An Emergency Exit Is Always Designed

What does social design mean to you? Could you give some direction to how you would define social design?
It would be naïve to assume that a social design is always good, just because social processes are always good. Neither is true. Social design can be used to ends as good, or bad, as the social processes it reflects.
We prefer to speak about design with social effects. Design with social effects is about the options we can choose from and how they are presented as choices. Choices are never all-inclusive. They always exclude possibilities. Even if one chooses not to choose, that results in an exclusion. It depends on the kinds of choices on offer. You may intuitively reach for the easiest and most gratifying choices, while you may not be offered good choices at all. We can recall this by looking at the way the financial crisis was presented. In the Netherlands, the basic choice was between bailing out the banks, such as ING and Fortis, or facing an uncertain, dark and deadly future fate. That is not a very rich palette of options to choose from. Of course, in a panic situation there are always less options and the choice has to be made more quickly. But choice always involves some kind of design. An emergency exit is always designed. Now it turns out that the bailing out has produced a result where we no longer have any choice left: our future is uncertain, and dark. The law theorist Cass Sunstein has called this complex phenomenon ‘choice architecture’, and has placed it at the centre of democratic discourse in his books Republic.com 2.0 and Nudge. One might call it the design of choice. The point of Sunstein’s choice architecture is that possibilities are always more, or less, visible because of a design decision, which may be improved or changed. So choice is endorsed, or obscured, by design, as we can see, for example, by observing how products are arranged on supermarket shelves.
As is shown by Utrecht Manifest’s Hoograven Invites You! project by Urban-Think Tank, the question of how best to renew a postwar residential neighbourhood needs a new and more diverse choice architecture than just the single option of privatization and gentrification, which has been the predominant model during the 1980s and 1990s.

What are you doing or showing at Utrecht Manifest? Could you explain how these activities relate to social design?
With our contribution to Utrecht Manifest – its visual identity – we reflect on ‘the design of the social’ as it is currently taking place in social networking platforms on the internet. How are social relations themselves subject to design? Facebook, YouTube and MySpace are decisive in the reformulation of social terms of engagement. We are interested in the social network as a phenomenon that produces, and makes visible, globalized relations between people, and makes possible but also structures new forms of agency. We were inspired by online profile pictures where people move their heads at the time the photograph is taken, resulting in an out-of-focus picture – by that movement avoiding cameras with face and smile recognition, as well as face search on the internet. a large-scale technocratic system where everyone and everything is tagged.
We are also interested in social networks as carriers of political power, in what the political scientist David Singh Grewal calls the ‘structural coercion’ presented by these globalized networking standards.
We have introduced a type of informal logo for Utrecht Manifest, the ‘social swoosh’, which presents ‘UM’ as a loose, hand-drawn line that anyone can reproduce. The different versions of the social swoosh are presented as colourful clouds, which have a certain awkward absurdity about them. This is combined with friends profiles of people which move their heads so that their faces become vague and distorted. There are various buttons and message pop-ups appearing – one of them says ‘collaboration is the new competition’, which is, we find, a deep truth: the one who in the past monopolized the system is now the one who has the most collaborations running, whose network power is affirmed by the highest degree of connectivity. Another, final and last element of the campaign is a series of smileys. It would be hard to underestimate the significance of the smiley and the emoticon as pictorial forms in abstract network spaces. Perhaps the smiley is the true ‘design classic’ of the network era and one of its best open source icons – everyone may use it, redraw it, adapt it and the meaning is by now close to universal. Ironically, according to Wikipedia the first time a smiley appeared on film was in a 1948 film by Ingmar Bergman…

What are some of the most urgent topics that need to be discussed – in the broader context of design as a social, political and economic reality?
At the risk of being a walking cliché: the climate and the environment, scarcity of resources and the deepening economic crisis will restructure politics and conflicts, produce new alliances, and pose fundamental challenges to design. In graphic design, perhaps the issue of shared authorship and how to combine intellectual challenges with a dose of accessibility and ‘good populism’, and at the same time, of course, to maintain research and artistic content as important elements that contribute to a better and richer type of message. Can designers produce models and propose new standards that do not just improve life but also show a deep reflection on where the world is going?

An interview with Metahaven
from the Utrecht Manifest 2009 Reader
http://www.metahaven.net