The paper starts with Jan Van Toorn dissenting and critiquing one of design’s largest associations in the world, Icograda —also known as ico-D— for wanting to capture as many topics as possible without a strong foundation.

Van Toorn is an advocate for radical criticality and reflective practice, he wanted the society’s perception of design as a social practice to be reconsidered hence he introduced the term visual journalism to us. He announced his opposition towards Jan Tschichold’s formalist and self-referential approach to design, as it only contributes to something that Van Toorn called ‘symbolic violence’.

The detached way of modern design will not work in today’s challenges, especially in the age of information overload. Instead, he supported El Lissitzky’s idea on how design unifies life, context, and the people in the public socially and he urges us to adopt a dissident behaviour and to question the impacts of our work become accessible, rather than just being neutral because many of the intellectuals such as researchers, civil servants, designers, and more are being colonised by the pragmatic managerial corporations and any other symbolic hierarchies. As a consequence, we lost our imaginative, journalistic side. It seems that Van Toorn is disappointed that perceptive and acute people, communication designers are not an exception, isolate themselves into exploitation and submission.

Neo-liberal capitalism divides meaningful human exchange in our daily interactions. Hal Foster came up with a clever analogy, using sites, to express Jan Van Toorn’s opinion on visual journalism needs to have a solid ground in order to present a point. Van Toorn’s aim is to create a courageous imaginative insightful community with fewer people becoming a tool for capitalism, honing solidarity in our circles, and cultivating more autonomous projects. Subsequently, he asked us to think that communication design should not question the subjects, but the priorities we need to set in public spheres. As mentioned above, the modernist approach creates an indirect wall between social interaction and functionality, reducing human engagement, creating an impression that nothing really happens.

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Van Toorn encourages us to be involved in the symbolic production so that we can understand better the notion that not everyone has a neutral perspective of facts and in standing. For this reason, he asked us to respect the individuality of our target market and strive for dissensus, a misunderstanding that communication needs to end with an agreement, which enables conversation. Jacques Ranciere’s theory teaches us that equality has already been given to us, humans, thus it should not be our goal anymore. When we already start acting and talking equally with each other, we have successfully arrived at the point of departure. I found this point very enlightening as I had never thought it in this way before. We often found ourselves working with briefs with a rock hard target audience. At the very least, I assume many of us have experienced it at least once in university or in a workshop. The idea of equality and open-ended dialogue between us, our work, and the audience leads us to an unconventional practice, which —he has mentioned it before in the text as well— will be a challenge to apply. 

I first heard of Jan Van Toorn through Rick Poyner's documentation on his and Wim Crouwel's debate about a designer's standing. Crouwel thinks that we need to remain neutral and only act as a translator while Van Toorn is the opposite. Through their clash, I could understand better the origin of Van Toorn's conception on subjectivity and how important it is to dare the world to include designers in the symbolic design production and post-production. Personally, I found his point very compelling, Van Toorn reminds us back that design evokes something more than just form and function, I admire his effort to humanise our design practice and established the knowledge to the world for the sake of emerging value-driven designers, then I believe it is our task now to take the wheel.

Image credits: Aatjan Renders from Dutch Graphic Roots.