Late last week, I watched Kapitaal by Studio Smack (link via TypeForYou) and was enrapt by the degree to which we are subjected to the power of design every day. Yesterday, walking through San Francisco’s Mission District, I had a flashback to Kapitaal and suddenly the answer to the questions I brought up in my last post emerged fully-formed, like Athena, from my head.

The Achilles Heel (lots of Greek metaphors today) of running corporate campaigns like RAN does is that corporations can outspend you. Markets campaigning goes for the jugular, in terms of reputation or branding, but a giant like Exxon or Ford can drop millions into a PR campaign to combat your educational outreach. Anyone who reads Stanifesto regularly has witnessed my ire for PR campaigns that do exactly that.

But these companies don’t do this all by themselves. They hire people to do it. They hire smart, creative people. They hire people who (and I’ve met a lot of them) are either completely full of self-loathing at being shills for gas-guzzlers, cigarettes, and war or are extremely thankful that they get to do something creative with their lives and merely rise to the abstract challenge of selling “n” units of product “x” with a budget of “$”. Design, at its core, is problem-solving. Lately, the problem has been stated in terms of units, products, and dollars… but it doesn’t need to be. We must change the challenge.

Joe Pytka has won countless Emmys for his creative and technically flawless commercials. A few years ago, he directed three spots for Chevron’s “Will You Join Us?” campaign. The campaign itself is merely to spread FUD about energy issues. A design community that recognizes any contribution to that campaign with an award, whether beautiful or not, is a community that is delirious. A magazine printed on 100% virgin paper cannot be great. A website inaccessible to non-sighted visitors cannot be great. The criteria for great design must be adjusted to reflect our modern values.

I’m not saying anything new. If you’ve ever read a copy of Adbusters you know that design is sick and needs medicine. If you’ve read Emigre’s “First Things First 2000” essay, or even the original from 1964, you know that these things have been discussed. Fists have been raised. So what’s any different now?

Now we can imagine a corporate campaign against design firms. We should name names instead of drop names. Which firms are perpetuating oppression and poverty, promoting greed and consumption, and rewarding want? Which designers are providing the skilled labor for the white-washing, green-washing, or any other CMYK combination of washing for Corporate America? Which designs, full of the spiritual investments by creative people, end up as just tools in the toolchest of maintaining corporate power? Find them. Expose them.

Markets campaigns work. Designers are sympathetic but need some tough love. With great creativity comes great responsibility.

Envision a world where the creative class realizes their power in shifting culture and stands accountable for doing it in healthy ways. Imagine advertising firms refusing to represent products untruthfully. Picture marketing becoming a new ally, not an enemy, to a sustainable world. Watch it spread across other creative lines: musicians refusing to license their songs to unethical commercials, writers forsaking puff pieces for real investigative journalism.

You and me free of the constant fear that people are trying to trick us into buying shit we don’t need, free to live our life in personally meaningful ways… that’s the world I want to live in. That’s the world I want to help design. Who’s with me?