2021-10-14 12:52

Some thoughts and notes towards a practice of Graphic Design as Research

– 01 We have to make some kind of distinction which would qualify or help understand a difference between a vanilla Graphic Design (GD) practice and a practice of GD that is in some way PR. One easy or straightforward way to do this is in terms of a purpose or intention (for each):

• one is mostly concerned with solving other people’s problems –
  • are there mechanisms or tools which frame this (the brief, for example);
  • the interpersonal relationships and professionalised identities which are practiced to underpin a successful performance of any story that is played out
  • the processes and professional armoury of skills, knowledge and tools which are employed to realise the role and to materialise the intended outcomes (theoretical, social, economic, commodity etc.)
• the other is primarily concerned with answering questions (your own or other people’s) –
  • of course, this doesn’t cover all of the different ways that people can and do make use of GD, and there is a tradition of a GD ‘personal’ project, or a personal practice which isn’t tied so tightly to ideas of externally-generated problems, and is more focused on exploration, experimentation and an open-ended type of enquiry - unfortunately, there isn’t a very well-developed language or terminology to support this so it tends to borrow ideas from fine art (I’m generalising) to describe what happens, and the outcome of this tends to be a confusion and / or misunderstanding: a bastardisation of art practice due to lack of knowledge or familiarity, and an under-appreciation for the work that is being done (it lacks the conceptual and theoretical apparatus of FA practice and misses the opportunity to develop one that’s distinct for GD)

& for Graphic Design-Research (GD-R) or Practice-Research (PR), there isn’t a very mature or distinct grammar and set of concepts to begin the process of understanding how there might be a unique type of PR from GD - and, like much Design Research, things are borrowed (either from more mature disiplines within design or, quite commonly).

So, we can start with this kind of distinction that might be useful in the short term, but I wouldn’t claim that it’s robust enough to last any journey which is trying to come up with something helpful and a bit more rigorous than what currently exists. We also need to acknowledge the work that’s taken place to carve out some kind of space within contemporary GD (or at least in terms of its relatively recent histories) that has reflected a desire to develop a plurality of practices — so we have well-developed ideas around critical design, some work on speculative design alongside others which frame practice through such lenses as activism, urgency, queer and anticipation - and, in particular, the work of Jan van Toorn, Paul Elliman, Paul Soulellis, James Goggin, Zak Kyes and Mark Owen, and Andrew Blauvelt (others to be added here) might be very useful pillars for any notion of GD PR that can emerge from these first thoughts.