User:Ssstephen/projectproposal
What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does "graphic design" even mean?!????!!1!?
What do you want to make?
I want to make a piece of research about graphic design that involves ethnography, toolmaking and performance as research methods.
What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does "graphic design" even mean?!????!!1!? is an assessment of what the term "graphic design" means to its practitioners today. Through experimental ethnographic research methods and the development of reflexive tools, the project seeks to highlight and question the boundaries that exist around this apparent category. The research focuses on my own practice as well as other people and groups that identify with graphic designer as a label. The research will be both conducted and shared with interested parties in the form of the tools themselves, as well as a series of performances. There is no strict distinction between the research and its publication. The tools will be released in an iterative cycle throughout the process of the project, and the research is conducted through the performative use and development of these tools.
How do you plan to make it?
This research uses experimental ethnographic research methods and reflexive tools, as well as performative actions. Keylogging, performance of personal work habits, interviews about the manual work of "immaterial labourers", and devices that connect seemingly unrelated practices will be combined in order to uncover less obvious and less discussed aspects of what a designer is and does, as entry points to the worldview, belief systems, mythologies or ideologies of its practitioners.
More about (auto)ethnography: I have been documenting my own practices as a graphic designer for three months, and will continue to do so for the duration of the project. I am experimenting with different ways of doing this, many based on text annotations. I plan to expand the methodology further to get a wider view of the practices. I will document the practices of others, through interviews and using the tools mentioned below. I will conduct interviews with designers, architects, musicians, etc. in Ireland the Netherlands and wherever else seems relevant (for example on fiverr.com). I will record the interviews. I will have prompts to open the discussion such as reading material and weird tools to try with them. I will carry out auto-ethnographic research using experimental methods such as mouse tracking and unusual annotation methods. I will share the results of this research as a publication with a small but selected audience of people who are involved in these processes and who would benefit from it.
More about undisciplined tools: Software and hardware tools that explore the boundaries of "graphic design" as a category. For example at the boundaries between graphic design and other disciplines. At the boundaries between work and play, or between design and art. These tools malfunction in order to explore what it even means to be working. The tools aim to highlight what a graphic designer does by interacting with their user in ways that the designers standard tools do not (such as an interface to connect musical instruments to the designers workflow), or conversely by amplifying how the designer usually interacts with their tools (such as a keylogger to celebrate and focus on the use of the keyboard). The tools are digital in nature and involve software and hardware interventions into the graphic designers work.
More about performance research: I see all the methods above as having a performative element. For example the ethnographic-slash-performative act of answering my emails on a large screen in front of an audience, research which was carried out as part of this project at Leeszaal, Rotterdam West on November 7th 2023. By showing directly the work practices of graphic designers to an audience, or their interaction with the tools mentioned above, I am publishing through performance the daily activities of designers and my aim is to show these practices without the conventional lenses they are seen through. To be contrasted for example with how graphic design is presented on behance.net or in a bookshop. To highlight the mythologies.
What is your timetable?
- November: Initiate autoethnography and gather preliminary data. Early prototypes of performances and tools.
- December: Conduct interviews with designers, review findings, and plan for tool development.
- January: Prototype undisciplined tools which explore boundaries of what "graphic design" is. Publish early and often, to designers.
- February: Make connections with other disciplines, continue tool development.
- March: Prototype tools, be undisciplinary.
- April: Create and gather content of final publication which reviews both the methods and findings of research developed.
- May: Create this publication and final iterations of tools. Rehearsals of performance.
- June: Finalize publication of research directly to the relevant public and also through performance at the graduation show.
Why do you want to make it?
To explore why designers make design, based on Clifford Geertz's ideas of why humans make culture: "to affirm it, defend it, celebrate it, justify it and just plain bask in it" (Geertz, 1973). And of course this exploration can also involve less constructive actions like participating, dissociating, questioning, protesting, destroying and disregarding. From personal experience and anecdotal evidence from others, as well as an increasing literature on the topic (Pater, 2021, Lorusso, 2023), there are obviously some problems with our understanding of design today. There is a disconnect between the narratives about the practice and the effects it is known to have, on its audiences, practitioners, and society in more general terms. People are reassessing what graphic design even is and also what it can be. This shit could be better. Its urgent for the people being exploited by it, to break the inequalities it serves to maintain, to expose what it hides, to improve things that are definitely working but not in a good way.
Who can help you and how?
Marloes, I dont really know how to write a project proposal for example. Joseph and Manetta, with technical aspects of the tools, and technical approaches to documentation maybe. People involved in other practices (disciplines) who could help me explore crossing these boundaries. Writer contacts in Ireland. OSP. Michael. Jian. Frank. Jonathan. xpubs. There are probably more. Maybe I will ask Meghan Clarke I really like her work and it seems relevant.
why are these things relevant?'
Relation to previous practice and a larger context
I have worked and been trained as a graphic designer. I have also worked and been trained as a musician, a theatre maker, a teacher, a web developer. The boundaries have never been clear. I'm not sure will this make them clearer or fuzzier. Hopefully bring the fuzziness into focus, without expecting it to be clear.
Needs more previous projects and description of how they relate to this
OSP. Ruben Pater. Meghan Clarke. The context of design studios and institutions I was involved with in Ireland. The context of other workers who relate to and struggle under systems and labels like "self-employed", "freelance", "creative". This also makes me a little uncomfortable as most of these workers including me come from an extremely privileged position of literal wealth and other advantages which allow them to operate in these fields. I dont want to suggest their struggles to be worse than or even comparable to those of many others people currently on this planet. But the topic relates to larger societal developments of precarity that are worth examining and challenging, so I will do this from my own practice and experiences within the creative industries.
References/bibliography
Anteby, Michel. “The `Moralities’ of Poaching: Manufacturing Personal Artifacts on the Factory Floor.” Ethnography, vol. 4, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 217–39. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381030042004.
Berlant, Lauren Gail. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Duke University Press, 2022.
Certeau, Michel de, et al. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1. paperback pr., 8. [Repr.], Univ. of California Press, 20.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books, 1973.
Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. 1st ed., The MIT Press, 2015. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029513.001.0001.
Libre Graphics Research Unit. 16 Case-Stories Re-Imagining the Practice of Lay-Out. 2012, https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/lgru/co-position-catalog.
Lorusso, Silvio. What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion. Set Margins’ publications, 2023.
Pater, Ruben. Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design and How to Escape from It. Valiz, 2021.