Lobby: MA Communication Design | Critical Texts

Photography: Ryan Ming Sheng Ten (2022)
Photography: Ryan Ming Sheng Ten (2022)
Photography: Ryan Ming Sheng Ten (2022)
Photography: Ryan Ming Sheng Ten (2022)
Photography: Ryan Ming Sheng Ten (2022)

Stanley Picker Gallery is pleased to be hosting a display and debate around critical texts by Kingston School of Art MA Communication Design: Graphic Design students.

How is theory used to inform graphic design practice?

For many, design theory is concerned with the pragmatics of how a visual message is constructed, produced, and disseminated, and can take the form of a set of instructions or guidelines.

Please join MA Communication Design: Graphic Design students in an open forum for debate around critical concepts of Hito Steyerl, bell hooks, Pablo Helguera, Legacy Russell, Matahaven, Federico P res Villoro, and Christopher Hamamoto.

In this open forum for debate the students will share their research into how theory substantiates a more critical understanding of design debates, histories, and practices in an expanded mode of design knowledge. Close readings of selected theoretical texts formed the basis of initial thinking through design exploring current design debate and its epistemological positions followed by interpretations, translations, and mis-readings.

To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it… listen to the text as an iridescent exchange carried on by multiple voices, on different wavelengths

(Barthes, S/Z, 1974 [1973] 4-42).