Active agency in graphic design communication

MA Graphic Design Communication course leader Sadhna Jain’s practice and research focuses on the ways graphic data and language is informed by interactive experiences.

Over the years, her work with postgraduate students has seen experiments within the course around the idea of the ‘scenographic’ – borrowing from the world of film and theatre, this uses the concept of staging a scene or micro world as a design methodology for the development stage of a project.

These exercises have invited students to address critical questions about the designer’s position in relation to the world of others such as: how do we foster relationships with our intended audiences and users of the work?

In 2020 Sadhna received funding from the Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Research Staff Fund to extend this research to explore models of social and cultural design practice: “We need models of practice which are responsive to the exceptionally different realities and lived experiences of people and communities.”

The result of this period of research is Active Agency, a publication which brings Sadhna’s work together with contributors Åbäke, Jacob Pardoe, Joshua Trees and Yván Martínez to present a series of speculative lectures on design encompassing language, matter, ontology and sound.

We spoke to Sadhna about the project.

Can you tell us about Active Agency?

The project has brought forward personal and individual ideas of agency from wide-ranging positions. The main topics that are included in the final project cover subcultures, ecology and acts of resistance.

The personal positioning of these topics allowed us to step back from the normative histories of Graphic Design Communication as a specialist subject and offer tactics for intervention through alternative bodies of knowledge. The changing register of voices and styles of writing and uses of text in the work reflect the different contexts of agency - where it is needed and how to activate it.

The resulting book is not an academic book in the traditional sense of research - rather it is a repository of ideas with the intention that the reader returns to and interacts with it in a variety of ways as they see fit.

How has the interest in ‘agency’ manifested itself in your work before? What has driven this project’s starting point of looking at alternative models of graphic design communication that respond to a variety of lived experiences?

When I talk about agency here I refer to the capacity to act with intention and influence within a system or group of people.

When I arrived at UAL I was committed to creative ideas and practices that looked beyond the limits of ‘representation’. At the time, graphic language occupied centre stage within the confines of message-making for the subject of graphic and communication design.

In contrast, I was interested in pursuing practices within interactive design/electronic media etc. which could open up the space for additional propositions and allow the inclusion of the body, gesture, voice, sound, code and multi-layered spaces. So, in this context, agency takes on the characteristics of a proxy; a device that could continue to act for or even accompany the participant once it has been activated within a project.

Fast forward to the present day and so many emerging designers are now needing and looking for ways to ‘inhabit’ their projects driven by very personal cultural and social agendas - in my opinion, this calls out for more ideas of agency and new models of design.

You have been experimenting over 3 years within the MA Graphic Design Communication course around the ideas of the scenographic - the staging of a scene or a micro world as a design methodology for the development stage of a project. Can you tell us more the about this?

I have been developing the scenographic as a design framework with Laura Gordon, one of our key visiting tutors for several years. Some of the ideas we have introduced and explored are the idea of mise-en-scène and a trigger event – something we introduced to the process this year.

The idea of mise-en-scène is borrowed from film/theatre. The exercise asks students to formulate and build a world in which they consider and communicate the materiality of existence through the arrangement of props, cultural systems, and behaviours. Here we connect the idea of mise-en-scène to setting the conditions and rules of the background concept of the project.

This year ‘the smoking gun’ as a trigger event was introduced. As Laura puts it: “The smoking gun (so recently fired that it’s still smoking) serves as proof of something that has recently happened, without the viewer being present to witness it.” This aims to foreground causality in the project - why does change happen in the world relating to the student’s topic?

The ideas of scenographic thinking that we use on the course have been a part of the next stage of developing the Active Agency project.

The book you have produced includes contributions from a range of practitioners and voices – Can you tell us about the value and importance of varying the contributions for this project?

Having varied and contrasting ideas in a discussion of agency is important because this acknowledges that the impetuses arrive from different directions and different lived experience - they can be distinct and unequal.

In the book we see one response which proposes the idea of language in the form of alternative lexicons, and in another chapter, the agency of sound as experienced through body and space suggests a slipping away from formal language systems altogether.

What are the next steps for the project?

In March 2021, I’m delighted to welcome a line-up of international practitioners who will be visiting MA Graphic Design Communication and addressing their own interpretations of the scenographic and personal ideas of agency within the context of their projects. These include The Rodina, Noam Toran, Eric Schockmel, Marloes ten Bhömer, Benjamin Redgrove and Arjun Harrison Mann.

Design at Camberwell has become very fertile ground for experimental research. We plan to encourage engagement with the topics of both the scenographic and agency, and continue to define design methodologies for ourselves.

Find out more about MA Graphic Design Communication at Camberwell

Active Agency is available on request. Contact Sadhna Jain for more information

Find out more about Research at Camberwell