“Graphic Design: Now in Production,” an ambitious American survey of Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture, includes an essay by co-chair Steven Heller on design entrepreneurship.

The exhibition curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrew Blauvelt, which launched at the Walker Art Center and will come to the Cooper Hewitt in June, focuses on the increased amount of designer created content, including thesis and post-thesis work by some of MFAD’s alumni.

From the catalog:
““Design Authorship” emerged during the late 1980s promising a counter-intuitive shift in graphic design practice from solely serving clients to actually being one’s own client. It seemed radical at first, but the Design Authorship movement, such as it was, never quite gave the proverbial asylum keys to the inmates. In truth, it was just the opposite. The term “design author” was transitional, easing the way for designers into the more provocative “Design Entrepreneur” movement.

Design authorship suggested a more intellectual, somewhat wishful design thinking – a dream that designers could command their own creative destinies. Design entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is a more demonstrative activity, moving beyond traditional service design into self-starting and self-sustaining design endeavors. The Design Entrepreneur movement allows designers to have greater responsibility as creators of their own marketable products. Consequently, design entrepreneurs are no longer merely serving business they are intimately engaged in their own businesses. This, of course, is a risky proposition – and many who have tried to be entrepreneurs judiciously keep their day jobs.”

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