Immutable: Designing History explores the graphic genealogy of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a roughly 5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed blockchain ledgers. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering securitization techniques (material, technological, administrative) against the entropy of a document’s movement through space, time and the political. This project is proposed as a counter-position to the imperatives of graphic design education, which foregrounds logos, books, websites and branding while passports, money and property deeds constitute the field’s more profoundly ...

Author Chris Lee in conversation with scholars Shannon Mattern, Francisco Laranjo and Lisa Gitelman about the new eBook Immutable: Designing History, which traces the evolving graphic strategies of documents, money and writing and their entanglements with statecraft and colonialism. This event took place online on June 15th, 2022.

Ali Qadeer and Chris Lee are designers and educators. Together, they edited a recent issue of C Magazine with the theme graphic design. In this episode, Jarrett talks with Ali and Chris about the issue and their ideas around the editorial point-of-view, their teaching practice, and why they like finding new definitions for graphic design.

This binder is organized around eight topics, each offering a constellation of questions as a way to navigate our image-saturated world. The topics build on one another and shape a multidimensional perspective of photographs as objects and images, as agents of history and instigators of contemporary conversations. As imaging technologies evolve, so does our thinking around what we see—everything from a vintage black-and-white print to an image manipulated on a mobile device—and how we see. Hence, we draw on the work of artists, scholars, and teachers who urge us to look in-depth and with care, and offer myriad ways for ...