The Prepared Mind Discussion about designing human interaction.

I just read a pretty disturbing entry over at Design Observer. It’s entitled “The Designer as Buffoon” and chronicles how in two major advertising campaigns in the UK for IKEA and Ford, designers are being lampooned and portrayed in an unflattering light.

Now I’m all for laughing at ones self and would be the first to admit that we designers do a lot of things that are pretty darn funny. How could someone who depicts the industry in the form of the See-no-evil, Hear-no-evil, Speak-no-evil monkees NOT concede that we can be a humorous bunch?

But I agree with Adrian Shaughnessy, the author of the entry, that the appearance of not one but two major campaigns at the same time are far from accidental and are indicative of a huge perception problem of designers on the part of the public in general and design buyers in particular. It leads one to two inevitable questions, the second more difficult to answer than the first:

1. Why is there such disgust for designers?
2. What role, if any, do WE play in the presence of this disgust?

I suppose that none of this should come as a great surprise to any of us. On some level, we had to know that most people viewed us as whiny, nit-picky, moody, brooding sorts who roll our eyes when asked to make changes and can routinely be counted on to make type and logos too small. But the entry makes some good points in other areas as well:

What do these unflattering portraits tell us about the current status of designers? The message is ambivalent. By using designers as central motifs in their campaigns, these two global brands appear to want it both ways. They want us to laugh at the designers — we can’t possibly like or admire these preening monsters — yet they also want something that these two men have: they want to extract the cool quotient of design and inject it into their own products. And it’s worth remembering that there are no accidents in the world of international advertising. Global brands and their advertising agencies don’t do guesswork. The decision to place designers — and design — at the centre of two top-flight TV commercials is undoubtedly the product of vast amounts of “strategic thinking” and consumer marketing research.

It’s also worth noting that designers played an integral role in the creation of the ad campaigns that make us look bad. In other words, lampooning designers wouldn’t be possible without the HELP of, well, designers. For that matter, global brand strategies that help make designers look bad wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of, well, designers. Shaughnessy then makes a more sinister, but not inaccurate, observation:

In a further twist, the depiction of both characters carries an undercurrent of sexual stereotyping. Both designers appear to be pandering to residual anti-gay prejudice. But yet again, there is ambivalence at work here. In Britain, over recent decades, the effeminate gay man has been a staple of TV comedy shows and sitcoms; but today, the notion of the gay man as a paradigm of stylishness and superior taste has become embedded in popular culture. Modern sitcoms occasionally have gay characters who are allowed to behave with an enviable élan; TV makeover shows have gay men instructing clumsy heterosexual men on how to dress, cook and decorate. In the popular imagination, gayness and designer fastidiousness are likely to be two sides of the same coin.

Ford and Ikea want to harness (or, as Orwellian brand-speak would have it, “own”) the undoubted coolness of both design and gayness. Yet at the same time, they want to distance themselves from the fundamental reality of both. In other words, they want a bit of design fascism, but not too much; the merest hint of design-lite will do. They achieve this by offering us ludicrous caricatures of designers, while calculating that just enough design stardust will simultaneously adhere to their products to make the connection worthwhile. So why not use a real designer? A “real” designer wouldn’t have the dramatic impact of an overblown caricature; the audience would be turned off by the seriousness of the real thing.

Sad but true. It’s an old true-ism that you have to make someone into a charicature that is tough to relate to before you can go about destroying their character. Ironic that it is so easy to do this at a time when everyone and their Aunt Millie is a self-professed “designer.” The entry goes on to make other stinging observations:

How galling this must be for designers from the “design-as-business-tool” school. They work tirelessly to promote design as the ultimate edge-giving device for the corporate world, and yet this is what big business thinks about designers. It is no less galling for those of us who view design as primarily an aesthetic and cultural activity. No one benefits when designers are treated as figures of derision. Yet perhaps we deserve to be lampooned? Perhaps we are guilty of such excessive self-absorption that we haven’t noticed that we are despised by those who can help us most? Perhaps our unspoken determination to be regarded as artists has resulted in our elevation to global laughing stock? Ironically, it used to be the case that if advertisers needed to conjure up an instant laughing stock, they would use a pouting, beret-wearing artist. Today, artists are heroes. Jackson Pollock, once a byword for absurdity (“my five-year-old could do that!”) is now canonised by Hollywood and admired as a 20th-century creative powerhouse. You wouldn’t make fun of him in a TV commercial; much better to make use of a designer — a far easier barn door to hit.

Ouch! Grim! So designers have occupied the role as the moody, beret-wearing, irrational, my-way-or-the-highway, artiste-type that was previously reserved for fine artists? It’s also worth noting that many think of folks who wear berets are typically French, and we SEE how badly they have been villified as of late.

.chris{}