“Design education not only teaches its technical and historical canon, or how to design, but more importantly teaches students how to be designers in society and in relation to capital,” writes designer Jacob Lindgren. “A school becomes a factory producing designers, one that, in keeping with the principles of ‘good design,’ turns them into efficient and interchangeable parts ready to hit the market.” In a new essay, Lindgren proposes models that may help us undo this factory setting of graphic design.
In his book of essays, The Shape of Things, Czech philosopher and media critic Vilém Flusser argues that factories are decreasingly places where goods are produced and increasingly places where new kinds of humans are produced. Flusser viewed factories as the primary vessels and sites for agendas of progress and ideology, ones that instead of manufacturing solely goods also produced new kinds of subjects, writing that:
Human history is the history of manufacturing and everything else is mere footnotes.
Flusser also described a similar tautology: “Science has become automated and has transformed scientists into its own tools.” For Flusser, learning was analogous to manufacturing: both being processes which are based on acquiring, producing and passing on—or “turning”—information. “It becomes apparent that the factory is nothing but an applied school and the school nothing but a factory for the acquisition of information.”
Graphic design is a practice inherently defined by its relationship to large-scale production and industry. It was closely intertwined with industrial production beginning with the Arts & Crafts movement—one of the earliest manifestations of the design academy, despite William Morris’ reservations on the matter—and its master-apprentice educational model. Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus—a studio-workshop model—soon followed with its foundational training. Building from the Deutscher Werkbund, an all-encompassing union of design and industry, the Bauhaus’s educational strategy attempted to unify craft with industrial production, its motto being “Art into Industry.”
While the Bauhaus anticipated an industrial revolution capable of delivering visions of mass-produced design for social good, most artifacts produced by the school were handmade and given the finish of a machined good—designers imitated factories. The Bauhaus wasn’t inherently different in nature from the factories Flusser wrote about.
The school changed locations throughout its existence, from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin, and directors—from Walter Gropius to Hannes Meyer to Mies van der Rohe—and closed in 1933 due to political pressure. The school’s instructors and students dispersed throughout the world and met varying fates: some would flee to the Soviet Union, Palestine, or to the US, while some would be killed. Despite insisting on being apolitical, both before and after its closing some of the Bauhaus’s biggest names would collaborate with the state.
From 1928 to 1937 Herbert Bayer designed posters and publications for Nazi exhibitions and propaganda, including leaflets for the Hitler Youth, only ceasing to do so when one of his paintings was included in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich. Hannes Meyer and several former students worked on urban projects and taught in academies for the Soviet Union, including contributing to Joseph Stalin’s first five-year plan.
Bauhaus-trained Arieh Sharon designed the White City in Tel Aviv—a project since described as aiding in the city’s controversial narrative surrounding the displacement and erasure of Jaffa, a city in part destroyed by 1,500 British soldiers in 1936. Architect Zvi Efrat’s film Scenes from the Most Beautiful Campus in Africa explores Sharon’s involvement in the design of the University of Ife campus and its implications in the context of Lagos, Nigeria.
Both historic and contemporary modes of design education are largely informed by this pipeline between their institutions and the commercial environment designers eventually find themselves working in, with graphic design securing its place as a tool almost exclusively for industry. The extent to which all these entanglements affect our thinking about and perception of design cannot be understated, and the Bauhaus plays a pivotal role.
For example, there is the statistical likelihood, as suggested by Mark Wigley, that you are reading this on a device that exists as a direct result of the Bauhaus. Steve Jobs himself proclaimed his subscription to Bauhaus ideology, stating at a design conference in Aspen that Apple would make its products “beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.”
This persistent reinforcement of industry determining the orientation of design education, combined with the increasing cost of education and burden of student debt, puts designers (and schools) in a position to desire, seek out, and reproduce employable skills in their practice. In spite of this totalizing picture of design education, one wonders how things could be different. How might graphic design pedagogy be repositioned to critique rather than uphold the ideological structures of capital?
Self-organized educational initiatives move closer to alternative pedagogies for graphic design while also serving as sites for rethinking the practice as one closer to a mode of inquiry rather than an effect of industry. Regardless of the varied approaches, the common thread between these efforts is the drive to disturb existing educational structures by building underneath, on top of, or adjacent to them.
What should be done? At the very least, a closer examination of graphic design’s factory settings—both the widely unchallenged, inherited models it has come to consider “default” in addition to its reluctance to step outside of (or sever from) its relationship to industry, to the factory. This reset—or reprogramming, or uninstallation—should challenge graphic design practice and education to be untethered from their one-way relationships to power and knowledge and might occur in parallel or “diagonal” to existing structures.
If the contemporary definition and standardized practice of design and design education are over a century old, might it be a good idea to reexamine both in an age where ecological disaster, immaterial and precarious labor, post-factual politics, and geopolitical conflict are among the world’s defining challenges? Self-organized education presents one tool, among many, which can be used to think through and act on these challenges.
If we can’t leave, or decide to stay, we need to repurpose its machinery and organize ourselves appropriately.
Rather, in what way can these same motivations, material articulations, and intentions—ones informed by industry and existing to service capital at the expense of destroying bodies and the planet—be reverse engineered and reconfigured for completely different ends?
Design should become decidedly and admittedly political—no more "leaving politics out of design."
To end where we began: Vilém Flusser described the factory’s mode of production as “turning,” in that manufacturing is “turning what is available in the environment to one’s own advantage, turning it into something manufactured, turning it over to use and thus turning it to account.” A long-standing mystery surrounding the Workers Leaving the Factory film is where exactly the workers are headed as they exit through the factory’s front gates. “To a meeting? To the barricades? Or simply home?” If the school is a factory, and the educational turn allows us to examine the conditions of our own manufacturing, or our “turning” as Flusser puts it—as we exit, where should we turn?