First Things First Manifestos: Social Responsibility in Graphic Design

The concept of social responsibility has become both an individual and a corporate phenomenon. In this context, all individuals and organizations are expected to carry out their activities within the framework of social responsibility. At this point, the social responsibility of the designer is even more important due to its mission of informing and directing society, as the designer raises awareness and convinces the society while presenting the product s/he has designed. However, in the situation that came with industrialization and then capitalism, the designer started to go out of his main duty and lost the awareness that this profession should be carried out ethically. One of the main reasons for this was that the rapid development in the advertising sector through a transformation towards a consumer society brought about focusing on the number of works rather than their quality. The First Things First Manifesto, which is against this kind of works and sees the works made according to the wishes of the consumer society as worthless and a waste of time, has attracted a lot of attention since its first publication and has been discussed by many field researchers and designers. Over time, the First Things First manifesto has been renewed against the changing problems with the development of technology and social changes and its 2020 version was published in order to draw attention to the effects of the climate crisis today. In this article, First Thing First Manifestos which draws attention to the main task of the designer in terms of social responsibility are examined, and the changing responsibility of the designer against current problems of the society is discussed in line with these manifestos.