First Things First manifesto was first written by Ken Garland in 1964 and updated in 1999. It pointed out that much of design talent is spent on advertising fast-moving consumer products, saturating the world with commercial messages. It argues designers could make themselves more useful to society by shifting the focus to “pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills”. “Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programmes, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.”
This manifesto is a pretty big deal — I learned about it in design school, and got the impression that most designers know about it. Along with the manifesto is the belief that design is “problem-solving” — we have great power and we have wasted it on useless packaging designs.
I held this belief until I read my partner’s Master’s thesis on social anthropology. He interviewed and analysed self-identified men who were studying Bachelors of Arts degrees that are traditionally, in Aotearoa (New Zealand), considered feminine. Take nursing as an example, he found that while the job is seen as interpersonal and care focused, men would re-frame it in masculine terms, like fixing the world as if it were a broken machine, solving problems.
First Things First, is praising designers as problem solvers, and the manifesto itself, is a problem-solving attempt. People point at this manifesto as if it offers the ultimate solution to consumerism; no further discussion is needed. Apply your skills (gained from a male-and-Western coded design education) to books instead of crisps, and voila, the world will become healthy again. Boring. I never looked at design from a feminist perspective, or a non-western perspective. Design has always been intertwined with production, progress, and organising the world in service to the status quo.
During Story Roots to Sustainable Futures course, we talked about the “Killer” story about conquering and taming. This is only one of the many story themes. If mainstream design is a killer story about extracting from and taming the cultural ground, where can I find examples of other stories about design?
The course reading The Fortress, the River and the Garden: A New Metaphor for Cultivating Mutualistic Relationship Between Scientific and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, young people in indigenous communities are pulled by two opposing messages — the community needs more indigenous scientists to take back control, and ‘Science’ is intellectual imperialism, disrespectful to indigenous rights and sovereignty. The author argues solution lies in rethinking scientific institutions to be intellectually pluralistic, to be welcoming to holistic thinking, and thus to traditional ecological knowledge.
Other ways of thinking in Design are needed. I think decolonisation and feminism practices can help me with my thinking. I’m not necessarily wanting to personally educate mainstream designers on how to be more aware of their assumptions, as I know a lot of people are already doing that.
From my previous post, I summarised my project as “Imagine stealing a bag of rubbish from a high street bin. The bag’s contents form a random archive of what people have been consuming.” This focuses on questioning the mainstream consumer culture. If I expose how mainstream aesthetics sucks from and pollutes subcultures, it’s only half the story, and it puts the cultures at a passive victim position.
Jess Smith, the guest storyteller at Story Roots intensive days, is such an amazing character. When facing oppression, she is telling her stories, charmingly. I feel a connected web of life force when I listen to her talking. They remember, they adapt, they cannot be tamed.
Is there a way to focus on the organic connections and resilience of marginalised groups when talking about their relationships with the commercialisation of their authenticity? The First Things First manifesto wants designers to choose their masters within the commercial world wisely. Is there an alternative to this? Surely this is not the only autonomy we can have!
I keep coming back to speculative design. Maybe I will keep the idea of my project, and replace the contents to speculative designs?
