Visualizing design history: an analytical approach

This project is about imaging complexity. It harnesses design’s intrinsic capacity for giving visual form to concepts and relations, using graphic design to interrogate its own history. There are two main threads to this research. The first is a critique of the construction of design history. It uses Philip Meggs’s A History of Graphic Design and Steven Heller and Elinor Pettit’s Graphic Design Time Line: A Century of Design Milestones as examples of the problems and limitations in historical writing about design. The second thread represents graphic design history in diagrammatic form, laying the groundwork for alternate ways of surveying the field. The research does not seek to supplant the written historical survey but rather to suggest complementary, design-based strategies. My approach is a speculative one, grounded in design experimentation. By recourse to external analogies—the ideas of the homunculus, the ancient continent of Pangea, and Mr Beck’s London Underground map—I employ inventive and imaginative approaches to visualise the web of forces and events that is design history. I approach this task not as a historian but as a designer seeking new applications for design thinking while making knowledge about design available in new ways.

The creation of design history has been challenged by a number of writers, who have argued that it is far from an objective or neutral enterprise. For example, Clive Dilnot argues that design historians place too much emphasis on the individual designer, instead of adopting a socio-historical approach, examining design activity against its economic and cultural context.¹ Adrian Forty sees the writing of design history pejoratively, as an activity steeped in connoisseurship, the goal of which is to erect a canon of the great authors of designed form.. For Fry, canonisation and connoisseurship reveal an ideological understanding of the nature of design, playing a hegemonic role in the unfolding contemporary design culture.² He argues that it serves to hide the social, political and economic implications of design practices behind an ahistorical discourse that deals with only one aspect of a design object's being, its physical appearance, masking issues like commodification and class division.

Historians have attempted to record the history of graphic design from very different focuses, and as discussed above, more effort is required to extend its breadth and depth, just like various maps, which do not contradict, but complement one another. Taken together they can provide a more complete account of the terrain, than when taken alone. Along with graphic design historiography, the knowledge of graphic design history has been encapsulated through text, and restricted to scholastic works; (although some publications claim themselves as “graphic design history”, they are more like monographs or biographies). This demarcation divides graphic design history from practical design, and places the attention on linear narration.

But as a hermeneutic or interpretive method, visualization has rarely been applied to the field of graphic design history, although graphic design is, itself, focused on the development and delivery of visual messages. Recently, some articles have suggested that visualization works in stages. Bruce Archer contends that “Design research is systematic inquiry, whose goal is knowledge of, or in the embodiment of, configuration, composition, structure, purpose, value and meaning in man-made things and systems.”⁵ This includes an understanding of design capacity as the generative basis of human agency, as well as allowing humans to participate in the ongoing genesis of creation. Basic design capacity is also inclusive, integrative and emergent; an analogue state from which categories of design ,inquiry and action can be dissected. Subsequent research has developed this assumption, recognizing that design knowledge may apply to a broader field. Chris Rust raises the topic that design has a special ability to embody ideas and knowledge, in the form of artefacts, which affords us access to tacit knowledge⁶, while stimulating employment of one’s own tacit knowledge to form new ideas⁷. Design is animated by purpose. Those served by a particular design activity are the ones who bring purpose to that activity. The means and ends of design activity are brought to life through the desires and needs of those who are being served by that design activity. When today’s graphic design historians become more aware of what they are writing and representing, design knowledge should be applied to reveal the real status of graphic design, together with new possibilities.
1.3 Envisioning information

Visual presentation can clarify complex relations, increasing the density, range and number of informational dimensions that can be represented simultaneously on one plane, or as a linked sequence of information fields; it can also demonstrate causality and elevate key content to its primary position. The process of clarifying the visual may also clarify the analysis of the data itself. These, of course, are the basic principles of information design, as advanced by Edward. "Escaping this flatland," he wrote, "is the essential task of envisioning information, for all the interesting worlds that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature."⁸ For Tufte, appropriate strategies of visual display have the capacity to enhance the viewer's consideration of information, reveal the implicit meaning of information, and emphase its more important aspects and inherent implications.

While looking at the same sign, two people will approach it with similar common sense, but also with group experience. At the same time, there are “differences“ in their configuring, based on the individuals’ dissimilar backgrounds, personal experiences and idiosyncrasies. Jacques Derrida explains how “meaning” is communicated in difference; the "meaning" being always deferred and the presence never actually being present. Signifiers attain significance only by their differences from one another⁹. Derrida also interprets the French verb “differer” to mean both “to differ“ and “to defer“,¹⁰ creating meaning in various contexts. This description indicates how differently we may experience the same data, and this is natural as well as essential. I refer here to the meaning of difference in forming my concern for graphic design history. Most graphic design history is actually “the history of graphic design objects”. When graphic design history is presented differently, it is because the design works chosen are different. On the other hand, the design works may be the same, while the interpretation is different. In this research, we go one step further; we look at the same collection, from two different publications of significant graphic design historians, reconstructing the design works and activities from the perspective of the “signified”¹¹. These design works have been accessed intertextually via different audiences, in time, space and personal experience. This notion of intertextuality originally came from Roland Barthes, whose unforgettable announcement on 'the death of the author' and 'the birth of the reader', declared that 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination'¹². Consequently, all literary works have been "rewrites"; the concept of intertextuality reminds us that each text exists in relation to others. In fact, texts may owe more to other texts, than to their own makers, providing much the same, visual presentation/representation, constructed and re-constructed, by author and viewers.

Historians’ idiosyncrasies appear in their narrations of design history legends. It is true that we all see the world through our own eyes, and from our own perspectives. Sometimes, however, we miss seeing something, even though it exists, because we do not fully comprehend, or even ignore it. The masses are educated to believe what they have been told, and discount the things they are ignorant of. The following section discusses and visualizes the historical perspectives, both conscious and unconscious, used by our two writers, illustrating how the conventions and ideology of historical writing challenge the prescribed narrative system of weltanschauung.

Of the more than 200 countries in the world, only 29 were referred to (Actually, 17 of these 29 countries were mentioned less than 5 times in the 5000 years history.), although Meggs traced some ancient connections, and Heller referred to some Japanese graphic designs., However, perhaps the historiography of graphic design history was obversely dominated by the Western Bourgeoisie, mostly male and white. Their exclusions and inclusions, in graphic design history, illuminated this specific primary hegemony.

A series of figures present the two main shifting and connecting phenomena found in graphic design history. These transitions have similar intersections to Pangea, which was a hypothetical protocontinent as part of his theory of continental drift¹³. The relative positions of the continents, at any time, are determined by paleomagnetic measurements. The direction of the field informs us of the distance to the magnetic pole. Magnetic anomalies on the sea floor can also provide a history of the opening of the ocean, which explains the original relationship and connection of the continents, under the impact of different factors, such as climate, the vagarious distribution of living species and the topography of these disjunct continents. We found the evolution of graphic design history to be highly relevant to the history of western civilization. By adapting Pangea as a conceptual metaphor, the visual connecting and assembling of Pangea can be interpreted as being similar to how graphic design historians were driven by the corresponding descriptions of the civilization process.

Figure 1, The Design Pangea: the power shifts and focuses in graphic design

There is another figure that presents the hegemony of graphic design history. Homunculus can be called ’a body map’ (Figure 2), sometimes thought of as the ‘little man inside the head’. The sensory homunculus in human beings has a very large face, tongue and fingertips. Such maps of animals and humans are created by recording the electrical activity in the neurons of the sensory cortex¹⁵, resulting from tactile stimulation of the skin. This figure is conceptualized from Homunculus, showing the volume of each continent’s design output, without relating to its geographical size. Relative importance has been presented as the number of design activities referenced in the two primary graphic design history publications mentioned earlier. Figure 3 illustrates the shifts in focus of graphic design history. According to the data collected from design history publications of Meggs and Heller, more than half of the design activities addressed took place in America, with Europe being the next largest, and Africa, South America, Australia, and even Canada, being almost negligible. Consequently, the dilemma of ‘who speaks’ involves issues of access to those people in the world who are automatically excluded.

Figure 2 Dubin, Mark, Images of the homunculus, 2003, www.dubinweb.com/ brain/3.html, (July, 2004)

Figure 3, The homunculus map of graphic design history