Chris Lee: Immutable - Designing History - Softcover

• Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a ~5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing — from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers, like the blockchain. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering a variety of techniques (material, technological, administrative, etc.) of securitisation against the entropy of a document’s movement through space/time, and the political.
• This project is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, websites, etc., but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., in spite of these being, I contend, design’s most profoundly consequential forms.
• As an alternative historiography, Immutable gestures both towards anthropologist Laura Nader’s call to 'study up' (on those in power), and the radical educator Paolo Freire’s recognition of the 'limit situation' as a generative condition for emancipatory praxis. The book’s aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument that imposes a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable. – Chris Lee
• Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Buffalo and Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of OCADU and the Sandberg Instituut. His research/studio practice explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards, and the document. Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at the Pratt Institute.

Pages: 192

Published: 2023

Size (cm): 12.7 x 19.7

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