Zerofee. Good Thinking:

We were recently con­tacted by Fran Hope, a graphic design degree stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of the West of Eng­land, Bris­tol. Fran is research­ing design ethics, specif­i­cally the prac­tices of com­pa­nies ‘who put eth­i­cal val­ues before mak­ing a profit’ and put a num­ber of ques­tions to us, some of which we found par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing – more so than usual – per­haps because Fran’s per­spec­tive is informed by some time in the industry.

Fran agreed that it might be more con­struc­tive and use­ful to post and answer the ques­tions posed here, so that other stu­dents could share in the responses and per­haps ini­ti­ate some dia­logue. Responses are given by Paul Buck (PB) and Ela Kos­maczewska (EK) and we’d be happy to take up any fur­ther dis­cus­sion in the com­ments below.

 
 
1. Are you famil­iar with the First Things First manifesto?

(PB & EK) Absolutely. We’re assum­ing you’re aware that the orig­i­nal man­i­festo was pub­lished by Ken Gar­land in 1964, and updated by Adbusters in 2000, endorsed by con­tem­po­rary prac­ti­tion­ers, writ­ers and aca­d­e­mics of the day, many of whom are still promi­nent. There’s an inter­est­ing archive of com­ment on and crit­i­cism of the 2000 man­i­festo here.

 
 
2. Were you con­cerned with eth­i­cal design as a student?

(PB) To a degree, yes. The var­i­ous projects I under­took dur­ing my time on a degree course were gen­er­ally, but not exclu­sively ori­en­tated towards social issues or activism (eg. the­o­ret­i­cal mate­ri­als for an age con­cern style char­ity, and sub­jects like the occu­pa­tion of Tibet). I think these choices were a reflec­tion of a dis­taste I had for self-motivated projects that con­ve­niently focussed on sub­jects and audi­ences that the designer already had an affin­ity for, or could pre-qualify an aes­thetic solu­tion that best suited them. At that time, I had no appre­ci­a­tion for con­cerns about the sus­tain­abil­ity of print design, or insight into business/brand ethics, just an incli­na­tion to dif­fer­en­ti­ate my work and skills. My eth­i­cal con­cerns as a designer really took form when I began work and inad­ver­tently found myself assist­ing var­i­ous brands that I per­ceived to be obnox­ious and harmful.

(EK) Yes, prior to becom­ing a graphic design stu­dent I had already devel­oped an inter­est in envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns and ani­mal rights issues. Some ‘live projects’ at col­lege enabled us to work with clients who were in need of design assis­tance and we were encour­aged to seek out such projects for our­selves. This allowed us to focus on key areas of inter­est – at that time I worked with a domes­tic abuse sup­port group, which was an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence. We also had a mod­ule – be it only one lec­ture – which dealt with the role of ethics and the designer and helped me reflect upon my own inter­ests and ideology.

 
 
3. Do you feel that by label­ing your­selves as eth­i­cal you open your­selves up to scrutiny in every area of the way your com­pany oper­ates? (for exam­ple, using a car­bon neu­tral web host­ing ser­vice, or bank­ing with an eth­i­cal bank)

(PB) Def­i­nitely, but I can’t say I feel we’ve been scru­ti­nised. We’re a very small com­pany and, as such, there’s cer­tain aspects of our busi­ness ‘foot­print’ (mainly envi­ron­men­tal) that we find dif­fi­cult to fully con­trol. For exam­ple, we can choose our bank­ing providers (Co-operative Bank) but our office arrange­ments don’t allow us to be selec­tive about our energy sup­plier. In some respects, I think that ser­vice pro­vi­sion choices of this kind can pro­vide a smoke­screen for more prob­lem­atic issues – it’s easy to switch energy sup­pli­ers while, pro­fes­sion­ally, you con­tinue to work uncrit­i­cally with and sup­port some of the nas­ti­est brands in exchange for finan­cial reward. It’s obvi­ously impor­tant to make eth­i­cal ser­vice choices wher­ever you can, but it’s also vital to do this crit­i­cally – I’d pre­fer to see respon­si­ble lifestyle and busi­ness atti­tudes become firmly estab­lished than a reliance on the con­cept of car­bon neu­tral­ity – ret­ro­spec­tively address­ing a car­bon foot­print by some debat­able means.

(EK) Poten­tially so, but this is not a prob­lem. We know it’s a bold state­ment to make but if we claim to be some­thing, we must be pre­pared to jus­tify our position.

 
 
4. How do you feel about the way your phil­an­thropic approach at Zero­fee (such as your ‘design dona­tion’ pol­icy) might be per­ceived as a pro­mo­tional tool?

(PB) Very inter­est­ing ques­tion. Our design dona­tion pol­icy pre­dates Zero­fee as a com­pany entity – it led us to the desire and pos­si­bil­ity of start­ing a design stu­dio of this kind, so the pol­icy is inex­tri­ca­ble and unavoid­able (our name was a great con­cern to us, since it orig­i­nated as one means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing what we offered). While we’ll always talk about our pro bono activ­ity, we’ve seen it as a need to make our ori­gins and inter­ests clear (it was retained, rather than replaced when we ‘started up’ as a com­pany because it always was a good con­ver­sa­tion starter but, equally, a dis­trac­tion at times). In my expe­ri­ence, the large major­ity of our cur­rent or prospec­tive com­mer­cial clients have no prac­ti­cal inter­est in our design dona­tion work – once we begin and con­tinue to engage with them, their inter­est lies solely in design abil­ity, expe­ri­ence, pro­fes­sion­al­ism, costs and per­son­al­ity. We’ve always under­stood this and always wanted to empha­sise design ahead of any phil­an­thropic detail. If our design dona­tion has a pro­mo­tional, business-generating poten­tial, then we’ve failed mis­er­ably to exploit it.

It might sound pretty crude but I’m pretty clear that I don’t care if our design dona­tion story and work is per­ceived cyn­i­cally – it’s some­thing we choose to do, love to do and we’ve never devi­ated from it, nor – as far as I can tell – directly ben­e­fit­ted from it in a busi­ness sense. I don’t really feel that we’ve really pro­moted that aspect of our work to prospec­tive clients or inter­ested par­ties – per­haps oth­ers would dis­agree, but I don’t think our site, blog or Twit­ter use reflects an empha­sis on dona­tion, beyond describ­ing it where appro­pri­ate and nec­es­sary. I’m per­son­ally more inter­ested in the eth­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the com­pany but, like design dona­tion, I don’t think any client past or present has elected to work with us on that basis alone – it would (and should) never super­sede con­sid­er­a­tion of effec­tive design and experience.

(EK) I have no prob­lem with how we’re per­ceived. We know the donated work we cre­ate makes a dif­fer­ence to those we help and at the end of the day that’s all that mat­ters. If a com­mer­cial client responds well because of that work, then that’s a great thing, as we prob­a­bly view the role of design in a sim­i­lar way.

 
 
5. Do you con­sider the long term changes that are bought about by the projects you under­take and is time taken to dis­cuss them in work place?

(PB) It’s impor­tant that we con­sider the pos­si­bil­i­ties of long-term, mean­ing­ful out­comes when we choose to under­take a project, but pri­mar­ily in terms of the ‘capa­bil­i­ties’ of the organ­i­sa­tion behind it and their objec­tives in that par­tic­u­lar case. If it’s a design dona­tion sce­nario, then the intent and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the project, as we per­ceive them, are pri­mary con­sid­er­a­tions when choos­ing to com­mit to the work. If it’s a com­mer­cial project, then we’re more con­cerned about ensur­ing that the out­come isn’t going to be harm­ful, or that the organ­i­sa­tion behind the project doesn’t have a track-record of doing harm. In either case, we always con­sider the effec­tive­ness of a par­tic­u­lar exer­cise – not just from a visual design per­spec­tive – and do our best to relate this to the client. I guess what I’m try­ing to say is that, if a project is mis­guided in the first instance, great design work is not going to save it or help it over­come the inher­ent prob­lems it has. We try to iden­tify such prob­lems and either avoid the project entirely or offer input that we hope might help direct it in a more pos­i­tive direc­tion. Some­times that’s suc­cess­ful, other times it’s not – where we have long-term rela­tion­ships with the clients con­cerned, it’s usu­ally more the for­mer than the latter.

(EK) Agreed.