The Rhetoric of Neutrality

Abstract

1) The essay was originally presented as a paper at the first Design Conference, held at Cranfield, England in December 1984. The author is grateful to the editors of Design Issues for their criticisms of an earlier draft. In the text now published it seemed appropriate to the aims and content of the paper to retain as much as possible of its original colloquial manner. Introduction Information has emerged within recent years as a distinct area of practice and investigation, bringing together among principal participants graphic and typographic designers, text writers and editors, computer engineers, psychologists, and linquistic scientists. Risking oversimplification, one might say that the information design movement (though movement may be too strong a term for it) has been concerned about discovering what is effective graphic and typographic communication. It has been concerned with the needs of users rather than with the expressive possibilities present in design tasks. This is its point of difference with graphic design as usually practiced and taught. The movement is an international one, though centered in Britain and the United States. It has generated a good deal of literature, including, as forums for discussion, two specialist journals: Visible Language (from 1971, formerly the Journal of Typographic Research, started in 1967) and Design Journal (started in 1979). This essay has two broad intentions. 1 First, to discuss, through detailed examination of some of the products with which information designers have been typically concerned, whether information can be neutral. And then to move on from this close criticism of ex mples to discuss the larger social and political dimensions present, even within the smallest and most mundane designed fragm nt. Thus, both explicitly and by example of the mode of argument employed, the essay makes some criticism of information design as it is so far developed.

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