Civic-minded design

I’ve been thinking, after reading Josef Muller-Brockman’s Grid systems in graphic design, about the purposes of graphic design and what ends it’s supposed to serve. The book is a technical design treatise, from the 1960’s, on organizing print design with grids of images and typography.

We’re familiar with the role graphic design plays in marketing, as a kind of table stakes of slickness needed to engage the visual cortex and draw people towards a product. But in his book’s introduction, Muller-Brockmann tries to set grid-based design methods within the loftier frame of the civically-minded designer. (In an ads-and-branding-saturated world, this may sound a touch anachronistic.) Some representative quotes:

“The use of the grid as an ordering system is the expression of a certain mental attitude inasmuch as it shows that the designer conceives his work in terms that are constructive and oriented to the future.”

“Design which is objective, committed to the common weal, well composed and refined constitutes the basis of democratic behavior.”

“Working with the grid system means submitting to laws of universal validity.”

You can feel high modernism in full swing here. We see the sketching out of a kind of civically-minded graphic design, one that draws its power from formalism and mathematical rules. The argument seems to run like this: The designer, first of all, starts from a place of humility. They must be aware of their responsibility, of their privileged position to lay groundwork for the future. To be oriented towards the future and serve many requires keeping your ego in check, and you can do this by grounding your work in formal methods, which are based on mathematics over intuition and are thus more universal. By staying humble and submitting to these universals, you make your work more inclusive. (You see shades of this as well in Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form.)

I wanted to write off this whole passage as something which we’ve a little bit outgrown. The role of a graphic designer doesn’t feel that consequential for democracy. At its best and most innocent, this kind of thinking gets you very-standard subway signage in Helvetica; at its worst, well, you know how that sort of modernism turns out. But you have to admit that there’s something here that feels almost right, or at least aligned with something right. Designers should be concerned with something greater than their own free expression. Serving the public is a worthy goal. And so I think these passages are only a little off the mark. I think it’s possible to rehabilitate them, if you consider that the heart is in the right place—we do want to design for everyone, and we want to ground our work in shared principles!—but the mistake is in thinking that the universals that serve the public are found in mathematical formalism.

Civic-minded design has only a little to do with formal concerns and much more to do with functional ones (and non-functional ones). I think there are two big ones.

Accessibility

Civic-mindedness means realizing that mathematical design methods carry you only so far, and the rest of your concerns are much less clearly-definable, because in the end, you are trying to communicate with humans, and we’re messy. A grid may be objective in that it’s always a grid, and they’re constructed the same for everyone, but that means little because a design’s layout is only a small part of how it functions, and that’s the part that’s meaningful if you want to make things work for a lot of people.

Inclusivity requires that you adapt your work to people, in all their many circumstances, and this means accommodating not only different degrees of ability but different situations that people might be using your product in, as Andrew Hinton talks about in Understanding Context. A grid provides legible structure and so aids understanding. But after our grid has been laid out, we must be concerned with accessibility.

Plenty has been said about accessibility that I don’t need to repeat here. In the web world, I fetishize GOV.UK for being so good at this. In my heart, this is what I want websites to be, at least the ones I have to use to get something done. (And, uh, it has a lot of grids.)

Neutrality

Beyond the question of can I use it, there is the question of what can I use it for? This too has a bearing on inclusive design, because you want to enable as many (good) uses as possible.

This may be more controversial but I think when we’re designing we cannot be driven completely by an ideology of convenience. This is tricky because meeting people’s needs in a way that is convenient for them is really a worthy goal, but it has a lot of overlap with a type of worship of convenience that goes too far and freezes many potential uses of a design, by over-optimizing for the ones you could think of beforehand; and it’s not easy to tell when you’ve crossed from one mode over to the other. I personally think the line is crossed when you try to anticipate, in fine-enough detail, what a person might want, and what they might want to do with your design. This makes you over-specialize, and too closely circumscribes your design by what you can imagine. Better a box of predictable tools than a magic oracle, because you can’t build an oracle (and if you can, maybe you shouldn’t).

Where appropriate, the most democratic thing you can do is leave the use of your design open-ended. That means standards. That means less trying to provide a “magical” integrated experience.

I’ll also admit that, OK, a neutral stance towards uses applies much better to some domains than others. When you’re doing something like service design for the government, the right design disposition might be just the opposite of all this open-endedness. There are times where you really do have a narrowly-defined idea of what the user wants—say, renew a driver’s license—and so a box of composable, elegant tools for renewing a driver’s license is really not the mode you’re after. But try to limit this to when it really makes sense, because your users will always have plenty of needs that are not on your menu, and you want your tools to support that beneficial emergence.

Serve people

In both accessibility and neutrality you still have something of “submitting to laws of universal validity”, in the sense of staying humble and chasing a higher purpose than glitz or total optimization. It’s just that the universally valid laws are not what Muller-Brockmann thought they were; they’re not about visual composition as much as how your design helps people, or hinders them.