What is Metahaven?

Source

https://www.frieze.com/article/metahaven-dutch-design-studio-172
Date Added

1 June 2015, 19:06
Tags

Critical Design Weblink Webzine English

Notes

This essay examines Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based design collective founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, through the evolution of design authorship from the 1990s to today. Beginning with Michael Rock and Ellen Lupton's influential essays on designers as authors and producers, the piece traces how the internet age has transformed creative practice, moving from traditional client-designer relationships toward more autonomous 'auteur-producer' models, while also revealing the darker realities of our post-Web 2.0 digital landscape of surveillance and corporate control.

Metahaven deliberately resists categorization, operating at the intersection of graphic design, research, theory, and activism. Their work appropriates corporate and governmental visual languages—using elements like Microsoft fonts, drop shadows, and pirated logos—to create uncanny, critically-charged designs. Notable projects include their 608-page publication Uncorporate Identity (2010), which explores connections between corporate branding and subcultures, and their volunteer branding work for WikiLeaks in 2011. The essay positions them as exemplars of contemporary design practice that grapples with questions of authorship, political engagement, and the visual detritus of our heavily mediated world.

The recent whistleblowing actions of Private Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and others have revealed that an NSA PowerPoint slide template uses the same visual design forms as the mainstream software we use in our everyday lives. Given that, perhaps design’s greater potential for social change lies not in its theoretical implications but in its functional ones: what, for instance, can design do to help people recognize political ideology at work? If Rock’s auteurist invocations helped create the critical conditions in which studios like Metahaven thrive, then it is Lupton’s consistent, if seemingly prosaic, demand for a design ethos that is intelligible to everyone, which suggests a different possibility for design’s continued relevance. The most effective visual joke for Metahaven to tell would be one so banal that it registers everywhere – or nowhere at all.