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

Lee, Chris

 
9789083404103: Designing History: Documents and the Design Imperative to Immutability (Set Margins, 37)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 9083404102 ISBN 13: 9789083404103
Publisher: Set Margins’ publications, 2025

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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Set Margins’ publications
Publication date
2025
Language
English
ISBN 10 
9083404102
ISBN 13 
9789083404103
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
176