Thursday 8 December 2016

Post-modernism design lecture

In the post-modernist design lecture given by Richard feminism was a core topic, which made the lecture much more interesting for me.

In a way I feel like modernist design fits into my way of working, designing and reasoning, but I can't agree with their political ideas and I tend to find myself more comfortable within a post-modernist theoretical frame.

Richard introduced a very interesting author (which I came across doing my research for COP) called Jacques Derrida, who talks about binary mirrors and how humanity has assigned values and meanings to things. For instance, the west is considered more advanced and civilised than the east, but the truth is that the west cannot survive as we know it without the east, and this applies to everything with the same kind of connotations. This mirrors are not to compare, but to make one side superior to another.

woman - man
white - black
east - west
speech - writing
culture - nature
present - past
art - design


men - women

active - passive
sun - moon
rational - irrational
culture - nature
head - heart
father - mother

Learned two words in this lecture: Logocentrism and phallogocentrism, both used by this author in his books, which I really need to read.

What was really interesting and mind blowing is how this could applied into graphic design to deconstruct the meaning. Richard Eckersely was very talented identifying this and making a text with paragraphs crazily laid out for the readers to find links between ideas, leaving an open interpretation to them.

It's overwhelming and at the same time makes me feel very small as a graphic designer because there is so much power in the meaning of things and it works so subtlety that the responsibility becomes obvious.

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