Designing History: Documents and the Design Imperative to Immutability

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.