I’m not totally sure what you mean by ‘traditional’ here but I can speak from my own experience and thinking about design practice and education.

Regarding practice, design is often presented (and talked about) as an autonomous discipline that imagines new futures and can solve all of the world’s problems. We like to think of ourselves as visionaries, as futurists, as those that turn the future into the present.

In reality, design is still largely a reactive discipline. More often than not, we are at the whims of clients, of budgets, of corporations. Design rarely operates in isolation – removed from marketing teams, from sales people, from capitalism, from the desires of those in power.

However, I’ve noticed an interesting disconnect here between design practice and how we teach design. While we like to talk about design in grandiose terms, design students are often still taught to simply be service providers — classes are filled with learning software and creating portfolio-ready work that will get them a job when they graduate.

When I was in school, I was taught that design was a neutral container in which to hold someone else’s content. My own education was rooted in the modernist tradition — strict grid systems, whitespace, clear hierarchy — in the shadow of people like Paul Rand, Massimo Vignelli, and Josef Mueller-Brockman. We were taught that this was ‘good’ design.

What gets lost in the retelling of design history is that the Swiss Modernists were actually just one group of people — mostly men — and Swiss Modernism was just one aesthetic. It’s not necessarily better or somehow intrinsically closer to “good design”. There’s a generation of design students who were taught that the opinions of a group of men in Europe were gospel and everything else is ‘experimental’.

When we teach design, I’m not sure we should just be teaching software that’ll get them that first job. If we truly want to design to become that kind of autonomous, world-building discipline, we shouldn’t be focusing on old software, old tropes, and old styles and telling students this is what good design is.

And, when we do teach design history, we should move beyond a history of styles and show that the way these things look — whether it’s the Swiss modernists or the experimental graphic design of the 90s — is a reflection of specific ideologies that come from specific people in specific places and times.

I define design as ‘ideology made artefact’. It’s the physical manifestation of particular ideologies. I think a lot about this line from French philosopher Louis Althusser’s essay Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus where he writes that: “ideology does not obscure reality but rather creates a new reality.”

My reading of this is that ideologies don’t keep us from seeing the ‘real’ world but rather recreates the world in its image. This happens — this move from ideology to reality — through design. Design actualises ways of seeing the world.

Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens, talks about “imagined realities.” In the book, Harari argues that humans became the dominant species through myth making. It’s the belief in myths that allow people to organise, to work together, to identify (or not identify) with people they’ve never met.

What is branding if it isn’t the telling and retelling of myth? We can view the creation of corporations, religions, and nations as a type of myth making and these myths are solidified — with branding, with borders, with iconography, with flags, with currency, with origin stories — through design.

I’m constantly quoting Mark Wigley and Beatriz Coloumina’s notion that “the entire globe has been encrusted with a geological layer of design.” Design has completely reshaped the world.

There is no world outside of design anymore from the keyboard I’m typing on, to the building I’m inside, to the roads I take to work, to the satellites orbiting the planet at this moment. Design is reality. They are completely tied up together.

So what do we need to change about this relationship? I guess we should acknowledge that this reality is shaped by design which in turn is shaped by ideologies. Which means we can change it, all of us, together.

It’s impossible to not feed your ideologies into the design process, right? Every decision a designer makes — whether it’s a colour choice, a button placement, a type selection — is influenced by their own world view: their own ideologies, biases, points-of-view, gaze.

I’ve been giving a lecture in nearly every course I teach the last few years called “Design is never neutral” that goes through a series of design artefacts to highlight the biases and ideologies of its creators from the prevalent use of Helvetica to how early Kodak film was colour corrected for white skin, often underexposing darker skin tones; from how Facebook encourages us to share particular kinds of content to what it means that the artificial intelligent assistants on our phones, from Siri to Alexa, are all gendered female.

Every time I give this talk, it seems there another new project I can include as an example. (I keep an Are.na channel of references around this topic too.)

Tradition is comfortable. It’s clear and knowable and nostalgic. In my experience, tradition and nostalgia become popular when there is uncertainty around the present and the future – which certainly describes our current moment, doesn’t it?

For designers, and especially design educators, “traditional design” is easier to talk about, easier to teach. It’s like what we were talking about earlier: we can teach grid systems and pairing typefaces, and all the ‘rules’ of ‘good design.’ That’s how most of us were taught and so it’s easier to continue those methods, even when we know it might not work anymore. It’s easier to teach that there is right and wrong, good and bad.

But to continue to teach that modernist graphic design is still the epitome of good design is wrong and does hold design back. I love Paul Rand’s logos as much as any other designer but to continue to teach his methods of logo design as if they still apply to current conditions does a disservice to young designers.

Rand never designed for the internet. He never saw mobile apps. The world of branding is completely different than when he was designing logos, yet many students are still taught that logos need to be a black and white, iconographic symbol that look the same on a billboard and a business card.

‘Culture is Not Always Popular: Fifteen Years of Design Observer’ is a book Jarrett Fuller designed and co-edited with Michael Bierut and Jessica Helfand celebrating 15 years of Design Observer.

I think design is too often seen as a universal force for good. Design can change the world! But as we’ve been discussing, that’s not necessarily true. The world is in a weird place right now and I think designers should be talking about their role in how we got here – whether it’s designing social networks that simultaneously bring the world together while destabilizing democracy or the promotion of particular corporations.

Like I said, design is all-too-often seen as an autonomous, world changing, force for good when, in reality, it’s often a tool of capitalism, at the will of clients, corporations, and people of power. I think acknowledging this tension, talking about design’s role in society — the ideologies we’ve made artefact — is the first step in pushing the profession forward.

One of the problems with defining design as ‘problem solving’ is that designers start to see everything as a problem that needs to be solved — a problem that design can solve. What’s the saying? “When you have a hammer everything starts to look like a nail?” This is how “design thinking” is often marketed — that design can make anything better from toothbrushes to death itself!

I’m very weary of what I think of as the designer-saviour industrial complex — this notion that the designer can come into any situation, any community, any corporation, and fix the problems. Design alone is rarely a solution.

It’s only in coordination with those on the ground, those with different expertise and skills, and only through working together and working with others that design truly be a change in the world.

I’m really conflicted about this to be honest. The short answer is yes, it can (and it does) but I have some caveats. Designers working in spaces we now call “design fiction”, “critical design”, “speculative design” and even the newer terms like “discursive design” are all using design methodologies and the design process to test, to critique, to speculate, and to imagine outside of a commercial context.

But we must acknowledge that there is a certain privilege that allows one to work in this mode. You need to be inside an academic institution or find funding or work within an organisation that values this. The demands of the market obviously make it harder to work in a more speculative context. I see this again and again when I’m working with graduate students where we put a lot of emphasis on research while students develop their thesis projects.

These students are paying a lot to be there and worry this will be the only time in their career where they’ll have the freedom to explore and test. Then there’s the constant dread of looking for a job after they graduate that’s trying to pull them back, once again, to those traditional design projects that’ll look good in a portfolio.

I mean, in a very literal sense with climate change, the world needs saving, right? Here’s an issue that’s so big and so all encompassing, it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around. It’s easy (for me at least) to not think about it or consider its full implications.

As I mentioned earlier, my alarm bells go off when I hear proclamations about how design can change the world. These statements can sometimes be arrogant and self-aggrandizing. Especially when the solutions proposed are a new branding campaign, a poster series, or some more ‘design thinking.’

Design by itself will not change the world or solve climate change. But if we think of design in this expansive view we’ve been talking about — as ideologies made artefact, as systems for organizing, building, and imagining new futures — then of course design will play a role. Design should play a role! Design can only make so much difference by itself but, by working in concert with others, it can truly become a force of change.

I also want to add: I don’t think of design in this expanded view as a type of colonising — as a way for designers to come in and tell others how it should be done — but rather as a type of democracy where the tools of design are made available to everyone. I think a lot about a sentence Victor Papanek wrote in his introduction to Design for the Real World: “Design can and must become a way in which young people can participate in changing society.”

I’m increasingly less interested in silos and definitions. This comes back to what we were talking about with ‘messing up my students’. I’ve often said that every generation needs to redefine what graphic design is for themselves. And I think you’re right, that’s increasingly a multidisciplinary approach.

Scratching the Surface: Jarrett’s Podcast – https://scratchingthesurface.fm/about

In graduate school, I did a double concentration in graphic design and critical theory so half of my classes were traditional design studio classes and the other half were writing and philosophy classes. To sit in these classes and read Marx talking about class, Habermas on Publics, Hegel on dialectics, Franz Fanon on the black experience or Judith Butler on the body, I couldn’t help but bring these ideas back into the studio.

We’ve been using the world ideology but maybe philosophy more generally also works: design is the material side of philosophy. Philosophy the thinking, design the making. (These divisions aren’t as firm as I’m making them sound, but I do see them as too sides of the same coin. I think you get the point).

Speaking on design changing the world, I’m reminded of that famous Marx quote: “Philosophers have so far only sought to explain the world. The point, however, is to change it.” Maybe philosophy explains the world and design changes it? (I don’t know, I just thought of that now!)

Honestly, this is probably the hardest question so far! My work bounces around between teaching, podcasting and writing, research, and more traditional client work. I want to keep doing all of these things — like we talked about earlier, multidisciplinary practice is increasingly the new norm — but I’m seeing my work moving further into education.

I think I’m a mediocre designer, a so-so writer, a mid-level podcaster but I actually think I’m a pretty good teacher. Most of my thinking these days is around classroom and I’m especially interested in developing and refining my own teaching practice.

Teaching has completely changed how I think about both design as a whole and my own work and place in this field. All of my work, I hope, whether it’s the podcast or the writing or the teaching, is about creating forums for discussion, building community.

As I get older, I’m finding I’m less interested in being the one with the answers, and more interested in being the one asking questions. I’m less interested in being the name at the top, and much more interested in being a support for others.

I don’t know, maybe it’s cheesy, but I just love design and I love this field and despite its problems, I think we can do better and I hope I can play a small part in making it more thoughtful and welcoming and engaging and critical.