Emergent graphics: graphic communication as a systems change agent

Graphics, whether you call it ‘design’ or ‘communications’ is a system that has emerged at various times, from various societies, and through various media, but with a common mode of practice. We communicate, using visual means (oh so many diverse means). And we carry out these communications in ways that are diverse in the visual codes that are applied, but commonly with a small range of intended outcomes: to explain, to demystify and to reduce the complexity of socio-cultural systems too baroque for the citizen to operate without help. Sometimes these systems are markets, sometimes cities, but graphics is there to help. While these operations have frequently been exploited to explain the ways of government to the governed, and then to sell merch’ to them too, it doesn’t have to be used that way. The practice of graphics is a process that is agnostic as to the thing being communicated: in 1919 El Lissitzky promoted the Russian Revolution, in 1924 it was Pelikan Ink. The practice of graphics can move beyond servicing vested interests and be a powerful tool in engaging in dialogic design to address global problems. The paper uses Meadows’ 1999, Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system, as a structure to consider the clustering of graphic communications practice
around certain functions of communication and control, with the intention of using its accumulated practice as a lever for large scale social change.