DESIGN DISKURS
Ruben Pater deals with the cultural bias in graphic design, the role of graphic design in capitalism. In the interview with Felix Kosok, the Dutch designer and author speaks about the lacking solid design education, the responsibility in visualizing gender and designing clever instead of always new.
Felix Kosok: Dear Ruben, just like myself, you started out as a graphic designer but then moved on towards journalism and writing about the political implications of design. What led you off the path of graphic design?
Ruben Pater: Actually, I would never describe myself as a journalist or writer. Because most of my time is still spent designing. It’s this strange thing, that if you write a book about design, then you fall into the category of design writing, design journalism or theory, and then you cannot possibly also be a designer. But I still consider myself a designer because that’s how I spent most of my time, next to writing and teaching. I did spend more than ten years working for studios, commercial studios, advertising, all these things. I know how it is to work on weekends, to work late, to have good and bad clients. So, I am never only looking at design from a theoretical perspective. But if you’re asking me about the shift towards journalism, this happened during my master at the Sandberg Institute in 2010. This allowed for some reflection and to look at the things that I was good at and maybe also the things that I didn’t like so much.
Felix Kosok: During your master at Sandberg, you focused your practice on a combination of design and journalism?
Ruben Pater: I always have enjoyed writing and teaching. But you’re not asked to write when you’re a designer. It’s always been a part of me, and maybe I would have ended up being a journalist. However, during my time at Sandberg I ended up doing a lot of journalism projects, a lot of research, a lot of writing.
Felix Kosok: One of your earlier projects which comes to my mind that includes research was the drone survival guide. It’s a visual information guide that helps identify a drone, especially the ones used in war zones. And it’s printed on a reflective material, which relates to the idea of reflecting the drone’s camera.
Ruben Pater: This was a project I did after finishing my master. I was still searching for my next step in design. I was still working part-time at a studio at the time. I wanted to work for think tanks and in journalism. But as a designer, you’re only seen as someone who comes up with the graphics, not as someone who also provides the content. If you do both the research and the design, they find it hard to fit you into their way of working. The drone project was basically something I just did because I had this idea. So, I just went out and designed it. And that gave me a lot of publicity because it was picked up by a blog in the United States. That project was a starting point of doing exhibitions and doing more projects in the field of design and journalism.
“I know how it is to work on weekends, to work late, to have good and bad clients.”
Felix Kosok: Can you describe what the project was about?
Ruben Pater: I called it a 21st century kind of bird watching. If we look up, and we see a silhouette of a drone, we’ll know where it's from, if it’s armed or not, and how to respond to that kind of threat. It was basically a survival guide based on different online sources about tactics for how to hack drones or to hide from them. It’s a visual map on the scale of the most used types.
Felix Kosok: Did you try to apply for jobs at design agencies after this project?
Ruben Pater: I was working part-time at a studio and quit a few years later to focus on my own work. I was still working because I was finalizing a project for the Biennale in Istanbul. That was a nice project that I got to do in the context of a last studio work. I think it was in 2014. Since the drone survival guide came out in 2012, I think for two years I stayed working. And then I had the opportunity to do other things, teaching for example.
Felix Kosok: How is your experience with design education in the Netherlands? Do you think that design academies prepare young designers properly for the future?
Ruben Pater: That’s a big question! First of all, there are many types of design schools. You have the engineering kind, you have the artistic kinds. And then you have schools that educate designers in that kind of production mode of doing web banners and UX design. The contexts are too broad to make a statement about design education in general.
Felix Kosok: Then let’s focus on the type of design you’re doing. What did you encounter while teaching? Were the students receptive to your approach of mixing research with graphic design? Or was it something that they had to learn?
Ruben Pater: Most of my teaching in The Hague is mentoring graduation projects. So, the students already do their own work and I can just advise them and ask them questions, give them references. In other assignments, students don’t really have to create their own content for me. I just want them to be clever and think about how they approach things. The schools that I taught at are more internationally focused. And there it’s already quite normal for the first year to make projects with their own narrative. A lot of design schools already assume an active stance from the designer.
Felix Kosok: Definitely. I also have some design schools from Germany in mind, that train the students like that.
Ruben Pater: But there’s something I have been noticing recently in the Netherlands, and I wonder how it is abroad. I see two movements now in design education. On the one hand there are smaller, local schools, that are struggling to get enough funding and therefore are connecting more and more with management and marketing schools. The design education there is focusing on the commercial aspects of design thinking and market research. And on the other hand, we have the small, international, artistic schools, that are moving more and more towards fine arts. Some of my students now are graduating with work that could probably be better classified as fine art. What’s lacking is that middle ground of solid design work.
“The fragmentation of the profession can make it more difficult to have the big discussions: Why do we design? Where do we want this to go?”
Felix Kosok: I would agree with your observation. In Germany, it’s mostly the private design schools that teach their students a strategic approach to design, that still promises those students well paid jobs in design management. And the art schools that also teach graphic design are becoming more artistic and experimental, also socially driven.
Ruben Pater: Well, it’s a bit of a shame because the worlds seems to become more separated. Either you’re in the commercial world or in the artistic world. But I think both worlds have a lot to offer. So, I think it’s important as a designer to understand the diversity of the design world. The fragmentation of the profession can make it more difficult to have the big discussions: Why do we design? Where do we want this to go?
Felix Kosok: Sometimes a common language is even missing to communicate with each other, which is very important. In France, they have this model, that if you work as a professional graphic designer, you really must decide if you want to work for the industry or if you want to work for the cultural sector, and there’s no mixing. Somehow, you’re morally tainted if you work for the industry. What do you think about?
Ruben Pater: I must say that in the Netherlands, this has not been my experience. Some of my best clients and some of my best work came from working for the industry. In the cultural sector, there’s lots of big ego involved. People really believe that you should be so lucky to work for, let’s say, a museum, for very little money. I found the atmosphere not very generous. It’s a very exclusive environment where you’re either in or out. And I always felt as an outsider, even though I have worked for the cultural sector and have spent enough time in and around the art world. Also, if you look at the material basis of the cultural sector, most of the money from the museums still comes from the same fossil fuel sourced companies.
The relationship to the industry is at least a bit more transparent with that. If you work in Wolfsburg or Stuttgart, it’s clear: They make cars and you as a designer are employed directly or indirectly for that industry. But whether you like it or not, if you work for a fancy museum with a very political program, that same museum might still be funded by the industry, tax money that comes from coal mining, etc. So at least in the working relation to the industry there’s this transparency where the designer still has that role to oversee a kind of mechanical or large-scale production. Currently, this is too polluting, and we should not be working for such companies as designers, but in the case of renewable energy, at least there is a clear relationship with the production and the role of the designer. While in the cultural sector, there’s lots of artistic and authored work done by designers. But ultimately, the work is more performative than functional, it’s all about the ego. But I think there are many different power structures at play besides cultural versus commercial clients.
Felix Kosok: It’s even not only more transparent to work for industries, but maybe it’s also the place where designers could have an influence on the way our industries are shaped.
Ruben Pater: I doubt if designers ever will have that kind of influence.
“Different classes, genders, and ethnicities are portrayed and ultimately constructed in the media.”
Felix Kosok: Then let’s talk about your first book, “The Politics of Design”. A book that really inspired me to do my own research into the political dimension of design. In your book, how do you understand the influence that graphic design has on us? How do you understand, let’s call it the political dimension of graphic design? How does it shape our societies?
Ruben Pater: What I discuss in my first book is not only design, but visual communication. Visual communication has such a strong influence on us, because we create identities, and we create categories of identities through media. This has been pointed out by critical authors since the 1970s. Different classes, genders and ethnicities are portrayed and ultimately constructed in the media. For example, from a very young age, our understanding of gender is performed through the media we consume. Kids learn gender from television programs, from advertisements and consumer goods: How gender talks, how gender dresses and how it is performed. A lot of that is decided by designers. We are the ones responsible for creating a lot of images out there of gendered or racialized people. But we don’t learn about those things at design schools. We should take our responsibilities seriously. This is what the book basically reflects on. And it uses a lot of visual examples, because if you buy a cultural studies book, there’s almost no images. But I think we as designers understand things better through images and through this reflection on the images we create.
Felix Kosok: I can confirm this, having read both your books. It’s always a very nice and very smart combination of text and images. It’s all about seeing the structures we are enforcing in our own work in the end. You continue your analysis of design’s systemic relationship to politics and our modern societies in your second book. “CAPS LOCK” looks at design’s entanglement with capitalism. Simple question: How is design related to capitalism?
Ruben Pater: Actually, in many, many ways. But the main idea of the book is that this already starts at the level of the state that creates the conditions for capitalism. I live in the Netherlands, you live in Germany, both capitalist countries, which is a system of free enterprise and supply and demand. That system can only function with all the documents, whether they are brands, advertising, but also coins, bank notes, maps, financial documents. All these things are needed to organize that system. And they are all designed. But that is not where design originated as a profession. A designer was somebody who prepares the artistic work for mass production. As opposed to the craftsman who made pieces by hand in small quantities. And because we as designers are so good at this, we became involved in things like market demand, marketing, production. The book is like a journey through these areas. And it also concluded that there’s many other aspects of design related to economics that I had not foreseen when I started my research. And that can also provide us with other ways of, let’s say, responding.
“As long as infinite growth is the logic of design, we won’t change anything.”
Felix Kosok: That’s a very powerful outlook. Because I myself as a designer feel like an intrinsic optimism towards my own work. I still believe in the power of design to change things. Yet when I encountered critical theory or a critique towards design, at first, it felt really grim, pessimistic even. The whole practice of design is so much entrenched in capitalism. It seems like we would have to get rid of the whole system of capitalism and, consequently, of design. But you described it as a way to design these things differently.
Ruben Pater: That’s where things get complicated. This whole question of how design should change or how we could change. The whole point is that I’m writing about design because I’m a designer. But what I am describing is not necessarily a design, but how design is related to all of these power structures. My main reason to write this book is that we are faced with a climate crisis. There’s a very simple calculation: When the average person in the world lives as a European, we need three planets. Capitalism is a system of infinite economic growth; how do we stop this? Design is still involved in the production and the promotion of new products. There’s probably no design school that would tell its students that they can’t design anything new anymore. It’s design’s relation to the idea of continuous growth, the misconception, that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet, that still defines design today. As long as infinite growth is the logic of design, we won’t change anything.
We need to conceptually translate a different idea of design into our everyday practice. And that’s going to be very difficult. Because I cannot change, what the political leaders are doing in my country. I cannot change the fact that they’re still subsidizing fossil fuels with 30 billion euros every year. I would like to, but this is out of my agency. Voting every four years is not enough. So, I must find a way to change something through my work as a citizen. We shouldn’t design something that only needs to generate new products and ever new commodities. Instead, we should think about how our design can inform people, or how our design could take care of the already built environment and the commodities we already have. Instead of throwing something away, we should ask ourselves: Can we fix it? Can we give it a new function? Can we start designing things that are not using these minerals that are so toxic and difficult to mine?
Felix Kosok: A lot of this relates to the idea of the professional designer, or rather to design by non-designers. Because many people, mostly in the global south, already design like that on a daily basis. In India, there is this thing called “Jugaad”. Improvised design or everyday design. But we in the global north do it as well: When I use a coffee cup as a toothbrush holder, for example. There are so many more modes of designing out there. We as professional designers have to get uncomfortable in our own design practice again and find new modes of working and designing.
Ruben Pater: What I try to do in the book is to historically analyze different aspects of design and then find studios that have tried to do it differently. Ultimately it comes down to a personal question about what kind of life and what kind of income you need, your family, the people around you, what you find important and how urgent it is for you to take action in this climate crisis. What can I do individually, and not just as a designer? Designing a poster that calls people’s attention for the climate crisis can give an important signal but is not actually the most effective way to deal with this crisis. In the end, the outcome is not necessarily designed. The outcome is so much more.
And that’s also what the studios I researched talk about. How do you work? How do you spend your money? You start a cooperative instead of a business. You work only with local suppliers. You make less, but you are more involved in helping other people to express their creativity through workshops. Then you already start to move away from this traditional relationship of the designer and the client because we start including the whole of society. And then you finally realize that many of these aspects of design are already practiced everywhere in the world. Still, the idea of a de-growth economy, that we will have to do with less and how we design that, is very central to my understanding of how design can be part of that transition.
“We cannot solve the climate crisis by changing the Pantone color, or using recycled paper alone.”
Felix Kosok: Since modern times there’s this element in design which is always focused on solving a problem. And maybe even though the climate crisis is like the biggest problem we’re facing, fixing the problem, or solving the problem is not something that works. We don’t have to design a solution for the problem, but we have to redesign our modes of being in the world, which is, of course, a different perspective. And a different goal for design.
Ruben Pater: And I would actually argue that that strong urge to solve problems comes from precisely the origin of design to prepare things for mass production. Because if I ask you, Felix, can you prepare this poster for a four-color offset machine, you probably know how to do that. If I ask you to create an image for an Instagram post, you probably know how to do that. We are trained to transform ideas into industrially mass-produced forms. There’s always a solution and it’s always a technical one. We as designers always translate ideas creatively. But with society, we cannot do it like that. We cannot solve the climate crisis by changing the Pantone color, or using recycled paper alone. Even the problem-solving approach was very influential in the 1960s, the post-war period, where there was this optimism, that we could change the world for the better, I think this idea of design started with design. We’ve always come up with a solution, the idea of that there’s no solution is not really part of our vocabulary. There is this very deeply grounded idea in design that there’s always a way out and there’s always a design solution for everything.
Felix Kosok: This, of course, leads us perfectly to the motto of our design competition WAS IST GUT, which is values in design. Aside from the obvious economic value, what kind of values can designers create for society? And what does it take to really create value-based design?
Ruben Pater: I’m still optimistic in the sense that design has existed before capitalism. It exists in every culture in the world. For example, there was this guy from Colombia that was staying at our place here in Amsterdam for a week. He showed us his little flute that he carried with him, an Ocarina. This is a small flute that the indigenous people make out of clay. But he explained to us, that it’s not just a flute to play music with, but also a way finding system, when you get lost in the forest. You can find each other through the specific sound of the Ocarina. I think that’s the elegance of design. It doesn’t really solve a specific problem. But it’s a way to engage with our material world, and we create something clever and inventive, that can be shared and that can be thought.
Design is not just form for a function but also cultural expression. We as humans will always have that. We engage with our natural and our build environment in clever ways, it would be cynical to say we have to get rid of design. Nobody would ever say that of art, even though there are many forms of art, that are just as extractive and exploitative as design. Yet, design has this complicated relationship to the industry. And if the industry won’t change, what do we do, right? We’re hoping for the industry to change, for example for Volkswagen to go completely electric. But will it ever? My answer to that dilemma is that if we as designers find ourselves in unethical situations we must work together, we have to unionize. If all the Dutch designers collectively decided that they won’t work for the fossil fuel industry anymore, then they would have a problem. If all German designers decided to not work for the automobile industry anymore, they would have a big problem. This idea may seem unrealistic now, but it makes you realize what kind of power designers have, if we decide to work together. If we really want value-based design, we must work together.
“If all German designers decided to not work for the automobile industry anymore, they would have a big problem.”
Felix Kosok: This brings me to my last question. We’ve talked a lot about the old ways of designing, about authorship in design and egos in design. But in your opinion and also what you’ve learned through your research: What is good design?
Ruben Pater: I have difficulties answering this question, because good design implies that there is a duality between good and bad design. But design that is good for one person might be really bad for another one. Think about the design of an AK-47 or an oil drilling platform. I think what good design is completely depends on who you’re asking. And this means that the question of good design should not only be posed to designers, but to everyone who is involved. In this sense, I think it’s all about the idea of expanding design to non-designers as well, to invite others and open our practice to outside influence. Maybe this way we will also become more focused on society rather than industry. I would see it more as a kind of holistic question that would be interesting if more people would be involved in answering that. For whom can design be harmful? Who does it exploit? How was this design created? All these questions belong to the question of good design and can be better answered by others than only the designers themselves.