Design Culture

Feminist design recap

We recently participated in a panel at the College Art Association entitled “Feminist Design, A Quiet Transformation?” moderated by Stephen Eskilson and Aaris Sherin. As it turned out, the panel evolved into something of an unexpected case study in several aspects of design discussion and practice. “Evolved into” is an odd phrase and it was an odd panel, with several unexpected elements. We thought it might be helpful to provide an account of the proceedings, from our perspective. We say “our” because both Vanessa Corrêa and Stuart Kendall participated in the panel, each in different ways. Stuart presented a paper and Vanessa participated in the discussion period which took up a substantial portion of the time allotted for the panel.

Stephen Eskilson and Aaris Sherin conceived the panel, selected the participants and moderated. They envisioned a panel in two parts: one discursive, the other more less defined. In the first half, Stuart Kendall and Lucinda Havenhand were to present papers in the normal fashion. In the second, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville would discuss the topic at hand through the lens provided by her own work. Due to a last minute family emergency, Lucinda Havenhand was unable to present her paper on feminism and interior design. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, for her part, was “banned” by the College Art Association due to what seems to have been a confusion over member’s rights to be part of multiple panels in multiple capacities. Though not on the program, Sheila came anyway.

Whether with intentional malice or not, the College Art Association scheduled this panel concurrently with a Design Studies Forum Special Session, making it impossible for members interested in design to attend one of only three design related panels at the conference. The audience was thus very small and entirely female.

Stephen introduced the panel, then Stuart gave his paper. Aaris then spoke about the historical moment of feminism in design and helped Sheila present a few slides of her early and recent work. Sheila presented her work as feminist design rather than speaking of feminist design and also of her work. In the substantial period remaining Sheila essentially commanded the women in the audience to share their reasons for being there that day. A few got up and left immediately and a few lingered for a moment before leaving, but several stayed for an impromptu roundtable, lead decisively by Sheila, on the contemporary design.

The proceedings were ironic in many ways. Stephen joked that he and Stuart, two young men, were there to represent patriarchy; Stuart in particular because he was going to present a “traditional” paper. Sheila was there to represent an alternative to patriarchy, and she was not going to “present” much of anything at all. Yet Sheila was by far the most famous and “successful” person present and by the end she had taken command of the situation. It was nevertheless deeply ironic that she took such pride in the notion of participation – and of participatory democracy – while simultaneously commanding the people in the room to speak.

Stuart’s paper appealed to two classic texts in feminist theory to propose an open theoretical model of design, a model predicated on the notion that graphic design objects always form a material bridge between design clients and design consumers. As is pretty clear, the paper proposed an attack on any form of hegemonic thinking. Sheila twice mocked the notion that any model might be helpful in understanding anything. This was only amusing when she did not recognize a rather banal binary list of terms Stuart borrowed directly from Cixous. Would Sheila have felt as comfortable mocking Hélène Cixous? We hope so: it would be in keeping with the anti-intellectualism that pervades the contemporary discourse on graphic design in America.

More significantly though, the conversation coalesced around the problem of the client in graphic design practice. For Vanessa, the client is essential to graphic design. Put bluntly, design without a client is Fine Art. Graphic design is graphic design because it involves creating a material embodiment of a client message that is legible and interesting to an intended target audience. The design process begins when the client discusses the project with the designer and it culminates in the creation of an actual thing in the world that communicates with and is interesting to the members of a targeted audience. No portion of this three cornered model can be eliminated. Design done without a client and without an intended audience is not design at all. And that’s ok. Why not call it what it is, whatever that may be?

Sheila asserted the notion that designers who work for clients who give them less that total freedom of expression are “oppressed.” For her, the best clients are totally uninvolved. She suggested that deliverance from the oppression of client demand comes about by means of self-interrogation and self-understanding. If you know who you are, she said, then you won’t need to work for those clients any more. Or, put differently, if you are working for clients, it is because you don’t know who you are.

Here again an odd irony entered the room. What presumption had lead Sheila to say such things to a room of strangers? From the perspective a working design professional, like Vanessa, who actually likes her clients, likes working with them, and likes the design process, from conception to completion, such a notion did not ring true, to put it mildly. Clients pay the bills and there is nothing wrong with that. The real pleasure is in working with them to convey their messages. This in mind, public art is public art and design is design. And we don’t have anything to gain by confusing the two.

Nor does it particularly interest us to valorize self-expression at this point. The “heroic” era, the Romantic era, of aesthetic production has ended, has it not? The expressive self collapsed on the analyst’s couch and fled Fine Art with neo-Dada. Why resurrect it now?

Design interests us precisely because it denies the unity of expression, because it reveals the relational process of communication in material form, because it embodies the limits and potentialities of both communication and community. “We are those who understand this thing” is a far more interesting statement to us than “I am the one who made this”.

The central paradox then was essentially that Sheila Levrant de Bretteville came to speak about her work as a public artist as if she were a designer and that she took no interest in understanding this paradox. Her work, her manner and her politics were however of a piece and her intentions noble. Our purpose is not to find fault but to raise the level of the design discourse in America.

Naturally these are summary remarks set down after the fact. They are not intended as an exhaustive account of the event nor of the issue of feminism and design. 

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© 2009 k. kanan design news and commentary.