I found Chapter 3 of Baldwin and Roberts’ book Visual Communication: From Theory to Practice interesting because this chapter discusses arguments put forward by theorists such as Victor Papanek, the rejection of many of the concepts and ideologies that might enable a more ethical design culture, the pressures that were being put on students to bow to, rather than resist, commercial forces, and the relationship between the design industry and the public. The chapter starts off with Victor Papanek and his ideals of Western design. He identified a tendency in Western cultures to produce products that are potentially harmful, extravagant, or just plain useless, which I agree with 100 percent. He goes into details about example of us doing this. He finishes off the chapter explaining his idea of what designers are supposed to do. He says that designers have a moral responsibility to improve the lives of those who use their designs. I agree with what he’s saying, but I think it is a little more complicated. As designers, our job is to tell a message to the public. Wether or not it is political commentary or selling a product, it is our job to tell that message. However, it is still a job. Most of the time, we cannot dictate the objective. If we are told to make something that goes against what we believe in, then they’ll find a designer who’ll make it. I think his theory works when we are our own bosses, but when we are working for a corporation, we have no choice in the matter.
The next sections that interested me was sections that talked about the rejection of many of the concepts and ideologies that might enable a more ethical design culture. Being from multiple different ethnic backgrounds, I was interested about what this meant. It starts off talking about culture jamming, which was something we just did as an excursive. The book explains culture jamming isn’t attacking the companies and advertisers. Culture jammers acknowledge that there is power in subverting them by turning their messages to advantage – in a very graphic way. I thought this was pretty interesting, because it takes something that already exist and appropriate it into something else. The book goes into detail about those you appropriate ads about brands to reveal truths. One example was the Absolute ads. The designer(s) took a truth, which was Absolute’s high alcohol content, and used a one of their ads to make something new. I really like culture jamming. I think it’s a fun way to tell a truth about a brand.
I though this last chapter was a good end. The book as a whole provided information about ideologies about design and how a designer fits into society. The book also went into different way we can communicate visually and the rules we must follow for that design to work. The last chapter also explained the age old question, are designers artist, which the book gave a beautiful answer that I can agree with.
The Khalil Experience 