Research
I am trying to narrow down what I want to do research about. What is my research question and what do I want to find out? What follows below is uncategorized reflections and idea generation on possible routes for my phd-proposal.
Maybe look at visual form of language? Written language in the west?
Narrative research in visual culture, or in visual communication, or typography/written language?
Possible routes:
- Mapping and design of narrative ecosystems
- Pluriversal design, designs, and designing
- Designing in the afterlives of colonialism, imperialism, and enslavement
- The role of narrative and embodiment in addressing systemic challenges
- Future-making through pluriversal design.
Maybe look at how temporality in storytelling can be used as a tool and a means of problem solving? Find new paths to the past.
I found this master project by Sophie Loloi, and it gave me some direction in my further research.
Possible research question: How does our western ontology shape our perception of values in visual communication / typography?
Existing research
I have been browsing and reading so many dissertations and articles. Some helpful extracts below:
Alexandra Tinning
“Exploring an alternative vision for a mental health care service, “our vision for the service is that there is no service”. This practice-based Ph.D aims to explore the way we think and talk about our own and each others mental health, inquiring into dominant perspectives and provoking conversation with alternative ones. At the heart of the approach is an ethics of care principle which guides design activity, what that means in practice is increased awareness and emphasis on relationships, interdependence and response. The design-research situates itself in matters of concern and care as opposed to matters of fact and with that framing is hope the design-research will bear fruits relevant to ontological design.”
Crystal Bennes “Thesis Title: Indirect observations and cultural translations: contemporary art, particle physics, hidden nature and scientific objectivity
“This thesis explores the ways in which art practices can engage with sciences, more precisely how my practice engages with the field of particle physics. Rather than define itself as interdisciplinary ‘sciart’ or ‘art-science’, the thesis argues instead for an innovative approach. Informed by the feminist works of Sandra Harding, Sharon Traweek and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, this approach explores a novel mode for art to engage with science, constructed as if there were no significant difference between an artist and a science studies researcher.”
Diletta De Cristofaro. The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times.
“This study tackles a topic – apocalypse – that pervades our culture. It offers an excellent starting point for grasping some of the problems and anxieties our civilization currently faces. By focusing her analysis on the temporalities in nine contemporary British and North American post-apocalyptic novels, the author demonstrates a trend in the 21st century: today the traditionally utopian end of apocalyptic teleology is removed; the utopian has become dystopian. Four chapters pursue the following fields of inquiry: history, narrative, power, agency. The first chapter looks at parodies of the biblical apocalyptic discourse. The second chapter demonstrates how the USA’s history, in particular, is intrinsically apocalyptic. The third turns to neoliberal trends and uncovers the nexus of colonialism, capitalism and the damaging exploitation of nature, the Anthropocene. The neoliberal utopian end of history is debunked in the final chapter as an extended hopeless present. The conclusion advances the importance…”
Take aways from these theses are
- Constructs that you take for granted as truths, like an universal truth
- Deconstructed concepts/phenomenons
- How can that relate to visual culture, communication?
- Designing radical relationality
- A lot of critical approaches are still anthropocentic, even critical/speculative design
We are still designing within the ontology of separation and would need more relational ontology in visual communication and/or critical design
Maybe I can look at narratives within visual communication that is building on the ontology of separation? Where do they come from? They are building on our book history, from the Enlightenment and before that–Early modern age as well, just look at for example the roman typefaces as they were seen as the rightful bearers of the Latin word while the Fraktur was for the barbaric protestants in the north.
Transition–how can we move on, is there an anthropologic approach to visual communication and/or typography. Can I use postcolonial feminism and design anthropology to research this within visual communication? And move away from the framework building on modern frameworks?
Semiotics?
Tutorial with Lina
I talked to friend who works with and teaches graphic design history.
She said: Classical typography, there is nothing more western, it is built on the western canon just piled up (rules and constructs on how to work in both micro- and macro level).
Could your work with narratives in our visual culture?
What if you can construct a theory from your research and write articles that are applications of that theory? As if you are creating a pair of glasses.
Reflection after tutorial:
The origin of visual communication is cave writing—>written language—>typography—>graphic design
In what ways are narratives in western visual culture and communication building on the ontology of separation?
Where do the narratives in western visual culture and communication building on the ontology of separation come from?
What constitutes our western visual communication and culture?
The discourse around our western belief system on aesthetics and what constitutes good design for many–where does it come from?
Possible approach for proposal:
Re-thinking Visual Semiotics
Research semiotics in creation of value in different forms in visual communication, such as aesthetic, economic and symbolic.
How semiotics contribute to narratives in western visual culture and communication building on the ontology of separation and where those narratives come from.
What constitutes our western belief system on aesthetics in visual communication?
Look at
- Semiotics –meredith davis, graphic design theory,
- Gillian Rose–visual methodologies
- Postcolonial theory
- postcolonial feminism
- Book history
Outcomes and impact
Hopefully the research can lead toward a theory from which practical applications will be possible, the research will provide a new lens through which one can get a new perspective on western visual culture and communication.
Further research for this route
- Rethinking Milton Singer’s semiotic anthropology: A recoinnassance
- Anthropological semiotics
- Research group : Aesthetics of Empire Research Cluster https://lnu.se/en/research/searchresearch/aesthetics-of-empire-research-cluster/
Walter Mignolo
Along with Spitzmüller, Walter Mignolo is my most read author at the moment. I bought his book ‘The Dark Side of The Renaissance’ and it is just amazing. Such a good writer, interesting perspectives and relating to a lot of my previous reading on colonial structures in history. I think Mignolo can provide the lens with which I will look at these constructs? And that lens is from southern epistemologies.
Mary Rambaran-Olm
Rambaran-Olm’s text ‘A Wrinkle in Medieval Time: Ironing out Issues Regarding Race, Temporality, and the Early English’. is one of the best texts I read in a long time. She is relentless and clear in her writing. She writes for example: “The crux of periodization, though, is that it operates within the framework of white supremacy, prompting scholars to view time both episodically and linearly rather than as a complex web. As a result, the dominant narrative highlights Western civilization’s “progress” and rise to superiority, while everything outside of the Western narrative diminishes by comparison.” (Rambaran-Olm 2021)
There is something very interesting in interrogating the historiography and look at how narratives shape our perspective on the past.
What will I analyse?
The biggest question of this project so far is what exactly I will investigate and analyse. I have tried to just make a list of possible aspects in the contemporary that has an echo from the past:
Contemporary
- aesthetics & style (van leuwen about style)
- dominant discourses
- agenda
- objectivity as an ideal with a suppressive agenda
- visual norms
- false dichotomies that dominate the discipline in practice and education
- ideals of reduction, neutrality and “modernity” and their affection to design ‘neutrality’ and ‘invisibility’ as desirable goals,
- efficiency and logic as the ultimate guiding principles to form.
- highly canonized field that needs a wider acceptance of plurality within the discipline: plurality of approaches, values, ways of working, and visual outputs.
- an exploration on how we can bring a greater plurality within graphic design through interrogating the roots
- the illusion of universality as a utopian ideal with the hidden agenda of erasing differences it is a place where history and the authority that comes with it are overwhelmingly present.
- aesthetics:
- universally accepted as good design
- what connotes and denotes for example luxury due to cultural, class etc
- simplicity
- minimalism
- striking
- objective
- problem solving
- legibility
- hierarchies
- manuals to regulate public image of organisations
- serifs–anonymous, trouble free
- decorative–bad
- functional –good
- open our eyes to other aesthetic languages
After some reflection and discussion I have decided to thematize the research from three main perspectives: Standardisation, Narratives, Aesthetics. These three include many of these listed aspects and allow for some direction in the proposal’s current form, but are open enough to allow me to develop a more clear direction throughout the coming year, depending on where my interest will be the heaviest.
Conclusion week 4
My ambition has been to take some kind of neck hold of our field. I would like a more fundamental answer to why some of our constructed norms in western visual communication are the way they are. I have been reflecting on what the absolut root of it could be, and I think semiotics is what constitutes our visual language.
Part of my idea here is that this provides a broader approach to my phd from which I can then write articles/etc where I apply this in more narrow or other contexts. A friend said when I presented this idea to her that “I am creating a pair of glasses” and if I develop a framework or a theory from this research, I can use that as a pair of glasses, or lens and aim it to a lot of contexts in visual communication.
References/bibliography
DE SOUSA SANTOS, Boaventura. 2016. ‘Epistemologies of the South and the future’ From the European South 1. 17-29. University of Coimbra.
GAZTAMBIDE-FERNÁNDEZ, Rubén. 2014. ‘Decolonial options and artistic/aestheSic entanglements: An interview with Walter Mignolo’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. Vol. 3, No. 1, 2014, pp. 196-212. University of Toronto. Available at: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/21310
JÄRLEHED, Johan, and Adam JAWORSKI. 2015. “Typographic Landscaping: Creativity, Ideology, Movement.” Social Semiotics. 25 (2): 117–125. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/10350330.2015.1010318
MARGOLIN, Victor. 1994. ‘Narrative Problems of Graphic Design History’. Visible Language 28:3, p 233-243. University of Illinois.
MIGNOLO, Walter. 1992. ‘On the Colonization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theories of Writing and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 301-330.. Cambridge University Press. [Available at: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/academic/lines/community/kenilworth/term2-wk9-mignolo-reading_5.pdf]
MIGNOLO, Walter. 2003. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization. The University of Michigan Press.
ONG, Walter J. 2012, Orality and Literacy. Florence: Taylor & Francis Group. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central.
RAMBARAN-OLM, Mary. 2021. ‘A Wrinkle in Medieval Time: Ironing out Issues Regarding Race, Temporality, and the Early English’. New Literary History, Volume 52, Numbers 3/4, pp. 385-406. Johns Hopkins University Press. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/846838
REYES, Angela. 2021. ‘Postcolonial Semiotics’ Annual Review of Anthropology. Available at: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-101819-110253
SPITZMÜLLER, Jürgen. 2012. ‘Floating ideologies: Metamorphoses of graphic “Germanness”‘ Orthography As Social Action : Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power, edited by Jaffe Alexandra, et al., De Gruyter, Inc. ProQuest Ebook Central. [Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/falmouth-ebooks/detail.action?docID=893929.]
SPITZMÜLLER, Jürgen. 2015. ‘Graphic variation and graphic ideologies: a metapragmatic approach’. In Social Semiotics 25:2 pages 126-141. [Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10350330.2015.1010323]
TARASTI, Eero. 1998. ‘On post-colonial semiotics.’ Sign Systems Studies, 26, 115-135. Available at: https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.1998.26.05
TRIGGS, Teal. 2011. ‘Graphic Design History: Past, Present, and Future’. Design Issues: Volume 27, Number 1. MIT Press Direct.
VAN LEEUWEN, Theo. 2005. ‘Typographic Meaning’. Visual Communication. Volume 4 Issue 2, page(s): 137-143. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470357205053749
VAN LEEUWEN, Theo. 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. Routledge, New York.