What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does “graphic design” even mean?!????!!1!?

I cut my thumb so every time I type i can feel it in my nerve endings. Not true, it’s my left thumb so I don’t type with it. Not true, I feel it anyway. Why are most of the function keys on the left of the keyboard. What’s so functional about pressing buttons. Stephen Kerr is a designer and musician based in. Have you ever loved an instrument? The Ctrl key broke like four times since I moved here. I have one more replacement because I bought a bunch of them but at some point I gave up and use an external keyboard. I dunno I’m more confused than ever. It was something to do with dreams and working. It’s the middle of the night I’m writing this on my phone. If I had a dream this is when I would be writing it. The memory is fuzzy: either I don’t remember or it didn’t make sense in the first place. It was something to do with fuzziness and memory no wait. Phones don’t have keyboards in real life third doesn’t make sense. I’m trying to type but I don’t think I can get it on the way to the office for the weekend and I think it was a good idea to do it and I was thinking about you and I was thinking of you and the kids in the morning and I was thinking about you and I was in the same place as a friend of mine and I was in the car park and we were in the car park and we were in the car park and we were in the car park and we were in the

The result of a tool that connects musical instruments to a pen plotter, using an arduino module. I created this tool to cross the boundary of “graphic design” as a discipline separate from music. 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 will draw. A performative autoethnographic research of graphic design practices, in this case answering emails using Google’s Gmail service. Leeszaal, Rotterdam West, November 7th 2023 Collective performative dream re-enactment at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands. February 5th 2024. Keyboard of things designers have said. keylogging research, recording the buttons a graphic designer presses while working do you ever dream about work? online research

An investigation into the practices and ideologies of graphic design in 2023–24 though practice-led artistic research and ethnographic methods. I held graphic design in my hands using ethnography, toolmaking and performance as research methods. I examined how a designer spends 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?

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.

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.
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.
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.