Jessica Helfand, "Ownership, Authorship, and Credit in the Digital Age." The AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 14:3 (1996) 4.

Can design be its own reward? Or does our behavior bespeak a yearning for public recognition in order to feel professionally--if not altogether personally--validated? Each year a host of juried competitions reinforces these inclinations with the promise of ceremony, ceremony that increasingly seems to take its cue, oddly enough, from the entertainment industry. In the design professions, aware recipients are feted by banquets and lavishly printed books, their names and titles recorded, and repeated, for posterity. Is it this reinforcement of the celebrity ideal that makes us so possessive on the subject of credit?

The issue of celebrity--of the public acknowledgment of credit--is a delicate one, reflecting a kind of unflinching territorialism more suited to birds, wolves, and political candidates. Such desire is driven by a need to establish parameters, to stake one's ground and be duly recognized for it. In the civilized world, territory has typically been marked by symbols that denote ownership: flags surrounding a castle, a gold band encircling a finger. These are gestures that establish moral, physical or political boundaries. Over times, such gestures become part of our cultural lexicon and we learn to respect them.

But in the gold-rush mentality of the virtual world, things are not so easy to define. Here, the "posterity" referred to above is merely symbolic: in truth, you are only as good as the thing you designed fifteen minutes ago. Recent advancements brought about by information technologies now enable increased access, independence, and customization. What that really means is it's all moving and changing, incredibly fast, and whatever you design won't be around for very long. Or it will, but it will mutate over time into something quite alien from its original incarnation. Therein lies the beauty, if not the insanity, of designing in an interactive medium: as in a relay race, the baton is perpetually on the move, from you to your audience to another designer. In this new democracy, territory itself is transient, intangible, chameleonlike. So how are we expected to take--or give--credit for something we can't possibly expect to quantify?

As projects themselves grow more complicated, so does the issue of credit. Who designed what? And where? And for how long? What do we call all these designers, each of whom contributed a critical component in an overall process that might span weeks, months, or even years? In the design and development of websites, for instance, the careful engineering of templates is an architectural challenge requiring sophisticated computational skill. The person who resolves the intricate ways in which varying types of content will become visually manifest may be a programmer, a systems engineer, or a client with a particular talent for coding. Occasionally, it may be a designer.

As in most industries, credit remains, in the end, largely contract-driven. The stalemate between new-media practitioners and many (though not all) of the lawyers with whom they must negotiate lies in an antiquated contractual vocabulary. Corporations have adapted boilerplate legal language to describe services, calculate fee structures, and restrict reproduction rights. Confidentiality and ownership clauses reflect the finite world of print, and age-old word of the law. What they seldom do is address collaborative efforts and acknowledge the complexity of the resulting forms.

The issue is not so much who did what, but how we talk about who did what. If seeking recognition is the only way to validate what we do, then sharing that recognition will always be perceived as minimizing the value of our achievements. And that is shaky ground, indeed.

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