Somehow after working through three projects this semester I've only now realized that beyond exploring my word, I’ve been actively performing censorship myself. Across the semester, I’ve been the one fragmenting, distorting, and deciding how much the viewer can or cannot access. I’ve been shaping experiences through selective design choices.
This brought me back to something a previous professor said about designers acting as authors. We aren’t simply communicating information; we’re controlling its delivery. This semester has felt like an exploration of how design manipulates perception and how I’ve taken on the role of both author and censor, constructing incomplete or obscured narratives.
It reminded me of Michael Rock’s “Designer as Author” essay, where he discusses how designers often do more than visualize content.
Because of this realization, the content of my reflective piece will focus on this duality — reflecting on the designer as both author and redactor. I want to explore how my own design choices this semester have shaped, fragmented, and withheld information.
Postmodernity turns on what Fredric Jameson identified as a “fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion” of the subject. Decentered text — a text that is skewed from the direct line of communication from sender to receiver, severed from the authority of its origin, a free — floating element in a field of possible significations — figures heavily in constructions of a design based in reading and readers.
“A film is not what it is about, it’s how it is about it.”
“designers must consider themselves authors, not facilitators. This shift in perspective implies responsibility, voice, action… With voice comes a more personal connection and opportunity to explore individual options.”
The problem with the authorship paradigm alone is that it encourages both ahistorical and acultural readings of design. It grants too much agency, too much control to the lone artist/genius, and discourages interpretation by validating a “right” reading of a work.
On the other hand, work is made by someone. And the difference between the way different writers or designers approach situations and make sense of the world is at the heart of a certain criticism. The challenge is to accept the multiplicity of methods that comprise design language.
If we really need to coin a phrase to describe an activity encompassing imaging, editing, narration, chronicling, performing, translating, organizing and directing, I’ll conclude with a suggestion: designer = designer.
