Our Masterclasses give you an opportunity to hear from our academic experts on a wide range of hot industry topics, while getting a flavour of our online master’s degrees.
In this MA Graphic Design (Online) Masterclass, you'll hear from Ben James, Lecturer on our MA Graphic Design (Online) course.
The Designer as Meddler
Design can help us navigate and respond to sources of our individual and collective discontent: a space from which to retaliate against today’s entanglement of racial injustices, climate chaos, forms of gender-based violence, and sexual oppression.
But, as Silvio Lorusso points out, design itself is also a source of discontent (Lorusso, 2023). Bound into structures of capitalism, the contemporary designer may increasingly find themselves in a position of precarity: one where client demands place limitations on our ambitions while asking us to perform repetitive tasks that are under existential threat by AI.
In this short lecture, Ben Evans James offers a lens through which to channel this duality of discontent by animating the role of the ‘meddler’. Ben outlines the meddler as a designer who, through tactics such as inquisition and resistance, can challenge fixed positions. In this process, he draws on contemporary practitioners and theorists to lay out a set of skills and sensitivities that may help equip the contemporary designer to face the myriad issues of our present.