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In our previous discussions, we’ve focused on how technology and power intersect to shape the world we live in. This lesson will focus on how graphic design and visual culture play a crucial role in mediating that process. If technologies intersect with power to produce narratives which in turn produce identities, knowledge, and truths; then visual culture is what helps shape, platform, and communicate those narratives. In other words, graphic design is a vessel through which these ideas become visible, comprehensible, and socially accepted—or challenged.

From this perspective, graphic design is not exclusively about decoration or clear, efficient communication. It constructs the visual and symbolic structures that hold cultural narratives in place. An ability to analyze that construction is an ability to make sense of the world.

This lesson prompts you to think about how a technology’s design relates to the narrative you uncovered in the previous lesson. We will look at the design across four dimensions. For each dimension, we will produce a formal analysis.

1. How does the technology look?
2. How does the technology produce visual culture?
3. How does the technology work?
4. How is the technology marketed?

These dimensions may set the path that we trace with a narrative. It could be that the very way a technology is designed is exactly what makes it useful in a power dynamic. For example, if a technology is designed in such a way that excludes certain groups of people, then at least one design dimension can help establish the narrative.

In other cases, the interaction between design dimensions and narrative is obfuscation and reveal. Does the dimension make the narrative more hidden or more exposed? For example a technology’s visual dimensions may reveal its value system, which perhaps launders an ideology for general consumption. Or it may be that the technology’s design hides this effect, such that users are subconsciously playing into a power dynamic.

In this way, our inquiry has a cyclical relationship to the discovery of narratives. Formal analysis of design dimensions may reveal narratives. Narratives may prompt us to examine certain facets of the design dimension.

How to make a formal analysis

There are many ways to do a formal analysis. One way is to spend time thinking about different attributes of the design.

• Hierarchy: Does visual hierarchy reflect the narrative’s value system? If so, what is marked as important and what is marked unimportant?
• Presence/absence: Does the design have a “scope” of relevance that covers that people/places/ideas? If so, who or what is outside of it?
• Permission: Does the design recognize and engage with particular people/places/ideas? Does it refuse this to others?
• References: Does the design reference a context outside of itself? What types of images are lent to the design?