A few days ago on Design Observer’s Observatory, Adrian Shaughnessy considered the role graphic designers may have played, indirectly, in last week’s riots in the UK. He argued that designers help create and sustain a “world of desire and consumption” which alienates those who can’t afford to be a part of it, leading some to take by force what they can’t buy. He writes:

But for the past three or four decades the major role of graphic design has been to create the branding and collateral of desire. For those who can afford entry into this world — no harm is done. For those who can resist the blandishments of this world — no harm is done. But for those who have neither the education nor emotional maturity to deal with this, immense harm is done.

Though I was pleased initially to read a discussion on the ethical responsibilities of graphic designers, its outcome disappointed me. Indeed it was hard for me to read Shaughnessy’s article and not think that he was implying, as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber put it, that “[p]oor people are too stupid to deal with well-designed stuff.”

Since Plato’s Republic, the idea that the working class and the poor (and women, and non-Westerners, etc.) are not equipped — “have neither the education nor emotional maturity” — to deal with the world has been used as justification to impose various forms of control on these groups. The “world” of course doesn’t need to be anything in particular. It can be art, literature, the “reality” of politics, or the alluring fiction of luxury brands. The general public is incapable of dealing with any of it we’re told.^* So although Shaughnessy meant to say, I think, that lack of educational and economic opportunities exacerbates the tension between what consumer culture makes available (and desirable) and the price, literal or figurative, we must pay to get those things, he ended up sabotaging his argument by using a reactionary trope to support it.

Instead, Shaughnessy could have pointed out that looters, as consumers of a particular kind, the kind that doesn’t pay, responded to brands like other consumers do. They wanted those products for the same reasons everybody else does. In that sense, there is little difference between shoppers and looters, between “us” and “them.” And so, if “immense harm” can be done to them by graphic design when it serves capitalism, and if their looting spree is our shopping spree, can we really say that “no harm is done” to us simply because we can pay for stuff? Or, to put it another way, supposing the problem with graphic design is that it perpetually makes us want things, does that problem go away if we can buy those things?

^*In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu showed how upper class taste is driven by the converse idea: the upper class is in control and can show restraint where the lower classes can’t. Expensive designs embody this idea. They are often sparse and monochromatic.