Immutable: Designing History

Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonialism/ity, framed as a 5,000-year chronology. It argues that design educators should teach forms like passports, money, and property deeds, as they are the most consequential forms. It aims 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.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 07 December 2022
Publisher: Onomatopee

Immutable: Designing History is a book that explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonialism. It is framed as a 5,000-year chronology, encompassing the developments of money and writing from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers like the blockchain. Immutability is presented as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering various techniques of securitization against the entropy of a document's movement through space/time and the political.

The book is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, and websites, but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., despite these being the most consequential forms of design. As an alternative historiography, "Immutable" gestures 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 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.

Weight: 244g
Dimension: 158 x 238 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9789493148420