First Things First: What (and How) We Design Matters

Last week Andy Rutledge trained his political sights on the "First Things First" manifestos, by way of Jon Tan's excellent essay on the same topic.

1964's and 2000's First Things First manifestos are, if anything, vague. But that's common among manifestos that are as brief as these are: a broad-brush critique, followed by an equally broad-brush call to action.

The FTFs are arguably the signature documents in the design world that push back against the idea that our profession is value-neutral. Tan's article puts them in their proper historical contexts, and muses on their meaning to the contemporary world of design and its current trends.

Rutledge, whose writings are no stranger to this blog, isn't getting it. After reading his essay, it became clear he just never acquired the conceptual tools needed to deal with what's being presented to him. At the risk of stating the obvious for some, I'll do my best to go through a few of Rutledge's major confusions.

The reworked “First Things First” is no less meaningless; filled with vacuous statements like, “…in favor of more lasting and democratic forms of communication…” and “The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand.” If you can tell me what this even means, I’ll give you a nickel. What is clear, however, is revealed by the part that goes, “Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed…” So consumerism is a threat that must be contested. Why? Consumerism is driven by what people want. In other words, it’s about choices. Where’s the problem? How are commercial messages undemocratic? What does that even mean?

Dominant mass communications is neither lasting nor democratic. The best example of this is TV. The occasional gimmick aside, it's entirely a transient, one-way medium with a centralized distribution model. The public influences content in only the most roundabout of ways, as we are in fact the product: our eyeball-time sold to advertisers.

The scope of debate in American society has indeed been shrinking over the past several decades. The Overton Window is an instructive metaphor. Political scientists and sociologists have long pointed out how constricted the range of our political and social discourse is, compared to most other republican democracies.

Rutledge's greedy reductionist view of how the consumer economy works is, sadly, probably all he was ever exposed to. The basic logic of it goes: consumer decides she wants something, producer learns of that want & produces it, and consumer purchases it if it meets her criteria (cost, quality, etc.). Most everything else supposedly flows from that fundamental relationship - supply/demand curves, market competition driving prices toward equilibrium, prevailing wages, and so on.

Of the many problems with that worldview, the one I want to focus on in particular is the role of advertising. People's wants don't simply appear in a vacuum. Advertisers have spent billions of dollars over the past century perfecting their abilities to not only persuade us to fulfill our wants in a particular way, but to actually create wants where there were none before. The depiction of business owners being held helpless at the mercy of the all-powerful consumer is a woefully inadequate explanation for what goes on in real life.

As the Wikipedia entry for consumerism starts out, "Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase commodity goods in ever greater amounts." To the extent that the ability to create and strongly influence the desires of the public is largely controlled by a powerful few, it should be considered undemocratic.

I think that the problem here is with the assumed definition of “democratic.” Socialists and Statists believe that democracy is best achieved by mandating policies that destroy democracy; they mistake equality of result for democratic choice or equality of opportunity. I guess that “democratic forms of communication” refers to mandating marketing messages that are crafted to counter the promotional messages offered by commercial companies. Communication that takes place in the capitalist marketplace must be balanced by anti-capitalist communication in order to achieve equity (read: democracy). Right? Did I get it wrong here?

I'm afraid he did. It actually looks like he's trying to shoehorn a caricature of left ideas about democracy into a caricature of left ideas about equality. As for equating "equality of result" and "democratic choice," I don't even know any Stalinists who would agree with that. (I wonder where my friends on the anti-statist left would fit into his categories.)

At the rist of doing some caricaturing on my own part (so correct me if I'm wrong), Rutledge is implying that market interactions (e.g. a consumer choosing a toothpaste brand) are an example of democracy. However, in the market it's not "one person = one vote"; it's more like "one dollar = one vote." The person who buys two tubes of toothpaste will have twice the market effect as someone who buys one. Considering the ludicrously top-heavy wealth distribution in the U.S., the term democracy ("power of the people") doesn't fit at all. Plutocracy ("power of the wealth") fits much better.

An example of a more democratic form of communication would be the very infrastructure on which Rutledge published his essay. Self-publishing on the Internet is much closer to that fabled marketplace of ideas - the Town Square of yore - than conventional media like TV, radio, and magazines/newspapers. An example of TV flirting with more democracy, however flawed in implementation, would be CurrentTV. However one doesn't need to experiment with that much viewer participation to move in a democratic direction. Media outlets owned and democratically operated by the employees who work there would be an improvement. (Gasp - a news outlet run by journalists? Perish the thought!)

There isn't equality of opportunity in the mass media, even if you do have the large amounts of money required to participate. That's actually one of the reasons Kalle Lasn started Adbusters. He had raised more than enough money to air some anti-logging ads to counter the pro-logging ads put on the airwaves in his home town, and every single broadcaster turned him down.

The solution to the problem of concentrated private power (corporations) dominating the airwaves isn't to introduce concentrated public power (government) and have them duke it out, but to decentralize that power to facilitate entry by smaller groups of people, perhaps right down to the individual.

Now finally, we get down to the role of the designer in all this.

Should we simply eschew commercial work and be honorably poor (and wholly dependent on our government) so that we meet the fuzzy standards laid down in these ridiculous manifestos?
[...]
Yet some seem to believe it’s an either/or situation: either you do marketing work (bad) or you do social/government work (good).

The decision of what is good and bad work is of course ultimately the decision of the designer - whether you're anti-consumerist or a free-marketeer matters. The FTFs in that sense are aimed at those of all stripes left of center. Ken Garland wasn't aiming to convince the Milton Friedmans of the design world when he penned four paragraphs in 1963, that's for sure.

I know a few of the FTF signers, and I know they don't advocate that designers become just another legion of starving artists. As I said in the beginning, what both FTFs are calling for first and foremost is a recognition and a discussion of the fact that design is not a value-neutral discipline. If you don't like the idea of Coca-Cola contract killing union workers in Colombia, then FTF would exhort you to not design for them. If you have the opportunity to veto a particularly horrendous ad technique or style, FTF would tell you to take it. We should stop thinking of ourselves as hired guns, selling our services to the highest bidder then moving on - the "it's just a job" mentality fostered in design schools and firms. We aren't automatons: we have agency not only over the kinds of gigs we take, but the manner in which we execute them.

As Jon Tan wrote, "We already apply our morality, politics, and sensibilities to our work in a multitude of ways. All the designers I know are subtle, thoughtful, detailed, scrupulous people by nature. It seems odd somehow that any of them would think their work as being apolitical. Or, to put it another way, that form matters more than content and the agenda behind it."

What we choose to design matters long after the job is complete; its social, economic, and political ramifications should weigh into consideration at least as heavily as the profit we could make from designing it. The sooner we disabuse each other of the notion that we have zero responsibility for what we design and what our clients do as a result of our designs, and the sooner we realize that our choices prefigure tomorrow's design profession and society, the better.