The International System Of TYpographic Picture Education is an absolutely fascinating case study in design ethics.
Isotype was developed by the Viennese social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath. Neurath saw a virtually illiterate proletariat emancipating, stimulated by socialism. For their advancement, he knew, they would need knowledge of the world around them. This knowledge should, he thought, not take the form of (relatively opaque) written language, but should rather be directly illustrated in straightforward images.
Gerd Arntz was the designer tasked with making Isotype’s pictograms. In sum, Arntz designed some 4000 such signs, which symbolized data from industry, demographics, politics and economy.
The process of selecting the relevant symbols, creating the rules, and prescribing the interplay between Isotype and (say) German is a design task of absolutely epic proportions, which is to say nothing of the ideological component of the project. All told, I expect Isotype to prove incredibly compelling grist for thinking about design ethics, political ideology and design, and design communication.* It is in my estimation a rare find indeed.
* Another outspoken goal of Isotype was to overcome barriers of language and culture, and to be universally understood. The pictograms were systematically employed in combination with stylized maps and diagrams to produce extensive collections of visual statistics. Their system became a world-wide emulated example of what we now call infographics.
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Paul — Mar 17, 2009
The way we talk about design changes what design is. This means that every blog post is a vote, a fact which DLB takes as occasion to once again "get all meta-," noting that this is nothing less than an ethical imperative.
It's Monday, and as we're all getting ready to start our weeks, getting ready to start working on our products, or with our clients – anyway, going out there and designing stuff – I'm going to try to keep it short and sweet. What I'm going to do specifically is lay a little aphorism on you, which I hope you'll think about as you go about your business. Here it is:
The way we talk about design changes what design is.
And if that's too Zen or Heideggerian for you, let's get practical. Why are all of our clients coming to us now talking about the power of social networking? It's because we've been talking about it for so long. Thousands upon thousands of blog posts have for years now been extolling the virtues of tribe-building, grass-roots social marketing, and the post-brand branding strategies to business decision makers.
And all the talking worked. Now, non-designers and non-technorati have been convinced that indeed the social media revolution has changed the way all of these important design activities need to be conducted, and have done so, I believe, swept up in a fervor emergent from the blog-level discussions of designers and technology advocates.
You can draw a parallel to most social phenomena here: from green design revolution to the French Revolution. These things took off precisely because people kept giving reasons why they should, compelling others until critical mass was reached.
If the way we talk about things influences the way things are, then every blog post is a vote: A vote for one of the possible ways that design could be. And if we don't just love the current state of the nation, we need to be casting our votes every day for the future shape of the discipline.
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Paul — Oct 6, 2008
