Vignelli and Geertz
Posted on May 10, 2011 | posted by:
I began this project by thinking about the different processes of Anthropology and Design. I was interested in how ethnography has been adopted or adapted as a method of research by designers and included in their process. In Assignment 2, I asked: When designers use/employ/evoke ethnography in their practices, do they mean it as method or as metaphor?
Anthropology is an academic discipline, and it produces knowledge about its own subject in the form of ethnographic work. Ethnography is a way of studying a culture that is otherwise opaque (or is presumed to be). Ethnography might lead to new ways of understanding the values of a culture (structures, dreams) but the designer is the one who acts in those spaces. What design does by its very nature is intervene. Ethnography exists as a stage or step for designers to undertake, not a framework for interpretation.
What become more interesting to me that simply observing or documenting the difference between disciplines was to investigate the historical relationships between design and social theory. While design may be understood to look to theoreticians for guidance, these the connection may be seen as more contemporaneous or integrated. When students in Paris were designing and innovating posters and street art in 1968, they were also reading Jacques Derrida and Henri Lefebvre. They were reading long, dense texts (made material by print and binding) and producing pithy, immediate, and confrontational art posters. The forms might have been highly divergent (book and poster or graffiti) as were their respective goals, but the underlying understanding about what society was and could be fueled both.
This example gave me the insight that I need to reframe my work and to make a plan to move forward. I would look at designers and anthropological writers of the same era to see what theoretical ideas they might have had in common. Were they speaking the same language of ideas but in different ways? The awareness I had previously gained (that ethnographic knowledge is an end to itself in Anthropology but that in design ethnography was a tool) was extremely important to the next step in my process and informed my new question: How might both designers and anthropologists working in different ways be generating similar understandings of the world?
I thought a lot about this. I had concluded the Assignement 2 with the insight that I needed a substantial amount of time to ‘mull,’ and that this time was an essential part of my process. I also knew I had to focus, and limit myself to one designer and one anthropologist who worked contemporaneously (a constraint I considered important to the dialog I would be constructing for their work). After much consideration that existed to an extensive level in my own head, I re-formed by guiding question as thus: Did modernist design seek to change, by intervention, the artificial world through concepts of universalism and legibility in similar ways as symbolic anthropology sought to order or codify ethnographic understanding as well as human activity?
I decided to compare Massimo Vignelli’s New York Transit Graphic Standards Manual from 1972 with Clifford Geertz’s “Tick Description: Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture” from his 1973 book of collected essays The Interpretation of Cultures. What I produced is the accompanying artifact, a style guide for Geertz’z symbolic anthropology in the format (or formula) of Vingelli’s manual.
I have recreated three classic or otherwise exemplary pages from Vignelli’s book. To highlight my work’s relationship to the manual, I included the original page numbers on the page I reproduced. This makes more transparent the reference to the original as well as making my artifact slightly less coherent (which is an appropriate price for increasing the intelligibility of my process).
On the three pages, I have applied direct quotations from Geertz, with great attention to his explanations of ethnographic process. I selected the excerpts through an intuitive as well as analytical process that involved a complex apparatus—highlighter. After selecting ten key passages, I typed them and read through them in different orders in order to make new connections.
I did not want to dissimulate Geertz’s ideas by taking his work out of context. Indeed, by applying Vignelli’s mathematical grids, detail sections, and hierarchical organization of information, I hope to illustrate the similarities of their respective work. Vignelli was attempting to apply order to a chaotic system, he created symbols and directional signage that mediated or intervened in the experience of being a user in his system. Geertz is also exploring ways to make sense, not just of culture, but of ethnography and its value. He directs through narrative a ways of understanding the world that is simultaneously interpretive and analytical.
The research became the artifact; the process of making the artifact forced me to work out the connections between the works that I had not previously considered.
Placing this piece in context with my previous design-led research, I realized that contemporary designers perceive an alternative model to the modernist designer’s controlling, severe traditions by using ethnography to get to ‘human truths.’ This older generation of designers has been criticized for being too authoritarian and ethnocentric. However, looking at ethnographic theory in a historical context, it is apparent that Anthropology’s method of analytical thinking, interpretation, and perspective, comes from a privileged position as well. The ethnographer of the past was going to a field site less sophisticated then the ethnographer’s native place. While anthropology has been working through some of these problems of positioning (native anthropology) that attitude can still infiltrate.
By taking a prescriptive design book and applying a prescriptive theory of ethnography, I am puncturing the myth that ethnography is an unproblematic or authentic alternative process.
The insights that emerged from this research were about how ethnography (which is not often considered holistically by other disciplines) could be disassembled, reframed, and re-presented, to reveals its inner workings, which are as problematic as any other model of research. I do not want to suggest that there actually is a how-to of design and a how-to of ethnography. When designers claim to engage in ethnography, they want prescriptive methods. They do not see ethnography as an end in itself. By getting in to the details of this discrepancy in my research, I can now differentiate between the concepts of ethnography as model tool and as model. I believe it is fair to conclude that ethnography is not an equivalent practice.
By dissecting Vignelli’s Swiss-style layout, I saw connections and order in information I had not seen before. This was an unexpected outcome. I have a heightened respect for Vignelli’s work, for its coherence and confidence.
Finally, I would like to conclude by considering the possibility of modesty, listening, and tailoring. While we know the shortcomings or limitations of our respective practices and methods that they are inevitability flawed should not lead one to ignore them. The first set of answers will never be enough.