Daisy Pearson Process Blog

The term so far…

I have been feeling a little lost this term, and have started to wonder if I’m on a tangent from my starting point… as though perhaps my car has been drifting on autopilot and I need to take back control of the steering wheel. This piece of writing is an attempt to get back on track, to connect what I’ve been doing this term with what I was doing last term, so that my car can be gently redirected, rather than crashed and reborn. I think I got lost this term because, while I was happy with the ideas and positions last term, I was not as convinced by the medium in which I was working. This term I sought to explore more immediate forms of communication, with a broader reach, and the forms of GCD that are more directly relevant to my activist practice. Branding is definitely this, as is typography. I was also interested in interrogating how visual media is actually, right now and continuously, shaping our collective understanding of justice, and how those powerful means of communication may be hacked to propose something new, or at least a new way of looking at things. I have also sought to place myself within existing GCD contexts.

This term I was randomly allocated the theme of justice to focus on. Previously in my work the focus on this term has been in relation to the concepts of social justice, global justice and climate justice, in particular in seeking to challenge complacency about the system and the world in which we live. I have sought to expose the historical legacy of our present injustices and crises to show that the world is this way for a reason, but it doesn’t have to be: things could be done differently. I have sought to increase knowledge and understanding about the issues I’m campaigning about in order to hopefully stimulate behaviour change. Justice meant addressing societal imbalances, that create huge inequality. That this present inequality (in terms of the distribution of wealth and resources; health and security; exposure to the effects of climate change; education and opportunities) so closely follows the lines of historic crimes against humanity such as colonialism and slavery feels to me like of the most unjust aspects of our current society. Not only has no real apology for these crimes been issued, nor reparations made, but there is no acknowledgement that the ancestors of these victims continue to feel the effects of their legacies. They are gaslighted as we continue to frame interactions between the global north and the global south as the aid and philanthropy of the former, rather than as one of continued extraction from and exploitation of the latter.

At the time of the first tutorial I was coming up to my first ever trial. In November 2020 I scaled the Houses of Parliament to hang a banner from a group called Africans Rising to the government and people of the UK, asking for an honest acknowledgement and apology for the true human cost of slavery and colonialism, and debt cancellation and reparations for Africa (among other things). I was charged with Trespass on a Protected Site under the Serious Organised Crime Act. When this term began I was pondering on the nature of justice, and a justice system, and the fact that by many global standards of justice the action I took was certainly a just one – good, right, led by morals, values and selflessness. It is something I am proud of, and was led by qualities I wish to continue to strengthen and improve: courage, care, humility. However, if I am found guilty, which is likely, this will essentially be the state telling me what I did was wrong, unfair, unjust, that the balance to society must be restored because of the bad thing I have done. That I owe a debt to society that must be repaid. I find this both distressing and intriguing, and set out to learn more about the nature of justice, its definitions, and whether a sense of universal justice is possible. I also sought to identify the barriers preventing the achievement of global and social justice, particularly where they exist (and therefore must be challenged) within the UK justice system.

Below are my musings from the beginning of this term:

I started this term by collecting statements (in the form of voice notes) on what justice means to people personally. I wanted to identify where the overlaps were, but I was more interested in the contradictions (both within definitions and between definitions). Continuing from last term’s work I collected these in voice note form; I wanted people to feel free and comfortable expressing themselves – I think many people express themselves differently (less naturally) in written responses. I also wanted to continue the themes from my previous term’s work, of platforming other voices and erasing myself – not editing the work but instead leaving in people’s idiosyncrasies, hesitations and mistakes, leaving them firmly with the authority (the role of the editor is incredibly powerful: literature scholars obsess over the smallest variations between different manuscripts of a text, as the smallest change in spelling or punctuation can potentially change its whole meaning. I wish to leave the power with my speakers).

I gathered about 15 responses (a tiny pool in terms of data gathering) but within this there was a fair amount of variation, in terms of nationality, location and occupation. I asked my coursemates (from a range of countries, including Mexico, France, Malta, China, Greece and Ireland), some of my housemates, including one who has worked as a prison officer for the last two years, some of my fellow activists, from India and Ghana, and some people from my neighbourhood, who work in the local shops and libraries.

Many people found the question challenging, and the concept hard to pin down, acknowledging its multifacetedness. Matt’s response in particular, for me highlighted the frequent contradictions that the concept of justice creates in terms of subjectivity and objectivity. Matt said that justice is “the execution of an objective good”, doing something that is “objectively the right thing”. However he goes on to clarify that “obviously this depends on what your definition of good is, which is what your morality is based on”, which of course varies from person to person and is therefore necessarily subjective.

In their responses, people focussed in on a huge range of different types of justice, such as retributive, distributive and utilitarian; elements of justice, such as criminal, social and climate; and political/social interpretations of justice – some more libertarian, some more authoritarian. Many people spoke of justice as a retrospective thing: the idea of setting something back to how it was before the wrong happened or the unfairness developed. Obviously in this latter case, the state you’re aiming for is almost certainly fictional, or at least never existed previously, but could, hypothetically exist: an ideal, neutral state. Others said that justice was about living in a state where you could expect fairness, where you could expect that if the balance was tipped it would be reset again.

Triangulate 2

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I wanted to use these to visualise and further explore how notions of justice, while apparently seeming objective and universal, can clash, overlap and impinge on one another. I tried setting them in different fonts and colours, text overlapping, so as to visualise a cacophony of voices – conversations and crowd-sourced definitions. But I’m not sure this was successful. I didn’t learn anything new. I liked the ones with two voices directly set over one another – both were legible, but you had to focus to read one or the other, and together I think they visualised a dialogue of differing opinions. This is a continuation of much of what I was exploring in the summer – how you bring multiple voices in, and platform, and visualise dialogue and collaboration in the output, however at the moment they have no audience, they are not being projected outwards, and therefore they do not engage in conversation. I’ve platformed, but how to amplify? How can I use this material to achieve my practice aims? To prompt audiences to think in new ways, and maybe spur people to take action?

Meanwhile I sought to analyse the visual language of justice in the UK. I analysed many of the logos of the key justice-related institutions. I was curious as to what the various logos sought to communicate, and why the Houses of Parliament was symbolised by a portcullis. I learnt very little from my analysis about how these institutions interpret the concept of justice. With the sole exception of the Crown Prosecution Service (which uses a set of scales to represent balance), I found that much of the imagery is there to confirm sources of authority and power, largely confirmed through connections to other higher sources of authority and power, always, ultimately, ending with the crown. There’s this constant backwards motion as the different features of the various emblems can be traced back to a certain monarch, or seat of power, or to an ancient Greek or Roman symbol, thus grounding the logo in the context of the historic progression and advancement of European civilisation. I used the catalogue form to break down the logos into their constitutive elements, and catalogued these as well, and through structuring the sections chronologically, and a key on each page I sought to recreate for the reader the journey I took for each logo, turning through the pages as I traced the elements back in history.

In doing this I sought to explore the visual system of the dominant form of justice, and what it communicates to people about the nature and definition of justice. I thought perhaps it would form the research to enable me to hijack these systems and use them to communicate something different. Instead of a justice system that is most concerned with communicating absolute authority, power and strength, history and tradition, what would it look like to create a visual system that communicates fairness, equality and a sense of higher good? Essentially I guess I’m talking about branding a fictional utopian justice system. In a speculative future of abolition, truth and reconciliation commissions and reparations, what would the justice system look like? What would the seal/emblem of its authority be? What would the values at the heart of it be, and how would it communicate those?

Or maybe this project is more of a direct continuation of the questions I was asking in the summer: how to communicate complexity, nuance and depth in places where the conversation is reductive and oversimplified? I think the legal system is taken for granted as being there to serve a “universal higher good” as Matt put it, and yet there is so much injustice in the world that the legal system is not challenging, and in many cases it upholds unjust aims. It is in service to corporations and money and property. I want to communicate that we should take none of this for granted, to inspire people to challenge their assumptions about it, and start imagining and demanding alternatives.

Critical Contexts:

Lauren Williams takes a similar, though far more forceful, starting point, in her project “Making Room”, an installation that seeks to transform the home from a site of carcerality into a space for abolitionist imagination, which she discusses in her Oct 2021 Futuress article of the same name. She opens with a classic discussion on the near impossibility of imagining a world without police, prisons, or capitalism, and asks the question: “What will it require to unsettle our trust in a set of institutions that never served us?” She argues repeatedly, with much evidence, that the system is working just as it has been designed to work (and therefore cannot be ‘fixed’ by reform), and writes that “Design is at best complicit and at worst a key facilitator” in the gentrification and policing that “erases, subdues, and makes Detroit palatable and decipherable as a frontierland.” She argues that future visioning and speculation are spaces reserved for those in power: economists and those with capital and the power to shape, invest and ‘develop’. She quotes Arjun Appadurai, who writes that the future has “been more or less completely handed over to economics.” She also articulates many of the challenges I have encountered in my work:

I’m terrified by the certainty I feel obligated to convey in this room but can’t grasp in my own imagination. I’m afraid of the pressure, the inherent certainty embedded in an idea once rendered into an object that we can hold onto, turn over, toss around, believe in, and dispute. I also know that this perceived certainty—meant to be taken as evidence of the possibility of an altered reality, not a prediction—breeds a sense of believability that I urgently need to construct because nothing about abolition feels certain, beyond the fact that we desperately need it.

I so recognise the conflict between certainty (that we need change and action, and urgently, and that I understand some of the problems and want to shout about them as loudly as I can) and uncertainty (the complete lack of knowledge of what comes next, what a world without these injustices would look like) – and of course the knowledge that of course I don’t hold all the answers, and we must create open dialogues and collaborations, that I must bring people into the debate, in order to move us further towards a vision of justice and equity. This uncertainty was also what led me to Sara Ahmed’s concepts of slowness and hesitation last term. 

Williams’s aims are very similar to mine, and may perhaps provide a guiding light for where my project moves next. She describes her work as “a provocation, not a vision”, that “makes room for critical conversations around what stands between us and abolition”. Similarly, in the ongoing aims for my practice, I have identified that I am seeking to “forge more attentive and open structures to provide opportunities for others to be heard” (Ellen Lupton on Sheila Levrant De Bretteville). My work is grounded in my activism, therefore everything I do is done with the intention of inspiring people to change their behaviour and take action. In both Williams’s and De Bretteville’s models, it is about bringing people in, providing provocations and invitations to co-create alternative realities and futures. Williams’s work is also explicitly about research, about researching “what stands between us an abolition”. Similarly, I set out “to identify the barriers preventing the achievement of global and social justice”. The rest of her aims provide even more inspiration for new directions and questions to ask myself:

• to change, or at least challenge, the course of our present and future by imagining an alternative telling of those moments in time. 
• to see what new questions and possibilities we can raise, open, debate, and refine 
• to inspire recurring, divergent, recursive, living reflections and provocations that shape what might take us to abolition.

Other GCD Contexts:

Collaborative Making:

• Queer Typography
  • the process is the medium
• A range of collaborative typography projects
  • collaborative making (in traditionally individual and controlled spaces)
  • end of designer as sole genius author

Logos & branding:

• Black Panther logo (Futuress) – collaborative women-led logo design, branding of a movement, death of the single lone author-designer 
  • link this to designer as author
• Freckles’s reference: how to design a logo/symbol for a movement

Imagining alternative worlds:

• Making Room: Abolitionist imagination (Futuress)
  • challenging thought processes that are fixed in place, that accept the status quo, that think you can reform fundamentally problematic institutions
  • creating the space for imagination and speculation about possible alternative futures to take place
• Dave Harvie, everything for everyone

Analysing the visual language of the Criminal Justice system & exploring the catalogue as a form for communicating my findings.

This section uses garamond – typeface of the Supreme Court, 3 column layout. Spaced out. Official. The ‘catalogue’ of British justice.

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I used the catalogue form to break down the logos into their constitutive elements, and catalogued these as well, and through structuring the sections chronologically, and a key on each page I sought to recreate for the reader the journey I took for each logo, turning through the pages as I traced the elements back in history.

Analysing the Visual Language of the Justice System – as I had encountered it

My initial encounters with the criminal justice system were stressful and chaotic. The level of disorganisation is shocking and unsettling.

When they sent through the prosecution evidence, it was printed on super cheap thin paper, held together with a corner tag/toggle thing. The envelope was so thin it was falling apart. They’d sent me all 17 of the witness statements against me, and a million other things, with no contents or page numbers.

Many of the sheets had these photocopy marks on them. I wondered if they would work like a fingerprint – uniquely identifying the photocopier that printed them.

They were all completely identical, 3 per page, evenly spaced out.

I found it interesting analysing the different ways in which authority and legitimacy were communicated – especially in these bold black bars at the top & bottom of pages, and the checker marks, which seemed to simultaneously echo ‘no entry’ or ‘warning’ patterns, and the well-known police markings: sillitoe tartan. I found it intriguing the high number of different fonts & sizes used. There was little coherency or constistency.

Another way that legitimacy was communicated were the many different handwritten sections & signatures, all evidencing that a real unique person (an individual, with unique handwriting) had written this. Like the trend of “eye witness accounts” in 17th & 18th century literature, around the birth of the novel.

There were a fair few logos:

With interesting textures from the cheap printing processes:

Here again I was intrigued by the huge range of graphic styles and elements, the mix of fonts, layouts, forms, structures and different ways of communicating legitimacy and authority:

Critical Reference: What Is Queer Typography?

Reflections:

• messiness, mix, connection, intersection
• not finding clear answers – but opening up space for community and conversation

• systems of power determine who is able to succeed, who is written into history
  • therefore measures of “success” erase those excluded from systems of power
  • failures can be seen as alternative successes
  • “who is labeled as other, who is dismissed as failure”
• “those logics of success are the specific ways that heteropatriarchy is maintained in capitalism, through acts of accumulation, reproduction of wealth, individualism, exceptionalism, control, and sovereignty”
• “failure is the map of political paths not taken” – Halberstam
• not legible = not represented by mainstream 
• type design = political, commercial (capitalist)
  • CIA – fonts frequently uphold and support imperial power
• “radical acts of care can be one of the most effective ways to reists capitalism, which so deeply need to extract and to exploit without concern of others”
  • not sure what a type design paradigm based on care is supposed to look like
• foundry —> library
  • keep type products fluid and changing, never official, never complete
• “at the core of typography… is control, precision, preservation or standards, the idea of perfect legibility, and the myth of the lone type designer as genius author”

• Queerness is not conformity within a corrupt system
• queerness = attitude
  • “…in the face of conformity, and attitude in the sea of passivity, and attitude to say yes when others say no”
• audience (and designer) – one of the things that determines queerness 
• “queerness in the scrappy, ad hoc, and sometimes homemade designs that were directly related to the urgency of protest and activism and survival”

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“only queer acts of reading and writing”

“queer as an action”

Critical References: Collaborative Typography

Ok, so how to enact my position through typography – not as metaphor, but as action?

I did wide research into collective typography, which challenges something innate in typography – the sole, genius, author-designer, working with precision and control, and asks how you can make this process collaborative, maybe even going so far as to use it to platform (Tre Seals does this beautifully with Vocal Type – celebrating and reviving the work of previous designers from social justice movements).

Here were some of my findings:

Collletttivo

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/collletttivo-typefaces-graphic-design-260319

• Luigi Gorlero of Collletttivo tells It’s Nice That, “our aim is to build an expanding group of typography buffs that can learn and improve through practice and mutual exchange.” Purposely contradicting the often solitary working methods of many type designers, Collletttivo’s open source ethos means its output is more collaborative and more experimental. Additionally the openness helps “broaden [their] audience and provides a platform to give and receive advice from other members of the design community.
• Their name encapsulates this ideology, deriving from the Italian word for collective “collettivo” while the extra “l” and “t” stands for the Italian term for open typography, “libera tipografia”.

http://collletttivo.it/

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/collletttivo-apfel-brukt-graphic-design-230120

CollabType Workshop

https://wtypefoundry.com/blog/collabtype-workshop-ft-new-latin-wave

• workshop
• instruction kit
• group collaboration 

Collaborative Open Source Type Workshop

https://fonts.github.io/typographic-collaboration/

• taking an open source font and adding glyphs
• using ‘design sprint’ – the technique of working on something for 20 mins, then swapping, so someone else can carry it on
• taking a serif font and design a sans for it
• taking a font and making it responsive to different screen sizes
• features a ‘recipe’ for how others can engage too

Group Font

Raissa Pardini brings creatives from across the world together to create Group, a collaborative typeface raising money for charities

• Raissa Pardini brings creatives from across the world together to create Group, a collaborative typeface raising money for charities
• Each letter and number of its alphabet has been crafted by a different creative
• “I wanted them to do their thing. A real spirit of trust and community”
• “My activism drives my art and my art is my escape from a society that I don’t agree with sometimes. Artists can send powerful messages with what they create and that’s why art is so important. Art shows the real side of everyone of us”
• “We can always do better, if we listen.”
• “Typography is really important. It’s how we communicate through reading, informing, guiding. […] The importance of translating a language the right way, with the right letters. The importance of respecting its history, while projecting it to a more contemporary twist. I see many things happening in typography in our future and I’m excited.”

Critical References: Redaction Typeface

https://www.redaction.us/

https://www.fastcompany.com/90502764/this-font-brilliantly-subverts-civil-rights-injustices

Reflections:

• “in hopes that individuals looking to communicate within the U.S. legal system have recourse to communicate not just through their own distinct language and voice, but also through design as a form of protest.”
  • because stylistically it is modelled on justice system – hard & soft, on the bitmap element – creating inktraps….
  • still not 100% convinced by the origin of the typeface and how it enacts protest…
  • could I take the idea further? could you create a typeface that, in the use of it, enacted protest

Inspirations from this, to inspire my work:

• abolition
• money bail in america – deep injustice – neither tried nor convicted, punished for poverty
• spiralling – can’t work, childcare etc
• redaction – using legal techniques against them, in reverse
• structured around portraits, poetry, collected documents – source material edited etc, then also type design, digital processes of sharing, printing, circulating 
  • medium is the message
  • texture of justice process
  • cheap paper, photocopies, scans, redaction

Observations of problems/issues to respond to:

• really difficult to get in touch with CPS
• need a registered email address 
• or post, which takes ages
• system designed to be weighted against people who self-represent
• sooooooo much paper – everything printed out. cheap paper, falling apart envelope
• terrible interaction design
  • why is all our tech energy going into making it super easy to shop and use social media??
  • why is one of the greatest celebrations of UX design the infinite scroll?
  • WTF aren’t these skills being used to help people navigate the benefit system, or the legal system
• the legalese – language is impossible to navigate 
  • could you do a translation service?
  • put into normal words
  • a guide to court?
  • google translate for legal speak

Reflection on ‘Redaction’ typeface – I want it to work, but I still feel like it falls into the trap of metaphor (as discussed in What Is Queer Typography?)… how is it actually creating resistance? in that it’s free to use and download… but that’s nothing to do with the design… watermarks – a visible sign that the work has been photocopied or shared

Create a piece of writing that uses specific writing structures, tones, or organizational methods to enact or embody your position.

Excerpts from a conversation with Nick Anim. Nick is an environmental activist who I know through Extinction Rebellion (XR) and one of the directors of Transition Town Brixton. He is an academic, currently at UCL doing a PhD entitled “Green, But Mostly White: Exploring The Perennial Challenges of Inclusion And Diversity In Environmental Glocal Social Movements”. The full conversation was 1hr 9mins.

Nick:                          We have to change— you have to change the narrative […] And you have— and this is— this is the thing as well. What, erm, environmentalism or environmentalists tend to have is empathy. Good. But they don’t have deep empathy. Deep empathy is the ability to— to— to— to— to not just, erm— imagine how somebody else’s life would be, you know, but the ability to feel, you know, feel what other people’s lives are, you know, and I’m talking about the people living at the moment because— in this system, as— as— as it is, there are people absolutely heading for extinction every single fucking day. You know, and we’re not talking about, you know, extinction of species, extinction of bees, and extinction of, erm, you know, we’re talking about human beings. You know, we’re talking about knowledge systems, we’re talking about about about cultures and so on, every single day are under threats from— from the, erm, dominant system that we live in. We’ve got to somehow convey all of this in a three second– hah, And it’s got to mean something to, you know… So somehow we’ve got to get deep empathy into the conversation, we’ve got to get radical love into the conversation.

[…]

Daisy:                        But in terms of these big questions that I’m asking of, like, what— how— how can graphic design be used to kind of like further, erm, instil empathy or communicate these deep, complex narratives and those sorts of things? This is— it’s so experimental and it’s so early days. And like whether we will ever have answers, I don’t know, but that’s really exciting, being able to be in that space and ask those questions of it.

Nick:                          Mmmm should I tell you something quite disappointing?

Daisy:                        Haha, I’m never going to get answers?

Nick :                         No. No— because, because, you know, we are so fluid as individuals and as a culture and as society and so on and so forth, we always have to shift. But the key thing is and I think this is part of what you are trying to do is to— is to— to control the narrative in some sort of way, or to help control, help shape the narrative, because the narrative at the moment is shaped by corporations. You know, the meta—narrative of how we organize ourselves and how life should be, etc, etc. It’s not even shaped by our government, it’s really by corporations who control our governments in many respects. You know, tied of course, tied of course, to this GDP thing we started off talking about, you know. So somehow we’ve got to reclaim the narrative. And—

Daisy:                        Yeah

Nick:                          That is a very, very powerful thing. And reclaim the narrative also is within XR and other environmental movements, You know, we have to reclaim this narrative that’s environmentalism is not just about green and pleasant lands. It’s about the people, you know. And if we don’t have deep love for those people, then we’re not going to achieve anything.

[…]

Nick:                          It has to be about justice. It has to be about justice. I mean, no matter how you look at it, you know, whether you look at it through a telescope or binoculars, it has to be about justice. You know, if we’re looking at some justice for future generations, who will be inhabiting this earth when we’re gone, or if we’re looking at people who are inhabiting this earth right now in different spaces and places, who are catching fire, who are catching hell, who are catching floods, you know, it has to be about justice. So, if there was anything I would say to take away, [it] is that your entry point should be justice, you know. Your entry point should be justice, erm— and then you can sort of frame it however you wish to. But it is messy. Justice is messy, but justice starts with recognition, actually.

Daisy:                        Yeah

Nick:                          That’s what people don’t get, you know, I’ve been told, you know, I’ve been told a few times in different ways, that erm, justice, you know the focus on social justice or racial justice, etc, focuses on difference, and that is a problem. You want to see what unites us, not what makes us different, but then if you don’t recognize my— my lived experience, as different, I’m not going to come on board, because you’re not recognizing that I’ve been— I’ve been through, I’m going through, I’m going to go through this shit.

References:

Nick Anim’s Work

Anim, N. (2021) ‘Reflections from the frontline: Does environmental sustainability have a problem with social justice? (Part 1)’, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, 1 April. Available at: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dpublog/2021/04/01/reflections-from-the-frontline-does-environmental-sustainability-have-a-problem-with-social-justice-part-1/ (Accessed: 31 May 2021).

Anim, N. (2021) ‘The What Next Summit: a pivotal moment for social justice in Transition?’, News, 21 May. Available at: https://transition-bounceforward.org/the-what-next-summit-a-pivotal-moment-for-social-justice-in-transition/ (Accessed: 31 May 2021).

TransitionTowns (2020) Green, But Mostly White. Why? 10 Dec. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPBSifJTCFM&t=179s (Accessed: 31 May 2021).

References proposed in the conversation

• Simon Anholt
  • On place/nation branding
  • The Good Country Equation
  • ‘Which country does the most good for the world? https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_anholt_which_country_does_the_most_good_for_the_world
• Rob Hopkins (founder of the Transition Towns movement)
  • From What is to What If’: Unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want
• Phoebe Tickell
• Nora Bateson
• Joanna Macy
• Timothy Snyder
  • The Road to Unfreedom
  • The politics of eternity

I have found it difficult to pin down what my coursework this term has been about. While I have definitely gained (some) clarity in my written work as I’ve progressed, I have found it challenging to pin down whether or not my visual work enacts these written aims.

I actively chose to engage with screen-printing as a medium – I have always loved the physical aspect of the process, which has become increasingly relevant to the ideas I’ve been working with. It has been wonderfully productive, alternating between the written work, the mental, verbal and written probing of positions and beliefs, and the completely different mindset of the print studio: exposing, cutting, scanning, washing, moving, pulling ink etc. The two processes have fed off each other.

There is obviously a powerful political/activist history to screen printing. While I haven’t exactly engaged with all aspects of this, there’s definitely been something about slowness, about labour as care, and about the physicality of the space that has felt appropriate for activist aims. As I discussed previously in relation to Uzma Rizvi – going slowly can be a way of resisting capitalist insistences on productivity; time can become something radical when it is framed as “time for” rather than “time spent”. The Care Collective’s Care Manifesto, and the amazing work done by Women of Colour Global Women’s Strike, who are campaigning for a Care Income demonstrate that care too can be radical. Certainly, I am seeing more and more people theorising that the way out of the climate crisis depends on more than a shift in politics, but a deep shift in culture and values, and a global resurgence in empathy and compassion. One such person is Phoebe Tickell, whose excellent blog post seems to have summed up my position this term better than I ever could myself!

As an activist and scientist, I spent a lot of my time moving amongst groups of people who seemed to have a very clear grasp on what they believed, but in a time of greater access to information and an explosion in the number of choices we have it becomes harder to cling onto a simple story. Perhaps it’s time to accept that an increasingly complex world we need to adapt to more nuanced stories and resist the urge to hone in on the one that is the most black-or-white. This is vital for two reasons: to prevent and reverse ecological destruction and climate change and to re-establish the role of community, empathy and cooperation amongst humanity.

There’s also a community element to screen printing – throughout this term I’ve been in the building more, getting to know the academic printmaking community, and sharing and exchanging ideas and expertise. It has the potential to be hugely social, collaborative, and connect movements through outreach and support. In the Extinction Rebellion Art Factory we share our space, resources and skills with other movements, allowing them to create work in our space, or learn what’s needed to get set up on their own.

My position has shifted across the project to accommodate this community aspect more. In my writing, I have been moving towards platforming and allyship as a bigger part of my practice. I am trying to act upon convictions I’ve held from the start that all my ideas and positions are unfinished, constantly changing and still being formed, and that my voice is maybe not the one that needs to be heard. Well-meaning privileged white people, even with the best intentions, make mistakes all the time. So I have been starting to ask: how do I bring other voices in, how do I learn more, how do I make that learning part of my work?

It has also been important to me to find my angle, my points of connection with the issues, for example finding local anchors for distant issues. Concerns over cultural appropriation, exploitation and othering have made me uncomfortable using some of the material and stories about issues to which I have no personal connection, especially when dealing with an issue of such violence and trauma. Navigating my way through the connections between this particular story and my own activism, and repeatedly retracing the journey that brought me here has been really important. Eventually I have found points to reconnect with other activists, and create new knowledge through the form of interviews. Doing this alongside starting Unknown Quantities has reminded me about the value of publication, and how writing can be used as a way of platforming other people.

Throughout this process I’ve not really been fully convinced there was a strong connection between my physical work and my written work – in particular that my visual work has enacted the position I have taken in my written work. However these connections have become stronger week on week. Part of this has been seeking to close the gap between my uni work and my activism, and trying to find ways to connect my uni work to “the real world”. What’s more, I am still excited by the visual potential in the forms I’ve explored – while I have tried to move past the simple equation of visual complexity with complexity of meaning, there’s something quite exciting about the busyness and layering and irreversibility of the printed animations I’ve been making, and in the way the meaning changes when their temporality is tampered with.

Moving past this idea of visualising complexity, I have been complexifying the making process, i.e. divorcing the making, or de-situating the making from the dominant system of power – if you make work using the same techniques, institutions and voices, the flaws and limitations in what you say will be the same.

There are several avenues I could explore from here:

• continuing to explore visual complexity, and if/how it can be used to communicate complex subjects.
• Complexifying the making process – bringing in more voices, collaborating, platforming, challenging the very systems and institutions that we make work from
• What does it mean to visualise complexity? To visualise things that aren’t data-based or quantifiable?

Just as I’ve reached the stage where reaching out to others (via interviews) for their knowledge and expertise on the second point, on this last point too I need to seek out help. I’ve got this sense that maybe it’s all a waste of time – surely I’m repeating other people’s labour Is it possible, or is it a pipe dream? Have other designers tried and failed and learned their lessons? Or are there examples of success I’ve yet to track down. I will start by talking to Clive Russell of design studio This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll, designer and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. I will read Ramon Tajeda’s Diagrams of Power, and maybe email him. I will research more into Kate Raworth, and how she came up with the doughnut diagram that is her proposed model for a new economic system in her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics. I will continue to have conversations with a wide range of activists and designers, and maybe (hopefully) document these conversations as I go. I will continue attending the weekly Against The Grain lectures, and reach out to the wonderful lecturers who explore the most fascinating and complex intersections of design, history and social and environmental justice.

I will continue to actively work out more ways in which I can use my practice to platform and support others. I will question if my current visual forms are the most appropriate for these aims.

The interview continues:

The leadership, youth, women and children are in silence. Sad.
Because our leader was murdered.

When we destroy the forest, when we destroy the rivers, we know what will happen in the future… Here in the Amazon, we have the world’s lungs.

I haven’t done my WC3 yet – sorry! I’ve decided to use it as an opportunity to interview someone — an indigenous rights activist, or BAME intersectional environmentalist activist, but I’ve yet to decide who. I’m asking around my networks now. I will be responding to the prompt:

Create a piece of writing that uses specific writing structures, tones, or organizational methods to enact or embody your position.

I will be using the interview format to embody my position, i.e. platforming someone else’s voice, using the process as an opportunity for me to learn, being transparent about the limits of my knowledge, and making my own learning process part of the outcome.

A regular part of my activist practice since the BLM protests of 2020 has been to actively conduct personal research, to approach people and ask questions, to seek to further understand the complex issues I campaign about. I found the confidence to approach people in full transparency that this was personal research. Here I will basically do the same, but in a slightly more formalised way. While I think it is a great idea as a response to the brief, I also think it will help bring much-needed clarity to my position too, or at least to further my development, because at the moment I’m at risk of going round in circles.

The starting prompts/topics for discussion will probably be:

• decolonising the conversation around the climate crisis. because it’s fair and just and right, but also because I don’t think we’ll solve the climate crisis without decolonising the conversation around it, telling the truth about how we got into this situation, so we don’t continue to repeat the same mistakes
• how we have that conversation, what role design plays in that, and what form that conversation must have in order to live by the values it proposes.

But I want the interview process to be open, and led by the participant. I don’t know where the conversation will lead me. Maybe it will give me some answers, but it is likely it will also raise more questions. Maybe it will inspire new people to talk to. I like the idea that this could become a longer series. Maybe it would become an iterative series – many version of the same conversation, with different people. Maybe the whole thing opens out into a polylogue, a term coined by Julia Kristeva, that I discovered in Maura Reilly’s Curatorial Activism, meaning “an interplay of many voices, a kind of creative ‘barbarism’ that would disrupt the monological, colonizing, centristic drives of ‘civilization’”.

Two other key influences for this idea have been, Evan Nicole Brown, whose Against The Grain lecture discussed the value and ethics of interviews. You should be critical about which voices you elevate and put on public record, and think about finding new sources for topics, so as to make sure you are not merely contributing to the feedback loop of whose voices are heard, but are adding more to the conversation. She talked about how to interview respectfully, and how to make interviewees feel accurately represented in the outcome.

Similarly, Issue 3 of Unknown Quantities was entirely made up of interviews. Here they resisted the impulse to curate too heavily, or to give their own angle/perspective on their subject. By featuring entirely interviews they created a open space for incomplete and ongoing conversation:

The questions we proposed to our interviewees sought no right or wrong answer, nor did we expect them to provide a fixed conclusion. Instead we hope it will provoke a debate about a term that habitually passes us by silently.

How are positions most effectively developed and demonstrated? Discuss this in relation to a creative practice or text. Then explain how this has helped you think about developing your own emerging position.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s appointment as the director of studies in graphic design at Yale University School of Art in 1990 symbolised a shift away from the Modernist theory of her predecessor, Alvin Eisenman, and towards a new model of graphic design, with diversity and inclusiveness at its heart.[1] De Bretteville’s postmodernist approach to the teaching of her discipline values a multiplicity of voices, and seeks to create designers that listen, are attentive, and think about how to make sure others are heard, not just themselves. She advocates strongly for putting yourself in your work: “my agenda is to let the differences between my students be visible in everything they do.” The anger with which her appointment was met from some members of the design establishment, notably Paul Rand, who resigned in protest, even further reinforces the exclusivity enacted by the insistence in graphic communication design upon Modernism’s superiority. That he resented the intrusion of “every special interest — women’s studies, black studies, gay studies, and the like” shows just how hostile to difference and individuality proponents of Modernism can be.[2] His language shows that, for many, modernism is seen as the only pure form of graphic design, while anything else is lowly, inferior and undeserving.

De Bretteville’s approach was not so much a rejection of modernism itself, but the attitudes of superiority and exclusivity that are attached to it. Her appointment and her approach to design education, started to shift norms around design practice and education, but also culture more broadly. As a signatory of the 2000 First Things First Manifesto, she demonstrated her conviction to re-examine the values of graphic communication design, and transform the discipline so that it might be relevant to and in touch with the political and social needs of our society. Thus design practice cannot be detached from real lived life. Practice and position must go hand in hand.

Sara Ahmed and Uzma Rizvi both emphasise that an activism as design practice must be lived, discovered, and constantly enacted and worked out over time. For both, their positions, respectively feminism and decolonisation, are something of an iterative practice, continuously enacted and understood through instances of application. As Ahmed says so poetically, “I think of feminist actions as like ripples in water, a small wave, possibly created by agitation from weather; here, there, each movement making another possible, another ripple, outward, reaching”.[3] Thus for her each instance is a small part of a larger whole, and vice versa, the whole position is made up of small instances of action. Rizvi gives the examples of how such things are enacted: changing the colours of “flesh-coloured” crayons and introducing gender neutral toilets in schools, in both cases to reflect the real range of bodies, and using the word “I” in your academic writing (when we’re taught from an early stage this is not “neutral” and therefore unprofessional) so as to be honest about your personal relationship to the work and your innate set of positions you bring to the research task.[4] De Bretteville is a fantastic example of this type of practice – her values are woven throughout not only her artistic practice, but also her career and her life.

Practitioners like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger create very politically urgent work, with bold statements challenging the state of the world and disrupting the status quo. Their practices are a lot about working out their own positions and opinions—Jenny Holzer’s text-based works (Truisms and Inflammatory Essays) consist of lists of notes she had been making for years: positions, opinions, statements she had gradually been forming—but they also both rely on large, loud, vocal projections into the world. I have never felt that there was anything I wanted to say quite like that – I have opinions, and positions, many of them, but mostly I feel that these are things I’ve picked up and gathered from others, to whom I am indebted. I feel aware of the significant limits to my knowledge, and aware of the degree of privilege I possess. I’m conscious that my voice, if amplified could unwittingly contribute to existing inequalities, and that any opinion I currently hold may shift over time. Of course, projecting your positions out in the world is usually the best way to speed up this process, as people will respond to them, challenge them, and, so long as you are receptive to criticism, a conversation begins and you grow. Formally, Holzer’s and Kruger’s work does not present itself as the opening of a conversation; it is somewhat closed, full of statements, bold letterforms, capital letters. It resembles the ‘final word’ in an argument, or a rejection of something, rather than a question asked. Holzer’s work is most open when her statements are self-contradictory: “Protect me from what I want” – they expose the contradictions built into the fabric of society, and pose questions through their absurdism.

Of course, I admire the positions that both artists take, and feel that both present a fantastic challenge to the prejudices of the art world and society. But I am interested in exploring alternative ways for positions to be communicated, in their innately unfixed and changeable forms. I am particularly keen to situate myself in response to De Bretteville’s call to use my design practice “to forge more attentive and open structures to provide opportunities for others to be heard”.[5]  

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[1] Lupton, E., 1993. Reputations: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Eye, [online] (8 vol 2). Available at: <http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-sheila-levrant-de-bretteville> [Accessed 13 May 2021].

[2] Kimball, R. Tenured Radicals. XL, XIII. New York, 1990. Quoted in Rand, P., 1992. Confusion and Chaos: The Seduction of Contemporary Graphic Design. AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, [online] (Vol. 10 No. 1). Available at: <https://www.paulrand.design/writing/articles/1992-confusion-and-chaos-the-seduction-of-contemporary-graphic-design.html> [Accessed 13 May 2021].

[3] Ahmed, S. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. p3

[4] Rizvi, U. ‘Decolonisation as Care’ in Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, ed. by Carolyn F. Strauss and Ana Paula Pais. Amsterdam: Valiz Publishers, 2016. pp. 85-95.

[5] Lupton, 1993.