Preface of Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Age of Information by Noemi Biasetton, published by Onomatopee in 2024.
We’ve all seen the stock photo. Its caption reads: “Disloyal man (known as Mario) walking with his girlfriend (Laura) and looking amazed at another seductive girl (name unknown).” Here is a possible symbolic reading of the scene: Mario represents Western politics; the red-dressed girl stands for new media technologies (particularly social media); and finally Laura is us, namely, communication designers.
The meme is a fitting allegory for the stalemate that Noemi Biasetton describes in this book. The liaison between politics and new media is becoming increasingly intimate, and it seems that all communication designers can do is watch, aghast. Well-crafted logos and visual identities alone won’t win people’s hearts – in fact, they might even lose them! For it is not so much the logo that matters, as the discussion surrounding the logo – ‘discussion’ being an euphemism for crowdsmashing, an online practice that seems to be politically agnostic.
This is not just a case of “bad publicity is good publicity.” When Michael Bierut, a distinguished member of the professional design elite, mocks the typography of the MAGA hat for its bad kerning, he is completely missing the point. Designers are like fish unaware of the water, which is not a calm sea, but a multimedia and multi-modal tsunami. This is what Biasetton calls the Superstorm. In such a context, a communication designer shouldn’t be surprised when the fandom’s tributes to a prime minister appear on Pornhub (as it has happened with the Italian Giuseppe Conte). The phenomena caused by the Superstorm may appear silly and vulgar, but a winning political strategy doesn’t know neither silliness nor vulgarity. While communication professionals ridicule the clumsiness, kitsch and plain bad taste of populist designs, the latter persevere, as they see bad taste, kitsch and clumsiness not as a vice but as a virtue. This is one of the lessons we learn from reading Biasetton’s book.
The demise of the Madmen-style communication experts did not happen all of a sudden. As shown by the activity of Atelier Populaire – whose assemblies to pick posters to print were not that far removed from contests for pro-Obama user-generated designs – the history of the politicization of design is also a history of disintermediation, and therefore of deprofessionalization. But it is also one of hyper-professionalization, as new figures emerge in the wake of new tools and channels, from social media managers to data scientists (AI-oriented spin doctors, when?) Thus, disintermediation is always ambiguous. Biasetton tackles this dramatic mutation of the political media landscape without moralism. Her approach is analytically useful, since some of the slogans of the Atelier Populaire – never not historically eulogized – such as “toute la presse est toxique”, could well be adopted (and perhaps have been) by flat-Earthers and other conspiratorial movements.
The inspiration for this book’s title comes from Dante, who likened the political condition of his time to “a ship without a pilot in great tempest.” Designers like to think of themselves as the pilot, but it’s time to accept that this ship is unmanned: as Biasetton puts it, “it is almost impossible for designers to be ‘in control’ of anything, least of all production means.” The means of production in communication design – that is, media – affect one another in surprising, non-teleological ways. For instance, in the following pages we find out how the hegemony of television propelled a poster renaissance. However, with the rise of the “metamedium” (the computer), the real paradigmatic shift is from media to content. This is rather bad news for designers, since they are traditionally media-oriented, whereas content, this ineffable entity, is media-agnostic. These are some of the reasons why, as Biasetton points out, the idea of a guidebook for political communication, although appealing, would be disingenuous.
Looking at both famous and little-known case studies from France, the US, the UK and Italy, Superstorm offers a practical model to frame the relationships between design and politics: design with politics, design about politics and design of politics. While the first relationship is established and the second is somehow safe, the last one is certainly the most challenging, thus, the most intriguing. Design of politics is the way ahead to avoid “design autarchy” (which is not the same as design autonomy). Sure, there’s no guidebook for that, but Biasetton doesn’t shy away from providing some guidelines. She urges us to realize that design + politics does not always = activism, that new struggles require new weapons, but also that “political interventions become real opportunities in light of specific and fortunate circumstances.” In other words, communication designers must not confuse cause and effect: they shouldn’t praise the visual means of a campaign only because it turned out to be politically successful or, reversely, mock it only because it led to political failure.
– Silvio Lorusso, September 2023