‘What’s the alternative? (to the system)’ : OccupyDesign

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‘What’s the alternative? (to the system)’ : OccupyDesign

By Marilyn ⋅ January 30, 2012 ⋅ Post a comment

Filed Under Activism, Design, Graphic Design, Marilyn Zapf, Occupy, Occupy Design

// ‘Beauty… invites a bureaucracy’ wrote architectural historian Arindam Dutta.1 Although Dutta’s words were crafted in reference to Britain’s Nineteenth Century Department of Science and Art, their implication reaches well beyond the DSA’s patronage of such events and institutions as the Great Exhibition, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Royal College of Art. Indeed, the political, educational, and social movements of today make Dutta’s statement seem tame. No, beauty demands a bureaucracy!

…Or such was the impression walking into the launch of Occupy Design UK this weekend.

A brief inventory of the materials used to produce the two day event held in The Rag Factory, just off of London’s own Brick Lane, reveals the typical props of a corporate team-building exercise: (countless) multicoloured post-it notes, a projector for power-point presentations, and a pad of newsprint for documenting mind maps. But the ambition of Occupy Design UK could not have been further away from the management tactics of an HR department.

Over 50 practicing designers, design writers, students and curious supporters converged to brainstorm about what role design had to play in the Occupy movement. Offering design support to UK protesters, building Occupy-based networks within the design community, and bridging the gap between protesters and supporters were among the goals generated at one of the first sessions on Saturday. A practical workshop on poster development was offered as well. Tony Credland and Glenn Orton, of Cactus Network, were joined by Noel Douglas to provide designers with a creative brief, a graphic design history of activism, a critique session on slogans and imagery for posters, and plans for screen printing the outcomes over the course of the upcoming week.

However, as the title of another session – ‘How could Occupy transform Design?’ – suggests, the interest of Occupy Design UK reaches beyond a unidirectional support system – creating the opportunity for an occupation of the design practice itself.

Former RCA Communication Art and Design graduate Bianca Elzenbaumer led a Sunday session questioning the systems of design. Participants discussed how designers could sustain social design not supported by ‘the market’ and change what Elzenbaumer called ‘the precarious working conditions of designers’: the capitalist-driven, competitive atmosphere found in design schools and offices, and the ingrained ambition of designers for success.

But somewhere between the call of ‘Designers for Occupy!’ and ‘Occupy Design!’ lies a point of great tension – it is the same uneasiness experienced when one realizes florescent sticky notes, sub-committees, and power-points lie behind the outward front of Occupy. A creative brief for a ‘We are the 99%’ poster intuitively seems against the main principles of the group.

Confirming such friction is media theorist McKenzie Wark’s definition of occupation as ‘conceptually the opposite of a movement’ because whereas ‘a movement aim[s] for some internal consistency within itself but uses space just as a place to park its ranks’ an occupation ‘has no internal consistency in its ranks but chooses meaningful spaces which have significant resonance into the abstract terrain of symbolic geography’.2 Occupy seems to exist in a space between a movement and an occupation – creating internal consistency, all the while resisting the temptation to impose hierarchy on the abstract.

In other words, the tension between Occupy and the post-it note indicative bureaucracy may not be a bad thing – for it is exactly such ambiguity that prompts bullet points like, ‘What’s the alternative? (to the system)’ to be scrawled in blue marker on newsprint and taped to the wall, as at the Occupy Design UK launch. Questioning the system is exactly what Occupy is about.

When economist David Harvey reflected on the challenges facing Occupy, he clarified: ‘All this has to be democratically assembled into a coherent opposition, which must also freely contemplate what an alternative city, an alternative political system and, ultimately, an alternative way of organizing production, distribution and consumption for the benefit of the people, might look like’.3 According to Harvey, the systems at the heart of capitalism are the same ones of central concern to the design practice.

And on that note, I will add my own slogan to the pile: Design demands a bureaucracy!

Footnotes

1. Dutta, Arindam, The Bureaucracy of Beauty (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 4-5.

2. Wark, McKenzie ‘How to Occupy an Abstraction’ Verso Books: Blog (3 October 2011)

3. Harvey, David. ‘The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis’ Verso Books: Blog (28 October 2011)

Further Information

Occupy Design UK webpage

Occupy Design: Building a Visual Language for the 99% (San Francisco hub)

Creative Review article on Occupy Design UK launch

Unmaking Things article on Occupy LSX as an illustration of Ken Garland’s First Things First manifesto