Designing History: Documents and the Design Imperative to Immutability (Set Margins, 37) - Softcover

Lee, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9083404102 ISBN 13: 9789083404103

Publisher: Set Margins' publications, 2024

Synopsis

On graphic design''s complicity in power and what can be done to transform the field

Moving beyond the usual forms endemic to the graphic design canon, Designing History studies bureaucratic instruments such as money, passports, certificates, property deeds and more. Such documents produce identity, assign ownership and ascribe value. They stabilize claims, memory and knowledge that would otherwise be vulnerable to contestation or obliteration. Despite their apparent banality, such documents are perhaps graphic design’s most profoundly consequential forms. This book is the revised edition of Immutable: Designing History (2022). It includes an extended essay that contextualizes the project as one concerned primarily with prompting a remapping of graphic design’s historical and practical assumptions.
Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn. His practice explores graphic design''s entanglement with capitalism and colonialism through the genre of the document. He is Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Moving beyond the usual genres of form in graphic design’s canonical history, ‘Designing History’ proposes a model centred on bureaucratic instruments of identity, ownership, value, and permission: money, passports, certificates, property deeds, etc. It considers the implications of a design history of the document, where the designer shifts from being a practitioner of conventional design histories to become subject and agency of bureaucratic authority. The book is a revised edition of ‘Immutable: Designing History’ (2022) and includes an extended essay that contextualizes the project as a remapping of graphic design’s historical, pedagogical, and practical assumptions.

Edition details

• Publisher: Set Margins' publications
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9083404102
• ISBN 13: 9789083404103
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126