James Dyer and Nick Deakin on Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops
The edited collection is “not a book of fixed methods but prompts to embrace an endlessly shifting terrain.”
Welcome to the Book Review, a new monthly column from Scratching the Surface on books in and around design, architecture, and culture. Each month, we do a deep dive into a new book or publication, either in the form of a review, an interview, or roundtable and share round ups of new books that arrive in the studio each month.
Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops: The Way We Attend to Things
edited by James Dyer and Nick Deakin
Set Margins’ (2026), 232 pages
In 2023, James Dyer and Nick Deakin, two graphic designers and educators, published Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design, which explored the separation between a designer’s intent and how the design lives in the real world. The book, an eclectic mix of interviews, essays, and visuals, made the case that designers, perhaps, should not always seek to solve problems but rather embrace the uncertainty of an unpredictable world. In other words, graphic design gets much more interesting when it leaves the designer’s computer.
The duo are back with a new book, Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops: The Way We Attend to Things, which I read as a sequel of sorts to Graphic Events. Though the title has the term “Graphic Design”, the workshops they’ve collected and solicited (of which, full disclosure, I am one!), are wide-ranging and anti-disciplinary. Taken together, however, they argue for looking closely at the world around us. I caught up with James and Nick to talk about how they sourced the workshops, how their positions as graphic designers and educators inform the collection, and why “attention” is a critical skill in our current moment.
I want to start with the title of the book: “Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops: The Way We Attend to Things”. The first part is self-explanatory, I think, but tell me about that subtitle. What does ‘the way we attend to things’ mean and how does that relate to graphic design workshops?
James: Generally, if we think about what “attention” is we would probably think of it as this quite narrow, specific focus. We might think of attention as something we are disciplined into giving, for instance, think of a teacher shouting for the attention of their pupils — which is to say demanding they are not distracted. But attention could also be something that happens at a seemingly involuntary level, such as when an advertisement “grabs” your attention, the urban legend of car crashes caused by road-side billboards of Wonderbras in the 90s is a spurious example of that. The argument Ninety-Nine puts forward is that focus, distraction, allure and so on are just a few of many other ways of attending to the world; we can also give attention through absurdist meanderings, wonderful daydreaming, empathic attachments, alienated cartographies, and so on and on (ninety-nine times, at least).
When Nick and I talk about the way we attend to things we are really meaning the way we evaluate things, the way we consider what is significant and worth being alert to. There is a real urgency to recognize this because the attention we bring to the world ultimately creates the world we come to know, think of the “law of the instrument”: to a hammer everything is a nail. Keeping in mind that idea of the instrument, if we attend to the world as if it were parsable into simple and predictable discreet units (here I am thinking about the uses of Large Language Models) and, more worryingly, we feel satisfaction in the things we find through those ways of attending then I think we are in real trouble in design; design is a discipline that should thrive in conditions of suspicion, ambiguity, confusion, complexity. To take that one step further, and this is a really important issue, Ninety-Nine is not just about offering simple instructions to see the world differently but it is also a provocation to recognize what is lost when we attend to the world in one way without imagining others. Ultimately, being cautiously vigilant with the way we attend to things is about changing how we think about what we do.
I think that’s right and an important point to make. Tell me more about design’s role in this idea of “being vigilant with the way we attend to things.” When did the idea of “attention” become a framing device for the book?
James: We often think of the best designers as innovative lateral thinkers, they are the people that find problems you didn’t know existed and solutions that seem unthinkable. I think these ideas about ways of attending to the world are our attempt to reverse engineer this way of working, which seems increasingly rare. I am always very suspicious of origins of ideas, particularly when they seem definitively coherent, so in a very obtuse way I can mention some names of theorists we were reading whilst writing Graphic Events that brought clarity to this idea of attention you see in Ninety-Nine: Nietzsche’s thoughts on perspectivism (the idea that there are as many ways for the world to exist as there are ways to perceive it), Alfred North Whitehead’s writing on concrescence (which is something like thoughts on the becoming of being), James Williams’ theories on the processual dynamics of semiotics (we have already mentioned him) and Iain McGilchrist’s thoughts on what he calls the “divided brain”.
Let’s get into the content of the book itself. You frame this book in the introduction as coming from graphic designers but the workshops included are not explicitly about or for graphic designers. Can you walk me through the process of sourcing and then curating the workshops presented in the book?
Nick: I frame the workshops as emerging from no single disciplinary perspective. They are not traditional design exercises, nor are they limited to graphic designers.
While James and I began the conversation that led to Graphic Events and Ninety-Nine in a staff room while teaching on a graphic design degree program, our discussions centered on approaching graphic design from the world, rather than peering out at the world from graphic design. As such, the title of the book is intended not to mark a disciplinary boundary, but to signal new territory.
Follow-up discussions with contributors to Graphic Events had led us to form a preliminary list of people who we felt were already aligned with the central themes of our research. From there we pencilled a broader range of potential contributors from graphic design education and industry, and beyond. Discussions took place in person, online, or by email and text messages. Those with experience of working in education often had material to work from, others developed workshops from scratch. Editing consisted of a back-and-forth until each contributor was satisfied. Some of the workshops were relatively quick to realise, others took months. It was important that all the contributions we included brought something unique and their workshops intentionally situated participants outside of graphic design.
Ok, so tell me more about this then. I’m interested in the idea of “not to mark a disciplinary boundary but to signal new territory.” What’s the value of keeping “graphic design” in the title? What’s this say about what you want graphic design to be?
Nick: By labelling the eclectic mix of instructions in Ninety-Nine as graphic design workshops we challenge those who read it to engage in new perspectives on a wide range of subjects and situations. It is an attempt to explore less familiar ground and evade prescriptive social norms. This attention to the messier qualities of the everyday is important. Graphic design discourse has tended to remove cues that interfere with the fact that it is subject to the chaos of the world, and, as a result, it loses something – or perhaps even a great deal.
James and I would talk about a person in the street encountering a poster as a particular moment, situated within a web of contingencies. What if that person were eating a sandwich? What if they’d had their heart broken the night before? We would be drawn quickly into a thicket, which we referred to as the “deep milieu” in Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design. As well as considering the poster, we would have to think about the kind of filling, dressing, and bread in the sandwich, the particular way their heart had been broken, and reflect on love, politics, morality, and so on. The workshops in Ninety-Nine are intended to coax participants into these conversations as part of a more mindful and generous practice. Life is complex, while graphic design requires acts of reduction. These workshops are provocations to return to that complexity.
This book followed another book you two worked on together, Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design. That book was an exploration of how design lives in the world after its been produced and, James, in your conclusion essay, frame these workshops as connected to the ideas in that book. Tell me about the relationship you see between Graphic Events and Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops.
James: The aim of Graphic Events was really to change (or at least provoke awareness of) the kind of language we bring to graphics. Recently you kindly republished one of the interviews from Graphic Events with James Williams where we talk about the philosophical implications of these sorts of ways of attending. During the research process while writing the book, Nick and I were finding really curious contemporary and historical instances of people other than designers putting graphics into oblique discourses. They were offering totally different worldviews that were not faithful to the abstract discipline of design but instead truthful to their unique real-world experiences. We were drawn to these unofficial cultures of graphics, it’s something we describe in Graphic Events as a kind of dirty realism, it’s a skewed, underbelly point of view. The last line of Graphic Events reads: “the graphic event makes new, risky, contingent, monstrous perceptions of design necessary.” I would say that Ninety-Nine is an attempt to aggregate those perceptions into a critical mass. So it’s not that one book follows the other but they undoubtedly compliment and problematizse each other.
With this in mind, were there any workshops or participants you were especially excited to include, or surprised to receive and discover?
James: I was honestly surprised and excited to just receive responses from the people we contacted. We probably emailed around 200 people inviting them to contribute to the book; it was a slow, piecemeal process (waiting for replies and sending reminder emails and nudges on social media as well as volleys of emails with edits and suggestions, etc.) we had a convoluted system of documenting all of this on a spreadsheet so we could keep track. As you could imagine, we had many rejections, usually it was because they were working on other projects or because of demanding personal circumstances. I really appreciated every reply we received. We were contacting people that have made a significant difference to how we think about design, and that includes our graduate students as well as big names from other disciplines that may be unfamiliar to most designers. It was really interesting to see how each participant worked with us; some really needed cajoling into it, others were immediately enthusiastic and supportive of the whole project.
Nick, in the introduction, you write: “Design is broadly expressed in these workshops as an act of kindness, a way of making sense of our lives, and a practice for fostering conscious connections between people, materials, objects, and the politics of public spaces.” I love this idea of design as kindness. Can you tell me more about how thinking about design as an act of kindness either counters or amplifies the trends you are seeing in graphic design education more broadly?
Nick: As somebody who works commercially as a graphic designer, as well as in education, I have a reasonable sense of both currents. If we are being cynical, commercial graphic design is at the mercy of a system of exploitation and profit (Pater) and in a crisis of disillusionment (Lorusso). Education is also mired with similar problems and disenchantedness. Students (as well as tutors), are tasked with producing increasing amounts of data as quantifiable outcomes deemed necessary to meet certain standards or requirements. The problem with this is that the creative process suffers and becomes a tick-box exercise for which you get something in return, the “what’s it for?”, as James said. An act of kindness or generosity negates this value exchange in favour of attention to the act itself. Baking or throwing a party as a creative process can be fulfilling, but once framed within the context of a particular value, attention turns to what it’s for rather than the how.
It’s challenging to escape the grip capitalism has on the way we act and think, particularly when it comes to design. What are we producing? What do we need from this? What is its worth, and how can that be measured? The workshops in Ninety-Nine offer a wilful refusal of these terms and are an invitation to participate without reward, to engage humbly, and to remain attentive to what is revealed rather than negotiating every encounter through the narrow bargaining of benefit and exchange.
I’m sort of obsessed with this idea that we keep using this term “graphic design” but we don’t really know what it means anymore. Do you both have definitions of “graphic design” and/or do you think Ninety-Nine puts forth a framework for thinking through what that term means today?
Nick: Graphic design is always changing and limiting it to one definition more often means that something is missed. Graphic design can be broadly understood as the production and communication of messages, the workshops in Ninety-Nine propose an equally important task in cultivating forms of attention through which those messages – and the worlds that produce them – can be more carefully encountered. The process philosophy foregrounded in Graphic Events asserts a dynamic world in constant flux, and the workshops in Ninety-Nine bring that world – and the awkward ways we inhabit it – into sharper focus. You use the word “framework” which may suggest a stable structure, yet both Graphic Events and Ninety-Nine are concerned with instability to a large degree. The instructions in Ninety-Nine are not fixed methods but prompts to embrace an endlessly shifting terrain.
Studio Arrivals
A roundup of books that arrived in the studio this month. Links direct to Bookshop.org, where if you purchase through our links, we get some money back to help support the show!
Mysteries of a Communist Cave by Lytle Shaw
I was very excited to receive the second volume in Park Books’s new series Gumshoe, edited by former guest Thomas Weaver. This edition, written by Lytle Shaw, investigates Oscar Niemeyer’s unique construction for the French Communist Party in Paris. Listen to our conversation with series editor Thomas Weaver:
The Hard Question of Art by Metahaven
Metahaven, the design, art, research duo of Vinca Kruk and Daniel Van Der Velden, have been influences on me for almost fifteen years so I was excited to see they have a new book, The Hard Question of Art, coming next month from Verso. The Hard Question of Art examines the many ways that art engages perception. Exploring cognition, empathy, complexity, and physics, Metahaven ask whether our capacity to perceive art anew can withstand the pressures of our times. Does beauty matter? Does art have a moral purpose? Is art a game or puzzle that AI will transform? Is the murmuration of starlings a form of art?
Vanishing Japan by Naomi Pollock
Vanishing Japan focuses on ninety buildings demolished since 2000. The project selection features beloved theaters, shopping centers, and offices built between the 1950s and 1970s, with select examples from the '80s and '90s as well. While many of these buildings were in Tokyo and Osaka, the book draws on examples from all over the country, charting the once recognizable local landmarks that continue to inspire as examples of architectural innovation.
Guiding Principles for Inclusive Design Values by Anne Berry, Meaghan Dee, and Rebecca Tegtmyer
How can designers meaningfully contribute to a more just and equitable world? Guiding Principles for Inclusive Design Values answers this question with clarity, urgency, and actionable guidance. Structured around the six official commitments of the AIGA Design Educators Community Value Design Education Pledge, this book offers designers and educators a thoughtful framework for integrating inclusion, equity, and justice into every stage of their creative process. (I’m honored, again, to have contributed a chapter to this book, writing about this work on the podcast and how publishing creates community!)