Katherine Moline - Authorship, Entrepreneurialism and Experimental Design

Designer as author.

Much of the authorship debate in the nineties was prompted by design educator Katherine McCoy’s assertion that “We are not here at Cranbrook to prepare 4 indentured servants for corporate America.” (McCoy 1991 quoted in Vanderlans 2005: 37). Designer Anne Burdick adopted McCoy’s perspective and claimed that “designers must consider themselves authors, not facilitators” (Burdick 1992). Burdick incited practitioners to take design seriously, invest more personally in design, and act more responsibly through attention to context. Because Burdick’s argument was a response to a demand by designer Howard Riley that designers engage in design as socially responsible service providers, the fault lines of the service versus authorship debate were drawn by 1992. As editor of graphic design journal Émigré (1985-2005), where much of the debate was published, Rudy Vanderlans was instrumental in re-enforcing the polarisation of designer-as-author vs. designer as service provider. According to Vanderlans his motivation in publishing Emigre was based on his view that “graphic design had simply become too narrowly defined as a service-oriented profession that organises and gives form to the ideas of commercial clients.” (Vanderlans 2005: 55).

Much of the rhetoric and enthusiasm about experimental typefaces and graphics of the 1980s and 1990s by critics such as Poyner proclaimed that experimental designs generated independently of client commissions but they also expressed “socio-cultural commentary” (1991: 10). Poyner proposed that some examples of experimental typography could be considered as a post-structuralist revaluing of the co-production of meaning by both author and reader. This is evident in his discrimination between, amongst others, “polemical” typeface designs that “demonstrate their designers’ reluctance to accept that the conventions of typography are inscribed inviolably on tablets of stone” (1991: 7), and “type as entertainment” that Poyner claimed functioned only as decoration (1991: 15). Poyner elaborated this view in 1996 and commented that experiments in typography “reflect a deep scepticism about received wisdom and a questioning of established authorities, traditional practices and fixed cultural identities” (1996: 15). Poyner contrasts his characterisation of experimental typography as the practical critique of design orthodoxies with the popular perception of designers as: “little more than service-providers whose job is to convey a given message to an audience as efficiently as possible” (1999: 28).