Essay Research - The Designer as Auther

The Designer as Author

Michale Rock

• Authorship may suggest new approaches to the issue of the design process in a profession traditionally associated more with the communication rather than the origination of messages
• The notion of a decentred text – a text which is skewed from the direct line of communication between sender and receiver, severed from the authority of its origin, and exists as a free floating element in a field of possible significations
• Most design is done in a collaborative setting, either within a client relationship or in the context of a studio that utilises the talents of numerous creative people, with the result that the origin of any particular idea is uncertain. The ever-present pressure of technology and electronic communication only muddies the water further.
• The figure of the author implied a totalitarian control over creative activity and seemed an essential ingredient of high art. If the relative level of genius – on the part of the author, painter, sculptor or composer – was the ultimate measure of artistic achievement, activities that lacked a clear central authority figure were devalued.
• (Designers had to) construct the notion of the author as a means of raising what was considered low entertainment to the plateau of fine art.
• Any inner meaning (of a collaborative artistic project) must come from aesthetic treatment as much as from content.
• Therefore graphic auteurs, almost by definition, would have to have produced large established bodies of work in which discernible patterns emerge.
• The primary concern of both the viewer and the critic is not who made it, but rather what it does and how it does it.