Introduction: Satellite of Love

It has felt quite strange reviving The National Grid a good thirteen years after I thought we’d knocked it on the head. Issue #8 came out in 2012 and was produced as a catalogue for an exhibition Jonty Valentine and I had curated at RAMP Gallery in Kirikiriroa Hamilton. Design and Designers: Artefacts from The National Grid was an exhibition made up of as many original objects as we could find that had appeared in the pages of our first seven issues. It was a specifically reflective moment for Jonty and I, before we decided to move on and spend time on other things.

Over the years, however, I came to really miss the conversations and specific thinking about graphic design that working on The National Grid had required of me. So, in 2023, I began to float the idea with a few different people that we might start some sort of national design research group/network type of thing. This quickly turned into semi-regular online meetings between myself, Jonty, Katie Kerr, and Matt Galloway. We talked about the lack of platforms for research-led and/or more speculative design practices in Aotearoa,1 and our initial idea was to form a group which might advocate for exhibitions and publishing opportunities. We added to this the idea that the group might also publish a journal. And then — obviously enough I guess — Katie and Matt pointed out that it sounded like we might as well just start up The National Grid again.

Neither Jonty nor I was immediately keen. There were obviously reasons why we’d stopped publishing this thing — mainly because it was a lot of really hard work. It was hard because we did it all ourselves, just the two of us, on top of our ‘real jobs’. It was hard constantly trying to get funding and organising all the distribution and postage. It was hard getting small independent bookshops — especially those overseas where we sold the bulk of each edition — to pay us. It was hard convincing people to write for us, and harder still to convince the universities we worked for that this was ‘research’ and not just ‘vanity publishing’. But a lot has changed in the last decade. (It is interesting to remember that when we published the last issue the idea that Donald Trump would ever become the President of the USA was still just a joke on The Simpsons.) The National Grid was eventually recognised — too late unfortunately — as legitimate research by the institutions we worked for.2 It’s also funny to remember that while platforms like Paypal existed in the early 2000s, they weren’t widely trusted and used like they are now. And, through more recent publishing projects we have been involved in, we know that possibilities for online sales and distribution have improved significantly.

But the main reason we are restarting this publication is because Katie and Matt talked Jonty and I into it. As a result, I have come to appreciate that there is a new generation of designers working in Aotearoa who, like us, are interested in design beyond the purely vocational — who are interested in design as it intersects with society, culture, politics, economics, and the environment. The general instability of which surely makes it hard to consider what we do in the world — what we design and put into it — without being palpably aware of the various existential crises we are facing.

In hindsight, my wanting to do something like this again was perhaps born in the Covid ‘lockdowns’ of 2020. From the safety of my home, I watched in astonishment as people I knew, or thought I knew, fell for bizarre conspiracy theories that seemed to flourish in that particular environment — everyone at home, living on the internet, experiencing life through social media platforms literally designed to track and reinforce each of our individual senses of outrage. The effects of this have been far-reaching and we are living in a more highly polarised world than I could have imagined when we published the first eight issues of The National Grid.

I became very interested in the role graphic design was playing in the popularisation of conspiracy theories. Disinformation and fake news was often ‘dressed up’ by graphic design to appear more believable or authoritative.3 It was a good reminder of the agency that aesthetics and ‘style’ actually have, and is even more worrying now that ‘so-called AI’ can help anyone make anything look more-or-less legitimate.4 And when so many of our problems hinge on communication, it must surely be a good time to think more deeply and critically about graphic design. (Or whatever you want to call that now.)

In May 2023, under our last Labour government, Waka Kotahi (NZ Transport Agency) released a proposal and consultation document to redesign road signs around Aotearoa to include te reo Māori. The proposal came with an in-depth peer-reviewed research document that reviewed examples of bilingual signage from other countries around the world. This was, I thought, one of the most exciting things to happen in graphic design in Aotearoa in many years. I gave the report to my students to read and waited for the design community to respond. There was only one response I could find: a very brief article on the Design Assembly website, which on closer inspection, turned out to be an advertorial for a multinational urban design company with an office in Auckland.5 The proposal was thrown out anyway, as soon as the new rightwing coalition government stepped into power in November 2023.

I guess what I’m trying to draw attention to here is the fact that there are big, complex conversations that graphic designers could be participating in. But maybe they are, and I just don’t know about it? Probably. The number of students studying design at postgraduate levels has shot up since we were last publishing. Where do they all go? What are they doing? I know many of my own students struggle to find ways to continue the type of work and thinking they have been engaged in once they graduate. I also understand that what I am saying might be seen as entirely superfluous to industry expectations, but there is a growing sense of interest, I think, of urgency even, from designers who want to think more deeply about what they do. And often simply because they enjoy it. So the point of doing this again, restarting this publication now, is in an effort to pull certain kinds of work and conversations into the public domain and to give them a platform. To make them visible, and to — hopefully — join in.

Jonty was a critical participant in our many conversations about starting The National Grid up again, but has unfortunately not been able to be onboard for the production of this new issue. We hope Jonty will join us again in an editorial capacity in the near future. Wanting to do things differently this time, we decided to reach out to a number of people with invitations to sit on an Editorial Board, which will kick in following the publication of this issue. This decision was made, initially, to cast our net more widely in regard to possible content, but we also look forward to being able to provide a more formal process of ‘peer review’ for authors/articles that might require it.6 Katie, Matt, and I would like to thank the following people for kindly agreeing to sit on the Editorial Board for this publication as we move forward:

Layla Tweedie-Cullen,
Tyrone Ohia,
Ella Sutherland,
Johnson Witehira,
James Goggin,
Shan James,
Kerry Ann Lee,
and Stuart Geddes.

The first thing we did to re-launch this project was develop a new comprehensive website that contains all the content from the first eight issues of The National Grid, issues 1 to 6 of which have long since sold out. The new website — designed, built, and repurposed7 by Alfred Hoi — can be found here:

thenationalgrid.net

Over the years since we stopped publishing, I have received many requests from people, mostly students and academics from around Aotearoa, for copies of various published articles that are now unavailable. So, putting this all online for free made a lot of sense. Graphic design has not been written about enough in our small part of the world, and when Jonty and I started this publication twenty years ago, we did so with a naïve ambition to contribute to what seemed to be a void. I guess I can’t claim that same naïvety now, but I do feel that same sense of enthusiasm again.

It’s worth noting here that others have, in different ways, thrown themselves into this void too. Threaded is an Aotearoa-based graphic design magazine that has been running since 2004 and has published twenty-one issues to date. Design Assembly was established in 2009 as an online platform for local design discourse, but has since settled into being a site for professional profiles, networking, and workshops. Designers Speak (Up) was an online platform set up by Catherine Griffiths in 2018 after she led a protest outside the annual Best Design Awards over an obvious gender imbalance in the Institute’s highest award, the ‘Black Pin’. Catherine decided to close this down in 2024 but the writing is still archived on the website.

The responses we have received to the news that The National Grid is up and running again have been hugely encouraging, and I want to thank everyone who’s supported us over the last year. I especially want to thank all the contributors to this new issue. Without them this thing you are holding in your hands obviously wouldn’t exist. The University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts ‘Harkness Fund’ has paid for the printing of this new issue, and I want to thank the School for it’s ongoing support. Twenty years ago now, this same funding supported the production of the very first issue of The National Grid and the school has a long history of being a home for an education in graphic design that is centred on culture and society, rather than as a mercenary device for corporates and economic growth. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Katie and Matt for convincing me (and Jonty too, of course) to put this old satellite into orbit again.