Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility

Edited by Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne. NY: Allworth Press, 2003. 259 pp. Paperback, $19.95. ISBN 1-58115-265-5.

Reviewed by Aaris Sherin, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: aaris.sherin@uni.edu.

With responsibilities to their clients as well as to consumers, designers are increasingly left to provide their own ethical bearings in a world of commerce sped up by telecommunications and diminished by global production. By what standards should designers work and live today? How can "good design" join forces with "good business" in a context that is post-Enron and post-World.Com? The credibility of big business (however little it usually has) is all but nonexistent now, so that even the gullible public has grown cynical because of the scandalous stories about the backroom dealings of American business. Corporate America, if ever it was otherwise, is less and less convincing in its tragicomic pantomime as the Savior of Capitalism who supposedly "trickles down" manna to the less fortunate. All the while, design and designers have unwitting contributed to this epidemic of corruption and misrepresentation. So how does a designer who wants to be socially moral survive in the murky complexity of today's market and client base? What role can education play in preparing future designers to maneuver in this new reality? Increasingly, it seems imperative that designers must be better prepared to defend their ethical standards. Might we be entering an era when standing up for ones principles and promoting the health of society will become as important to designersłor more sołas the formal skills of placing type in relation to an image? This anthology is a wide-ranging survey of the means by which design professionals and design educators confront these issues. In the introduction, Steven Heller, who art directs the New York Times Book Review, talks about how "good design" and "good citizenship" should ideally overlap, and then asks provocative questions about what it means to be a designer in relation to the basic needs of society. As Heller suggests, if we ask what it means to be a "good designer," we must also answer what "good design" is, and, as we all know, the latter, no less than the former, is fraught by all kinds of loopholes and Catch-22s. Co-editors Heller and Vienne have assembled a diverse and sometimes antipodal mix of opinions by contemporary designers. Vienne, for example, describes the little-known efforts of Sara Little Turnbull, who has held sway over top executives for the last 50 years, and whose work resides somewhere between that of a consultant and cultural anthropologist. She also interviews Kalle Kasn, founder and publisher of Adbusters and Adbusters Media Foundation. Interspersed between interviews and essays by Vienne and Heller themselves are dozens of wide-ranging essays, including rants and musings by design-related authors like Katherine McCoy, Maud Lavin, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Matt Soar and Susan Szenasy. This book would be invaluable to design students and young professionals as they enter the work force, but its contents are likely to also appeal to anyone who is interested in the social responsibility of designers, especially those who currently face these same perplexing issues in professional practice.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, Winter