The Anti Design Festival runs parallel to the London Design Festival, providing an outlet for new risks and creative exploration in art, image, design, product, film, fashion, performance, 3D, digital and sound. Josh Barr from designworks was invited to be part of this year’s show.

In September, in London’s now-trendy East End, I took part in an earnest attempt by a group of creative people to save designers from the modern blights of Lomography, Scandinavian furniture and each other. To dismiss the Anti Design Festival (ADF) as sensationalist grand-standing by design royalty trying to purloin media attention from the “real” London Design Festival would be missing the point.

The ADF invited communicators to be frivolous, impulsive and intuitive and not to settle for the Thatcheresque mantra of “success at all costs”. Neville Brody and his co-conspirators told us to shrug off the obligations of industry; to reconnect with ideology and manifesto and invited us to fail. Epically fail. In this regard, I was particularly fond of Dominic Wilcox’s lampshade made entirely out of bread.

My own ADF submission was a failure. BlogRoll was a complicated piece of work that stood outside the bounds of normal communication design, and caused the assessors a great deal of discomfort, irritability and swelling when I presented it at Massey University last year. It dealt with the idea that it’s easier to publish ‘information’ online, but its value is diminished through boundless diffusion. I spent the weeks leading up to the festival manufacturing over a kilometre of BlogRoll, as the curators had suggested we hide most of it in the bathrooms – to the surprise of many patrons.

Opening night saw Neville Brody and a good 300 lesser mortals creating, questioning and rearranging the gallery. The sheer energy was amazing, and amidst the piercing shouts generated by the strategically placed Loud Hailers (that make your ears hurt like HELL in a concrete gallery), we knew something special was happening. Modernist utopian aspirations met with an excessiveness and cheek that Coons would have gone giddy for. And in a referential, oh-so-post-modern way, the participants became the spectacle as we were invited to combine clipart stickers and cardboard boxes to create fresh product ideas for the Pope’s visit to London. The “Cardinal Reader” EFTPOS machine was a crowd favourite.

Curator Tim Holloway (www.timoholloway.wordpress.com) gave me a tour of the front gallery space created by the Research Studios team; a faux office strewn with small works, posters, pins, crusty CRT monitors, and ancient ink-jet printers. Buried in one of the drawers I discovered a manifesto from London interactive studio AllofUs (who presented at Semi-Permanent 09). Their low-fi epistle Time is of the Essence calls for creatives to reject the fallacy of productivity and actively seek the downtime in which we are sub-consciously creative. In keeping with the ethos of the festival, I took the publication home with me.

In the safety of the LondonNewCastle gallery space, we took our first tentative steps into the “post-success” world. ‘Must we contend more openly with our own waste?’ sewer artist Bruno Rinvolucri asked? Should we cling to ideals and become Design Fundamentalists, as “Manifesto” curator Daniel Charny suggests? Are tragic figures like King Ludwig, Elvis, and MJ the inevitable products of success culture? The deluge of post-capitalist rhetoric that’s beginning to appear, even from the British Finance Minister (who was all over the news during my stay in London), suggests that the ever-upward quest for success is reaching a plateau, and creatives must find new standards of quantifying the value of their work.

Back in New Zealand, I feel like an impostor. BlogRoll was never about the value of publishing – that’s just a convenient post-rationalisation. It was about the failure of a design industry to deal with the nemesis of its own success; overcrowded un-differentiated markets and rising design agnosticism. It was a pastiche of the humourless diatribe of mass-market design, where marketers still employ the same BRAND NEW! tricks from yesteryear in an attempt to salvage a system built on increasingly pointless consumption.

For me, that was the central message of ADF. ‘Success’ has out-lived its tenure as a valid motivation for creative practice. We need to find greater meanings to fuel our practice, and motivations that go beyond the next deadline or star-studded award night. Practice quieter lives. Experiment. Fail. Fail again. And ransom your soul at all costs from whoever you sold it to.

[ENDS]