By Timo de Rijk with Felix Janssens
published in
YEARBOOK DUTCH DESIGN 03/04
Vivid and Premsela Dutch Design Foundation
pub. Episode, Rotterdam 2004

(FJ:)You are asking me about the contrast between Experimental Jetset and Mevis + Van Deursen, like it existed between Wim Crouwel and Jan van Toorn. In don't think such a contrast exists, and definitely not the way it existed at that time. In my opinion those two designers are on the same side, Experimental Jetset also represents artistic authorship. For a start, consider the differences between then and now and you will notice that contemporary design practically has, despite its alleged pragmatism and its claim of objectivity, a retro character. The contrast between Jan van Toorn and Wim Crouwel does not exist today the way it used to, in the sense of objective pragmatism versus politically committed modernism. Personally, I see the contrast more in the author as opposed to the pragmatic designer. Authorship is not an issue for me. Authorship is not so much a subject, it is something that is obvious. As a designer you are involved in every project and you play a role, in organizing, directing or eventually creating it. To try and maintain a neutral and objective position as a designer is perhaps not hypocritical, but it certainly is fake objectivity, in which you seem to define yourself outside the designing process. Nothing could often be further from the truth. You are in charge of every objectifying manoeuvre yourself. Your mission as a designer is having an agenda of your own. Of course you can be pragmatic, most agencies are, but I don't find that interesting. It is uninteresting in the same way that engineering is uninteresting. No agenda, just responding to the question.

Design as strategy

All our actions have become strategic. Everything has become communication: politics, architecture, sports. So you can say that a politician is as much a designer as an architect, and that a PR-manager works in the same way as a graphic designer: organizing attention and creating stories. Within this context design plays an important role. Think of David Beckham, think of the fake turkey that George Bush served to his troups in Iraq or the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam. Design is the tool par excellence to realize goals which were set in advance. Design has been degenerated to packaging, to a means to accompany ‘transformations’. Even within the government, which is supposed to be the guardian of civic society.
Museums are a good example: until some five years ago, museums organized exhibitions, produced catalogues and a poster and that was it. The catalogue was the product of the director's or curator's expertise on the subject. However, that has become subordinate to the marketing department's policy, the image, the identity and the communication of what would be core business. Imagine that you are opening a new museum. Then you, as a designer, should be given the opportunity to think about how the museum could be reinvented and not just asked to come up with a nice logo. The problem with the so-called quangos is that they don't look beyond their job description of making an ‘operating profit’, while they have a public role to fulfill. And that doesn't just happen at UWV!
Designing stamps is another good example, which used to be the crowning glory for a graphic designer. They would take it very seriously, the Dutch Post Office (PTT) was a professional organization with expert knowledge. These days profit margins are more important than cultural meaning. So in terms of content, there is hardly any commitment any more. Design has become a marketing tool to museums as well as to companies. As a designer you can't escape that. Being a designer you have become a label, and you are asked on the basis of that.
Mind you, not because design is not valued as an autonomous practice. Design is everywhere, everybody knows the word, has an opinion about it and also has an example or an image in mind: a brochure is design, but living is design too, eating is design, communicating is design, life is design. So it's not the success that's the problem, or at least it is the success of the image of course. In that sense the design profession may have become over-professionalized: everything gets a great deal of attention, the projects are larger than life and have actually been created for the photograph, for the company's PR department.

The role of the government

Those designs are what I call pragmatic. As a designer or an agency you are selected to do precisely what a company expects from you. And of course that has to do with the greater professionalism of companies. However, the input of a designer who thinks independently is ruled out. Our culture is ruled by the Weakest Link: systematically outsourcing duties and responsibilities and concentrating the decision. That is how toothless tigers are created - the way Richard Sennet describes it in The corrosion of character (1998). That is the reality we are dealing with. But to me, communication and designing are still more of an experiment rather than a tool.
Particularly in the public arena where designers used to be able to maintain an independent role. The government, all of us, have given up a sanctuary with the arrival of privatization. Not one where anything goes, but a situation guarded by a responsible government where there is scope for the experiment.
In terms of ‘corporate culture’ the government has also become a market player, thinking in terms of results that are judged like a return on investment. Citizens are perceived as consumers which has led to a situation with little room for generosity. The public broadcasting corporation is the best example of this radical change: reality has been reduced to one option: what it ‘generates’. The reasoning behind the restyling of the public channels illustrates this. The public arena becomes in fact increasingly marginal as opposed to the dominant corporate space. What I am trying to say is: does the true public arena still exist, now that literally everything has become institutionalized or commercialized? In my opinion the public arena has become subversive. The free space that used to be claimed exclusively by the arts, has suddenly become much larger! That's where the opportunities are for everyone who deals with the public case and designing. The government should create conditions to develop new imaginative space and find new forms for it. The experiment is valuable as a situation that keeps a culture alive.

A powerless visual culture

We live in a society with an omnipresent, seemingly omnipotent visual culture. However, that visual culture has been completely undermined and it has become powerless for society. Design is therefore back to square one. A practical example is that ‘top design’ no longer looks like ‘design’, for all sorts of reasons, not in the last place because it no longer wants to have to deal with what the ordinary man in the street thinks of design. It communicates among the incrowd, the small inner circle, who are aware of the codes. Visual culture has degenerated into HTML, there is no longer any correlation between form and content or between concept and representation. And why should there be? Complexities and representations are included in other levels within the design. That's where the most exciting things arise. Nicolas Bourriaud (Palais de Tokyo) described that as a result of Post-Production.
Design has meaning within subcultures: maybe a main stream no longer exists. In that sense, design has become a subculture even though it is everywhere around us, that is the paradox of our time: my father recognizes the outward appearances of hip hop, but he doesn't understand them. The same goes for ‘art-design’, take for example Martin Margiela's clothes, to many people they look like stuff from the pawnshop. If you know something about Margiela and his ideas, you can appreciate it. If you don't, you can't appreciate or understand the quality. Design is there without attracting attention, or at least it is there without communication. You can tell from the generations who have grown up with corporate culture, with campaigns from companies who see people merely as consumers. They have gradually become indifferent. A few years ago, you used to get a lot of culture jamming, it was fun and exciting to play with those corporate manifestations: using logos, reversing brand names etc. Designers ignore it now, it no longer has an impact, it is a powerless reality. They no longer present themselves in contrasts.

The meaninglessness of images is increased by what we do with them. Images, designs or photos are all predestined to find their place within a fixed framework of concepts. Otherwise it won't be registered, apparently. This is true for popular culture, but also for art. Curator Arno van Roosmalen (of TENT, Rotterdam) goes even further in claiming that we can only think in terms of those labels, the rest misses out. If there are no words for something, it doesn't exist.
That is an interesting starting point for a discussion but I don't share his opinion. There is something beneath that, in a way, a sub system that might at first sight be invisible but we know of its presence or we can tell it's there, which does represent interesting new things. That is the area without a framework of concepts, that may have to formulate itself. We immediately put a label on everything because we can understand it that way. But to me, it is precisely in that sub system where interesting developments can often be found.

The designer's role

As a designer you will have to question that world, which role you can play, not the role of problem solver, but being someone who makes problems or contradictions visible, the designer with an agenda of their own. Crimson has recently asked a similar question in architecture: what happened to architecture in the era of high design: all those fabulous buildings, those ego designs, it was some kind of self gratification, demanding attention and being present as much as possible.
Crimson rightly remarked that we should wonder about what has not been happening: people have not been invested in, they have not been asked what they want, nobody has thought about living and inhabiting. Form is now no longer an issue, from the idea of intervening and programming, you should not aim to be as visible as possible. My motto is in any case: be invisible, in order to create and achieve things. That is my designership: having a reason to be able to understand and study the world. Not everything I do is directly related to this attitude. A good example of my work which is intervening is the project Beyond. The Council of Utrecht asked us because of our house style design for Rotterdam Cultural Capital of Europe in 2001. That is where we gave the inhabitants of the house style centre stage. Beyond asked us (T(C)H&M works as part of a team) not to design a strictly visual house style, but to come up with a narrative structure. How do you talk to a (new) community and the government about art in public places and more importantly: how do those people talk to each other? Do you organize evenings for the public to comment, do you write everything down and do you meet in a working group to work it out in more detail? That's what we didn't do. We wanted a dynamic environment, not a black box, in which information keeps circulating, everyone is sender and receiver, there is no hierarchical structure, the layer is horizontal and vertical, the information flows both ways. That is important to me, because it matches the nature of organizations these days, both in business and in government. When you ask people where their organization ends, how various parts of the company are related, then they don't know. Due to continuing processes of mergers and de-mergers an organization can no longer be represented with modernistic ideas of house styles with a logo, a font and a handbook. A conventional house style, like the new house style of Amsterdam, is an idée fixe, it is going back to the past, an almost nostalgic desire for control by managing and organizing top-down. Thirty years later Total design means something completely different!
In Beyond real and fictitious information act within a narrative. Thus a house style becomes more of a number of participants changing positions, with scripts and syntactic elements rather than a visual recognition. Its goal is a developing information flow, in which the time factor plays an active role, there is no completion or conclusion, but there are results that can influence the next step. As you can see, Beyond is the kind of project in which I, as a designer, can make use of my insights and my interest in structures. Whether that is the designer's role? Some designers create autarchic houses, others are fascinated by putting tunnels underneath the Netherlands, that is up to each designer. You mention Nederpoort of the insurance company Achmea. I think that is a clever way to put ideas across and to get ideas back in response. The project has a commercial intention of course, and I wonder if it hasn't been streamlined a little too much, but in principle it is an intelligent extension of communication options.

Copyright and authenticity

We live in a consumer society of images, in which a lot is organised for the production of the image. That's why I think something like copyright is nonsense. Who has the copyright of a photograph of Lance Armstrong cycling on a mountain? You would think the answer is the photographer, or is it Armstrong himself, his team sponsored by US Postal, or perhaps the organization of the Tour de France? Maybe all of them together, and not one of them in particular. The Tour de France is an event par excellence that is organized for that photo: without the Tour there is no image and without the image there is no Tour. Armstrong is going to cycle the Tour for that picture. Copyright is something that is superseded.
The idea of copyright is based on the inalienable and intrinsic qualities of a design. The design has become a piece of a jigsaw in a large whole, the way in which things are linked together and sampled can not be controlled by copyright.
The work of art that arises out of this is called life style. It is all about authenticity, about an authentic experience. The ideologies are lost, the major stories are gone and everyone tries to live in their own story, whether it is invented by themselves or by someone else, that basically makes no difference. The designer has become a supplier of props, the story's pieces of scenery. This ranges from the retro product for the nouveau riche to the ‘Slow Food’ for the cultural elite, essentially there is no difference of course, it stems from the same desire by and large. As a designer you need to relate to this, and I want to relate to it too, take it into account. Yes, perhaps in order to be able to escape from it.