The National Design Awards are a serious deal. The program “celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.” It’s a big enough deal that the winners are invited to the White House.
This year, however, five Communication Design honorees decided to decline the invitation.
That’s right, they turned down going to the White House. In a letter they sent to the White House, they stated (emphasis mine):
Graphic designers are intimately engaged in the construction of language, both visual and verbal. And while our work often dissects, rearranges, rethinks, questions and plays with language, it is our fundamental belief, and a central tenet of “good” design, that words and images must be used responsibly, especially when the matters articulated are of vital importance to the life of our nation.
We understand that politics often involves high rhetoric and the shading of language for political ends. However it is our belief that the current administration of George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged in a prolonged assault on meaning.
While we have diverse political beliefs, we are united in our rejection of these policies. Through the wide-scale distortion of words (from “Healthy Forests” to “Mission Accomplished”) and both the manipulation of media (the photo op) and its suppression (the hidden war casualties), the Bush administration has demonstrated disdain for the responsible use of mass media, language and the intelligence of the American people.
Chipp Kidd was also invited to sign this document. His response, via email: “…But as graphic designers, we rightly complain that those talents are too often uncredited and taken for granted. Personally, in this case, I think it accomplishes more to stand up and be counted than to stay away.”
I’m somewhat on the fence here. I agree strongly with what these designers (Michael Rock, Susan Sellers, Georgie Stout, Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister) are saying.
Design does have power, and Good Design should be used responsibly. Propaganda is an example of this gone wrong. (and yet I still adore propaganda. Maybe for this reason alone.) But Chipp is dead on in saying that it’s important for design to be recognized, because people just don’t realize how important design can be.
Maybe the thing to have done is publish this letter condoning the design actions, and yet still go accept the award. Use it as a soapbox?