Always Sometimes Anytime

Kelli Anderson is a multidisciplinary designer who employs various mediums to question and subvert our preconceived and prescribed reality. We caught up with Anderson ahead of her lecture at Semi-Permanent Auckland to discuss – among other things – why creating a fake New York Times is about as real as it gets.

What piqued your interest in design in the first place?

To be honest, it took a while for me to realise that what I was doing was considered design. I’ve always made all manner of visual things for as long as I can remember, but while I was attending grad school in New York, friends began approaching me to help out with their album art, music videos, etc, and I began doing more and more of this collaborative work. Turns out that having assignments and deadlines is a great motivator for getting-all-manner-of-things-done. And the public nature of design makes it naturally interactive – and means that many different types of people will participate with the work, which gives it a life beyond what I can do with it.

What attracted you to infographics?

I like understanding how things and systems work, so I’m a natural diagram fanatic. (Ikea Furniture assembly = guilty pleasure.) But also: It’s a good moment for infographic work (as distinct from data visualization) because the culture-at-large presently approaches them with a degree of healthy skepticism – people know that the presentation of facts and figures can obscure the truth just as readily as any other type of communication can obscure the truth. That has had the effect of taking infographics to a whole other level: they seem to talk about our relationship with data, as much as they present data.

I also like that guiding every little design choice about lines or typefaces are the aspirations of clarity and usability. When you create an infographic, you are designing for the human mind – the ocular and biological way that we ingest information.

Tell us how you started to get involved in the subversive, user-focused projects you have been associated with.

Well, it wasn’t really a conscious decision to make work that subverts assumptions. I was making lots of things and occasionally had these overwhelming “wow, that’s cool!” moments and then had to go back and retroactively analyze what seemed so exciting about them.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my favorite projects (the stuff I get really excited about) is the work that challenges complacency; that goes back far into the fundamentals, refusing to take them for granted. This type of work (if successful) has the potential to resurrect meaning in places where it has been used up. There is boundless potential in a piece of paper, but when you see a pile of mail on your desk day after day, it is easy to forget the material’s wonders.

I think design work can remind us that there are possibilities which lay latent in the things we take for granted.

What was the first project you worked on?

The first project that would qualify would probably be the paint-pen-and-acrylic science diagram illustrations I was making in high school. They were about physics concepts but were rendered in this totally inadequate visual language of campy illustration.

You’ve created subversive projects both online and in reality. How do you find gaining public interest is different in the different mediums. Do you find one easier to achieve? Do you find one more powerful?

That is a good question. It’s a nice surprise when people I don’t know get excited about a project. Gaining public interest probably has less to do with physical-vs-digital divide and has more to do with how the audience receives the experience: whether they have to seek it out or it gets handed to them.

When we put hundreds of thousands of fake NY Times in peoples’ hands, there was concentrated interest that day. But something like a small website experiment is more likely to be gradually noticed – people come to by and by.

I keep interested people abreast of current projects through Twitter and dribble. I also write long blog posts about each project when it is complete – just to work out my own ideas verbally, but also to contextualize what I’m doing.

You are essentially framing reality with these projects. Do you have any particular messages you are trying to deliver?

Not necessarily—while some of the work I make is overtly about activism, most of it isn’t. However, I am a person-with-a-point-of-view and I follow my interests, so my passions and beliefs probably end up being pretty transparent.

In your TedTalk you argue that reality is structured in a particular way and doesn’t necessarily have to be, and you subvert this using design. Why do you think design has the ability to subvert reality particularly well?

Design, even more than art, is integrated into everyday experience. It is those everyday experiences that form our basis of reality (through sheer repetition.) As designers, I think this puts us in a position of great power, because we are essentially working with this medium of the overlooked/everyday. It is ripe for intervention, which can prove to be shocking or whimsical or surprising, but always readily provokes wonder in these little corners of life we cease to consider. (I think of Spike Jonze’s music video for Björk’s ‘It’s so Quiet’ (wherein the transacts and mailboxes begin dancing in the street).)

Design can get directly at the very heart of what we have forgotten to think about.

Your design-oriented work is quite political as you question the established forms of media and government. Do you think it’s more important now than ever given the global control some corporations / media organizations / governments are wielding? Discuss your thoughts on this in relation to the faux NY Times project you undertook.

Yes, I mean, it is easier to have a voice/lobbying power in the world if you have piles of money. In America, there are a gazillion different official and non-official loopholes that the corporate elite actively exploit to affect policy. This isn’t the way that American was designed to work, and we wanted to remind people of this with the NY Times. All of the positive changes heralded by the paper were the effect of “popular pressure.”

As part of this NY Times project you also mentioned that you only put ‘good news’ in the newspaper. It reminded me of something that Stephen Colbert said in his Correspondence Dinner speech in 2006: “You weren’t telling us and those were good times, for all we knew”. Is escaping reality as much a part of your work as re-framing it, or are you trying to seriously instigate change?

No, it was intended to remind people of what should be possible in a democracy. We actually named our collaborative secret group (the group who officially released the paper): ‘Because we want it’ to represent the simple little idea that the people’s interests should be the driver of change in a democracy. We released it just after Obama was elected because we wanted to remind people that one man was not going to save the ship and that if we desired change, we had to continue to visibly push for it.

Again, the NY Times project: you discuss a futuristic Utopia. What did this futuristic Utopia consist of? What do you think the major problems we as society face at the moment? Do you think we’re at all likely to sort any of our problems out?

Yes, the paper was “set” six months in the future and depicted a world created by pressuring our elected officials to do the things that we thought would most benefit the collective good. It was sort of “progressive wish list” of policies which included big things like closing Gitmo, fixing health care, instituting a maximum wage law, but also smaller (but equally important) ideas like bringing high-speed internet to Appalachia and returning Civics class to high school curriculum. It was a very detailed policy piece, as well as a hoax.

Climate change is probably the largest challenge we face as humanity—the more we learn, the worse the prognosis gets. It is really pretty scary. Ugh.

Kelli’s TedTalk:

Kelli’s design for Occupy! – a book about the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Kelli’s paper record player project:

Check out Kelli’s work over on her website.