The Design Anarchists Bible

by laurel saville
kalle lasn creates another publication soapbox with his book design anarchy,
again calling on designers to change the world by changing themselves & the way they work.
Design Anarchy is Kalle Lasns barbaric yawp over the roofs of the
design world. Part personal scrapbook of all things that have infuriated him over the years, part political, psychological and ecological polemic, the book is a manifesto on how the merger of design
and commerce is eviscerating the spontaneous, individual, creative, healthy, happy, messy soul of our world and replacing it with
nothing more than a consumption-driven pseudo-culture.
The diatribe starts out gently enough, with a recollection of a
childhood spent playing in the gaps between buildings, ruins of
buildings, fallow land, abandoned industrial areas, gravel pits and
sand mines. However, this dirty, unused place of youth is soon
ruined by the city gardeners the eliminators of mystery, the
killers of the empty spaces. The rest of the book goes on to enumerate the multitude of ways designers have nullified our mental mysteries and killed the empty spaces of our imaginations by
cooperating with corporations to fill our minds with messages of
manufactured inadequacies and shallow promises about products
that will cure our so-called problems.
The books pages are, appropriate to an anarchist, unnumbered, but Lasn wastes no time in putting forth a solution. Spread
eight reveals his demands, in type cut from a newspaper like some
kind of B-movie ransom note: What design needs is 10 years of
total turmoil fuck-it-all anarchy after that maybe it will mean
something again stand for something again

who is this guy?

80

november

| december 2007

step inside design

81

82

november

| december 2007

photo jim labounty

Talking to Lasn is like being peppered with a rapid-fire list of the

worlds ills. But unlike many radicals, he is just as quick to offer
solutions. Everything is delivered in a passionate staccato, leavened with the traces of his Eastern European accent. It makes for
a bracing and energizing engagement. Lasn says designs problems
and societys problemsthe implications of climate change and
psychological and ecological change, depression and mood disorders that are sweeping across us, and the so-called war on terrorare inextricable from one another. And why is he placing the
blame so squarely at the feet of designers? Paradoxically, because
he believes so deeply in them.
He yearns for the days when designers were mightily engaged
in the world, and fears the last generation of designers was
schooled primarily in how to use design to make money for themselves and their clients. The old-school designers have forgotten
that we are very powerful people, and we are the creators of this
culture, he says. He believes if designers made it, they can also fix
it, and its up to the newest generation of designers to do exactly
this. I think designers are starting to realize that theyre creating
the slickness of this culture, the tone, the ambience. The medium
is the message, and we designers control the media itself. We have
incredible power, and over the next 10, 20, 30 years, we can play a
huge part in solving this crisis that we find ourselves in.

adbusters & the culture of commerce

We have incredible power,

and over the next 10, 20,
30 years, we can play a huge
part in solving this crisis that
we find ourselves in.
kalle lasn

For his part, Lasn has spent the last few decades creating opportunities to control both the medium and the message. A former documentary filmmaker, he became both educated and enraged in the
late 1980s when he tried to buy television time to run an ad against
the depletion of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest; he
was shocked to find no one would sell him airtime. This stark lesson in the lack of democracy on the airwaves led him to create
Adbusters magazine, a process he describes in Chapter 3 of Design
Anarchy: We were a bunch of burnt-out activists tired of environmentalism, feminism and all of the other isms. We had this
nasty feeling that we the people were slowly but surely losing our
power to sing our songs and tell the stories and generate our culture from the bottom up. A visually driven bunch, they made
the magazine by laying spreads out over picnic benches in an effort
to create a single, ad-free, visual and mental narrative of images,
polemic, essays and culture jams.
But it took almost a decadeand half a million dollars of
debtfor Adbusters to truly find its voice and harness the power
inherent in design. When Chris Dixon came on board as art director, says Lasn, he taught us a few tricks and increased the volume
of the message, as well as the circulation, by dramatically improving the look of the publication. Then, he and Lasn visited Tibor
Kalman, armed with the original First Things First manifesto,
which had appeared in 1964 calling for designers to find something more meaningful to do with their talents than engage solely
in the high-pitched scream of consumer selling. Working with
Ken Garland, the British designer who created the first manifesto,
Lasn, Dixon and Kalman reworked and updated it, got 33 signatories and published it as First Things First 2000. (See the text on
the facing page.) This new version again lamented the increaseconsumption-only approach to design and called for a reversal of
priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of
communication ... toward the exploration and production of a new
kind of meaning.
step inside design

83

I WAS LOOKING FOR A NEW WAY OF BEING

Once I started relating to the world as an empowered human being
instead of a hapless consumer drone, something remarkable happened.
My cynicism dissolved. My interior world suddenly became vivid. I felt
like a cat on the prowl: alive, alert, and still a little wild.

84

november

| december 2007

I really enjoy my fight with the old-school designers. I love it.

In dangerous times the world needs mavericks.
kalle lasn

why blame design?

The new manifesto caused quite an uproar, especially, according

to Lasn, because of its challenge to redefine the meaning of design
itself. It effectively provided the spark that reignited the debate
about what responsibilitiesif anydesigners have in terms of
considering the cultural impact of their work.
When asked about Lasn, Steven Heller points out that, after
all, design has always been aligned with commerce: Design is an
aesthetic service, he says. Has it prostituted itself? No. It does its
job, sometimes for good, other times not. But design is a commercial enterprise serving other commercial enterprises. That does
not mean there is no room for criticism. But realpolitik is such
that the mission of most designers is to make a client look good.

It wont take too many of us a global network of about 500 of us can pull this thing
off. We start by brainstorming on the Internet. Through trial and error, wild ideas and
incremental refinements, we create a steady stream of memes: stories, stickers, posters,
flash animations, games, songs, documentaries, TV mindbombs, happenings, provocations
and pranks that communicate the absurd, cold-blooded unsustainability of it all: the
perversity of a system that thrives off the death of nature and the backs of future
generations. We unleash wave after wave of cognitive dissonance, life-affirming epiphanies,
devastating moments of truth. Meme by meme, mindbomb by mindbomb, protest by
protest, we take the piss out of consumer capitalism and crystallize a new vision of the
future a new style and way of being a sustainable agenda for planet Earth.

a fight for designs soul?

However, its precisely this concept of most designers that Lasn

frets about. We all have to live our lives, he concedes, and some
people care about bucks, and they can live their lives being service
providers to clients, and there will always be designers like that.
My problem is that 99 percent of designers now are like that. We
all have to make bucks, but life is not just about making money; its
about living a fully engaged life. Id like to see just some small percentage of designers give the profession back its soul.
One of the original First Things First 2000 signatories, Jonathan Barnbrook, is trying to do just this. When he first came across
Adbusters, he found it directly spoke to me about all the things I
believe and hadnt put into spoken form. He points out that design
always has been the vehicle for change, even when it wasnt thought
of as graphic design, from the church being the first publishers, to
the constructivists helping the Russian Revolution. The real world
isnt just having a client and producing the work. But Barnbrook
recognizes that most designers need to get a job and work for bosses
and clients who may not be trying to save the world, real or otherwise. He suggests a kind of carbon-neutral approach to design. If

above and on facing page: pages from design anarchy, published by adbusters
media. a users guide to culture-jamming, its imagery expresses Kalle lasns urgent plea for design activism.

step inside design

85

I too am not a bit tamedI too am untranslatable;

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
walt whitman, leaves of grass

you are forced to work for someone who is not particularly wonderful, he says, then do something to offset it. Go help in the community. The thing is to use your skills positively in your own time.
Its easy to do nice, cool-looking work, but this is a medium that has
power to communicate. If you go and do something for your local
school, thats more helpful than complaining.

an underdog, a reformer, an anarchist

Design Anarchy is Lasns personal effort to combine complaint

with help. A massive collection of the ideas and images that
have stayed with me over the years of culture-jamming and putting out Adbusters magazine, he describes the book as a monumental struggle with everything weve been involved with, dished
up in a way that will hopefully engage not just designers, but artists, architects and all the visual communicators of the world. The
content includes liberal lifts from Adbusters, advertisements and
news images, many of which have been written over, printed upon,
pasted up and/or put next to other images, words, poems, essays
and opinions that shock the senses and subvert the original commercial and political messages.
You have to understand that, in a sense, its a jam, says Lasn.
Its basically taking the modernist, Helvetica, slick design aesthetic that exists in every brochure and website and magazine that
designers put out, and was an attempt to jam that. It was driven by
anger and a desire to fight back against this aesthetic that I think is
just wrong. I dont think of it as designed, and didnt come up with
this new aesthetic, but it was an attempt to make people think.
Which is the work Lasn seems made to do. Born in Estonia in
the middle of World War II, he spent his early childhood living
in a displaced-persons camp before immigrating with his family
to Australia. After receiving a degree in pure and applied mathematics and working at a job where he played computer-simulated
war games, I traveled the world, mostly in poor countries, because
86

november

thats what I was drawn to, he notes. He worked in advertising and

marketing in Japan before moving to Canada where, for 15 years, he
was an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Then his fateful
collision with media monopoly sent his life in a new direction.
In addition to Adbusters, Lasn has also launched a slew of anticonsumerist social marketing campaigns such as Buy Nothing Day
and TV Turnoff Week, and started the PowerShift Advertising
Agency, which works only on cause-related marketing and for nonprofit organizations. I know what it feels like to be discriminated
against, to be an underdog and fight your way up from the bottom, Lasn says. My life has turned me into a maverick. Its a role
he relishes, and one the design world seems to need. I really enjoy
my fight with the old-school designers. I love it, he says. In dangerous times the world needs mavericks.
Steven Heller agrees. Its always good to have mavericks kicking
up dust, he says. Particularly when they are more than just talk.
Lasn truly believes that the world would be a better place if designers acted responsibly. Hes shown with great consistency that he
believes in ideals that are worth following. I admire his tenacity.
And despite all the serious ills hes wrestling with, Lasn
remains hopeful about the future. I think that maybe 20 percent of designers are realizing that they are people who want to
engage in the world in the most emotional and visceral way, and
that the reason they got into design is that they see it as the best
way to engage, he says. They phone me and e-mail me and tell
me how wonderful it feels to fully engage their convictions in the
profession theyre getting into, and discovering it can be a way to
live a fulfilled life. Lasns positive outlook should not be surprising; after all, to be convinced that change is not only necessary but
achievable, any true anarchist must be a devout optimist as well.

www.adbusters.org

| december 2007
Reproduced with permission of STEP inside design magazine, nov/dec 2007,
V23N6, 2007, Dynamic Graphics Inc., www.stepinsidedesign.com

step inside design

87