To hide or be hidden. Anonymity is a complex and murky concept, neither clearly positive nor obviously negative; the yielder feels empowered and the invisibilised feels forgotten.
As historically hidden identities emerge out of enforced invisibilisation and entire communities employ new tools and technologies to hide, anonymity simultaneously acts as a catalyst for opposing forces: empowerment, resistance, rebellion, protection, mystery, invisibility, negligence, discrimination.
Anonymity can be as much of a statement as an imposed condition, in a society that has been domesticated to embrace individual recognition as the ultimate aim of contemporary life.
Movements, ideas, companies, trends, nations, have all been given faces of single individuals, faces that are said to represent everything behind them, but that often conceal more than they show.
We see generations that have been shaped to understand their virtual identities as the only ones that really matter, and online platforms as opportunities to display themselves, in an internationally shared quest for visibility and notoriety. As the world becomes more ‘connected’, communication tools designed to bring us together only become bigger stages to perform, bazaars for likes, follows and fame.
Individuals, like tall trees in a dense forest, compete egotistically for exposure to the light, determined to have it all, and careless of what is left behind this façade. But it is below the impenetrable canopy and the meaningless and superficial competition it represents, that we have decided to look, where life is prioritised over exposure, where interdependence and collective action are the foundations of a thriving ecosystem.
It is within this ecosystem that projektado chooses to be situated. As unnamed participants to a collective effort, projektado’s members remain individually anonymous, a decision that comes with the privilege of being able to freely make it. Still, it stands as a statement of our intention to distance ourselves from individualistic tendencies and instead adopt a collective, transdisciplinary and international approach.
Some may feel unsettled by the lack of an author’s name next to projektado’s contributions to this magazine. It may strike as being reasonable that whoever wrote the piece deserves the recognition they put into it, or that the content could have been read and interpreted differently should the author had been known by the audience. Nonetheless, the decision of going anonymous comes with an inherent provocation at the necessity of identities overexposure: do we need to know who we are agreeing or disagreeing with? Should our judgement be made on a face or name rather than on the message? Doubts that come from a worrying accustomisation to the principles of a socio-political structure that reigns us all but that we have a choice to fight against.
Others too embrace anonymity to escape the norms of societies built on vision, on surveillance and on information, but in the same way that we adopt anonymity as a liberating tool, it can also represent a form of imposed oppression, an invisibilising restraint capable of silencing screams and defusing action. A sinister weight on the shoulders of many; a veil of impossibilities; a closed door.
It is in the contrasting and multifaceted nature of anonymity that our very first issue anonymity in design will find opportunities to open conversations, debates, and critiques on the intrinsic relation the designed world has formed with identity.
The issue opens the discussion on anonymity with instances of realisation, from the design industry imposing, as a form of control, the systemic trapping of its new generations in a limbo of decision-making and purpose-finding, to the dominating mindsets that bar the contribution of those whose vision does not fit the picture. We look at the ethical bindings of the profession and the dysfunctional systems of support for those labouring in it. A series of systems of restraint that contributes to a design world shaped by repulsive processes of invisibilisation, exclusion and oppression on various scales.
We explore the built environment and development plans that disregard city dwellers that are deemed to have no claim over the space they inhabit, the limits of official masterplans that refuse to acknowledge chunks of the urban creation growing outside and beyond the identity that has been envisioned for them. While acts of resistance against such forces occasionally manage to outpace the hand that stifles them, there are other spheres of design in which the lethality of the system does not afford the oppressed any space to escape, when design is employed as a figurative and literal weapon of erasure, able to disrupt the present and future of life and identities.
We question the responsibilities of our profession and the role of its outcomes, in an industry that glorifies fame at the peril of any and all things touched by its influence. We find in anonymity opportunities to reinterpret the way design is approached and valued, reflecting on past and present instances of liberation of the designed from the designer, in which the boundaries of usefulness, collaboration, ownership and innovation have been reimagined beyond what has now come to be the mindless capitalisation of all things.
We criticise the present reality of profit being generated from what once was shared, and the supremacy of giant companies determining what labels, names, brands, images, ideas, and anatomies we should conform to. Redefining the relationship between body and digital world, between identities and virtual representation, and in so doing, enabling a different level of control on one’s identity or lack of it. An opportunity for anonymity to be used as a defensive veil for those who don’t need protection, but also as an empowering statement for those willing to raise their voice and choosing not to remain passive in the determination of a collective future.
As we launch this inaugural issue of projektado magazine on anonymity in design, it is with great pleasure that we look back on the reflections that this knowledge creation process has ignited among us as a collective. We humbly thank all who contributed directly and indirectly to our magazine for their perspectives and insights, for their time and trust, in joining us on this critical journey that has resulted in an experience of great meaning.
With all the discussions and viewpoints that it collects, this issue has broadened our understanding of the implications of anonymity within and beyond design; what it has meant historically, the processes it continues to sustain, and the doors it could open. Yet, as complex and multifaceted as anonymity is, so many of its dimensions shall remain unexplored unless critical designers raise the issue through discussion and practice again and again, along which path this collective aims to be a companion.
With all our love,
projektado collective
first published for projektado magazine issue 1: anonymity in design / may 2021
