User:Yiorgos Bagakis/Essays/outline essay2
The death of the designer as an author and the birth of the reader as a designer. How the internet has brought the rise of a more powerful reader and transformed the designer profession.
Designer as author by Michael Rock - eye Magazine “What does it really mean to call for a graphic designer to be an author?” Michael Rock “new approaches to the issue of the design process in a profession traditionally associated more with the communication rather than the origination of messages.” Michael Rock
What is an author? Significant texts on the subject:
- Michel Foucault used the rhetorical question 'What is an Author?' in 1969
- 'Death of the Author', proposed by Roland Barthes in 1968
- Derrida’s Deconstruction theories
The designer as an Author
- The designer as an intermediary between clients and audience/consumer/readers
- Katherine McCoy's prescient image of designers moving beyond problem-solving and by 'authoring additional content and a self-conscious critique of the message. . .
- The promotion of the notion by educational institutions during the 90s. (Cranbrook, Saint Martins etc)
- MFA designer as author (Steven Heller)
- Designers artists – self initiated projects
Things have changed dramatically since the advent of web2.0
- The reader, the user and the consumer
- What is an internet user
- The amateur user becomes a hacker – modification of digital products
- Reading texts online vs reading printed texts –hypertexts and intertextuality
- Internet Blogs - journalism challenged – the user as designer and author.
- Myspace Users are designing their own web pages
- Template websites that allow users to design webpages up to a certain degree
The new elevated status of Designer
- The designer as a craftsman – a thing of the past?
- New design disciplines - interaction design – designing services
- The engineer as designer –the programmer as designer –the designer programmer
Conclusion
- Democratization of media. Less passive audiences?
- The designer has a new role. Anew engagement with technology
- Design as a more interdisciplinary profession
- Homogenized aesthetics. Diminished originality.
- Cacophony and information mayhem.
Additional stuff:
“Text became a kind of private property, owned by the author, and a critical theory developed which reinforced that relationship, searching for keys to the text in the life and intention of its writer. With the rise of scientific method, on the other hand, scientific texts and mathematical proofs were no longer seen as authored texts but as discovered truths. The scientist revealed an extant phenomenon, a fact anyone faced with the same conditions would have uncovered. Therefore the scientist and mathematician could be the first to discover a paradigm, and lend their name to it, but could never claim authorship over it.” Michael Rock