The Designer as…
interview with Steven McCarthy by Maddalena Dalla Mura
October 13, 2013, via skype, St. Paul (Minnesota) – Udine (Italy)
Your book The Designer as Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator, and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating was released this year (BIS Publisher). As the title suggests, it deals with different facets of the designer’s role. The main thread connecting all of these facets is design authorship. So let’s begin from this notion, and your interest in it.
Steven McCarthy: As you can tell by the book’s introduction, it is a topic I have been interested in for a long time, beginning with an exhibition I co-curated in 1995-1996, called Designer as Author: Voices and Visions, with my colleague at the time, Cristina de Almeida. The idea we had been talking about for a year or so concerned our observation of the confluence of activities like designing, writing, self-publishing, and of designers’ increasing engagement with content and meaning. We therefore sent out a call for entries for a juried show. We were amazed at the reception: there were a lot of submissions, especially by people with big reputations and at the vanguard of that kind of engagement. In February 1996 the exhibition opened, just two months before the appearance, on the pages of Eye magazine, of Michael Rock’s influential article “The Designer as Author” – he mentioned our exhibit but just in passing, he didn’t even mention our names. Anyway, my personal interest in design authorship has been there for a long time. And I have myself continued to make work that is self-authored, where I define the topic and give it form; this kind of work often takes the form of books or other kinds of alternative narratives, like short videos, posters, web sites and so on. Some of these works are now in good museum, archive and library collections.
The first chapter in your book opens with the paragraph “Design authorship explained”. Why did you feel the need to explain an idea which is quite widespread nowadays?
SM: Design authorship sometimes defies definition because of its multi-faceted aspects and that’s why I state in the book that it is not a style, nor a genre, but it is really a kind of engagement. It is an expansion of the designer’s voice from being an allegedly neutral or objective form-giver and problem solver – always client-oriented – to being more engaged with what his or her designs mean, with who they are for, why they are being made – the message, the audience, the context –, and to finally initiate their own work. In design authorship, there might not even be a client, there might purely be the designer’s message and voice which wants to get out there. But authorship can also regard client-oriented work when the designer personally engages in a project because s/he views the communication as a shared enterprise, and not just the client’s one-way message. So again, it is a complex thing and there are many definitions and no single correct one.
Is it important to advocate design authorship today, two decades or so after the idea of authorship as such emerged and spread?
SM: Well, as you say, it was certainly in the mid-1990s that a critical mass developed about these issues, not least due to the introduction of desktop publishing, which, particularly thanks to the Macintosh, gave designers the integrative tool, where writing and designing and printing could all be manifested in the same device. The nice thing about the Macintosh was that in a single integrated platform you could write, edit, proof, design, illustrate, scan and do photography, as well as use a laser printer to make small additional prints for yourself. This is why in the book’s introduction I use the year 1984 as a convenient starting point of design authorship and I think it holds up, although you could find points earlier than that too. Of course you can see evidence of authorship that goes as far back as the nineteenth century – think of William Morris. In the 1990s, however, there were a number of projects, articles, exhibitions where people were talking about it and the phenomenon was noticed. What happened then was more self-awareness, critical mass, and a confluence of different publications and voices. After the intense debate and interest in the 1990s and in the 2000s, people moved on to other things. They were interested in interactive media, the web, flash-based animation, and social network gaining tools. But even there you can find evidence of authorship. So, to answer your question, my book attempts both to offer a historical bolstering of the theories around design authorship and to acknowledge and discuss design authorship as not tied to a medium or a process, as open-ended, flexible and more about an approach or an attitude.
In the introduction you also recall how the very first relationship you had with the idea of authorship happened when you were writing and preparing your thesis, for which you were required to find a topic, develop research, take photographs, and so on. Now that you are an educator, do you think design authorship as a concept and approach is particularly valuable in the field of education?
SM: Absolutely. I think authorship should be an integral part of design education. I usually have both my graduate and undergraduate students define their own topics, identify an area of inquiry they want to work on and investigate it, research it, give it a visual form. So when we have critiques it is not just about how the works look but it is about what they say, mean, why they say it, and who they are for. I think that this kind of assignment offers students the possibility of getting used to thinking more critically from an earlier age. It gives them more empathy. Even if in the future they will do just typical client-based work – which most of them will likely do – they’ll have an expanded tool kit and an enlarged voice. I think that voice can also contribute to issues involving ethics, morality, politics, society.
Aspects of authorship you discuss include the participation in and the curation of design exhibitions. Can you briefly explain how you view these activities as design authorship?
SM: Design is both a noun and a verb, the object or the subject. So on the one side you have the design as the object on show, the authored work, the manifestation of the voice of the individual designer. On the other side, or on another level if you wish, you have the designer-curator, who defines a brief around which items are collected, selected and exhibited. In that respect I define the curated exhibition as an act of meta-authorship. Curating itself is an act of authorship in the way that the projects are aggregated and displayed. The exhibition can be about authorship and as authorship. I argue that the curator’s role is at a higher, more abstract level where he or she creates a scenario, establishes a set of conditions, a theme. In that way an exhibit becomes more intellectual and expansive than the mere portfolio show. I think that the curatorial activity is fascinating in that it occupies these hybrid states of being, both about something but also of something, both subject and object.
(Continued)
