Ways of Working — To Sift, Structure

Ever since we looked up at the night sky and saw soldiers and bears and twins in the stars, we’ve been telling each other stories about the world around us. The best of these didn’t claim complete truth. Instead, they were ways to understand the world and our place in it by allegory, metaphor.

Storytelling is not possible, of course, without language — a set of fixed objects and concepts that can be placed in certain relations to one another, and to the outside world, in order to create and convey meaning. Italo Calvino writes, “the storyteller explored the possibilities implied in his own language by combining and changing the permutations of the figures and the actions, and of the objects on which these actions could be brought to bear. What emerged were stories.”¹

If language is simply a set of “figures and actions,” we can look beyond words and grammar to other figures — individual pieces of content, and other actions — visual, design relationships. We’ve never had more possibilities at our disposal than we do today, in this era of endless content and ever-increasing complexity. I’m interested in using these opportunities to tell new types of stories, to use existing content to open up access points to otherwise inaccessible systems — what Paul Elliman describes as “working or thinking in the language of the things around” us.²

What emerges is a kind of second-order language, a design syntax that places pieces of content in certain syntactical relationships with one another in a way that is reactive to the way we as people naturally think. Images become nouns, tweets become verbs, entire books become subordinate clauses. And by carefully considering the content and the structural arrangement of its presentation, sentences begin to form, then paragraphs, then stories — we begin to read this content. Gunther Kress distinguishes this “image-reading” from regular text reading as follows: “The imaginative work in writing focuses on filling words with meaning — and then reading the filled elements together, in the given syntactic structure. In image, imagination focuses on creating the order of the arrangement of elements which are already filled with meaning.”³

The idea is not to put this content behind glass as an object of study, but instead to let it live and breathe and find new purpose. Or, as Elliman puts it, the goal of this act of collection and arrangement is not “separating [content] from a living world through the act of completion,” but instead “reinstalling some of the precariousness of life” in the collection.⁴ The content is arranged in carefully considered ways that are suggestive of meaning, but that are open enough to allow each reader to create his or her own meaning, to find his or her own narrative.

My hope is that this second-order design syntax opens up a dialogue between the audience and the endless streams of content around us — that by reading these arrangements, we let the content tell its stories, but also find our own.

1. Italo Calvino and Surprenant Céline. Cybernetics and Ghosts, 1987.
2. Martens, Karel, and Paul Elliman. Counterprint. London: Hyphen Press, 2004.
3. Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (London: Routledge, 2010).
4. Martens, Karel, and Paul Elliman. Counterprint. London: Hyphen Press, 2004.