The last corporate taboo
‘Every designed object contains in itself the seeds of future practices and future behaviours.’35
Researching contemporary Graphic Design studios, it is difficult to find images of the designer’s workspace. However, speaking to fellow graphic designers who have recently worked and interned in design studios, the majority have expressed the rich presence of potted-plant life within these spaces, paired with a large amount of time confined behind their computer. These interior gardens perhaps have something to do with resentment for time at the computer screen, a form of compensation for time spent outdoors. These interior gardens are essential to retaining some peace of mind regarding work, some way to slow down to nature’s time, as everything else seems to continue to speed up—a tangible response to our increasingly claustrophobic urban environments made up of concrete, steel, and glass.
Being a freelance graphic designer allows for the choice as to where to work and when—however, it is tempting to become so engrossed in virtual content that it can be difficult to remove oneself from it.
The history of graphic design is inextricably linked to that commerce and consumer production. But if design has a history linked to the generation of need, consumption and desire, it is also linked to the generation of knowledge and information. At the level of the service industry, where most design takes place, graphic design exists only as form-giver and not as a content provider. This is something that can and should be subverted. As Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven states in his essay ‘Research and Destroy’:
I have personally neglected the use of physical tools in favour of digital ones, and have therefore limited myself in terms of working environments, limiting myself almost solely to working indoors. For fear of sounding old fashioned, I believe that the fact that the bulk of our work happens on a screen is detrimental to the development of a healthy design practice.
I propose a return to the Garden. The philosophy of the gardener and the lifestyle that accompanies it defies that of the homo economicus—he who tries to foster steady use and profit stemming from unrestrained consumption and production.
Gardening embodies a certain kind of morality, of perseverance and of values of confidence and hope for the future—subsumed in the wisdom behind the act of planting and the ability to wait for uncertain results—to be confident about the possibilities offered by the uncertainties of the future. In that sense, the sustainable designer can be likened to the gardener.
34 Van der Velden, Daniel. 2006. “Research & Destroy. Plea for Design as Research” Metropolis M, issue 2
35 Marenko, Betti. 2015. ‘Deleuze and Design’. Edinburgh University Press, p.1–35
I did not originally intend for this thesis to carry an eco-plea. However, in the face of an ecological crisis, it is difficult to overlook.
Work tends to be the root cause of this overwhelming issue, which is ironic because the Garden of Eden—the most divine form of nature to ever grace the Earth—is supposedly the place from which work originated.
We seem to have worked our way from the wilderness into offices where we don’t tend to feel much of a connection to nature at all. We are ever busy, ever-building, ever in-motion, ever throwing out the old for the new—that we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy making, and what we have consequently neglected.
The recent trend of introducing nature into the workplace on a large scale is an appealing—but misplaced—solution to workers’ worsening anxieties which are due in part to peoples’ diminishing exposure to nature. This particular solution relies on increasing workers’ health, and consequently their productivity by improving the workplace through biophilic design.
It is difficult to question society from a safe, comfortable and illusory environment. Therefore, it is important to be mindful of the spaces where we create and what we create within these spaces. How you work depends in large part on the spaces in which you work. When workers think about how to take control of their workspaces, they think about how to transform the work itself and consequently its value. I propose that the worker reclaims their right to physical contact with nature through the role of the gardener—sewing seeds of optimism for the future and drawing the world into a Good Anthroposcene.