There is a well-established idea among designers, especially those working with visual interfaces, that design should be invisible. This mantra is connected to a metaphor introduced by scholar Beatrice Warde in her essay The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should be Invisible (1932 [1956]). She uses the image of the Crystal Goblet to develop her idea: a clear wine glass, the eponymous Crystal Goblet, allows us to concentrate on the wine, whereas a vessel made of an opaque material, no matter how intricately made, would obscure it, would distract us from its contents. In terms of her practice as a printer and typographer, Warde says that “the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds” (ibid.: 13). To put it another way, she believes that design should be at the service of the content it is supposed to convey. It should be transparent, as invisible as possible. The Crystal Goblet is supposed to eliminate distraction and set the stage for the unobstructed substance to appear.
In our contemporary context, in which almost all aspects of everyday life have been infused with design, it is particularly interesting to observe that design does indeed remain largely unnoticed and, at least to some degree, as Warde advocated, “invisible.” At the same time, design is so essential to the highly mediated and therefore visual world in which we live that I want to suggest we take a closer look at the coexistence of invisibility and hypervisibility and their apparent contradiction. In order to look at some aspects of this relationship more closely, it might be helpful to look at the idea of “spectacle,” as well as at attempts to disrupt and subvert normative interpretations and representations. To this end, we will look at the concept of hypervisibility as it relates to the racialization of people and consider some contrasting examples from the Black Panther Party and the Black Lives Matter movement in order to explore how those movements subverted or played into the logics of visibility.
The word “spectacle” originates from the Latin root spectare, meaning “to view, to watch, to behold” (Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities). As such, it entails an intrinsic concern for an audience beyond the scene itself, around which the visual is centered. With time, the word has come to describe the vast and ever-expanding field of media formats. In the 1960s, Guy Debord used the term to analyze the social conditions under mass media, arguing that media acts like a glue holding society together while alienating the individual at the same time: “In the spectacle, a part of the world presents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very centre that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness” (Debord [1967] 2004: 16).
The center that Debord describes could be said to be the entertainment and information industry, which transmits the same information in more or less the same form to as many people as possible at any given time – at least to all those who have decided to switch on their viewing screens (such as TV sets). This transmission presents and distributes what, taken as a totality, is known as the “spectacle.” The act of “watching” is just as central to Debord as it is to the etymology of the word spectacle. For Debord, it is primarily through visual perception that the spectacle actualizes itself, and therefore begins to define what is understood as “common.” The spectacle thus has a certain power, especially when information is centralized, over how we situate ourselves in the world and how we relate to each other. One could say that the spectacle is an active and acting entity – even performative.
To further explore the interplay between performativity and the spectacle, Daniel Dayan’s concept of “monstration” can be useful (Dayan & Katz 1994). Monstration draws on the performative aspects of representing events through media in order to highlight the inherent power dynamics involved. It shows how the selection, framing, and representation of events is ultimately a kind of performance that can influence our perception of reality and shape public opinion. This echoes Debord’s notion of the spectacle, which also emphasizes how the performative nature of media and consumer culture serves to create a superficial and alienating environment in which the spectacle comes to dominate our genuine lived experience and shape our interpretations of it.
However, the media landscape has changed fundamentally since Debord’s time in the 1960s and Dayan’s time in the 1990s. While social media platforms can indeed be seen as centralized media outlets, it is far easier for individuals to influence the “spectacle,” as anyone can convey information to “the masses” at any given time. It is, therefore, important to ask what role design plays in this environment and how we could think about the relationship between invisibility and hypervisibility in this context.
When we think about our contemporary relationship to information and how it is mediated, we must look at the realm of the digital and consider one important sub-category within the large field of communication design, namely “interaction design.” One of its proclaimed guiding principles is the concept of “affordance,” which seems to share a lot with the idea of the Crystal Goblet. Namely, that the user should immediately recognize and sense how an object is meant to be used and that form should not obscure that function. Or, as Steve Krug implores designers, “don’t make me think” (Krug 2014). Indeed, the original idea of affordances, as proposed by the psychologist James Gibson, is that which the environment offers the individual (Gibson 1979). In other words, to see things is to perceive what they afford. Thus, the concept is predicated above all on the relationship between the object and the user. Or, to tie this all back to the spectacle, between the scenery and the spectator. And as design itself seems intent on becoming more and more like the Crystal Goblet, designers keep performing – both as workers in an achievement-based and increasingly matdriven industry, and as actors in a digitized society, creating and being part of “user-experiences” with the specific aim of engaging the audience through the spectacle. If design is everywhere and yet so subtle that we don’t perceive it for what it is, then it is worth asking, to echo Beatrice Warde: Is this an unobstructed message or a distraction from its substance? This, however, is a false dichotomy. Indeed, both are dependent on each other. The message is distraction. That is the spectacle. Seen in this way, design is often done in service of the spectacle, and therefore becomes spectacle, regardless of whether or not it aims for invisibility.
But even if design is part of the spectacle – serving to distract from substance – it can also subvert it, it can be a call to action that is grounded in genuine urgency. In order to explore the question of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility, it is indeed important to look more closely at those moments when existing structures responsible for causing blindness through oversaturation or a restrained vision of what is “common” in our societies are effectively unsettled.
In order to illustrate the point, we will look at two examples that are historically related to each other, but that also offer a counterpoint to the strategies we are examining here. Both involve movements of Black Americans fighting against systemic racism and its effects, which have always been violent, and often lethal.
In 1966, during the American Civil Rights era, the Black Panther Party was founded out of a need to protect themselves against police brutality (Doss 2001). One of its founders, Huey Newton, described the group’s choice of a black panther as their symbol, saying that panthers only act in self-defense, but that “if the aggressor strikes first, then he’ll attack” (Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, 2015). This symbolism was specifically intended to inspire the struggle against systemic racism and to empower Black communities (Doss 2001). Among many other means, members used posters and flags with their logo to spread their message and amplify their collective voice. The way members dressed was also a significant part of their message. Wearing black leather and choosing natural hairstyles was a display of cultural pride that sent an important political message while also allowing non-affiliated supporters to connect with the movement by adopting its aesthetics (Vargas 2009). In terms of visual communication, the Black Panthers were extremely skilled at crafting an effective image, a counter-spectacle if you will, and at reclaiming and resisting a system that was fundamentally built to uphold white supremacy in the guise of a “normative whiteness” (Reddy 2017), a concept that was, and to a large degree still is, declared to be what is most “common” among the American people.
As Maureen Reddy explains, normative identities, such as whiteness, often go unnoticed or unexamined by those who belong to those categories, making racialized individuals hypervisible in contrast. In addition, the invisibility of whiteness to most white people is accompanied by the hypervisibility of their whiteness to those who do not embody or conform to this normative identity. This “norm” is not a coincidence, but has been made so by design (Reddy 2017). Simply put, the noticeability of normative constructs increases to those who deviate from the norm, just as the supremacist system designed to uphold the norms only reinforces their invisibility to those who benefit from them.
This invisibility/hypervisibility paradox was expertly wielded by the Black Panthers in service of their political agenda — in both actions and aesthetics. Indeed, their unified aesthetics were in themselves a form of action. In addition to the aforementioned visual elements that made the Black Panthers recognizable, they also used other strategies to make the bigotry of white America very visible. One example was the public display of Black Panther members with guns and rifles. In fact, the party advocated for armed self-defense as a means to protect Black communities from police brutality and racial violence (Doss 2001). Their visible display of firearms at public events and protests was a very deliberate violation of so-called decorum. It was also a deliberate attempt to assert their Second Amendment rights while challenging the systemic racism of law enforcement by subverting norms. And though they were well within their legal rights to do so, Black bodies with guns are simply not perceived the same way by the white establishment as white bodies with guns. Power dynamics were suddenly unveiled, and the violence experienced by one group became tangible to those who had never been affected by it and who had in fact caused it. A social contradiction was effectively laid bare, made visible, and, in the truest sense of the word, (de)monstrated. In effect, they were able to expose the spectacle’s claim that the law is blind – or just.
The negative reaction to the Black Panthers’ (de)monstrations, from largely non-racialized individuals, did manage to bring national attention to issues of racial injustice and the need for gun reform, leaving a lasting impact on the broader discussions surrounding gun rights and racial equality in the United States (Doss 2001). It must be acknowledged, nonetheless, that the number of Black Americans who suffer violence under police brutality and racially motivated killings is still disproportionally higher than of any other group (Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network 2021).
The Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) is a contemporary anti-racist movement that has a certain continuity with the ideas of the Black Panther Party. Despite being involved in substantial anti-racist work since 2013, the group became particularly well known in 2020, after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, which sparked protests far beyond the borders of the United States.
An action that, crucially, was not promoted by BLM itself, but which spread from within the music industry, was Blackout Tuesday, which took place on June 2, 2020, and was intended as a show of solidarity with the movement and the protests. Among other actions, Social Media users were called to post a black square in order to show their solidarity with the movement. It became such a trend that social media feeds did indeed “blackout.” This blackout, however, ended up creating a detrimental, albeit unintended, side effect (Willingham 2020). In fact, the use of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag along with the black square actually ended up crowding out the useful and important information that was usually found through the hashtag. For many, this was a performance of allyship – spectacle – in order to sustain credibility with their audience (Wellman 2022). To return to Warde, this was not unobstructed substance but was rather obstructed distraction.
Though it can be argued that this event did raise awareness of BLM’s cause on a global scale, so far there has been little sub- stantial progress toward racial diversity, equity, and inclusion (Wellman 2022). Looking closely at the work of groups like the Black Panthers and BLM is crucial for understanding how to unlock subversive possibilities within a system that seems immutable. Using the forms of protest available at the time, the Black Panthers were able to challenge systemic racism and actually produce change. BLM has unfortunate- ly been less successful in shaping public policy and perceptions (Horowitz et al. 2023), perhaps owing to the spectacle’s cooptation of the movement. However, it’s also important to note that the point here is certainly not to compare the Black Panthers and BLM, nor to suggest one group is somehow more successful than the other. Instead, the goal is to analyze two different approaches to working with and / or against the spectacle, and to explore the role of design in both veiling and unveiling. Indeed, some awareness of the spectacle can help to spark debates about urgent topics, and designers, as shapers of the interfaces through which we interact with the world, can make their expertise quite fruitful here. As designed realities become increasingly important in the relationship between people and their surroundings, it is crucial to recognize the responsibility not only of designers, but also of the symbols that create and hence shape reality. Samuel Weber wrote that “[i]n order for something to be a spectacle, it must, first of all, take place — which is to say, it must be localizable. Whether inside, in a theatre (of whatever kind, including our own mind), or outside, in the open, a spectacle must be placed in order to be seen” (Weber 2002: 18).
As design- ers, we occupy a place in contemporary visual culture and that necessitates working directly with the spectacle, which also makes us respon- sible for the cultural space in which we op- erate and over which we hold sway. In this context, the questions of how to design in a way that promotes social responsibility and how to do so with political intent, are particularly crucial. Especially when very real and deep-root- ed problems aren’t always evident because they are largely hidden by the spectacle. This is, after all, a matter of epistemic justice that we certainly shouldn’t ignore.