I’m writing this from my apartment in Valencia on Spain’s east coast, dreaming of pāua fritters and sausage rolls. Being away has made me reflect on what it means to call Aotearoa home, and what makes our place unique.
Valencia, like many regions across Spain, has its own language, Valenciano, that is woven into daily life. Across Spain’s 17 autonomous communities, language and cultural identity remain fiercely protected. The thriving Basque culture, and the tensions with the Spanish state, are a clear example.
At home, Te Ao Māori shapes our shared language, traditions, and worldview – though it does not stand alone. Aotearoa’s identity is shaped by the relationship between tāngata whenua and tāngata tiriti. The conversations and tensions within that relationship are not always comfortable, but they make us stronger. That’s why I feel ashamed that the New Zealand Government refuses to formally recognise Palestinian statehood. A country whose identity is so deeply shaped by its own indigenous people refusing to acknowledge the indigenous people of another place feels gutless. It makes my blood boil.
As we have in the past, I know that we still have a place in the world to lead on moral issues. We tout these historic moments of leadership with pride – being the first country to grant women the right to vote, leading the Asia-Pacific region in adopting same-sex marriage, standing strong on our nuclear-free stance, keeping out of the United States’ war on Iraq – even if politicans today don’t lead in the same way. Perhaps we can strengthen the foundations for a return to this leadership position by keeping our peers in check and communicating our values within our communities and industries. For me, that’s graphic design.
Articulating the entanglements between the work of design, ethics, and morality is nothing new. The late Ken Garland’s First Things First manifesto, written in 1963 and under-signed by 21 other designers, was a compelling challenge to the design industry to do better. The piece called for designers to resist being solely a tool of advertising, to stop being “gimmick merchants” for trivial consumer advertising. Instead, he suggested that we dedicate our imagination and design talent to “our culture and our greater awareness of the world”, to “worthwhile purposes”.
The writing set up a binary between so-called ‘cultural’ design and ‘commercial’ design, which many critics questioned. The current state of the design industry reflects an imbalance between these two parts, as design critic Rick Poynor put it, “The vast majority of design projects – and certainly the most lavishly funded and widely disseminated – address corporate needs, a massive over-emphasis on the commercial sector of society, which consumes most of graphic designers’ time, skills and creativity”. Over 60 years later, and with four new iterations in many languages, the manifesto remains more relevant than ever.
The manifesto received immediate attention from an unlikely reader, British Labour Party MP Tony Benn, who republished it in full in his Guardian column. This led Garland to be invited onto the BBC, where he read a section of the manifesto to millions. From here, it was translated and published in various international publications from the Netherlands to Australia.
It ignited a discussion on the role of design in society and how it could be a force for good, at a time when the newly professionalised field was trying to define itself and project importance as a key contributor to a growing economy. Professional organisations were forming to represent the workers, like the predecessors of The Designers Institute of New Zealand. It was at one of these industry meetings, in England, that Garland first read the piece he had penned. Later he recalled, “I wasn‘t so much reading it as declaiming it. It had become, we all realised simultaneously, that totally unfashionable device, a Manifesto."
The new iterations of the First Things First manifesto (in 2000, 2014, and 2020), built on the vision of the first, have been modernised for the evolving concerns that the industry faces. The millennium iteration led by Kalle Lasn of Adbusters was co-published internationally by all prominent titles in design commentary. The manifesto was predominantly a print campaign as the internet was still in its infancy (think the noises of dial-up connection), and it managed to generate a deluge of international attention and heated discussion.
This time, the response from the industry was fierce. In 2001 design critic, Rick Poynor, wrote it was “Naive. Elitist. Arrogant. Hypocritical. Pompous. Outdated. Cynically exploitative. Flawed. Rigid. Unimaginative. Pathetic. Like witnessing a group of eunuchs take a vow of chastity”. This list of reactions shows how this iteration touched a nerve in the design community. Perspectives from both sides flooded the magazines that had published the manifesto.
Michael Beirut was one of the key design thinkers who penned ten cutting footnotes to the manifesto. He questioned the reputations of the signatories and why he hadn’t initially been invited to sign. He picked at the vilification of “techniques and apparatus of design” and made a point that many successful social campaigns also utilise these. He went on to question how much advertisements really do, as the manifesto says, “manufacture demand”, suggesting that people don’t really act without any critical thinking because “their designer puppetmasters have hypnotized them with things like colors and typefaces.” Beirut later did sign the manifesto, and in a 2014 interview about the footnotes with the magazine Graphisme En France, he said, “Designers, like doctors, should first do no harm.”
In contrast to Beirut's take, Design Agenda, a British think tank, rejected the manifesto by claiming that a designers’ job is to do “great design for design’s sake”, and that their role is no different from an accountant. As Katherine McCoy observed in 1994, “we have trained a profession that feels political or social concerns are either extraneous to our work or inappropriate,” even though “design is not a neutral, value-free process. A design has no more integrity than its purpose or subject matter.”
We’re surrounded daily by the power of design, in the abundance of advertising, both physical and online, and in the interfaces on our devices. Digital design shapes our reality, influences our decisions and what we engage with, and much of its impact goes unnoticed and unaddressed. The truth is, as designers, it’s a misstep to try to abdicate the responsibility of design.
The 50th anniversary iteration of First Things First in 2014 tackled this issue of digital design head-on. The release coincided with a global reckoning on digital surveillance, driven by key newsworthy moments, such as the WikiLeaks release of the Snowden files. The initiator of this iteration, web designer Cole Peters, noted, “How culpable were we in this machine that was feasting on personal data and surveillance – a machine that was often made to feel chic and essential through design?”
Six years later the 2020 iteration embraced the qualities of the time and was mainly online. This had key benefits, like having 21 translations on one site and a collaborative process where a diversity of voices contributed to the text. This iteration attempted to face the compounded crises of the times, expanding the text in length and scope to include a range of issues omitted from the previous versions. It highlights key issues that are uniquely intertwined with the design field, such as ethics considerations, inequality, racial justice, and the climate crisis. It leads with cutting commentary that holds no punches, “Our time and energy are increasingly used to manufacture demand, to exploit populations, to extract resources, to fill landfills, to pollute the air, to promote colonization, and to propel our planet’s sixth mass extinction.”
My takeaway from all this messy history is that, despite the contradictions of the design industry and the limitations of the manifesto format, the process is worth emulating. It's one that allows values to be articulated and prioritised, that can evolve and respond to context or new information, and that can be used to guide how we put our skills to use.
In the second part of this piece, to be published here at the end of April, I’ll discuss how a values-led process could work in the context of Aotearoa. There’s clear challenges that need to be faced in our design industry, and a process of self-reflection and accountability in the spirit of First Things First could help.
