<p>Practice-led artistic research into the 21st century phenomenon of
the graphic designer. I held graphic design in my hands using
ethnography, toolmaking and performance as research methods. I examined
how designers spend their time in everyday life, this designer, me, as
well as you, what are we doing? What are our worldviews, belief systems,
mythologies and ideologies?</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../stephen/keylogger.jpeg"
alt="Keylogging research. I recorded the buttons a graphic designer (me) presses while working, as an autoethnographic research method into what exactly it is that designers do. To celebrate this labour, I then used a pen plotter to make a series of posters. Three minutes of the designers keypresses took about eight hours to plot. October 24th 2023." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Keylogging research. I recorded the
buttons a graphic designer (me) presses while working, as an
autoethnographic research method into what exactly it is that designers
do. To celebrate this labour, I then used a pen plotter to make a series
of posters. Three minutes of the designers keypresses took about eight
I was thinking about you and I was in the same place as a friend of mine
and I was in the studio and we were in the studio and we were in the
studio and we were in the studio and we were in the</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../stephen/email.jpg"
alt="Email answering performance using Google’s Gmail service. To reveal the work of the designer clearly, I performed the designer’s task of answering email in front of an audience. Due to the performance happening at 7pm, out of office hours, there was extensive use of the Scheduled Email feature. Some stories emerged about our precarity including overdue rent and invalid payment information for Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions. Leeszaal, Rotterdam, November 7th 2023." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Email answering performance using
Google’s Gmail service. To reveal the work of the designer clearly, I
performed the designer’s task of answering email in front of an
audience. Due to the performance happening at 7pm, out of office hours,
there was extensive use of the Scheduled Email feature. Some stories
emerged about our precarity including overdue rent and invalid payment
information for Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions. Leeszaal, Rotterdam,
November 7th 2023.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../stephen/laziness.jpg"
alt="A performative tool that measures the laziness of the designer as they work and graphs it on a pen plotter. The less the designer uses the mouse, the longer a line the pen plotter draws, it creates a record of the tiny moments between the work." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">A performative tool that measures the
laziness of the designer as they work and graphs it on a pen plotter.
The less the designer uses the mouse, the longer a line the pen plotter
draws, it creates a record of the tiny moments between the
work.</figcaption>
</figure>
<blockquote>
<p>Secondly, during my studies at XPUB, I plan to combine different
strands of my practices (design, music, programming, theatre). Being a
designer is an important part of my identity, and I am keen to make work
true to who I am.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Excerpt from xpub application letter, March 15th 2022.</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../stephen/peecee.jpg"
alt="Re-enacting dreams about work at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Participants use felt dolls to tell stories of our dreams on the small and squishy stage. We’re trying to balance design labour with other labour like making food for our loved ones, we can’t stop brushing our teeth, brushing, brushing, brushing. February 5th 2024." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Re-enacting dreams about work at Piet
Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Participants use felt dolls to
tell stories of our dreams on the small and squishy stage. We’re trying
to balance design labour with other labour like making food for our
loved ones, we can’t stop brushing our teeth, brushing, brushing,
brushing. February 5th 2024.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../stephen/amro.jpeg"
alt="Collective dream re-enactment at Art Meets Radical Openness, Linz, Austria. Inside a tent, a group of people perform eachother’s dreams about work and discuss and analyse them together. We feel like impostors, we don’t know how to work these machines, we’re going to crash. March 11th 2024." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Collective dream re-enactment at Art
Meets Radical Openness, Linz, Austria. Inside a tent, a group of people
perform eachother’s dreams about work and discuss and analyse them
together. We feel like impostors, we don’t know how to work these
machines, we’re going to crash. March 11th 2024.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../stephen/dizzy.jpeg"alt="Where do dreams come from?"/>
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Where do dreams come from?</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../stephen/form.png"
alt="do you ever dream about work? Online research and publication where we shared our dreams, worries, rants, designs. The answers to the question are published together as a collection of voices." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">do you ever dream about work? Online
research and publication where we shared our dreams, worries, rants,
designs. The answers to the question are published together as a
collection of voices.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../stephen/wood-keyboard.jpeg"
alt="Keyboard of things designers have said. Our feelings about work." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Keyboard of things designers have said.
*What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does "graphic design" even mean?!????!!1!?* is an assessment of what the term "graphic design" means to its practitioners today. Through experimental ethnographic research methods and the development of reflexive tools, the project highlights and questions the boundaries that exist around this apparent category. The research focuses on my own practices as well as other people and groups that identify with "graphic designer" as a label. The research was both conducted by and shared with interested parties in the form of the tools themselves, as well as a series of performances. There is no strict distinction between the research and its publication. The tools were released in an iterative cycle throughout the process of the project, and the research is conducted through the performative use and development of these tools.
This research is carried out in three intersecting methods: experimental ethnographic research, reflexive tools, and performative research. Keylogging, performance of personal work habits, interviews about the manual work of "immaterial labourers", and dream analysis are combined in order to uncover less obvious and less discussed aspects of what a designer is and does in their daily life, as entry points to their worldviews, belief systems, mythologies or ideologies. The methods were developed in an iterative process that reflected on findings from the previous prototypes. The research took into account its own publication as part of one process.
1. Experimental ethnographic research methods: I documented my own practices as a graphic designer for nine months. Sometimes based on technical observations of my interaction with my tools, primarily my laptop computer and the software on it. I conducted interviews with designers. I recorded the interviews. I had prompts to open the discussion such as reading material and weird tools to try with them. I will carry out auto-ethnographic research using experimental methods such as mouse tracking and unusual annotation methods. I shared the results of this research as a series of interactive publications (tools) with a small but selected audience of people who are involved in these processes and who would benefit from it.
2. Reflexive tools: Software and hardware tools that explore the boundaries of "graphic design" as a category. For example at the boundaries between graphic design and other disciplines. At the boundaries between work and play, or between design and art. These tools malfunction in order to explore what it even means to be working. The tools aim to highlight what a graphic designer does by interacting with their user in ways that the designers standard tools do not (for example an interface to connect musical instruments to the designers workflow), or conversely by amplifying how the designer usually interacts with their tools (for example a keylogger to celebrate and focus on the use of the keyboard). The tools are digital in nature and involve software and hardware interventions into the graphic designers work.
3. Performative research: I see all the methods above as having a performative element. For example the ethnographic-slash-performative act of answering my emails on a large screen in front of an audience, research which was carried out as part of this project at Leeszaal, Rotterdam West on November 7th 2023. By showing directly the work practices of graphic designers to an audience, or their interaction with the tools mentioned above, I am publishing through performance the daily activities of designers and my aim is to show these practices without the conventional lenses they are seen through. To be contrasted for example with how graphic design is presented on behance.net or in a bookshop, this performative approach will highlight the mythologies and practices of the graphic designer.
I made this to explore why designers make design, based on Clifford Geertz's ideas of why humans make culture: "to affirm it, defend it, celebrate it, justify it and just plain bask in it" (Geertz, 1973). This exploration will also involve less constructive actions like participating, dissociating, questioning, protesting, destroying and disregarding. There is a disconnect between the narratives about "graphic design" and the effects it is known to have on its audiences, practitioners, and society in more general terms. I am attempting to "loosen the object" of graphic design (Berlant, 2022), to make the definition less defined and maybe more useful or easier to engage with. This shit could be better. Its urgent for the people being exploited by it, to break the inequalities it serves to maintain, to expose what it hides, to improve things that are definitely working but not in a good way. Design can hide and reproduce inequalities in its output and also dominate workers in its practices. This research starts primarily from the bodies and actions of the practitioners so will primarily engage with the effects on and by these bodies.
