Pixelgawker

Last year, our chapter of the AIGA, hosted a very special lecture at the College for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit. Three legends of the Detroit design community – Nelson Greer, Ron Rae and Ed Fella –presented highlights of their portfolios and offered anecdotes about their adventures in graphic communication. First amongst equals was Fella who combines a no-nonsense nonchalance with an uncanny talent for raiding the history of Western Art to create wild pastiches and parodies. At one point in his talk, Fella noted, somewhat pointedly, that he never considered himself anything more than a commercial artist. You could see more than a few creatives in the audience reaching to fidget with their designer eyeware and check their iPhones. The truth hurts.

The fact is that the vast majority of graphic communication involves client work. Design is a service industry. You get hired to say what the client wants to say or help the client find out what they want to say. Is this entirely satisfying? I doubt it. I’ve never met a copywriter who doesn’t have a novel or a
script in their bottom drawer. I’ve never met a graphic designer who doesn’t paint landscapes or make jewelry on the side.

But Fella’s point is even more interesting when you think that he and his colleagues worked almost exclusively for one set of clients: the Big Three. We all know what has happened to them and to the towns where they did their business. And no town had more Big Three business than Detroit.

So what is the future of design in Detroit? Not design as a “lifestyle” but as a business. The design business requires clients. So the real  question is what kind of clients can designers expect to find in the future of Detroit.

But, first, what is going to be the relationship between designers and Detroit. One of the principal “holy grails” in the urban planning strategy of distressed cities is how to attract creatives to revitalize
moribund areas. I’ve been to plenty of these talks and ultimately as the last slice of veggie pizza has been wolfed down the consensus is how to turn Detroit into Portland or Missoula or Boulder before it was eaten alive by Denver.

You could bring busloads of the tattooed, the pierced, the socially  networked, the hip, the hippie, the vegan, the gay, the transgendered “creative class” to Detroit and still be faced with the question of what would will they do when they get here? Urban farming is great and cafes are nice places to tipple a wine or five but creatives need clients to do… commercial art.

The conservative pundit David Frum (a fellow Canadian) suggests that Detroit spare its factory ruins from the wrecking ball because who knows what businesses will arise post Big Three. The problem is that Detroit has been Post Big Three for thirty years! Many still don’t want to believe it because the city’s identity and self-esteem was so tied into the fantasy of the American Automobile’s timeless prom king status with the car-buying public.

The Michigan economy is going to have to completely restructure itself around a diversified base of growing industries, a base that may include “green” automobiles, but certainly won’t star them. Alternative energy and biotech research seem to be the leading candidates. It’s conceivable that Detroit may eventually become Michigan’s second or third city with Ann Arbor as the educational powerhouse and Grand Rapids or Lansing as the green research and development powerhouse.

Detroit has lost half its population in fifty years, going from 1.8 million to just under a million. Flint, Michigan has lost half its peak  population as well. Flint, once the thriving home of thriving Buick, isn’t taking any chances about an uncertain renaissance. The city is buying up homes and
relocating residents to carefully planned green zones where linked neighborhoods will be built
around park areas to form a tight, vibrant city core with minimum sprawl, enforced by savvy zoning regulations and demanding next generation employers. In twenty years, Flint will cease to be a massive ghost town of abandoned six-lane freeways. Is this what lies in store for Detroit? Let’s hope so.

But Detroit may never be able to kill its sprawl. It is one of the most segregated cities in one of the most segregated states. Its public transportation system is a disgrace, a sad legacy of the complicity
between city and regional governments and the car industry. Even before the riots of the late sixties, white flight was rampant, both blue and white collar. Industry decamped from the city to the suburbs where it could find cheap land, tax incentives and desirable employees.

If Detroit is to lure people back from the suburbs, it must concentrate on building a strong economic base that can pay for desirable services and schools. To attract the next generation of employers, Detroit has to develop a school system that will produce a next generation of employable employees. The DPS, hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, is not that system. The College of Creative Studies has wisely launched LINX, a program designed to attract minority students to design. The Detroit chapter of the AIGA is developing a mentor program to encourage high school students to pursue a career in graphic communication. But these programs are dust in the wind if the elementary and secondary schools in Detroit don’t deliver students capable of writing a coherent sentence or sitting still.

It is estimated that 80% of recently arriving urban homesteaders have a college education. Fantastic. No doubt a good many of these people are design professionals. It remains to be seen if they will have to get their cars every day and drive out to the suburbs to do their clients’ bidding or whether they will be able to stay close to home. To repeat: Design is a service industry. The time is now for designers and the industries they service to find a home in Detroit.

The house has been stripped to the studs. Now’s the time to build.

Guest contributor Timothy Dugdale is the editorial director of the Detroit chapter of AIGA. He is the founder of Atomic Quill Design, a boutique firm specializing in brand management and strategic thinking.

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