Everyone as Author

Each week I'm focusing on a particular topic (see my syllabus at right for the breakdown), and this week my focus is on "The Designer as Author…" inspired of course by the infamous 1996 Michael Rock essay of the same name.

I reread The Designer as Author yesterday and a few things jumped out at me:

"Authorship may suggest new approaches to the issue of the design process in a profession traditionally associated more with the communication rather than the origination of messages. But theories of authorship also serve as legitimizing strategies, and authorial aspirations may end up reinforcing certain conservative notions of design production and subjectivity--ideas that run counter to recent critical attempts to overthrow the perception of design as based on individual brilliance."

It seems like a lot of sentiment expressed by designers comes from a place of insecurity, and I wonder if this is bred into the field due to our history of acting as 'decorators' for other peoples' ideas and our relative youth compared to other disciplines. It's interesting that Rock refers to authorship as giving legitimacy to designers...that certainly seems to be what happened in the era of design superstars. We went through our "I want to do it MYSELF!" phase and have emerged more mature and less histrionic about our role in the world (maybe?)

So what's the status of authorship now? Designers are originating messages but so is everyone else...we're in the age of user-generated content, open source technology, and wiki-everything. Self-publishing and amateur reporting (ala CNNs iReport).  However even with UGC driven media, someone ultimately has to 'author' the interaction and moderate the content. And--in my experience--for all the lip service we give to user agency, we're quick to structure and limit the way non-designers can interact with our work. We're still pretty hesitant to give up the reigns and are offended when our expert message is altered.

One of the most inspiring examples of a designer's vision being altered (in a great way) by 'amateurs' is the case of the Mercy Corps logo. Steff Geissbuhler wrote this opinion piece on Brand New about how the identity system he designed for an aid organization has been applied in areas of the world where they don't have computers and could care less about a branding guide. Ultimately the important thing in the case of Mercy Corps is that people are able to find the help that they need and can recognize a legimitate aid organization as quickly as possible. It's important to mention that the designer foresaw this need all along, and designed the logo with the idea that users could and would alter it later (and the logo had to be applicable in situations where non-designers and non-computer users could still create the mark). In his own words:

As we often warn people in graphic standards guidelines in order to protect our precious logos from being bastardized with sentences like: “Do not reset, redraw, distort in any way …always use original art from master files…Do not reproduce from photocopies, etc.” Well, the good people of Mercy Corps violate all of these, and, if all you have is a brush and some black goo and no way to access or utilize digital files, you may be forced to reconstruct it based on someone’s business card, crude photocopy, or from memory.
I had to laugh when I saw some of the pictures from the “field.” It made me in a strange way happy to see obvious non-designers succeeding in copying the logo, in a different scale, on a piece of wood, cardboard, cloths or stone. Needless to say, it’s more important to be out there, in a vaguely recognizable way and saving lives, than being “correct.”

 Perhaps the key for designers is to recognize that EVERYONE is a potential author, and to design accordingly.