How can professional design practice be socially, culturally and politically engaged? What methods can help further inter- and intra-disciplinary design? Is creative production valued as scholarship in academia?

These questions have been hot topics recently in academic and professional circles. The international symposium DECLARATIONS of [inter]dependence and the im[media]cy of design at Concordia University in Montréal actually succeeded in addressing them. Unlike the tired approach used by many professional organizations whereby conference committees assemble a roster of popular design stars, DECLARATIONS put together a diverse roster of presenters culled selectively from an international Call for Proposals, and invited other individuals doing provocative work and groups with subversive tendencies to attend. The mix was rich: academics and practitioners, students and professionals, artists and designers, journalists and labor organizers, with presentations from Dutch, French, American, Canadian, New Zealander and British individuals and collectives.

Some presenters, such as Naomi Klein, Jan van Toorn, Teal Triggs, David Berman and Amy Franceschini were recognizable due to their writings and creative projects over the past few years, but presentations given by lesser known speakers were equally compelling. Matt Soar gave his lecture wearing his own “FedUp” t-shirt, a jam on the FedEx corporation’s logo. Meike Gerritzen of NL Design showed her interactive works – intentionally using only sans serif bold typeface set in all caps, as a means of establishing a distinctive typographic voice – along with works of her students from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Jean-Pierre Boyer and Jean Desjardins demonstrated the contents of an interactive graphics archive on Qubecois labor movements and political protests, consisting primarily of popular, do-it-yourself imagery.

Prior to the lectures and presentations, DECLARATIONS also hosted an intense three-day atelier (studio) experience for students, enabling undergraduates and graduates to collaborate with practising designers in the creation of graphic works dealing directly with the conference theme. This demonstrated the conviction of DECLARATIONS’ organizers to its program: to “bring together designers, artists, educators and activists to explore the public sphere as a space of democratic voice and citizenship with an emphasis on graphic agitation, manifestoes, interventions, alternative modes of public address, and culture jamming.”
http://design.concordia.ca/declaration/

The facilitators – academics and forward-thinking practitioners from different countries and employing different approaches – challenged the students to create work that was probing, engaging and relevant. The atelier workshops offered to the students were: We Interrupt the Programme (Ian Noble and Russell Bestley), Who Needs a Manifesto? (Teal Triggs and Sian Cook), and Design is Not Enough (Tony Credland, Brian Holmes and Sandy Kaltenborn). The resulting work was displayed in Concordia’s Visual Arts building gallery and on the streets and subway trains of Montréal; it was a declaration of honesty, humor, poignancy and soul. Enabled to attend by a grant from the University of Minnesota’s Design Institute, the six student attendees from the Twin Cities brought the infectious DECLARATIONS atelier energy home with them. Within a couple of weeks, an intervention was held in the college atrium, whereby some students created display panels and posted signs arguing for greater access to the building’s public space. After some negotiation, their desires are being realized.

DECLARATIONS produced an array of activities that were thoughtful, motivational and relatively low on rhetoric. Attendees will hopefully emerge from the event ready to take on the arduous task of reconciling the commercial parameters of graphic design with its greater goal of improving life in our daily lives.