Last month, I dissected the messy history of the First Things First manifesto, which has evolved over 60-years to meet new challenges facing the design industry. Now I’m turning my attention to Aotearoa, where we face our own unique challenges against systemic pressures and cultural crunch-points that undermine our industry's ability to do meaningful work. I believe a framework is needed to ensure our local design industry is a force for good.
We are not immune to seeing design used to persuade people to consume, mislead them, or cause harm in other ways. In 2023 Z Energy (one of New Zealand’s biggest emitters) and Saatchi & Saatchi’s blatant greenwashing campaign, led with the words “We're in the business of getting out of the petrol business,” landed them in court. In fact, they had no plans to get out of the petrol business, despite what the advertisements said. In 2024 the Advertising Standards Complaints Board ruled that an advertisement on New Zealand Herald's front-page breached the Advertising Standards Code. It had been placed by the ring-wing group Hobson’s Pledge, who along with other lobby groups use the language of advertising and design to promote a warped view of Aotearoa’s founding document and shared history. Even when laws and codes aren’t broken, design takes part in systems that harm. Zuru, the “empire of plastic” that built the wealth of New Zealand’s wealthiest family, sells mass-produced stuff mostly destined for landfill with slick design and playful advertising.
Our industry in Aotearoa often focuses more on the value than the values of design, with design’s contribution to the economy (higher than agriculture) a constant bragging point. The Designers Institute of New Zealand's top award, the Black Pin, defines design's role with cutting certainty: “It's not about proving design matters - it 'is' business-critical”. By contrast in the Social Good Award, design “can make” an “important contribution”. It’s subtle, but the different phrasings show the weighting of value and values. That doesn’t take away from the award winners in either category, it only shows how our industry abdicates responsibility for the values in design work, while championing our critical contribution to anything that creates profit.
The damage of growth-at-all-costs capitalism and consumer culture is clear for everyone to see. In a world full of examples of greenwashing, plastic-pushing and AI-slop, we as a design community need to challenge the dominance of advertising and market-led priorities in design practice.
Graphic designers help tell the stories of our distinctive country, and it’s incumbent on us to make sure those stories centre the values we want to see. Like the signatories of the First Things First manifesto, we could gather under shared values. We could start by drawing lines under industries and ideas we no longer want to support such as:
- Fossil fuels – many creatives are refusing to work for fossil fuels under the banners of different organisations, including Creatives for Climate, founded by New Zealander Lucy von Sturmer.
- Weapons manufacturers – this should be a no-brainer. Military-style weapons were used to massacre our Muslim communities in Aotearoa, and are being used in genocides overseas.
- Nicotine and tobacco companies – we could decide that no matter what form it comes in (vape or ciggy), we won’t work for nicotine-pushing companies, whose products have disproportionate negative effects on Māori and Pacific populations.
Another way to commit to our values is to prioritise the work we want to see within our industry. This could be as simple as social design thinker Victor Papanek's suggestion that we devote a portion of our work to a social cause. We could also look internally and consider how our workplaces operate and ensure they’re places where everyone is able to thrive. We could also choose to work only with sustainable materials in terms of paper, packaging, and other products.
Earlier this year books with AI generated imagery on their covers were almost ruled out of contention at the PANZ Book Design Awards due to new criteria. While the books were allowed following backlash, the book awards trust stood by its decision to introduce this rule. Simialrly we could restrict the use of AI-generated content, or demand better legislation so that its use doesn’t breach copyright, objectify our youth, and entrench racial bias. In the tech-entrepreneur spirit of move-fast-and-break-things, the AI race has meant that many obvious considerations have been overlooked. These resource-hungry slop-producing machines are not only scraping artwork from everywhere with no care for copyright (or royalties), they are breaching tikanga by generating faux-taonga with no mauri, no wairua and no connection to whakapapa, while what they generate entrenches colonial stereotypes and bias.
In Aotearoa, the future of design must centre Māori and honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We should encourage kaupapa Māori ways of working that may be non-linear, socio-centric and use longer-term thinking that reflects on the past and our ancestors. As an industry, we should listen to the Māori voices and acknowledge mātauranga . There are many further subjects that require expertise to lead: accessibility, representation, copyright, and the use of AI. They are all deserving of our consideration when centering social values in design that benefit us all.
It’s good to remind ourselves of the power of design to centre values. For instance, the peace symbol was originally designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Ken Garland (Author of First Things First, 1963) redrew the symbol “to give it a hard-edged graphic clarity for maximum legibility on posters, pins and placards,” creating the graphic peace symbol we are familiar with today.
This symbol was a key influence for the designers of the hongi symbol at the centre of the Together for Te Tiriti campaign. In the face of the Treaty Principles Bill which challenged our founding document, ActionStation approached Tyrone Ohia at Extended Whānau. They wanted to create a lasting campaign to emphasise the importance of Te Tiriti for all peoples of Aotearoa. The result was Together For Te Tiriti, with its iconic mark, which helped unify a movement and gave rise to Aotearoa’s biggest hīkoi in November 2024. The hongi at the centre of the campaign, seen on banners, fences, cars and badges across the motu, was chosen because it is central to Māori culture and important tikanga like pōwhiri. In an interview with The National Grid, Tyrone talked about the greeting’s symbolism, “The hongi is the breathing of life. It has been a way for us to share breath, to see eye to eye, and to acknowledge one another. It’s also intertwined with conflict and resolution. Early on we landed on the hongi as a symbol of unity.”
The symbol also welcomes tauiwi supporters of the movement and acknowledges that both sides of the treaty partnership have responsibilities. As Tyrone explains in an interview with Design Assembly, this extends to the design profession: “As designers, our responsibility is often to create things that people can use, and things that carry a message. We have a lot of respect and belief in the power of visual symbols to do this.”
To acknowledge that respect, belief, and responsibility for the visual worlds we produce, designers in Aotearoa could form a culture and framework that will help to guide our industry. To help us create lasting works like the peace symbol or the mark for Together for Te Tiriti. It can’t be as vague as asking a mate to “act now”, but in the same breath, it shouldn’t act as a dogmatic list of rules. And importantly, as the original First Things First says, “not to take the fun out of life.”
We need to work as a collective to further develop this process to guide our industry. We need to centre strong kaiwhakatere (navigators) to lead the way and promote adoption. In this process, we can allow room for dissensus and the contradictions of our industry and our country while still showing moral leadership.
