AND THERETO I PLIGHT THEE MY TROTH

Today’s post is going to be all about back-story; thus I shall begin with the end: I may have changed my mind about working as a designer in the industry. With that said many of you should immediately see the need for some back-story here, and hence my first assertion. Questions abound, such as: What was my position relative to working as a designer? Why might I have changed my mind? Why has this even come up? And, of course, what has this to do with the marriage ceremony from the 1662 Church of England Book of Common Prayer?

I will get to all of these questions – and assuredly several others in due course – but only in my own special way. Today I feel like teasing the words out, wandering through them, inducing phrases to form sentences and paragraphs as they please. During my trip to Philly I spent much of each of my evenings continuing my reading of Daniel Deronda, and have found myself returning often to Eliot’s phrase “all this yeasty mingling of dimly understood facts with vague but deep impressions…” It seems rather appropriate to the way I have been thinking about things as of late, so today I shall abandon myself to that mingling and see what the writerly fermentation might yield up.

So, some back-story perhaps. I was in Philadelphia the past few days to interview for a teaching position at Philadelphia University. At the moment I wish to bypass that topic and push this narrative along in another direction – though, so as to not leave the insiders hanging, I rather enjoyed myself and feel it went about as well as could be hoped for. That said, I shall divert your attention to the hotel bar in Philadelphia. It is a reasonably nice place: Yuengling lager on tap, a piano player who was not intolerable this particular evening, and eventually karaoke that could have been far worse and much more drunken. Hence, this was a perfectly good place to read for a while and pass an evening in Philadelphia.

A short while into the evening an exceedingly gregarious gentleman arrived at my right, announcing himself as a lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law. He flashed a wad of cash, ordered an espresso Martini – a sure sign of a dumb-ass – and began to question me for some unknown reason. He was quite evidently drunken already, and I am giving good odds that he was quite happily coked up. He asked to know what both the man to my left and I did for a living and it turned out we were both designers: he in the industry in Philly and myself in academia – though not at the moment, hence the trip to Philadelphia in the first place.

Now, it must be understood that I am not your traditional designer, but since you are here you probably have already guessed that on your own. I am not quite sure exactly what I am anymore when it comes to career or academic designations, but designer fits as well as any of the others; so I run with it. Actually, I do consider myself a designer, and am rather proud of that as a premise; I simply hold to a rather expansive understanding of the definition of designer.

At this moment we – you, the reader, and I – stand together on the precipice of two of the back-story questions. At the moment I prefer to meander through my past relationship to the design industry first – a relationship which isn’t really much of a relationship at all. We have largely ignored each other thus far. When I was younger I was one of those kids whose parents regularly found “DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS” one his report cards. It was not that I was a violent child – I just didn’t like other people, or more to the point I found them to be dumb. That is generally how I think of clients, and – based on most of the ads, commercials, and design work I see in the world – is probably how I see most designers. Thus I have stayed in academia – despite its own manifold difficulties. I have managed to have one reasonably good client relationship – though to call them a client may be a stretch. I redid the website for the Art & Design Department at Drake when I was teaching there. This one worked out well, I believe, though that is because I essentially hijacked the entire process. Now that I have left they have ceased to update it, leaving it to suffer digital decay. Otherwise I still often do not play well with others: clients and designers alike.

But during the rambling couple of hours that ensued this particular evening in Philadelphia a question was asked. Amidst discussions of the history of Punk, thoughts on both the recent and far past of graphic design, considerations of the role of art and design schools and how well they are doing, the gentleman to my left asked me a question: was I interested in working in the industry? I must admit I have my reservations, but I may be changing my mind. That evening we talked about the relationship between theory and practice, and the relative merits of each. This mirrored a discussion earlier in the day with someone from the university about the relationship between research and practice within academic design. In this I perhaps find myself at a crossroads. I have an expansive definition of design – as I have already stated – but my experience of this definition has essentially excluded a swath of experience. I do not think I ever have to work in the industry to be a designer, but why not? What might I learn there? Further, what more might I be able to do? What resources for pro bono activity might be at my fingertips? Perhaps it is time I give it a go. Perhaps it is time for me to stand up and speak from within the arena, which brings me back to the Book of Common Prayer.

When the wife and I got married we slightly altered the modern Christian wedding vows to exclude "obey" and to include the phrase “and thereto I plight thee my troth,” from the early Anglican Church. This phrase has recently re-emerged in my thought in a more academic manner, though not an entirely unrelated one. While I was working on an abstract for a paper the wife suggested I look more carefully at the origins of the word "truth" and suggested a book to read. As one would expect it was a brilliant suggestion, one that has produced a cascade of thoughts and implications: one of which is that I have been thinking of design in relation to troth-plighting.

I will be brief in my description, but the medieval conception of truth was far more complex than the modern premise tied essentially to facts and verifiability. Truth – or troth, or trowthe, or several other spellings – ran across social, ethical, legal, theological, and intellectual senses. [See A Crisis of Truth by Richard Firth Green.] Troth-plighting was essentially about standing up and pledging one’s truth, one’s integrity, one’s faithfulness and more. It was a contract of believability, of meaning, not simply bound up with evidence but with trust. I have been thinking of the designer in much the same way – at least when design can be seen as culturally relevant and not just as empty shilling for culture-consuming product launchers. That was the basis of my talk at the university earlier in the day of the evening in question. The way for designers to make themselves heard is to stand up and have something to say, to speak with audiences in meaningful ways, to learn to speak well and to embrace the responsibilities of speaking at all.

Perhaps I should be considering taking that responsibility, of entering the industry and speaking responsibly. I have spent the past three-and-a-half years trying to teach my students to do so, but I have yet to try it. Maybe it would be a way to improve the practice; to become one of those who does not reduce design to being a simple tool set; or one who allows it to rely on racist, sexist, and homophobic devices in the place of speaking in any depth. Maybe, or maybe not, but I may have changed my mind. Not that I expect to hear from the gentleman to my left ever again, despite a pledge to drop an email. I shall have to think some more about this, wait to hear back from a school or two, ponder this and that and what else I may want to do with myself, but perhaps it now grows even more complex. For the moment I believe it is time for a little Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, some more Daniel Deronda, and perhaps a game or two of pinball at the local pub. Thus I bid you adieu.