Graphic Design: A Stepping Stone for a Dystopian Society

Graphic design is incorporated into almost every product humans interact with. Effective communication is the foundation of design. Graphic design is everywhere, and graphic designers are always in high demand. Wherever information needs to be effectively relayed, graphic design is behind the scenes operating to catch and keep attention. Therefore, it is not a lie to say that graphic designers wield immense power and have the potential to create either a utopian or a dystopian society.

According to journalist Rob Walker design is a morally neutral idea. It is whatever one does with it that can be good, bad, or somewhere in between. However, taking a deeper look at the modern society brings to forefront the fact that graphic designers have used their craft to bring the contemporary world into a dystopian state.

Graphic designers have long been pledging to abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm. However, that remains far from the truth. The 1964 and 2000 First Things First Manifestos suggest that designers could have a more positive impact on society by working for clients outside of advertising but most designers do not heed this advice. The 2014 First Things First Manifesto goes further: “Some of us have lent our expertise to initiatives that abuse the law and human rights, defeat critical systems of encryption and privacy, and put lives at risk.” Design has been used to persuade, manipulate and deceive. Designers go ahead and create campaigns for political campaigns with apparent harmful ideologies. Many designers work to promote addiction, deception, or control.

It is also important to acknowledge that a designer’s level of harm fluctuates over time, that some designers cause more harm than others, and that a designs harm can vary between being “easy to evaluate” and “difficult to evaluate” (e.g., impact of design for cigarettes versus design of algorithms). Assessing the ethicality of a particular design in this leveled landscape of cloaked and changing harm is not a straightforward business. It was abundantly clear that people’s ethical and moralistic standpoints vary enormously and one’s moral compass can determine how largely they contribute towards the creation of a dystopic reality.

During my research to understand the darker side of design I read up on subliminally persuasive techniques provided by neuroscience and psychology and how they are being implemented in the design field. Some of these techniques are:

·         Message framing

·         Visual Metaphor

·         Priming

·         Emotional Contagion

·         Nudging

·         Anchoring

·         Choice Blindness

 

One particular application of the above social influence techniques I explored further is the use of dark patterns, according to darkpatterns. org, (2015). “A dark pattern is a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.”