As with all contemporary idea-based work, the things that graphic designers make is never really any one single thing. Behind every poster, book, typeface, or web site lies an elaborate system of interlocking ideas and interests, which take place at multiple scales and levels of resolution. When determining what all of these things mean, the context is everything — from the minutae to the global. As technological progress paves the way for increasingly easy access to design tools, the growing complexity of the ideas around us are more and more in need of a common mode of critique and disucssion — a framework for talking back.
I am interested in the notion of the feedback loop, and how this construct operates as a fundamental building block of the dynamics in graphic design. For the purposes of this analysis, we can think of a feedback loop as a system whose output is connected back to its input. The feedback loops I will consider are never exclusively linked like this; as such, they are always part of a larger context. By investigating feedback loops throughout a range of design contexts — in theory, practice, and criticism — the key loop structures that operate both within my work and throughout the contexts that define it can be understood and described. From the smallest technical minutae of design craft, up through the broadest overarching themes, we can see the circular paths inscribed by our ideas, concepts, and methods.
When we think of a loop, we frequently think of a round shape — which is different from the archetypical notion of a cycle, which can appear in a variety of forms and shapes that are not obviously circular, like a sine wave, or a recursive block of computer code. Conversely, one advantage to using loops as the primary visual metaphor for analysis lies in the fact that cycles can be diagrammed or visualized with circular shapes — allowing complex interactions at many levels between design and context to be illustrated without being trivialized.
All of this is further elucidated and hashed out in the full abstract. Clickable JPGs of the document are available for the curious, below.
