So I went back and read Emigre and all these things that were in the air when I was an undergrad and I noticed that the postmodern stuff had very little to say about what I was most interested in understanding: work. When these writers did address the constraints of the workplace, it tended to be this thing about how The Man was going to put you in a Helvetica straitjacket and take away your personality. It seemed to me, on the contrary, that designers were increasingly expected to mine their souls for marketable new expressions.

JDB In making capitalism the context, I’m just naming a force that already structures design history as we know it. Even in the most basic textbook accounts, the designer only really emerges with the modern separation of planning and production. From Arts and Crafts all the way through the Bauhaus, there is an ongoing conversation about alienated labor and the possibility of socialist technology. That emphasis recedes during the interwar years and in the postwar U.S. a buttoned-up version of modernism becomes the face of corporate management. This sets the stage for new critiques beginning in the late ’60s. But in graphic design, postmodern theory arrives fairly late and it gets all mixed up with the arrival of the Macintosh so the idea of technology as a progressive force that liberates the worker (this time, the designer) sneaks back in. My graphic design history course ends with the First Things First Manifesto 2000, where you can see the profession timidly confronting the social crises of late capitalism.

Of course, what we teach needs to be broader than the canonical narrative I just sketched. For one thing, I think we should question how we even define “the designer.” The cast of characters in the history textbooks can seem a little arbitrary. We get a lot of information on modern painters (even cave painters!) but there is less on printers and typesetters, whose work more closely resembles our own. I think this stems from an impulse to depict the designer as an “author” — someone fully in charge of their own expression — rather than a worker who produces under specific constraints.

JDB Part of the point in foregrounding capitalism, which is, of course, a very broad historical category, is to get away from presentism. As it often turns out, our contemporary anxieties and fantasies about technology have deeper roots. In one of my courses, for example, we read about nineteenth-century wood engravers. These workers initially enjoyed a lot of autonomy, but as demand for printed images increased, their work became more routinized and their wages dropped. With the invention of the halftone process, they basically disappeared as a necessary link in the transmission of images. Students often connect that story to the recent emergence of gig apps and template apps or to predictions of a future role for AI in the design process. But we also see how this streamlining of image production enabled the communications media that our practice now takes for granted. It’s a good study in “creative destruction,” which is one of the grand themes of both modernism and capitalism. It’s sort of what people mean when they say “disruption” today.

JDB Maybe first I should acknowledge the difficulty of teaching history and theory in any serious way within the existing forms of design education. Design programs radically diverge in what they offer (or even make time for) outside of studio courses. And students are understandably focused on the kind of professional training that will make the immense cost of college worth it. Then, as they enter the field, they face unprecedented expectations of flexibility and versatility. They are coached to ceaselessly adjust and retrain, but they aren’t offered a lot of space to question where those compulsions come from or why they exist. The emphasis is always on transforming yourself to meet social demands which defers the question of transforming society to meet human needs.