This text re-presents Michael Rock’s arguments from “Designer as Author” and “Fuck Content” as a staged debate between two archetypal forces: the AUTHOR and the DESIGNER. Both want power. Both want legitimacy. Both want to decide who gets credit and what counts as “content”. Nothing here is neutral.
AUTHOR: You want my job. That’s what this whole profession is about. You want to wear the aura of the originator.
DESIGNER: I want recognition for the systems I make. For the structures. For the frame. For the sequencing that makes meaning possible.
AUTHOR: Sequencing is not meaning. Sequencing is an arrangement.
DESIGNER: Then what do you think you do? You arrange words. I arrange everything else.
AUTHOR: I begin with nothing.
DESIGNER: Romantic fiction. You begin with culture. You begin with language that precedes you. You begin with other texts. You’re remixing like everyone else.
AUTHOR: But I’m recognized as the source.
DESIGNER: Only because culture still believes in single, sovereign original points. The “genius”. The lone voice.
AUTHOR: And what are you then? A translator? A service provider?
DESIGNER: I’m the person who decides how the world sees, reads, navigates and experiences information. That is not “service”. That is authorship through infrastructure.
AUTHOR: You’re trying too hard to be me.
DESIGNER: NO… I’m refusing to be below you.
AUTHOR: Then create content.
DESIGNER: Content is a false category. Content and form are the same substance experienced at different resolutions.
AUTHOR: Designers want to run every decision into content.
DESIGNER: And authors want to pretend “content” falls from the sky into their mouths like rain.
AUTHOR: You think the future of authorship is graphic design?
DESIGNER: I think authorship has always been infrastructural. You wrote a book, I built a system through which books become a cultural object.
AUTHOR: You manipulate containers, not messages.
DESIGNER: The container is the message. The container creates the conditions of interpretation. You just don’t like that I’m starting to say it out loud.
AUTHOR: Maybe we’re both liars then.
DESIGNER: Maybe authorship is a costume we both put on when we need to be believed.
AUTHOR: And who are we when we take it off?
DESIGNER: Collective. Contextual. Intertwined. Impossible to isolate.
AUTHOR: That’s a very design-school answer.
Yes. And it’s the only one that still makes any sense.
References
Rock, M. (2013) Multiple signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users. London: Rizzoli. (Originally published 1996, 2009.)