Designing as Factory Work
by Daniel van der Velden, 2006
In the NRC Handelsblad newspaper, Annette Nijs, cultural spokesperson for the VVD (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy), wrote, ‘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 (estimates vary from 30% to 45% of the professional population)’.2 According to a study by the TNO, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, the major portion of economic worth derived from design (about 2.6 billion Euros in 2001) is from visual communications.3 Can a designer, if he is in fact seen by the VVD politician as the successor to the factory worker, still encompass the strategic distinction that Alvin Lustig, Milton Glaser, Gert Dumbar, Peter Saville and Paula Scher made in the meeting rooms of their respective clients? Is a designer someone who thinks up ideas, designs, produces and sells, or someone who holds a mouse and drags objects across a computer screen?
If designers are labourers, then their labour can be purchased at the lowest possible price. The real designer then becomes his own client. Emancipation works two ways. Why should designers have the arrogance to call themselves author, editor in chief, client and initiator, if the client is not allowed to do the same? Only the price remains to be settled, and that happens wherever it is at its lowest. Parallel developments here find their logical end: the retreat of the innovative designer away from corporate culture and the client’s increasing control over the design.
Read the rest of the essay here.
0 Comments