The role of designers in communication and visual culture evolves, from designers serving as commercial “hired guns” to assuming the more empowering roles of design authorship. As an example, design studio Metahaven’s Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk can be considered ‘auteur-producers’: tenacious visionaries who work across multiple platforms to create a broad variety of functional objects, as well as a prolific amount of insistent, manifesto-like critical and self-referential writing. More and more it has become standard practice in design education to teach designers to develop their own voice and create self-initiated projects.
