I’ve always considered Stefan Sagmeister a professional provocateur. I still remember, as a young designer fresh out of school over ten years ago, receiving posters in the mail that he designed for the AIGA: the headless chickens, the wagging cow tongues, and the X-Actoed typography (into his own flesh, no less). I thought, who is this guy?

Now I know: He’s Stefan Sagmeister, a superhero to many in the design world (even though he prefers not to be seen this way). He can convince clients to take creative risks that leave the rest of us awestruck. He employs guts in his work and gets endless publicity for his most shocking and provocative designs. Young designers everywhere revere him.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and he is attempting to bring a sense of humanity back to design and remind us of our individual power as designers—all by asking us one simple question: Can design touch someone’s heart? To get things rolling, he has turned the question into a course he is teaching at design schools in New York City and Berlin, including the School of Visual Arts (SVA), the Cooper Union and the Universität der Küenste.

Stefan’s question has inspired me to take a closer look not only at Stefan as a thoughtful designer and teacher, but at what my own design work is accomplishing (or not accomplishing).

Understanding the question
Stefan first raised this question in his book Made You Look, published six years ago. Today, an Internet search brings up countless postings as designers everywhere attempt to answer it—including students. American designers (as opposed to European designers) take the “heart” aspect of the question quite literally. The word “heart” in English implies love, caring or affection. Therefore, it makes sense to many designers to answer the question by taking on pro-bono projects for various causes, as side projects to everyday client work. While these designers’ efforts are commendable, Stefan is asking us to delve much deeper than some may understand. What he is really asking us is: Can design do more than sell products for our clients? Can design move someone enough to change the course of events? Can design play a bigger role in solving societal problems? “You could also say, do something that matters,” he explains. “It’s a pity that the majority of what we do is promote or sell products for clients. I have nothing against selling. I do it, too. But I also think design can do so much more. It can inform, delight, provoke, support and simplify someone’s life.” The answer must come from your own heart. This takes an innate understanding of where your particular passions and design skills can make a difference to someone else. It takes soul-searching.

What prompted Stefan to pose this question to our profession in the first place? When he arrived at the AIGA Design Conference in New Orleans ten years ago, he was handed a bag of promotional goodies, all well designed, of course. (Yes, this is the conference for which Stefan designed the promotional poster featuring bloody, headless chickens.) But what did these designers accomplish? “So much of what designers do is technically very good,” he says, “but it leaves people cold and has little meaning in their lives. The question came out of a frustration of drowning in professionally designed things that nobody gives a **** about, neither the maker nor the receiver. The main reason for all this stuff is that most designers don’t believe in anything. When your conscience is so flexible, how can you do strong design?”

This is quite a provocative and challenging statement, but then, that is Stefan’s style. While I don’t agree that designers don’t believe in anything, I do believe this is Stefan’s way of throwing down the gauntlet to designers to get back in touch with their beliefs and act on them. In our day-to-day work, it’s all too easy to set aside our personal beliefs and convictions for the sake of getting an assignment out the door and getting paid for it. I agree that we can create more opportunities to incorporate the ideas we feel most strongly about into our work, thus making our visual communications more meaningful and personally rewarding—not only for ourselves, but also for others.

Furthermore, what Stefan is advocating is not the first time these types of thoughts have been voiced in our profession. They have been floating around for decades, heating up again with the release of the First Things First manifesto and the international debates it sparked. I feel that Stefan, however, has been able to put it to us in a more thoughtful way (as opposed to the manifesto authors’ approach that put many designers on the defensive). Considering most designers are artists at heart, the opportunity to explore a poetically phrased question is one they are open to, especially as Stefan does so with them. He is smart to scrutinize his own work with this question: Have any of his designs touched anyone’s heart? (Because he has done this, people perceive him as sincere and not hypocritical.)

He confirms the project that came closest to touching someone’s heart was not a professional one, but personal: “Of all the hundreds of pieces I designed in the last twenty years, there is only one project where I can say for sure that I touched somebody’s heart with design. My friend Reini came to visit New York City. He was afraid that none of the sophisticated women would talk to him. So before his arrival, I ran a poster campaign on the Lower East Side that read ‘Girls, Be Nice to Reini.’ At a small party we gave for him, this campaign turned out to be the conversation piece that started him talking to a beautiful woman. They actually wound up together. Not only am I fairly positive that I touched their hearts, but it is also one of the very few pieces of successful advertising I have ever been associated with.”