Thinking in public,
one fragment at a time.

A Response to a Internet Comment. (Probably the last of many)

Self-taught designers can't make good type. (Paraphrased)

This actually provokes critique of a kind of blind trust and faith in the institution. Not entirely warranted, or at all...If you reconcile that the institution (either academy or professional) is only supposed to take creativity and philosophy and any other largely subjective field so far. The point of the institution is to develop scholarship, not to breed excellence. The excellence part is—in this and many other cases—a matter of taste, whimsy, and even vaguely irrelevant, next to the capture and dissemination of works that exist at the edges, that help document the field as it exists.

The thing is: College and study can certainly be a predictor of output. The whole idea of organising a profession is to rationalize the various ways of learning/knowing and compose a kind of cannon.—of people who have expressed confidence in these areas as to expand and further codify what reliable qualities and practitioners might show up. When I say predictor of output, I mean there will be more consistent output from people who have studied design. The various programs will create more consistently bad, or good designers, designers who are more or less consistently concerned with one or more aspects of the field and how it is expressed.

Academic or Professional communities might be compelled to define:

Good Design: Qualities of design that might be a signal of a professional standard.

Ethical Guidelines for Practice: What is boundary of the profession as it relates to ethics.

Text Books: As a continuous reference—and Authors who are attending trends and advancements in the field.

Branches of study/specializations: Typography, Data, Screen, Print etc.

Of course there are many contributions that institutions (and their inculcated curricula) offer, to be frank-limitless-. I want to caution the reader to include excellence. This is about the often rarely viewed constellation of access, instinct, drive, and raw talent. And that shit shows up in lots of ways for lots of people. I wish us all luck. Always.

I do still believe that there are really very few rules in graphic design that are valuable beyond exploring what kind of quality it provides. There are—and will always be—ways that we are—more or less—effectively communicating with each other. Some of these ways are created for very specific audiences that possess their own languages, vernaculars, and visual codes, norms and more.  And where I sense we lack some rigor is that I believe Designers would do well to ask—That is to—Research and position their works for those audiences that they are charged with reaching or hang back and let those who are fluent, do the work. This also goes a long way to help those fluent in those obscure dialects develop their confidence in our very competitive field.

The competition I speak of is against acculturation and intellectual simplification. Neither—a great recipe for design. (More on that later)

The audience can spot the signals—when it's for them. The designer owes the audience a way to enter.

A Pause

If you pause for a moment—suspend your agency—you might find something to call god, if you like what that suggests about power. You also might find the energy to act on—or care about—something different(ly) as you realize what is being done for you, how well it is being attended to, and by whom. 

This acknowledgement might allow—for an already developed imagination—a small amount of bandwidth for an intellect to operate at another higher more evolved level. This might be the closest thing to a consciousness-a both highly contextual and profoundly limited consciousness. It may even have the elaborate, detailed, delicious geometry of consciousness but it would still be quite a small portion. 

So—I understand—by calling it small it might have the effect of making me appear judgy and rude, even obnoxious and conceited.

It would also be natural to have a bit of a trip (a feeling) about that kind of consciousness. A person might even decide to feel good about it. Which is why some people who are normally quite lovely can appear quite annoying from time to time.

So, did you notice I did not exclude myself from the group?

Transition Design

Transition design is a resilient practice of developing new, well-informed policies with public and environmental priorities—of any size—these policies have a principle purpose of improving the quality of a person's life, their geography and ecology. It is a transition from policies with other priorities and objectives that are generally less concerned in the needs on non-shareholders. 

SOUND TIME SPACE

All Sound is observed over time, Time is experienced in space, and Space is often defined by how it is occupied by our conception of MATTER.

The Way it Was.

There are some of us who were raised in a time when/and where design was practiced by largely cis white guys. A genre of person who in 2026 seems less qualified to exclusively practice anything alone. Especially not something that I might care deeply for. Think chaperoned or shadowed.

We might have imitated their hubris and their glibness and their non-sense, but not for long. It took a hot minute for me to understand that my own values are more valuable than that, my own instinct was so much more mature. The tribal instinct isn't primitive at all, it's rather sophisticated. In so many situations that are solved with competition and and strategy for domination as the defining aspect of success—tribal thinking allows for a collective measure of success, largely defined by the health of a community's most vulnerable person. This is intelligence, this is cooperation. This is survival.

White men in the field of graphic design especially in small markets where there is less competition had developed a conception of themselves as important and beyond the punishments of the unwashed younger (and sometimes) junior designers. I tried it on for 5 mins. Decided it wasn’t for me and got down to being real with my community.

Disassociate or embody and internalize.

The choice is not yours. It isn’t clear what our choices are in this kind of conflict—to capitulate to the power with toxic agreement or non-action in the face of abuse or something more brave. Without indicting oneself along the way.

Design Again

A sense that design is what humans do this particular kind of human. The Sapien made tools. The sapiens made tools because the sapiens wasn’t thinking in the present. The thinking was happening for the future. It’s just what we do we future we design featuring is designing and in every format in every vertical in every field in every area that we think about the active future is actually the act of co-creating or creating the futures that will live in sometimes better futures, sometimes worse, not because of malice necessarily, but because of a lack of ability to integrate the sciences to integrate the humanities and to ask ourselves not what we are featuring, but why we are future design right now is obsessed with the what creating product after product after product sometimes thought product intellectual product sometimes tool product you know to help other people become better designers better Futurists the whole thing is predicated on futures if you look at why we are in subscriptions it’s because they’re trying to capture the futures that we would make, and the money that we would make or the currencies that we make or the resources that we gather in the present are applied in the future. The whole notion of the future is based economy is because we’re still alive because the pandemic didn’t wipe us out or some other ex extinction level event didn’t just destroy us and make way for the next version of us designing as featuring in the way that the organ called the heart is also responsible for distributing oxygen. it’s layered it’s detailed, but it’s true with future like nothing else. We are impossible to control in the future, but in the present, we are so easy to manipulate..

The worker whose job it is to lubricate the robots.

Davis, finishes the third cycle shift at the disassembly line, mostly harvesting the chips from the Roombas(TM) from 2020 and forward. Their small fingers were in demand for this work mostly because during this part of the century most IOT hardware was onboard and hard-pushed. 
The next four cycles on the line were specifically for restocking the non-metal parts library since the ban on new plastics and right now...snagging all the chips before firmware gate was a chore that came with a bonus. 
And yes the bonus was quoin.

There’s nothing odd or special about this moment, this had been this way for some time and the P-C was in a typical geo-seasonal cycle—that meant that at this is the time of year the plant-based stim-packs would be plentiful and movements around the N/H almost completely unobstructed for those with cred.

Soon Davis would be on route to the second China Island—this one had become an island fortress, with a man made reef and desalinated moat. This was one of a dozen sites on the sphere where all production is machine articulated, the sole employees are 18 people who have traded IAP (international access papers) for 2 years of lubrication duty. They labor for two moon cycles and immediately following collect IBI (a kind of  minor pension) for the rest of their lives. Free to go and spend it wherever they please.
Thanks to the Apparatus. Long live the Apparatus.

It’s a well coordinated action that has been a global priority since the end of NATO and the reunification of the Russian Union. Most choose to lubricate, everyone has the option and everyone understands the work perfectly. There are countless vidstreams that -more or less- glorify the labor. The spheres 5 major tribes and the hundreds of other sub tribes and factions agree to allow all of their people an undisputed immunity at all dozen sites.  Generally kept—all details of all treaties are kept in a device they called the Nest. At Site 6. South of the site FKA Lima, Peru.

Humans around the planet generally have what they need there is no abject poverty, no hunger, and those who provide labor are simply interested in labor, and making...in all sorts of ways. Human craft is rare and well rewarded, labor is traded for access which is also access to other knowledge and skills undeveloped in your part of the sphere. One should know though —people who move freely have already given their time to the Apparatus. Each person who is moving may only carry four books in analog format. 3T of books in any digital format.

Veterans have a sub-c tattoo, you can't see it but if you paid attention to their gate you could easily distinguish the hipsway of person who was moving freely around the planet from those who could hardly leave their M-C (micro climate). Anyone with any ambition at all has either served the Apparatus or is scheduled to serve.

Davis has a muscular degenerative disease, which had -thus far-kept them from the upper 78 floors of their M-C block but that was all. Really life was otherwise quite mild, once they committed to perform their service all the accommodations needed to travel would become available, the medicine (cure), the rehab, the papers would all fall into place, removing all barriers and invalid aspects of their lives with AMC (all modern conveniences) and the sub-c credentials to migrate and choose their own adventure.

Besides the service there more or less 5 different types of exchanges on the sphere. Different people with different access need different things. And there were 5 ways of adding value. Labor, Barter, Swap, Share, Contr-Act.

What we make is of consequence somewhere.

Anyone that calls themselves a professional designer owes the community they serve—the people and the places that they make for—some consideration. For the gifts they express cannot become curses. They should quietly disintegrate, or disappear or be of a quality and value where no person is harmed in its making or maintenance. No person should be forced to exist with it or negotiate against its presence.

The Fuel

We're done being the fuel for this morbid enterprise.

or 

Maybe we're not.

or

Maybe it's a provocation on the notion that we have been trained to be the fuel, and have great difficulty evading this purpose for some purpose less self-destructive.