artists began to develop their own variations on critical design. Anthony Dunne investigated the value of electronic products/objects, technology, and the relationship between industrial products and consumer culture in his books. He mentioned that a parallel design activity (critical design) that questions and challenges industrial agendas need to be developed.[2]
It is understandable that why Anthony Dunne targets his exploration on the basis of electronic products, because his background is industrial design. However, except for Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby[3], teachers, researchers and graduate students from the Royal College of Art such as James Auger, Crispin Jones and Noam Toran are practicing critical design as well. Besides, there are other product designers working in an analogous way which could be portrayed as critical design, such as Jurgen Bey, Marti Guixe and Elio Caccavale.
To take a panoramic view of their works, product design obviously became to the mainstream of this area of design. But from the perspective of the overall design discipline, the question - is critical design can only be expressed by a product or an object is essential to be asked. Not only can product design be utilized as tools for awareness and reflection upon issues, which largely surround the implications of existing and future technologies, but also other forms of design.
Take an example of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s work. His projections onto buildings of hands or faces of people who speak about personal experiences or crimes they have suffered, allowing the public airing of issues usually kept private, his projection works also gave people an opportunity to speak about their harrowing experiences. Through the animation of historic public buildings and monuments in many cities around the world, his video projections create social conscious and initiate a critical dialogue both within a specific marginalized culture, as well as with the greater community. Although he has labeled his style as interrogative design, obviously such kind of art rendered with equal values of critical design. His work contains architecture design, digital communication, lighting design, and enviornment design, and his style is newly expressed critical design in a novel way which different from the traditional methods (although such area of design still fresh in the design field).
Figure 1. Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projections, Tijuana, Mexico
So it is manifest that, critical design can be interpreted into other design forms, such as graphic design, interior and enviornmental design, architecture design, fashion and textile design, photography and fine art, etc. Although different methods and expressions explore different values, the common purpose of different forms of critical designs is making people think, raising awareness, exposing assumptions, provoking action, and sparking debate.
From this perspective, this paper targets at one of the design disciplines – graphic design, to explore how can critical design be interpreted into graphic design. Besides, the concept critical graphic design is also investigated in this paper.
Rationales
Two key design disciplines - graphic design and critical design are involved and studied in this paper, so, to well-understand the rationales of the two disciplines is vital for developing deeper analysis.
Critical Design
Design as critique has existed before under several guises. Italian radical design of the 1970s was highly critical of prevailing social values and design ideologies, critical design builds on this attitude and extends it into today’s world.
During the 1990s, there was a general move towards conceptual design which made it easier for noncommercial forms of design like critical design to exist, this happened mainly in the furniture world, product design is still conservative and closely linked to the mass market.
The term critical design was first used in Anthony Dunne’s book Hertzian Tales (1999) and later in Design Noir (2001). Critical design is a design which uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life, especially the electronic products.
From Anthony Dunne’s point of view, the current product design has pushed human relationship with the medium of electronic technology to the limit. He believes that there is a contrast between the banal design of many electronic products and the extreme misuses they are subjeced to, so that human experience of everyday day life lived through conventional electronic products is aesthetically impoverished.[4]
Indeed, almost any newspaper reveals a very different view of everyday life, where complex emotions, desires and needs are played out through the misuse and abuse of electronic products and systems. A mother shoots her son after an argument over which television channel to watch; a parent is outraged by a speaking doll which sounds like it swears; the police set a trap for scanner snoopers – people who listen in to emergency radio frequencies illegally – by broadcasting a message that a UFO has landed in a local forest, within minutes several cars arrive and their scanners are confiscated.[5] It proves that electronic products are negatively influencing people’s life.
It has also mentioned in Anothony Dunne’s book Design Noir, that people are living within the electromagnetic spectrum which is created by electronic objects, by influence from the electromagnetic pollution, people suffering from electrical sensitivity, electro-illnesses, and short life-span. Some people even used electromagnetic technology to commit crimes.
Anthony Dunne mentioned that, designers need to explore issues which caused by electronic products, “not just by finding new ways of exploiting the electromagnetic spectrum as a medium, but by defining and giving tangible expression to new thresholds between inside and outside, public and private, mine and yours, within a cultural context.”[6]
Therefore, critical design emerged to question and challenge industrial agendas. Such design is opposite to affirmative design: design reinforces the status quo. Critical design rejects how things are now as being the only possibility, it provides a critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values.
Critical design asks carfully crafted questions and makes people think by developing new products – smaller, faster, different, and better. More specifically, critical design is purpose to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the aesthetic quality of our electronically mediated existence. It is more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a method.
Graphic Design
During WWII and the post-war period, graphic design in Europe and the US, had a clear and purposeful role: to provide propaganda, camouflage, and information design on behalf of governments for the armed forces and civilians. Many designers were involved with the nation’s various efforts to reconstruct public services and to improve the quality of life, such as Tom Eckersley,[7] F.H.K.Henrion,[8] and Abram Games.[9] The close relationship between graphic design and the socially progressive policies of governments, public services, and even the major corporations of the day continued well after the war had ended.
In today’s society, the responsibility for social change and progress has fallen to individuals and small groups, non-profits, and publications. Consequently the messages are more numerous and more complex. Designers, of course, are working for a host of social causes, but as design critic Rick Poynor has remarked, “Designers inevitably express the values of their day. And today’s values are not primarily about social responsibility.”[10] Graphic design, as one of the most broad and powerful design disciplines, has been expanded its values beyond the social reponsibility.
Graphic design is for selling things and ideas to make money or to further political agendas, but meanwhile, it is also for critiquing such behaviors. It is for making things clear – saving lives even – but it’s also for enriching people’s everyday lives through the addition of layers of complexity, nuance, and subtlety. It is for helping people find their way and to comprehend data, but it is also for helping them to get lost in new ideas, fantastical narratives, or landscapes, and to question and contest what information is presented. Therefore, graphic design is enmeshed within all aspects of social life.
Graphic design communicating with people: audiences, viewers, readers, users, receivers, visitors, participants, interacters, players, passers-by, experiencers, members of the public, communities, inhabitants, consumers, customers, subscribers, and clients. That means, graphic design is working for its focus groups, usually are clients and target audiences.
Graphic design is also a cross-disciplinary design and collaboration. It is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, geographically disributed, and collaborative. Complex problems require sophisticated responses that draw from expertise in multiple fields, therefore graphic designers need to be fluent in many fields of specialized practice, which underneath the graphic design discipline, such as advertising, experimental typography, package design, editorial design, book design, information design, web design, interactive design, identity design, movie titles, visualizing music, broadcast design, sound design, signage, type design, writing, software design, mise-en-scene, and games design, etc.
Critical Graphic Design
Why
Why doing critical graphic design? Nowadays, there are growing numbers of designers who embrace the idea of design being something that changes, mutates – even decays – over time, and the loss of control on their part that this implies. A new generation of designers is experimenting not only with what culturally connected sustainable design could look like, but also with what it doesn’t look like, because truly sustainable design allows for the contributions of mutiple authors in unexpected ways over time – the kinds of change that haven’t even been imagined yet.
Critical design emerged under such background to explore sustainabilities. However, to be considered successful in the marketplace, design has to sell in large numbers, therefore it has to be popular. Critical design can never be truly popular, and that is its fundamental problem. Objects that are critical of industry’s agenda are unlikely to be funded by industry. As a result, they will tend to remain one-offs. [11] So it is necessary to explore a new category which can be popular and sustainable to refine the avant-garde: critical graphic design.
What
What is critical graphic design? Critical graphic design integrates the purpose of critical design and graphic design together, and shapes a new and more specific purpose for its own. As has mentioned above, the purpose of critical design is making people think, raising awareness, exposing assumptions, provoking action, and sparking debate, and the purpose of graphic design is to sell or explain, to express, communicate, inform, and influence the thoughts and actions of its audience, so by absorb the two design purposes, critical graphic design comes up its own definition: critical graphic design, with the intention of business and marketing development, aims to stimulate debates or discussions by challenging the narrow social, cultural, technical or economic values within a group of people. To explain, the debate or discussion which the critical graphic design stimulates, target at a focus group of audience, usually is the audience that the clients tend to communicate with, and the debate or discussion may reveals the relationship between clients and its audience.
There are similarities between critical design and graphic design, but obviously there are also some differences between the two designs. The main difference is graphic design usually service for a client, and focus on different audiences which different clients target at, but critical design, with its specific destination, just focuses on its steady audiences which the design aims to inspire and communicate with. Such difference is not a problem in doing critical graphic design, but it indicates that not all the graphic designs can involve critical design elements in, by choosing appropriate graphic design forms to develop critical graphic design is a vital factor for making a successful critical graphic design.
How
How to do critical graphic design? The key point in doing critical graphic design is the marketing intention of the client. Whether the critical graphic design methods can be taken, all depend on values and/or audiences, which the client tends to be challenge and/or communicate. In a case where critical graphic design can be done, the role of graphic designers is in making suggestions on critical graphic design and offering experimental solutions to their clients.
Take advertising campaign as an example. As advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages that share a single idea and theme which make up an integrated marketing communication, so the target audience of an advertising campaign is very specific, and advertising campaigns can appear in different media across a specific idea, so there are host of opportunities to develop critical graphic design in an advertising campaign.
Destinations of advertising campaigns usually around: social awareness improvement, product marketing development, brands promotion, and political intervention; there are some narrow values exist in almost all the aspects which advertising campaign deals with.
An example of advertising campaign with critical design ideas – ‘Bed’, has done by DDB Hong Kong for its client McDonald’s. Working hours in Hong Kong are long, with many people working a 55-hour week. This means that most professionals get less than the recommended eight hours of sleep, which in turn leads to trouble in getting out of bed in the morning, and no breakfast became to a great health problem among Hong Kong professionals. This campaign featured a young office worker slumbering peacefully in a bed placed in a busy metro station. Beside the sleeping woman was a picture of a McDonald’s breakfast meal, with the copy: ‘Having trouble getting going in the morning? Start your day right with a McDonald’s breakfast.’
Breakfast is the meal that really defines how much energy people will have to start their day off right, but the agency’s target demographic tends to skip it, or grab a very light meal on the go. The task of this advertising was to shatter complacency and get people to ‘wake up’ to the value of a great breakfast. On the other hand, this advertising tried to lead discussions among Hong Kong professionals about their health problems which caused by the stressful working routines and long time working hours; also it tended to increase awareness of healthy working in both of employers and employees.
Figure 2. Advertising campaign - ‘Bed’, Client: McDonald’s, Agency: DDB Hong Kong
Clearly, the critical part of making a critical advertising campaign is determining a theme, as it sets the critical tone for the individual advertisements and other forms of marketing communications that will be employed. The campaign theme is the central message that will be communicated and discussed in the promotional activities, and themes are usually developed with the intention of being debated, in order to attract attentions and promote the products or ideas at the same time, discussion or debate is employed for a substantial period promotion and development.
Conclusion
Critical graphic design is a post-critical, post-disciplinary deconstruction of the all-too-serious solidity of design culture itself. Graphic designers inspired by this paper, should think about for what kind of ways the critical graphic design presents graphic design and graphic design knowledge and skills as a lively medium for use, appropriation and reinvention? Further more, to what extent does the critical graphic design breaks down contemporary graphic designers’ relative reluctance to critically inquire into the relationship between their distinctively paper- and digital-based design realms (from the making of book pages to the design of graphic identities, billboards, signage and other forms of communication) and the ways in which these creep into and through the exploration of juxtaposing parallel disciplines, critical design for instance?
References
[1] Anthony Dunne is Professor and Head of Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London. He is also a partner in the design practice Dunne & Raby, London. [2] Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, 2001, p.58 [3] Fiona Raby is a faculty member in the Design Interactions department at London's Royal College of Art. She is also a partner in the design practice Dunne & Raby, London. [4] Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, 2001, p.8 [5] Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, 2001, p.6 [6] Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, 2001, p.26 [7] Tom Eckersley is a British poster designer who drew maps for the RAF during WWII, produced posters to promote worker welfare and safety. [8] F.H.K.Henrion is a German designer who immigrated to Britain in 1939, designed campaigns about health and rationing for Britain’s Ministry of Information. [9] Abram Games is an Official War Artist during World War II; he designed over a hundred posters and later created the symbols of the BBC and the Festival of Britain. [10] Alice Twemlow, 2006, p.8 [11] Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, 2001, p.59
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