The Designer as Producer
Ellen Lupton
The slogan “designer as author” has enlivened debates about the future of graphic design since the early 1990s. The word “author” suggests agency, intention, and creation, as opposed to the more passive functions of consulting, styling, and formatting. Authorship is a provocative model for rethinking the role of the graphic designer at the start of the millennium; it hinges, however, on a nostalgic ideal of the writer or artist as a singular point of origin.1 The avant-garde movements of the 1910s and 1920s critiqued the ideal of authorship as a process of dredging unique forms from the depths of the interior self. Artists and intellectuals challenged romantic definitions of art by plunging into the worlds of mass media and mass production. As an alternative to designer as “author,” I propose designer as “producer.” Production is a concept embedded in the history of modernism. Avant-garde artists and designers treated the techniques of manufacture not as neutral, transparent means to an end, but as devices equipped with cultural meaning and aesthetic character. In 1934, the German critic Walter Benjamin wrote “The Author as Producer,” a text that attacked the conventional view of authorship as a purely literary enterprise.2 He exclaimed that new forms of communication— film, radio, advertising, newspapers, the illustrated press—were melting down traditional artistic genres and corroding the borders between writing and reading, authoring and editing.
Benjamin was a Marxist, committed to the notion that the technologies of manufacture should be owned by the workers who operate them. In Marxist terminology, the “means of production” are the heart of human culture and should be collectively owned. Benjamin claimed that writing (and other arts) is grounded in the material structures of society, from the educational institutions that foster literacy to the publishing networks that manufacture and distribute texts. In detailing an agenda for a politically engaged literary practice, Benjamin demanded that artists must not merely adopt political “content,” but must revolutionize the means through which their work is produced and distributed.
Benjamin attacked the model of the writer as an “expert” in the field of literary form, equipped only to craft words into texts and not to question the physical life of the work. The producer must ask, Where will the work be read? Who will read it? How will it be manufactured? What other texts and pictures will surround it? Benjamin argued that artists and photographers must not view their task as solely visual, lest they become mere suppliers of form to the existing apparatus of bourgeois publishing:
What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful value. But we shall make this demand most emphatically when we—the writers—take up photography. Here, too, therefore, technical progress is for the author as producer the foundation of political progress.3
Benjamin claimed that to bridge the divide between author and publisher, author and reader, poet and popularizer is a revolutionary act because it challenges the professional and economic categories upon which the institutions of “literature” and “art” are erected. To enact this revolutionary shift, the author must embrace the new technologies of communication.
Benjamin’s Marxist emphasis has a tragic edge when viewed from the vantage point of today. By the time he wrote “The Author as Producer,” abstract art was already at variance with Stalin’s state-enforced endorsement of social realism. Benjamin applauded dada and surrealism for challenging the institutions of art, and yet, such experimental forms were forbidden in the Soviet state he so admired. Benjamin’s theory of the author as producer remains relevant today, however, as writers, artists, designers, and editors challenge the existing structures of media and publishing, opening new paths of access to the means of manufacture and dissemination.
In the 1920s, Benjamin met László Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian constructivist who had become a prominent figure at the Bauhaus. Benjamin’s 1928 collection of essays One-Way Street reflects on experimental typography and the proliferation of such commercial forms as the pamphlet, poster, and advertisement, which were upending the classical book as literature’s sacred vessel. Benjamin wrote, “Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form.”4 Describing the relation of authorship to technology, Benjamin predicted that the writer will begin to compose his work with a typewriter instead of a pen when “the precision of typographic forms has entered directly into the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces might then be needed.”5
Such “new systems” are, of course, ubiquitous today in the form of software for word processing and desktop publishing. These tools have altered the tasks of graphic designers, enlarging their powers as well as burdening them with more kinds of work to do. Such is the rub of despecialization. Benjamin celebrated the proletarian ring of the word “production,” and the word carries those connotations forward into the current period. Within the professional context of graphic design, “production” is linked to the preparation of “artwork” for mechanical reproduction, rather than to the intellectual realm of “design.” Production belongs to the physical activity of the base, the factory floor: it is the traditional domain of the pasteup artist, the stripper, the letterer, the typesetter. The “desktop revolution” that began in the mid-1980s brought these roles back into the process of design. The proletarianization of the editorial process offers designers a new crack at materialism, a chance to reengage the physical aspects of our work. Whereas the term “author,” like “designer,” suggests the cerebral workings of the mind, “production” privileges the activity of the body. Production is rooted in the material world. It values things over ideas, making over imagining, practice over theory.
When Benjamin called for authors to become producers, he did not mean for them to become factory workers alienated from the form and purpose of the manufactured thing. Likewise, the challenge for educators today is to help designers become the masters, not the slaves, of technology. There exist opportunities to seize control—intellectually and economically—of the means of production and to share that control with the reading public, empowering them to become producers as well as consumers of meaning. As Benjamin phrased it in 1934, the goal is to turn “readers or spectators into collaborators.”6 His words resonate in current educational models, which encourage students to view the reader as a participant in the construction of meaning.
• How can schools help students along such a path at this critical juncture in our history?
• Language is a raw material. Enhance students’ verbal literacy, to give them the confidence to work with and as editors without forcing them to become writers.
• Theory is a practice. Foster literacy by integrating the humanities into the studio. Infuse the act of making with the act of thinking.
• Writing is a tool. Casual writing experiences encourage students to use writing as a device for “prototyping,” to be employed alongside sketching, diagramming, and other forms of conceptualization.
• Technology is physical. Whether the product of our work is printed on paper or emitted from a screen, designers deal with the human, material response to information.
• The medium is on the menu. Familiarize students with the many ways that information and ideas are disseminated in contemporary life. Give them the tools to find their rightful place in the food chain.
The power of the term “author”—its cultural authority—lies in its connection to the written text. In order for designers to take charge of the content and social function of their work, they need not become fluent writers, no more than an art director must become a professional photographer or illustrator in order to use these media effectively. In the business of film, a producer brings together individuals with a broad range of skills—writing, directing, acting, cinematography, editing, and so on—in a work whose authorship is shared. For the designer to become a producer, he or she must have the skills to begin directing content, by critically navigating the social, aesthetic, and technological systems across which communications flow.
Postscript, February 2005
I wrote this essay in the summer of 1997, just before embarking on a major shift in my career: the decision to become chair of the design program at Maryland Institute College of Art (in addition to serving as curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, a post I have held since 1992). I wrote the essay before ever having taught a studio design class. Although I had taught many courses in design history and theory at the undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate levels, I had never taught design students about how to design.
It is interesting, thus, to look back eight years later at an essay conceived as my own personal manifesto for graphic design education. The idea of production as a mode of authorship has, indeed, proven hugely important to my work as an educator. But in light of my own involvement with authorship in the conventional sense, I have engaged my students much less with writing than I would have expected. I have focused, instead, on making things.
In Maryland Institute College of Art’s recently launched graduate program, we are experimenting with what I call underground capitalism. An ongoing project of our graduate studio is buy*product, where students conceive and produce original products and offer them for sale at various venues, from local shops and the Internet to tables set up in the campus café. The products range from T-shirts and bound books to home furnishings and housewares, all conceived from a graphical point of view (image + message + material). For their thesis work, some students are developing products that they first “tested” in the arena of buy*product into goods to be manufactured and marketed commercially. The students have become producers in much the sense described at the end of my essay, with an emphasis on the materiality of the end result. Our studio is equipped not just with the expected computers, but with a silkscreen setup, a sewing machine, a spiral-binder, and a Xyron 900 sticker-maker.
buy*product inspires students in ways that traditional assignments involving hypothetical clients simply don’t. It is an idea that could be easily implemented at any design program. The buy*product experience has given me a new list of bullet points to include in my productivist manifesto. Creating products and offering them for sale, even in a localized, small-scale way, has brought me to the following insights about design:
• Shopping is interactive. Watching people walk into our “store” and pick up objects, open them up, turn them over, and then decide whether or not to buy them, is at least as entertaining as having an in-class critique.
• Collaboration is in everyone’s best interest. We all talk about collaboration in art school, but it’s hard to make it work because students want to have control (i.e., authorship) of their own work. buy*product fosters collaboration effortlessly, because the project can’t succeed without group effort. As the old cliché goes, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In other words . . .
• You can’t have a bake sale with just one brownie. buy*product combines individual, private authorship with intense collaboration. Each student has ownership of his or her own contribution (including the risk of financial loss and gain), yet each student is fundamentally connected to everyone else, because the success of the overall project relies on the profusion, variety, and connectedness of the goods on display.
• Design is social. Design lives in society, it builds society, and it needs a society of its own in order to flourish. buy*product draws together our own little community of design students, and at the same time it invites in people from other communities (fine arts students, faculty and staff from across the school, the general public) to experience design in a vivid way. Hands-off design exhibitions fail to engage these publics so directly. buy*product actually helps people understand what designers do.
Walter Benjamin may have found the capitalistic bent of all of this a bit repulsive. Looking back at the avant-garde design productions of the 1920s, however, one can note that much of the work we find most inspiring was done in a capitalistic framework. The brilliant posters that Rodchenko and Mayakovsky created in the early 1920s served to promote commercial goods that competed with privately produced merchandise. (Lenin allowed limited free enterprise during the early 1920s in order to jump-start the Soviet economy.) Kurt Schwitters published his magazine Merz in order to promote his ideas to the international avant-garde; he sold subscriptions and advertising space to make it all possible, and that commercial aspect did nothing to degrade the final result. At the Bauhaus, graphic design was used to publish, promote, and sell the school’s products and ideas more than it was considered an artistic vocabulary in its own right. Graphic design emerged as a powerful medium at the Bauhaus because it had a powerful function.
Notes
1. Michael Rock offers a critical history of “authorship” in “The Designer as Author,” originally published in Eye 5, no. 20 (Spring 1996): 44–53 and reprinted in this volume.
2. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 220–38.
3. Benjamin, 230.
4. From “One-Way Street,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 77. My attention was drawn to Benjamin’s acquaintance with Moholy-Nagy in a lecture given by Frederic Schwartz at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 21, 1997.
5. Benjamin, 79.
6. Benjamin, 233.