Reading I: Discourse and Authorship in Design Practice
Who was the first to make the statement designer as author?
It is an odd question to ask about something that seems to be such a general discussion. Equally odd as Andrew Bennett asking the origin of the first author. But unlike the long list of men given the honour to be called the first author, Michael Rock’s name stands alone in the list of google results when searching for “designer as author” or “designer authorship”. It puzzles me, that though we often refer to authorship in design as a long ongoing and widespread debate, the discussion as we know it today seems to be primarily fuelled by the words of Rock.
Paradoxically, Rock opens his writing by introducing the term authorship, in one form or another, as frequently used in graphic design circles. This indicates that he is actually not the first one to state “the designer as author”, and is probably writing in reaction/response to a previous debate. But who is Rock addressing his critique to? The designers who claimed themselves as authors? If so, why did designers of the time feel the urge to take on an authors’ role? Did they want to take part in the ownership and authority that comes with the term? Or which of all descriptions of authorship did the designers identify with?
What does it mean to call Michael Rock (a graphic designer) an author?
Another question of interest, how come that Rock, who critiqued designers in taking on the role as authors, has himself become the conventional author of this discussion? Conventional in the sense that his writing fits into several of the descriptions of a “pre-Barthes” author:
1. A unified voice. Rock’s text is repeating pre-existing words and thoughts, and at the same time, he is formulating new ideas. In ancient Greek terms: “He both repeats the song and invents it as he sings”. In medieval terms: “he is the auctor who writes both his own words as others, but with his own in prime place and others’ only for purposes of confirmation”.
2. A writer. The author has become synonym with someone who writes, and in Rock’s own words he certainly fits the category, “perhaps the graphic author is actually one who writes and publishes material about design”.
3. © Michael Rock. At the bottom of the text, a small c surrounded by a circle next to the name Michael Rock declares his authorship in terms of being the “originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the work”.
Even though Rock is in many ways an author, it is relevant to ask if this authorship is connected to graphic design. Do Rock’s identity and practice as a graphic designer have anything to do with his authorship in writing, or is he merely a writer in this context? I would say his role as a graphic designer is as relevant as in any other part of his practice. Primarily because his thoughts on authorship in graphic design have come to influence the discourse of the field for over two decades. He might not be the first or the only one to say the words, but he certainly has become the original voice of the statement “designer as author”.
From a reader’s point of view, it is interesting to take the power of an author’s text and twist it around. I am quite sure I have not read Rock’s text the way he intended and have probably left out all of his key points. Instead, I have taken his words and used them against him, not because I disagree with him but because as a reader, I can.
However, taking this kind of control was not my intention from the beginning and I was only able to break my usual habit of reading because I had Barthes radical words on the top of my mind. I became aware of the fact that we easily fall into conventional roles and that it is much easier to “kill the author” in theory than in practice. Old hierarchies and power relations are hard to owercome when it comes to taking on the role as author or receiver of creative work. Rock for example, establishes his position as an author while critisizing it. That is why I decided to consiously take authority as a reader and analyse Rock's text on more of a meta-level in order to challenge the power balance established by authorship.
Barthes critical writing on authorship was relevant in order to foil a culture of self-appointed geniuses (or the author´s powerful empire) and instead, acknowledge the reader as the endpoint of meaning creation. Looking a few years back on the design industry, I feel like there has been a similar culture present – with high-status designers who have more or less the final say in every aspect of the field. In some ways, it is even hard for me to believe that there ever was a need to claim the conventional form of authorship in terms of ownership, status and credibility. But I am sure there have been times when this was the case.
However, I believe it has been equally important for the design field to gain entrance to “authorship” because of the critical debate initiated by Roland Barthes accompanied by Michel Foucault and others. If nothing else, I believe there was a need for stating designers as authors in order to declare the designer dead.
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