Unraveling The Knot

An unraveling archive of thoughts and annotations on readings, design, meanings and communication

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Baker School

Today, an education in Art & Design that refuses to focus on form and content, meanings and contexts is like a Baker School that has forgotten to teach the many ways flour and water, salt and yeast can combine together in order to bake bread. 

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Come ho fregato TG, politici e giornali con Wikipedia

Credo ci siano un paio di punti in questo articolo che andrebbero rivisti, magari smussando certe impennate e possibilmente evitando generalizzazioni.

La questione è spinosa, perché al di là di "news values", "news business" e della leggerezza di alcuni giornalisti nella verifica delle proprie fonti, questo articolo tocca la tanto dibattuta ed esasperante questione della verità, che anima e rianima il dibattito filosofico da millenni. Questo articolo sembra basarsi su un punto chiave. Elementi ‘falsi’ sono stati introdotti nella rete attraverso Wikipedia e sono stati presi per fatti ‘veri’ in una transizione poco controllata fra realtà mediatiche da parte della comunità giornalistica.

Per prima cosa, qui non sono state create false news, bensì sono stati introdotti elementi falsi nelle news. Il falso, per natura, ha lo scopo di passare inosservato. Il falsario non è colui che esegue per essere identificato. Lo scopo è progettare il maggior grado di attendibilità, una simulazione di verità data dalla coerenza di ciò che viene detto in relazione al suo contesto. Di conseguenza, più che un esperimento di critica mediatica, mi sembra che questo sia un buon esercizio di progettazione del falso. Daniele stesso ci dice, a riguardo del caso Melato, che ha coniato “una finta citazione che cerca di riprodurre (…) la miscela di poesia, ironia ed umorismo tipica” dell’attrice e continua dicendoci che per lui creare una falsa citazione è da considerarsi, in certi casi, un omaggio alla persona alla quale la citazione è ‘falsamente’ attribuita.

Diverso sarebbe l’esordio dell’esperimento – e la sua criticità –  se ad essere false fossero state le news. Mi spiego. In questo articolo l’unico elemento ‘news’ (novità, scalpore) che ricorre fra tutti i casi proposti, è il lutto di persone mediaticamente conosciute. È la loro morte, ahimè, l’elemento che garantisce la news value, la vendibilità dell’informazione che scaturisce l’interesse della stampa e garantisce una risposta di interesse da parte dell’audience. Ma non è la loro morte che è stata inventata, anticipata o attribuita a cause false. I ‘falsi’ dell’esperimento, infatti, sono “solo” elementi di contorno, ben progettati nella loro falsità, a tal punto che la loro coerenza non ha destato sospetto né nel giornalista, certo un po’ ingenuo e alla rincorsa dello scoop, né nel politico, pronto a scartare prelibatezze linguistiche di fronte al proprio audience (di elettori).

Si avrebbe però tutto diritto di criticare una testata giornalistica che, per dire, avesse pubblicato un reportage approfondito sulla sensibilità poetica di Mario Scaccia, sensibilità rintracciabile non solo nella sua professione, ma anche nella sua quotidianità, come quel giorno in cui, poco prima di morire, sussurrò che “nel palco della vita, siamo tutti figuranti”. È chiaro che in questo caso il peso contestuale del falso sarebbe ben diverso. Ma è anche chiaro che questo articolo non ci pone di fronte a questo caso.

Il problema, riformulato, è che dei giornalisti hanno messo in bocca certe parole – falsi progettati in maniera contestualmente e temporalmente coerente – a persone (nella triste occasione della loro morte) che queste parole non le hanno mai pronunciate. La gravità dell’attribuzione “disattenta” cresce per via della notorietà dei mancati. Ergo, i giornalisti hanno sbagliato. Hanno agito tradendo i principi della professione e la fiducia dei lettori.

A questo punto il tutto rientrerebbe nel domino dell’etica, che come ricorda il buon Eco in Cinque scritti morali (raccolta d saggi brevi, fra i quali uno molto interessante sullo stato della stampa italiana, 1997) ci pone di fronte alla domanda “cosa si dovrebbe e cosa non si dovrebbe fare”. Si noti che qui il ‘contenuto’ dei falsi in questione, però, non è preso in considerazione. Quali spunti di riflessione se questi “falsi d’autore” fossero stati di carattere diffamatorio e avessero gettato un’ombra nelle vite dei loro presunti autori, invece che essere delle note rosa di accompagnamento, diciamo, al triste evento della loro scomparsa? Ci sentiremmo ancora in pieno diritto di dare addosso alla stampa, o forse ci interrogheremmo sul perché qualcuno abbia voluto macchiare il ricordo di persone scomparse? Chi sarebbe l’indagato? Il falsario o chi ha creduto nel falso? La questione, come accennato in apertura, è spinosa.

Malgrado sia chiaro che la stampa non debba riportare il falso, prendo come spunto il cosa si dovrebbe e cosa non si dovrebbe fare, per porre un’altra domanda… Siamo sicuri che questo esperimento sia “accettabile”? È giusto inventare dei falsi altamente coerenti – e pertanto facilmente attribuibili ad un presunto autore – con la speranza/scopo, in qualche modo, di trarre in inganno giornalisti o politici, per poi pubblicare un resoconto semi-polemico intitolato “Come ho fregato tg, politici e giornali con qualche riga in Wikipedia”? Forse non siamo di fronte ad un esperimento di critica ben motivata come potrebbe sembrare e credo sarebbe più sensato evitare esercizi di questo genere, lasciando i giornalisti gestirsi le già tante gatte da pelare.

Si badi che non sto cercando di favorire o incoraggiare in alcun modo la mediocrità dell’informazione, né sarei particolarmente dispiaciuto nel confermare lo scarso spessore di certi politici italiani.

L’attendibilità dell’informazione è stato, rimane e rimarrà un argomento scottante. Tuttavia non mi sentirei in grado di generalizzare sull’intera stampa (né sul Web come spazio di condivisione). Non esordirei chiedendo se i giornalisti (tutti? qualcuno?) verifichino o meno le proprie fonti e non risponderei alla mia stessa domanda impennando sentenziosamente sulla scia di un discorso (attaccare la stampa) che garantisce di suo una buona risposta di interesse da parte dell’audience.

Ottenere ampio consenso con una news che critica, tutto sommato in maniera un po’ superficiale, il modo in cui le news vengono prodotte e negoziate è a suo modo antisportivo come la pesca delle trote salmonate nel laghetto sportivo di provincia. Specialmente, poi, se i giornalisti (che certo hanno peccato di leggerezza) sono stati di fatto “attirati” da materiale particolarmente adatto all’occasione, difficilmente distinguibile come falso e proveniente da una fonte, Wikipedia, che negli ultimi anni sta guadagnando (faticosamente) maggiore attendibilità.

A mio discreto giudizio, l’allarme “giornalisti e politici dozzinali come sempre” dovrebbe in questo caso rientrare per favorire altri elementi di discussione.

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Commenting on 'What good is information?', by Dougald Hine

I’ve came across this article by Dougald Hine on AEON Magazine (March 6). It’s about the (redundant) subject of over information, boredom and knowledge. I commented with what follows, focussing primarily onto what is information for semiotics.

Interesting read, though maybe not particularly original to people familiar with interpretative semiotics. This discipline has outlined the fundamentals of the ‘information - meaning’ issue already in the late 60s. Then, in mid 70s U. Eco wrote A Theory of Semiotics (pub. 1979), a rigid yet very comprehensive general theory in which the author specifies, in this regard, that ‘information represents the lower threshold for semiotics’; something that means nothing if someone - a human being - does not actualise it. Eco’s focus on this issue is due to the rise of Information Theory (Shannon, 1948), which helped define communication as a process a great deal (sender-channel-noise-receiver), but did not put much focus on meanings, which should be seen, as suggested by semiotics, as the ultimate goal of communication. But again, there’re no meanings if someone does not actualise them. 

Interestingly, meaning translates into message for semiotics. In some respect, it’s possible to say that a lot of contemporary communication acts - those processes that we activate by clicking here and there, by sending stickers and pokes, ‘liking’ randomness around,… - don’t represent communication at all (communication as that happy condition called negotiation of meaning), but rather they represent a sort of idea of communicability, the potential that some meanings could be negotiated, an environment where the impression of meanings originates.

However, another great aspect of semiotics (and especially interpretative s.) is the responsibility left to human beings - us - in the act of actualisation of meanings. Meanings are the cooperative result of communication processes, and therefore the problem of ‘too much information’ bounces back, in some respect, as ‘the problem of the lack of willingness to actualise information’. I think this is a very intricate phenomena and if the quantity of information is definitely an impediment for the actualisation (we simply can’t actualise everything), there are several other elements in the equation that render this issue as more complicated than it might appear.

Just to mention one rather important fact, we shouldn’t forget that the media environments for connectivity which characterise our contemporaneity welcome aesthetic communication a great deal. This might sound bizarre, especially if the idea of aesthetics is misinterpreted with naive concepts such as ‘beauty’ or ‘art’. The aesthetic nature of media and mass media communication had been outlined in the 60s (by Eco again) and lately this communication function has just peaked. Very briefly, the aesthetic function traceable in communication acts is a condition of what is said that comes with ambiguity and self-focus. As an obvious result (that we all probably know), aesthetic is that condition for which we consider more how things are said, rather then what is being said.

Now, what I’m trying to say here (chopped by brutal simplification), is that the aesthetic layer that characterizes the ‘breaking news!’ business, YouTube, social network’s ‘viral’ videos, and all those sorts of things is something that, so to speak, doesn’t help actualising what is negotiated in the network - that is the actual meaning of a communication process - due to the fact that how these things are ‘negotiated’ already produces some effects; surprise, amusement, fear, and so forth. This is an emotional layer, which I reckon is really important, but that needs comprehension.

I suggest a very simple exercise. Next time you get surprised by something you read or watched in the network, try to understand what is being said. It’s really intriguing to realise the extent of repetition and banality of a lot of ‘things’ injected into the networks. For example, we all know the massive phenomena of cat videos. A business of billion of clicks, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. Countless hours of recordings that, more or less, represent the same subject - cats and their owners - doing the same things - acting weirdly, looking funnily, jumping here and there. Isn’t this a monstrous pile of information that basically might be reduced to the same meaning? Maybe there isn’t too much information out there, but just leading topics and relative, endless and camouflaged versions of them. 

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Lightness of form

Today's session of Critical Forum (a group discussion moderated by Debbie Cook and David Blamey around the student's work) saw Hayley Warnham and Marie Matheron presenting their work. Marie's work didn't impress me as first presented, but I had to acknowledge a couple of good points towards the end of the session, changing my opinion.

Marie's work

Simply put, her work starts from an aesthetic fascination of modernist-like buildings and their external, recognizable structural grids. Marie has a background in graphic design and she's been exploring different contexts and experimenting with 'new meanings'. Today's outcome (just after the WIP show) showed her interest in investigating grids as architectural structures from which she extrapolates visual patterns, which, not surprisingly, allocates her work sometime between the 60s/70s. Blamey suggested the work of Sarah Morris as a reference  – whose work perfectly matches Marie's – and I personally thought of Bridget Riley and her optical explorations – though Marie's ones don't pour into optical playfulness.

Marie's presentation

Following a brief introduction – a bit unsure and not completely convincing – Marie honestly said to the group that she doesn't know how to talk about her work. Blamey and Cook tried to encourage Marie to expand her position further, but that didn't really work out, so the conversation began surveying possible practical applications of her work. Marie had some ideas, like collaborating with a textile student and producing some fabrics that display those inspired patterns or, similar to that, curtains for windows. I also intervened by suggesting that Marie could also consider a 'solid' application of those patterns, like coloured and translucent plexiglass panels to be installed in front of windows (maybe considering an overlapping system of multiple panels?) to colorize environments, which in London are generally rendered grayish by that typical cloudy daylight.

The lightness of the conversation

More ideas have been suggested, and the conversation around potential applications really became the central aspect of the group discussion. I listened carefully and at the end, I had to admit what follows: "I think you (Marie) shouldn't try to attach more meanings to your presentation neither today, nor in the future. There's really some beauty in the lightness of this conversation. We are talking about form; inspired, genuine and playful patterns that would be mad, I reckon, if we now tried to forcibly attach meanings of any kind". There's a context out of which Marie's patterns come from, and if we really were to perversely abstract meanings out of her work, we could have started talking about those contexts; but I think, what's the point of it? The conversations did really assume a very informal tone and it's been intriguingly appealing to notice how the group reacted to it, by releasing a sort of lightness conveyed through loose words and happy suggestions. I noticed as well that once in a while we didn't try as a group to solve someone else's life troubles through deep meaning-related analysis, whereas the conversation has been seriously productive and fruitful.

Reading through the lines of this morning

Now, Marie's work is maybe exemplary of a pure form exercise, and to my experience has been quite rare to come across such an honest aesthetic work ('honest' because Marie didn't try to squeeze into lines and rectangles meanings for 'the possible origins of the universe' or 'her psychological demons'. Her work does talk about lines and rectangles). However, this morning made me wonder if there was something really wrong with the way we 'present' and 'critique' our and other people's work in the frame of an educational journey. What I could read through the lines of this morning, is that it would make everyone's life easier if we tried to understand and separate form-related processes and meaning-related ones. What I'm arguing (possibly again) is that it might be more productive if we applied an understanding into basic semiotics concepts, and particularly into the correlation between the plane of the expression and the plane of content, being the former the so called conveying system, and the latter the conveyed one. The reason why I'm saying this, is that I believe that a more structural approach (that doesn't imply excluding a good dose of common sense in discussion) would definitely help, both in terms of articulation of a discourse, but also in terms of self assessment and understanding of the nature of one's work. After all, aren't critiques meant to leave the students with a more in depth knowledge of some kind about their works (this knowledge being maybe the direction where not to investigate further), or are they supposed to throw students into the dark lands of their demons (and with this said, I believe that getting to know our personality, demons, weakness and strengths is a really good thing, and education can't exclude this). I think that even the more intricate pieces of work can be approached in a more loose way if we establish a simple vocabulary in discussion, and if we trained our minds a bit and eyes to systematize 'things' (deconstruct and restitute). Recognizing which instances and occurrences constitute the conveying system and which ones characterize more the conveyed one can't hurt. I believe a rhetorical exercise of this kind – which might even assume the format of a game – could empower group critique and discussions in general, but more importantly it could really operate against those heavy, occasionally even scary meaning pastiches that occupy the minds of a lot of students. 

A loose suggestion 

How long will it take to acknowledge that life is easier when considering the outside world as a game of communication processes in which we, as designers, artists, illustrators, you name it – but more importantly human beings – carve out contextual niches into which our varied body of work constitutes a procedural engine of cultural understanding. 

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Typographical design should perform optically what the speaker creates through voice and gesture.

El Lissjtzsky

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The Work of Art in the Age of Communicability

If I were a good writer and if I had somehow managed to study philosophy, I would probably write an essay entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Communicability. 

Of course, the link is to Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), where the author addressed important issues about the effects of reproducibility of the work of Art.

It's been a while I'm thinking of this, and a few days ago I shot these pictures in the tunnel that connects to South Kensington station. 

Message patchwork, South Kensington tube station, London (11.2013)

Posters accompany people throughout the tunnel, and generally they are displayed on raws. Here, the communication game begins. Posters for Art exhibitions, films, TV series, records releases, Christmas events and so forth melt into a patchwork of meanings that I'm not sure the overall effect on people of it might be.

Though I might not question what I see, since we are sort of used to this visual collage, I believe things change pretty much when posing the attention on meanings. And questions arise.

How meanings around Impressionism or Klee (and in general the overall ones about Art) that I've acquired through exhibitions, readings and education are being affected when placed side by side the electric guitars of The Killers, or the intimate shot of Don Draper + new wife? And how Art messages affect mainstream culture when melting into these kind of meaning's patchworks?

These are naive questions (and I'm sure there are a lot of answers out there), but I'm not following bias thinking. I don't cry out loud for any presumed corruption of 'high Art' by a lower (by contrast) mainstream culture. I'm just curious about how communicability change the work of Art (and therefore Art itself).

The work of Art is in fact open, according to Eco (The Open Work, It., Opera Aperta, 1962), that is to say, its peculiar configuration is subject to continuous (potentially) interpretation. Day by day, month by month and years over years, the meanings of a work of Art keep changing. 

The work of Art , as a communication device that offers different 'states of the world' through aesthetics, is supposed to 'differ', somehow. But to what? Can you still call Art anything that is injected in the stream of communication? And then, who can claim to be an Artist? Is the one that joins the stream, or is the one that escapes from it? 

A lot of questions, no answers.

(I also failed to follow the post 'This Archive #2')

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This Archive #2

I shall reduce the length of the posts. Trying not not care they might not 'signify' something specific or conclusive. Maybe I should apply a character's limit, like it happens for twitter. 

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Though this article is pretty old now (two years ago), it describes some sort of feeling that I get often while dealing with the Art torrent that floods out off exhibitions of various kind, galleries of different size and location, art schools and cornflakes packs. 

What I’m wondering regards, again, meanings, and the fact that they are, according to Eco’s interpretative semiotics, the result of a cooperative labour between (in this case) the artist and the audience.

Meaning are opportunities, not products for exchange. Strangely enough, this makes me wondering about Apple. Personally, I feel that underneath the glass of my iPhone, there are shit lots of underlying meanings. They are my attachment to the company, the fact that Apple still is for me the company of the ‘mavericks’ against the grey enemy (though, today Apple has become the coloured enemy to fight), and so forth. The fact that some other million of people bought iPhones, speaks for the fact that this damn object signifies something for them, as well. But Apple is that sort of company which invests billions of $ in communication (and they know pretty well how to get customers craving for Apple’s product).

Meanings that underly Apple's marketing strategies are packed in very appealing way. They are very easy to get and they don't require a proper 'interpretative labour'. Considering that Apple is not the only game player in our culture, and other billions of communicative acts are activated daily in 'the system' and displayed to us in several different ways, I'm wondering to what extent this phenomena (that has experienced a considerable boost with the explosion of social network and mobile communication) is actually affecting the way we are willing to welcome interpretative challenges the moment they get more intricate. 

The question at this point is. What if I didn’t live in a society that produces and delivers meanings in order to activate the customers to buy products / participate in communal experiences (to finally spend some money in no matter ways, which is today’s trend of the market)? Would I be more willing to ‘understand’ art? Would I be more willing to produce meanings by interpretation, actually accepting the chance any art piece is offering to the audience?

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Erasion of meanings

Communication is not just about something happening between senders and receivers (addressers and addressees). Nor the message is the quintessential need of communication. The goal is the negotiation of meanings. Too many communication acts do not necessarily means a lot of negotiation of meanings. 

This leave with a sort of awareness that 'something' is going on (in terms of communication), but that actually is not giving us the chance to understand that actually that 'something' might lack of core essentiality. Meanings. And this is because we are simply not able (physically) to actualize all the potential meanings embedded in a flood of emails, notifications, banners, advertisements, books, lists, visuals, and so forth.

Meanings are what we decide to get from communication. Is not a transfusion, is participation. Our crave (need) for meanings seems to have led us to produce technology that actually facilitate the erasion of them.

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Armin Hofmann. Hipster of the 60ies?

Armin Hofmann, Graphic Design Manual, 1965 (cover) Image source: thisisdisplay.com

In the introduction of Graphic Design Manual (1965), George Nelson writes about the fragmentation of perceived realities societies were experiencing during those years as a consequence of various changes imposed by technology, which had already "become central fact of life" (p.35). 

Apart from the fact that this introduction could be sneaked as a statement for any contemporary design university or college without the risk of sounding old fashion, what intrigued me is the fact that, according to Nelson, Hofmann is "saying, in both words and drawings, that modern life is indeed desperately fragmented… but rather then deplore these facts, (Hofmann) chooses to accept them" (p.35).

Jonas Berthod, écal – Mémoires 2012, 2012 (cover) Image source: johnasberthod.ch

When I look then at graphic design works like Jonas Berthod's écal – Mémoires, I can't stop labeling it as 'hipster'. I'm not sure, to be honest, if that is because of the bold typography arranged sparsely on apparent random paths, or because my eyes keep identifying triangles and other  beloved hipster basic shapes, or again if it's because some sort of meanings that I'm tempted to read through the visual composition. 

Following the third option, what I'm tempted to say, is that visual languages of this kind (proliferating within and without Switzerland) do say something to me when I stop seeking for meanings in relation to the content, to welcome instead a broader (synoptic?) general view. At this point, I can read meanings like playfulness and simplicity (but not austerity). 

Delving a bit more deeper in this, the way the 'information' has been organized in the page, also portrays to me a sort of sense of looseness. 'Things' happen in the page following a sort of casualty that I'm not sure what it's actually saying about the écal (the prestigious and fancy school of design in Lausanne, Switzerland), if not embodying the lifestyle of young graphic designers living in Lausanne and studying there.

Of course, one might say that in those casual shapes and lines lies the rejection of all the Swiss principles of organization and order that symbolize for many – and when it comes to graphic design – the chocolate country around the world. But at this point I would argue that, actually, it doesn't work so well as a 'radical' critique. 

Anyway, without going too far with this (but I might go further in other posts), what I would like to stress is the meta-communication that I believe is possible to 'read' in Berthod's work and that I think succeeds in giving form to young speeches – to the way communication, among a certain community of people, could be represented.

The fact that I'm tempted to label this work as hipster (or maybe just hipsterish), is due to the fact that I get similar feelings almost anytime I look at works of this kind (trendlist.org). A plethora of lines, basic shapes and undulating paths, either welcoming wobbly and loose typography on gradients, flat backgrounds, or image compositions, or constraining them onto thick frames. 

But what ultimately hipsterish designs communicate to me – again in terms of meta-communication – is a sort of looseness in doing things. A sort of 'who cares' touch underlies these composition a great deal. I'm not sure if this speaks for a design culture that embraces totally contemporary discourses, but for sure it doesn't speak for one that reject the present and repeats nostalgically what masters in graphic design used to do half a century ago.

And is precisely because of this reasons that I'm wondering if Armin Hofmann used to be a hipster of the 60ies. He embraced what used to be 'contemporary' for him, and his visuals (together with the ones of his students) reflected the fragmentation Nelson describes in the introduction. Is it in the embracement (as non-rejection of) the present that lies the hipsterness?

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Sharing and triangles

If a triangle has become today the symbol for hipster, there should be a reason somewhere. Is this reason lying in its form? What is its form telling us? How such a basic form could have become such a trigger of communication acts (sharing). What is that cultural appreciation power that keeps people pushing the ‘like it’ button? What is culturally embedded in a triangle that brings people marking permanently its form on their skin (tattoo). Is the culture (and communication) able to ‘empty’ (erasing, setting to zero,…) forms and then able to re-write cultural meanings into them? Posited that it’s truly probable, how is that possible? Might this even happen in Europe, let’s say, to the swastika? What distinguishes formally a triangle to squares and circles (speaking of basic forms) that enables it at a certain moment, in a certain place to welcome someone injecting meanings of successful aesthetic appreciation?

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Graphic designer. Translator of semiotic systems

When I was studying in Switzerland, we interviewed graphic designer Bruno Monguzzi (who lives nearby the university) on the role of graphic designers. The interview is published in Artichoke #6, the yearly magazine of the graphic design course published by third years students in Visual Communication.

Monguzzi's prolific responses all focussed on the idea of the graphic designer as a translator. In line with El Lissitzky (for which typography was the form of thoughts), Monguzzi believes that when we read typographic compositions, our minds translate these forms into voices. Sort of colloquial mind speeches that embody visuals into their different timber and tonality. So, a poster can be 'told us' either by a gentle female voice, a playful male one, or other serious and more informal ones. Hence, the graphic designer is the one who first decides 'which voice' would represent at best the commissioned communication work, and secondly will translate them into forms.

Visuals and thoughts belong to different semiotic systems, hence the idea that the graphic designer could be seen as a translator of semiotic systems. 

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This archive #1

I tend to think a lot and I am a graphic designer, currently studying at the Royal College of Art, London. Thinking and designing always collide, sometimes successfully, sometimes unproductively. 

The matter of this archive I've come to see that a personal interest for more understandings mostly focuses neither in the thinking per se, nor in the designing per se, but in the correlative coexistence of the two. How graphic designers manage to 'translate things' into meanings? What are these 'things'? Does a graphic designer really 'translate'? What is the role of graphic designers in contemporary culture and in contemporary communication? How communication keeps mutating? What are the forms of contemporary discourses? How contemporary media bend and shape these forms? Ultimately, is there a role of the graphic designer that can be tailored specifically upon meanings production, forming strategies and communication, or is this research already 'old' and so unnecessary?

People familiar with graphic design (and willing to / craving for investigating in depth this subject) know that the role of the graphic designer has never really been specified. Some remarkable publications – such as Richard Hollis's Graphic Design. A Concise History (1994) and Writings About Graphic Design (2012) or Robin Kinross's Modern Typography. An essay in Critical History (1992), but also (the Italian-only) Carlo Vinti's Gli anni dello stile industriale. 1948-1965. Immagine e politica culturale nella grande impresa italiana (2007), to name a few – offer profiles and historical (and critical) perspectives about graphic design. They are truly useful compilations of names and facts placed in cultural contexts; essential readings that provide cultural organized timelines in which subjects such as the industry, the application of visual arts in the culture, technicians and craft-men, all find a place in a thick web. However, it didn't seem to me that a genuine 'role of the graphic designer' digs out those readings (and the multitude of showcasing magazines, blogs and even critical writings), but is essentially clear that (if there is a role) it has a lot to do with the industry, visual arts, communication needs, cultural discourses and technological paradigm shifts. 

Banal? Yes, but to me worth of exploration.

Methodology of collection and research  After my BA in Switzerland, I've come to appreciate semiotics a great deal, though I've been left with a sort of random omniscience on signs, meanings, communication and so forth. I've become slowly but really attached to this subject, especially for two reasons:

In a culture that is based profusely if not uniquely on communication, I feel that the only way to investigate the mentioned issues can't be anything, but semiotics. Umberto Eco already said in 1979 (when designing semiotics as a proper and autonomous discipline) that ultimately "semiotics studies all cultural processes as communication processes" (Eco, U., A Theory of Semiotics, p.8. 1979). 

A lot of things can be said about graphic design (and designers), but as banal as it might sound to some, I still believe that the role of graphic designers has lot to do with communication (todays discourses in graphic design education seem to privilege the idea of graphic designers as 'pattern-thinkers', to be thrown into institutions, places or contexts in order to reveal hidden patterns. To what these patterns might be useful for, is rather 'mysterious' subject). 

This archive  This archive is primarily a personal box for giving form to thoughts, making annotations on readings and authors, posting pictures and comments. Hopefully, it will help me delving deeper into the issues mentioned, and not getting lost in the process. If I was born 70 years ago, this archive would have been probably something like a ring binder with annotations, names, ideas or starting points for further research.

Notes for the possible (though improbable) reader English is not my mother tongue. There'll be mistakes throughout this Tumblr page, and if you're willing to help, you might want to highlight them to me by email, smoke signs or pigeon messengers. That would be really appreciated!