This is from a Neville Brody interview just published by the good people at It's Nice That

What are you trying to highlight?

We have forgotten why we are here. We have lost touch with what makes us tick, what drives us. That fire of creative possibility has started to die, and it is time to re-light it. The Anti Design Festival was born out of a need for change. A need for something new, ugly, scary and dangerous. We welcome no_use, no_function and no_fear. We welcome anarchy, without the stereotypical.

Brody, Britain's most influential graphic designer and typographer, cut his teeth on The FACE during the corrosive era of punk, which also revelled in the creative power of anarchy. Punk burst forth around the time of Margaret Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street. The economy was in a state. There was a new Conservative government. Is Anti Design nostalgia, or a timely call to arms? That depends on how much this zeitgeist strikes a chord with the new era of designers. 

What it does highlight is position of design, sitting in the rich but often uneasy creative space between commerce and art. The American designer Tibor Kalman, who sailed a parallel course to Brody in the United States with the magazine Colors but who died in 1999, issued a similar passionate manifesto once that's always worth revisiting:

'We have to be brave and we have to be bad. If we're bad, we can be the aesthetic conscience of the business world. We can break the cycle of blandness. We can jam up the assembly line that spills out one dull, lookalike piece of crap after another. We can say, "Why not do something with artistic integrity and ideological courage?" We can say, "Why not do something that forces us to rewrite the definition of good design?" Most of all, bad is about recapturing the idea that a designer is the representative - almost like a missionary - of art, within the world of business. We're not here to give them what is safe and expedient. We're not here to help clients eradicate everything of visual interest from the face of the earth. We're here to make them think about design that is dangerous and unpredictable. We're here to inject art into commerce. We're here to be bad.'