I was recently asked by Lauren Mackler, a former student of mine at RISD, to be part of a project she’s working on that will collect thoughts on the question of authorship in design from a range of people working in the field. While it’s an abstract and difficult subject to approach, I noticed that my writing has only dealt with this issue in a glancing way, and this seemed like a good time to get a few more concrete thoughts on the table. What follows really just lays out the issues as I see them in the broadest possible sense. It’s kind of a “brain dump.” There are, I’m sure, projects more nuanced and interstitial than those my analysis allows for, and I think that’s all for the good. Designers can and should challenge how their work is considered by the public and authorship is part of that. But as they initiate these challenges, they will inevitably encounter at least a few of the issues I outline below, and, in those cases, I hope that sharing these thoughts will be of some help. —RG
Authorship in design is a sticky question, and always has been. There are a few considerations: collaboration, control, voice, and limits. The questions that follow from these considerations are simple enough. If—like architects or filmmakers, but unlike bookwriters or oil painters—we collaborate on our projects with a huge array of people, including paying clients, regulatory and legal institutions, fellow design staff and subcontractors, printers and fabricators, merchants and mailing houses, are we even able to “author” a work? To aid us in this discussion on collaboration’s impact on authorship, some designers (in particular Michael Rock) have pointed out Andrew Sarris’s auteur model, developed for the analysis of filmmaking.
Another question is control. Design is often an applied art, made for someone at their request and for a sum of money. After that money is paid, the designer generally surrenders all rights to the work, which is “for hire.” Fine art, at least as it outwardly presents itself, is made at no one’s request. Instead the buyer buys the object, or the book, and the artist/author maintains some control and creative ownership of the work. In fine art, the divorce of work from object leaves the “concept” of the work itself behind with the author. Those who spend money on fine art do not own both art and object. This is not true with most design, where the object moves into the collector’s or consumer’s hands. Finally, authored work is synonymous with art, but much design is blatantly commerce. This fact alone disqualifies a large subsection of design from the authorship question.
But certain designers, despite the diluting effects of collaboration, and despite a seeming surrender of control, find a way for their unique voice to come through in a certain cohesive set of works. This is Sarris’s argument for what denotes an auteur in film. This would seem to make something like a writer’s “voice” the key characteristic of authoriship, but for some reason we don’t see highly distinguishing and vocally-consistent corporate campaigns like Target’s or Apple’s as authored. The reason, as I mentioned earlier, is that authorship is an idea native to fine art, not commerce. So it is not enough to have a voice; that voice must be applied to a sphere of culture that feels wholeheartedly more artistic than commercial.
This is why so many “artist/designers” want to work as close as possible to architects, museums, fashion designers, and other cultural pillars. It is Wim Crouwel’s posters for the Stedelijk Museum or his clientless, experimental Neue Alphabet that distinguish him as an author of those works, and it is these two works that are most frequently anthologized when a catalog or book is placing him in this context. Less frequently do we see his wonderful corporate identities in this context; rather we see them as evidence of his modernist approach or Total Design’s professional design success.
This raises the question of limits. Does anything a designer makes alone, with a maximum of control, without a client, in advance of some kind of artful impulse, qualify as an authored project? Not necessarily. For the authored work must also have cultural value, and that is something that is absolutely impossible for its would-be author to control. When a certain standard of quality in a work is not reached, viewers will be less interested in considering that work’s author, as the term venerates the maker of that work in a way that feels false. Further, when the limits of a relatively standard (or narrowly expansive) set of media (posters, books, websites) and methods (silkscreen, offset, HTML) are surpassed, when the work no longer walks and talks like a piece of reasonably familiar graphic design, when we’re given any cause to question what the thing we’re considering is being called, then viewers will not consider it a work of authored design but a work of authored “something else.”
The authorship question is contentious among designers because the things that define authorship in design are both oddly fickle and surprisingly constrictive. Work can either be collaborative or not, as long as control is believably retained, voice comes through, the context is non-commercial, and standards of artfulness are reached on the one hand and design recognizability is not exceeded on the other hand. Given all this, it’s amazing that we’re after the mantle of authorship at all, a term that’s increasingly tougher to define and whose meaning slips further and further not just from designers, but from all of us.