In this conversation Léo Lamont and Javi Syquia explore how the language we use inherently shapes our practice and world-views. They believe that the spoken, written, and visual language hold the power to describe and define the contexts that exist within, around, and without us.
L: When I hear the word «African» or «Africa», I’m always curious about the speaker’s assumptions or points of reference. Even if unintentional, often when we use the word «Africa» or «African» to describe the continent, its cultural artifacts, and/or the people, we’re inherently flattening the diversity of lived experiences into the one we expect or demand.
As a Black designer struggling to embed elements of African diasporic and cultural history into my design practice, I often find myself wondering what an «African» visual language is. If I decide that a visual language is «African», I’m flattening a group of cultures to fit the visual box I’ve decided is «African». Does that mean that if a Malian designer creates a design that doesn’t incorporate bògòlanfini, is their work still «African»? Who gets to decide the «African-ness» of a designed object, be it tangible or intangible?
J: I have a similar relationship with the term «Asian», at least in the United States context. I was born and raised in the Philippines and lived in Hong Kong for 4 years. Until I came to the US to study, I never identified with the term «Asian». It was disorienting to meet Americans who didn’t know the geographical location of the Philippines, especially when considering that the Philippines was once a US colony. That experience revealed a huge disconnect on how Americans view the global landscape.
Similar to your relationship with «African», I find that the broad generalization of people from the Asian continent – that most people actually conflate more closely with East Asia – causes a reductionist flattening of the Asian American identity as a single monolith. This language enables the Eurocentric mind to have one ubiquitous view of the Other inevitably impacting the Asian American visual language.
Specifically thinking of the Orientalist framing of East Asians in the US, I am immediately reminded of the 1906 rebuilding of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinatown was representative of the «Oriental» Immigrant community and was seen as a nuance by the white American. After Chinatown was demolished by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, local Chinese immigrants strategized to rebuild their city in a way that would «rebrand» how they were perceived. Vox reports how «Chinese businessmen hired white architects to reimagine an exoticised theme park version of Chinatown. […] These architects had no connection to Chinese culture, [and] rebuilt Chinatown in the way [they fetishistically] perceived Chinese culture.» In this way, the Chinese American Immigrant experience was manifested through the visual language of Oriental architecture. Chinatown’s rebuilding was seen as a «success», primarily due to its capitalistic gains of it becoming «a hub of trade and tourism», and how this architectural language has been widely adapted and rebuilt across Chinese American immigrant communities. I think most Americans – even Asian Americans – lack this nuanced historical understanding of Chinatown’s architecture, likely due to the verbal and visual languages exhibited in current day America.
L: There’s a larger question here that we haven’t touched on yet – who defines what design is? As I continue to build my practice, I’m noticing that the definition of «design» varies from person to person.
My dream is that visual designers of all backgrounds could come together and agree on a shared definition of design, but I know that’s not feasible, nor is that necessarily the best idea. Design as a practice is mutable precisely because it pulls directly from the experiences of the practitioner and the audience that shaped their respective ideals of «craft», «taste», and «feeling». That makes design as a word and practice truly powerful. But it also means that its definition is easy to manipulate. In 1993, «design legend» Paul Rand stated that «To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.» This definition, while beautiful, is but one way to interpret design, but given Rand’s status and the human tendency to place people on pedestals, many people take his definition as fact. This means that when someone in power decides that «tribal» design is x, it brings visibility to the concept of «tribal» design, but creates a rigid box that leaves very little room for innovation, interpretation, and something entirely different from what we’ve been taught to expect.
J: I also think that there is a lack of shared definition within the design industry. In the US, I’ve seen so many different design job titles: graphic, advertising, brand, UX, interaction; list goes on. I feel that the recruiters hiring for these roles don’t fully understand how much design can encompass, and how these «different» roles are all interconnected and rely on one another to produce «successful» design «solutions». I believe they can all be approached in similar ways, with only the final design outputs actually differing. Within our industry, I see this misunderstanding of the ways design can transcend the boundaries of the strict definition set by capitalistic corporations.
L: That’s a great example. Maybe design’s definition is malleable – shaped by the context that it lives within.
J: I agree – design must be shaped by its context. Otherwise, who and what are we designing for?
Recently I was reading «Filipino Folk Foundry» (FFF) by Hardworking Goodlooking, a publishing house from the Philippines. It was interesting to see the interviews they conducted with Filipino sign painters. For those unfamiliar, if you look up photos of a jeepney, they are adorned with hand-painted lettering and illustrations. But the people who paint those jeepneys don’t actually identify as designers or artists. They see themselves as sign painters, makers. Within the Filipino context, most self-identifying graphic designers are designing for advertising; for capitalism. Once graphic design is used as a form of agency or creative expression, I see the maker either identify as an «artist» or «craftsman».
After the FFF made major media traction in the US and in the local Philippine design community, I have seen it have a tremendously positive impact. The spotlight that has been placed on sign-painters – by defining their work as typography and graphic design – has allowed for both their practice to gain legitimacy and appreciation by local and diasporic Filipinos, and provided the self-taught Filipino designer with a form of agency; with a new way of viewing their own Filipino graphic landscape. Clearly, the language used to define their practice has had a monumental effect.
L: I’m constantly navigating my design relationship with the hegemonic design canon. I acknowledge that I’ve been trained as a designer using Eurocentric practices of design – but I’m learning that there’s so much more out there.
As a first-generation Jamaican-American, I’m always trying to understand how the elements of my culture may not fit into the accepted design canon as «good design», but that I have the opportunity to create a visual language that is entirely mine. In doing so, it creates not permission but an allowance of an expansive imagination for both those who do and don’t look like us, to think about what has never been thought of before and to create something new, remixed, and reworked – maybe even reclaimed.
J: That is such a good point; I myself fall into this trap of saying I actively subvert Eurocentric «good design», yet it is impossible to completely unlearn all the design «rules» that I have been taught at the Rhode Island School of Design. I have also found that decolonial design discourse often continues to center the white designer. In saying that we are going against the Eurocentric canon, we are still unfortunately and unintentionally centering that canon in our work.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Corinne Ang who is a Filipino type and graphic designer. She sees her practice as the in between of remixing and reworking frameworks learned at Eurocentric institutions while still bringing in her own unique, reimagined, point of view.
She is of a similar mindset to me where she tries to stay away from simply «digitizing the typographic forms of Filipino sign painters into a font that is essentially mass produced and distributed. It takes away from the slowness of the hand that is imbued in sign painting.» When I asked her about how she approached her type design practice – which I see as the literal combination of language and design – she told me that as a Filipino, she believes «what is more important to gain from sign painting is not its visual cues but rather what it represents. When observing sign painting you are able to trace back a history of both the way colonization has affected Flipinos, but also the written hand of our predecessors. I see typography to be more about memory – about the connections that branch people within the past, present and future through written language and visual form.»
I find Corinne’s type design practice to be a beautiful culmination of the themes in our conversation. I view it as one that picks up from current day Filipino and Eurocentric (visual) languages while simultaneously exceeding our expectations of Filipino type design. The remaking, repurposing, and reclaiming of a visual language, initially defined by Spanish and US colonization, into one that is distinctly her own.