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Here’s an excerpt from my annotated bibliography, all of these are essays from a fantastic book called Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility.

I was excited to realize when I started compiling my bibliography that all the articles I’ve annotated so far are by women!  Which is awesome, since graphic design is traditionally a very male-dominated field… Some of the essays are better than others, but I’m rating everything I read on a scale from 1 to 5 ampersands, for easier delineation purposes.

“Socially Responsible Advertising: Altruism or Exploitation?” by Judith Schwartz.
A fantastic essay examining the complex ethics of using social change, environmentalism, and charity as marketing and branding strategies.  Schwartz breaks businesses using these strategies down into three categories – niche marketers, passion branders, and image builders – and goes into specific examples for each.  At the end, she concludes that there is no such thing as true altruism when it comes to business.  Society and the causes being supported CAN benefit from these advertising campaigns, but the bottom line is always profit and self-interest, and cause marketing is often opportunistic and exploitative.
Rating: &&&&

“Good Citizenship: Design as a Social and Political Force,” by Katherine McCoy.
Generally not a very useful article for me.  The primary audience is clearly design educators, and the focus is on the problem of neutrality and detachment in many design classrooms. “Should one help sell tobacco and alcohol, or design a Presidential memorial library for a man who reads only pulp cowboy novels? …The answers may be more subtle than a yes or no.  But one thing is clear: Design is not a neutral, value-free process.” McCoy discusses how it’s important for design students to sometimes think about social and political content in addition to projects focusing on selling goods and services, and try developing their own personal content independently of client assignments.  That has pretty much been my entire Hampshire career…
Rating: &&&

“Beyond Pro Bono: Graphic Design’s Social Work,” by Anne Bush.
This is the best and most useful article I’ve read so far.  Bush goes in depth about the importance of sociological and anthropological considerations in design, and critically analyzes several poorly executed poster campaigns.  In one poster, for the New Liberal Party in Columbia, classic images of working class empowerment “…reinforced the rhetoric of existing power structures rather than interacting with a more conflicted social reality.  It attempted to represent rather than engage potential readers.” Communication is fundamentally about dialogue, and Bush encourages exploring how an active dialogue between client, designer, and audience “could result in more collaborative (and ultimately productive) communications that are interactive in their actual intent and that function through joint design rather than prescribed conditions.”
Rating: &&&&&

“Ethical Design Education: Confessions of a Sixties Idealist,” by Susan Szenasy.
This article was not very relevant to me.  It’s basically a design professor at Parsons musing about how to make her whiny, cynical, self-centered students give a damn about the world and not be concerned merely about making money.
Rating: &&

>>Blog of the week: the Groundswell Collective blog, edited by Hampshire alum and fellow design-for-social-changer Dave Morgan. Groundswell is dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism, and does a fantastic job of highlighting projects, artists, and organizations that actively engage with social justice causes in a variety of creative fields.  The blog has actually been down for the last few weeks due to a hacker attack, but is now up and running again, so check it out and spread the word!