A critical analysis of local and global cultural factors in graphic wayfinding design: a case study of Beijing

The main intentions of this thesis are to analyse and explain changes in the function and graphic components of Beijing s wayfinding systems and to explain how the systems construct multiple cultural and political identities at different historical periods and in changing local/global contexts. In the thesis, the oversimplified one-way theory of the global-local dichotomy, in which the global power of the West is overwhelming and constantly dominant, and the local system of non-Western countries is passive and fragile, is challenged. Instead, this thesis seeks to examine the interactivity and correlation of the local and the global from two perspectives: mobility and reversibility. Looking at mobility is to consider the local and global and their nexus as different interconnections and networks that are constantly and unevenly changing. Reversibility, with which this thesis is most concerned, deals primarily with the reversible relationship of the local and global, namely, that either the local or the global can be dominant. This point is well illustrated by the evolution of Beijing s graphic wayfinding systems function and appearance. Beijing, as the capital of China, has undergone a radical transformation from the fall of the last Empire Qing (1912) to the establishment of the People s Republic of China (1949). The meaning of Beijing varies in accordance with the changes in its political and social structures. There have been five phases in Beijing s development: a well-planned imperial city; a capital city with a republican spirit; a totally industrialised but relatively isolated capital of a socialist country; an open and modernised Chinese-style socialist city; and a cosmopolitan city. In the course of this metamorphosis, what took place was a series of collisions, exchanges, fusions, and re-collisions between local power and global power. Along with the immense changes in Beijing, the role and appearance of the graphic wayfinding systems have also changed, especially those of road signs and doorplates, whose roles have been transformed from that of initial household register to orientation reference, to effective propaganda tool, and then on to the regeneration of a city. Finally, Beijing s graphic wayfinding design within its urban development has been reconfirmed as a useful instrument to support the new forms of visual narratives and consolidate the city brand of Beijing in the 21st century. This study probes into the political and cultural significances behind the changes of the graphic wayfinding systems of Beijing, as well as the interaction between the local and the global as reflected in the formation of these findings. The mutable and reversible relationship between the local and the global is illustrated and clarified through analysis and comparison of various functions and visual elements between Beijing s present graphic wayfinding systems and its early wayfinding signs, as well as decoding the different mainstream political or cultural ideologies that have deeply affected the function and design of Beijing graphic wayfinding systems at different periods

Designing modern Ireland: the role of graphic design in the construction of modern Ireland at home and abroad (1949-1979)

As the modernising Irish state sought to project a positive image of post-war Ireland, a paradox emerged: how could the symbolism of national distinctiveness (heretofore synonymous with the past) be reconciled with modernity? This thesis outlines the role which graphic design played in attempts to resolve tensions between the national and the modern. The thesis examines how design was mobilised as a symbol and agent of modernisation in Ireland in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the 1958 ‘Programme for Economic Expansion’, widely considered to be the manifestation of an explicit state-led programme of modernisation. It examines the gradual replacement of the outward symbols of Republican Nationalism with a pervasive symbolism of modern efficiency, suggesting that this was a visual manifestation of the drive towards ‘organisation’ and rational management that gripped the civil service. It examines the paradoxical situation whereby designers in Ireland sought to present themselves and the nation as modern and professional, while the Irish Trade Board (charged with both design and export promotion) looked to professional designers abroad to present Ireland and her exports as traditional. Central to this discussion is the critique by designers (particularly those associated with Ireland’s first professional body, the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design) of so-called ‘Stage Irish’ versions of national image-making. An examination of their work and writings provides evidence for a series of alternative visual strategies for being Irish and modern —often quoting Celtic and early-Christian artefacts in otherwise modernist settings— which I have termed ‘Celtic modernism.’ From the early 1950s onwards, debates over ‘tradition’ and ‘modernisation’ were given visible form in the contentious issue of which letterform to use for the Irish language: ‘roman’ or ‘Gaelic’. This culminated in 1965 in the decommissioning of the Irish alphabet – at which point typography, that most everyday and habitually overlooked of visual material, became briefly visible and highly charged. The final section of the thesis focuses on the relationship between language, typography and identity. It argues that the debates about language reform in the mid twentieth- century led to a reconsideration of the variety of ways of ‘being Irish’ typographically and that the ‘Celtic’ associations of the uncial letter in particular offered potential for the negotiation of tradition and modernity. The thesis concludes that design in Ireland was presented as a means and a metaphor of modernisation. It attempts through an examination of a range of design examples, to follow Roland Barthes’s injunction to ‘track down in the decorative display of what- goes-without-saying’ the ideological constructions hidden in plain sight

Back to the Future. The Future in the Past. Conference Proceedings Book

ICDHS is the acronym of the International Committee of De­sign History and Design Studies, an organisation that brings together scholars from Spain, Cuba, Turkey, Mexico, Finland, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal, the US, Tai­wan, Canada and the UK. Since 1999, when the Design and Art History departments of the University of Barcelona organised the first edition of the ICDHS, a conference has been held every two years at a different venue around the world. These conferences have had two dis­tinct aims: first, to present original research in the fields of Design History and Design Studies and, second, to include contributions in these fields from non-hegemonic countries, offering a speaking platform to many scientific communities that are already active or are forming and developing. For that reason, the structure of the conferences combines many paral­lel strands, including poster presentations and keynote speak­ers who lecture on the conferences’ main themes. The 2018 event is rather special. The Taipei 2016 conference was the 10th edition and a commemoration of the ten celebrations to date. Returning to Barcelona in 2018 marks the end of one stage and the beginning of a new one for the Committee. The numbering chosen—“10+1”—also means that Barcelona 2018 is both an end and a beginning in the ICDHS’s own history. The book brings together 137 papers delivered at the ICDHS 10th+1 Conference held in Barcelona on 29–31 October 2018. The papers are preceded by texts of the four keynote lectures and a written tribute from the ICDHS Board to its founder and figurehead, Anna Calvera (1954–2018). The Conference, and the book, are dedicated to her memory

Back to the future. The future in the past: ICDHS 10th+1 Barcelona 2018: Conference proceedings book

Obra dedicada a la memòria d'Anna Calvera (1954–2018).Conté: 0. Opening pages -- 1.1 Territories in the scene of globalised design: localisms and cosmopolitanisms -- 1.2 Designing the histories of southern designs -- 1.3 Mediterranean-ness: an inquiry into design and design history -- 1.4 From ideology to methodology: design histories and current developments in post-socialist countries -- 1.5 [100th anniversary of the Bauhaus Foundation]: tracing the map of the diaspora of its students -- 1.6 Design history: gatekeeper of the past and passport to a meaningful future? -- 1.7 Constructivism and deconstructivism: global development and criticism -- 1.8 An expanded global framework for design history -- 1.9 Design museums network: strengthening design by making it part of cultural legacy -- 1.10 Types and histories: past and present issues of type and book design -- 2.1 Design aesthetics: beyond the pragmatic experience and phenomenology -- 2.2 Public policies on design and design-driven innovation -- 2.3 Digital humanities: how does design in today's digital realm respond to what we need? -- 2.4 Design studies: design methods and methodology, the cognitive approach -- 2.5 Vehicles of design criticism -- 3 Open session: research and works in progress (1) -- 3 Open session: research and works in progress (2) -- Addenda: 10th+I keywords mapInternational Committee of Design History and Design Studies. Conference (11a : 2018 : Barcelona, Catalunya),ICDHS is the acronym of the International Committee of De­sign History and Design Studies, an organisation that brings together scholars from Spain, Cuba, Turkey, Mexico, Finland, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal, the US, Tai­wan, Canada and the UK. Since 1999, when the Design and Art History departments of the University of Barcelona organised the first edition of the ICDHS, a conference has been held every two years at a different venue around the world. These conferences have had two dis­tinct aims: first, to present original research in the fields of Design History and Design Studies and, second, to include contributions in these fields from non-hegemonic countries, offering a speaking platform to many scientific communities that are already active or are forming and developing. For that reason, the structure of the conferences combines many paral­lel strands, including poster presentations and keynote speak­ers who lecture on the conferences’ main themes. The 2018 event is rather special. The Taipei 2016 conference was the 10th edition and a commemoration of the ten celebrations to date. Returning to Barcelona in 2018 marks the end of one stage and the beginning of a new one for the Committee. The numbering chosen—“10+1”—also means that Barcelona 2018 is both an end and a beginning in the ICDHS’s own history. The book brings together 137 papers delivered at the ICDHS 10th+1 Conference held in Barcelona on 29–31 October 2018. The papers are preceded by texts of the four keynote lectures and a written tribute from the ICDHS Board to its founder and figurehead, Anna Calvera (1954–2018). The Conference, and the book, are dedicated to her memory

The Chinese Seal in the Making, 1904-1937

Seals are hand-held printing blocks inscribed with some pattern, generally text. They were objects of immense power and prestige in imperial China. This dissertation examines the modern afterlife of inscribed seals against the backdrop of the decline and collapse of an imperial era order of knowledge and social status, the rise of modern consumer markets and mass culture, and the local accommodation of modern disciplines that promoted new ways of classifying and engaging the material world. In late imperial China (ca. 1600s-1800s), seals legitimized the rule of the emperor and his civil servants and marked the taste and erudition of the literati elite. As hand-held printing blocks that replicated in ink small textual signs, they produced authorizing marks of personhood and office and attracted elite collectors as calligraphic compositions of antiquarian interest. In modern China, seals proliferated within the cosmopolitan material culture of cities like Hangzhou and Shanghai. As the seal was transformed following the disintegration the imperial system, its multifaceted meanings and functions were increasingly subsumed under a monolithic category of "Chinese seal" as art object. The making of the "Chinese seal" as a representative fine art and marker of a distinctive Chinese culture evolved out of the diverse ways in which the carvers, consumers, scholars, and users of seals defined the object's significance in a modern world. This dissertation is thus structured around the new social venues in which the seal emerged in the first four decades of the twentieth century, from the final years of imperial rule through the period of the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). The seal in premodern China was not an unchanging part of a traditional material culture. Its uses and significance had already undergone dramatic, historically contingent, transformations before the twentieth century. Chapter one broadly examines the multifaceted functions of the seal through Chinese history, and explains the emergence of the seal as an object of literati fascination in the late imperial period. The relationship between seal carving and the literati way of life would have to be at least partially displaced for seal carving to survive China's transition to a more mass-oriented society. Chapter two demonstrates how members of the Xiling Seal Society (founded 1904), the first-ever specialized institution devoted to seal carving and inscriptions celebrated literati values of amateurism and exclusivity while simultaneously contributing to the commodification, public visibility, and transformation of literati seal carving. The Xiling Seal Society, as a modern heritage institution based in Hangzhou, had a commercial counterpart in Shanghai with a national and international consumer base. Chapter three uses catalogues of this business and its offshoots as evidence of the crucial role of the market in transmitting and modifying seal carving and related aspects of elite material culture after the collapse of the imperial order. While the Shanghai Xiling Seal Society positioned itself against a vulgarization of seal carving in contemporary society, it incrementally detached the seal from a broader framework of imperial era knowledge production and ultimately marketed it as a customizable commodity suitable to the needs of the modern consumer. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the emerging categorization of the seal as a fine art object. Through an examination of how-to manuals published during the Republican period, chapter 4 focuses on the ways in which practitioners characterized their expertise and how their practical instruction aimed at a general reader marked a transformation of the concept of amateurism. Chapter 5 looks at the seal's incorporation into state-sponsored national exhibitions of fine art held in 1929 and 1937 and the tensions produced by the collision of connoisseurship culture with the mass pedagogy of "aesthetic education." The categorization of seal carving as fine art can be understood as the grafting of an exogenous classification system onto a local practice. But this new categorization did not only transform the seal, it also transformed the very category of "fine arts" as it was understood in China. The final chapter examines the seal as an object of scholarly inquiry and the relationship between seals, seal carving, and an indigenous field of metal and stone inscription study (jinshi). The second director of the Xiling Seal Society, a scholar named Ma Heng, incorporated seals into his vision of metal and stone inscription study as a sub-discipline of modern historical scholarship. Ma Heng judged seal carving not by the aesthetics of the seal composition, but by the integrity of the archaic text as an accurately rendered play upon epigraphic models. His insistence that seal carving be understood as an expression of scholarship serves as a reminder of how awkwardly imperial era practices of connoisseurship and knowledge production mapped onto a modern field of disciplines, with their hardened boundaries between the arts and the sciences. Today, the Chinese government promotes seal carving as a representative part of an ancient and enduring Chinese culture. As examined in the dissertation's epilogue, the People's Republic of China has succeeded in having "the art of Chinese seal engraving" inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The seal has now come into the purview of the contemporary state's heritage politics. This has only been possible because the seal proved useful, significant, and accessible to people in the early twentieth century even after the imperial system that had accounted for the object's former prestige was torn asunder

The design of trust, past and present: A dialogue between ‘design for trust’ in contemporary design practice and the fire insurance industry in England 1680–1914

What does trust look like? How can it be designed? These are questions that today’s designers face, particularly in the digital world. This thesis lends these challenges a historical context. To do so, it examines the print culture of the fire insurance industry in England in three historical periods. It argues that print was the tangible material that was designed to build trust for this intangible industry. Scholarship has identified the relationship between print culture, trust and credibility. My contribution is to make a detailed analysis of how one financial service made its commercial print effective, and how this can be attributed to design. In this thesis, past and present work in dialogue. Part I reviews the ways in which contemporary design practice has engaged with the concept of trust, in four case studies: Airbnb, Projects by If, a publication by the UCL Urban Laboratory and a project by Service Design students at the Royal College of Art. This survey informs my approach to the historical material. Part II analyses the printed and part-printed documents produced by the Insurance Office (Nicholas Barbon’s Fire Office) between 1680 and 1700, the Sun Fire Office between c. 1800 and c. 1820, and the Sun Insurance Office between c. 1894 and 1914. This part shows how these graphic objects elicited trust. The printed page communicated qualities such as security and afforded the format of the fire policy. It also shaped the work of the people involved in these companies – directors, agents and firemen. The final part of the thesis shows how news print assisted the fire insurance industry in the building and maintaining of trust, at the same time as being a channel which on occasion challenged this message. A multitude of printed matter was designed to dispel the uncertainty upon which fire insurance rested. But the same channels made fraud and distrust both possible and visible. By studying the graphic objects of fire insurance in dialogue with contemporary design issues, I test the philosophical and sociological discussions of trust against the material approach of designers. This thesis deepens the study of ephemera and everyday graphic design. It expands the boundaries of design in Britain since 1680, and builds a bridge to practice today

Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment Inscribed Objects in Medieval European Literature

In the Middle Ages, writing was not confined to manuscripts, but inscribed in the broader material world, in textiles and tombs, on weapons or human skin. This volume presents the first comparative overview of text-bearing artefacts in medieval German, Old Norse, British, French, Italian and Iberian literature and offers a fresh perspective on the medieval world that takes seriously the vibrancy of matter as a vital aspect of textual culture

Bernard Shaw at Shaw's Corner: Artefacts, Socialism, Connoisseurship, and Self-Fashioning

This thesis analyses artefacts belonging to the playwright, socialist and critic Bernard Shaw, which form part of the collections at Shaw’s Corner, Hertfordshire, now managed as a National Trust property. My original contribution to knowledge is made by revealing Shaw through the artefacts in new or under-explored roles as socialist-aesthete, art patron, connoisseur, photographer, celebrity, dandy, and self-commemorator. The thesis therefore challenges the stereotypical views expressed in the literature which have tended to focus on Shaw at Shaw’s Corner as a Fabian with ascetic characteristics. The thesis aims are achieved by contextualizing the Shaw’s Corner Collections, both extant and absent. Historically the artefacts in the house have been viewed from the perspective of his socialist politics, ignoring his connoisseurial interests and self-fashioning. Hence there was a failure to see the ways in which these elements of his consuming personality overlapped or were in conflict. By examining artefacts from the perspectives of art and design history, focussing on furniture, private press books, clothing, painting and sculpture, Shaw is shown to be a highly complex and at times contradictory figure. The discontinuities and ambiguities become clearer once we examine the possessions from the house which were removed and sold by the National Trust after Shaw’s death. Whilst some Shavian scholars and art historians have acknowledged Shaw’s role as an art critic and the impact it had on his dramaturgy, there has been little recognition of the ways in which this influenced his domestic interiors, consumption, and personal taste, or indeed his interest in the decorative arts and design. Artefacts and furniture in the house today reflect Shaw’s role as a socialist-aesthete, and his involvement with Arts and Crafts movement practitioners and Aestheticism. As an art patron Shaw also shared the aims of artists, connoisseurs and curators working in the first decades of the twentieth century, and we see evidence of this through certain artefacts at Shaw’s Corner. With a strong aesthetic sense, he devoted time to matters of beauty and art, but was equally governed by economics and a desire to bring ‘good’ art and design to everyone. Shaw was considered to be one of the greatest cultural commentators and thinkers of his generation, but he was at the same time a renowned celebrity and influential figure in the mass media. The literature has tended to dismiss the latter role in order to preserve his place among the former, but I argue here that Shaw did not necessarily view the two as separate endeavours. In fact items from the house, notably Shaw’s clothing and sculpture, are considered as the bearers of complex philosophical, symbolic or iconographic meanings relating to his self-fashioning, aesthetic doctrines, and desire for commemoration, which demonstrate the links between the celebrity and the critic. By considering the artefacts in conjunction with the Trust’s archive of Shaw photographs, as well as his representation in popular culture, and by then relating this material dimension to his writings, the thesis brings a new methodological approach to the study of Shaw. More importantly this thesis reveals new knowledge about the philosophical ideas, humanity, generosity, and personal vanity of the man that lay behind those artefacts

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference