by selina.pichler -

20*A Semester in Print – Looking Back and Looking Forward

Every research project begins with a suspicion.

Not a hypothesis in the formal academic sense, necessarily. More of a feeling. A hunch that something you have noticed repeatedly in the world around you is worth examining more carefully. For this semester’s blog series, that suspicion was relatively straightforward: that analogue political media is not simply a leftover from a pre-digital era, but an active, meaningful and ideologically loaded form of communication that continues to shape how people understand politics in public space.

Nineteen blog posts later, that suspicion has largely held up.

But the process of testing it – through design theory, cultural criticism, printing, and finally a small survey conducted on the streets of Graz – turned out to be considerably more layered than the original hunch suggested.

The semester began with questions about why physical political media still matters at all. In a media environment dominated by algorithmic feeds, disappearing content and endlessly optimised digital branding, the persistence of posters, stickers, banners and printed pamphlets seemed worth accounting for. The answer that emerged across the early posts was not simply nostalgic. Physical political media occupies space in a way digital communication cannot replicate. It confronts rather than competes. It persists. It deteriorates. It leaves traces – on walls, and in memory – in ways that a sponsored post optimised for a six-second attention window simply does not.

From there, the series moved into the mechanics of political visual language: how colour, typography and composition function as ideological shorthand, communicating political orientation before a single word is consciously processed. This was perhaps the most theoretically dense section of the semester, drawing on design theorists, political communication scholars and cultural critics to build an argument that visual literacy is not a specialist skill but a widely shared cultural competence, absorbed through years of repeated exposure to political environments.

The argument about analogue authenticity followed naturally from this. Imperfection, it turns out, is itself a form of communication. Rough textures, visible print processes and DIY aesthetics signal human involvement, collective effort and resistance to institutional polish in ways that highly produced digital branding cannot easily replicate – even when it tries to imitate them.

Then came the practical work.

Designing the survey sheets forced every theoretical argument back into lived decision-making. Choosing colours meant navigating real cultural associations. Selecting typefaces meant working within – and sometimes deliberately against – the visual conventions that Austrian political culture has built up over decades. The design process confirmed, from the inside, what the theoretical posts had argued from the outside: there is no neutral visual choice in political communication. Every decision encodes something.

Printing confirmed it further, and added a complication. The colour divergence between the digital and risograph versions of the survey was not ideal from a methodological standpoint. It was, however, honest. Real analogue political communication does not exist in controlled conditions either. It is produced under time pressure, with available materials, in imperfect environments. The imprecision of the riso output felt, in retrospect, less like a research flaw and more like an accidental confirmation of the series’ central argument about the material nature of analogue media.

The survey results themselves were, broadly, what the theoretical framework predicted. Colour associations mapped closely onto local Austrian political conventions. Typography produced consistent ideological readings along the lines that design theory would anticipate. And the risograph format was reliably perceived as more liberal or radical than its digitally printed equivalent – a finding that felt almost too clean, and yet was grounded in the very real cultural associations that riso printing carries within contemporary visual and political culture.

The results mostly matched expectations. But matching expectations is not the same as being unsurprising.

There is a difference between believing something theoretically and watching it confirmed by a stranger on a street in Graz who glances at a printed sheet and immediately, without hesitation, places it politically. That moment – repeated across participants, across design variations, across printing formats – was genuinely striking. It made the abstract arguments feel suddenly very concrete. Visual political literacy is not a theoretical construct. It is something people actually do, quickly and confidently, without being asked to think about it.

That is the detail that will stay with me from this semester.

Not a particular survey result. But the speed of recognition. The automaticity of it. The way a person looks at a slightly misregistered riso print of three generic political words and immediately, instinctively, knows what kind of politics it is supposed to feel like.

There is a great deal more to understand about how that process works. How it differs across demographics and political contexts. How it changes over time as visual conventions shift. How it interacts with the circulation of political media in specific urban environments. How it might be deliberately disrupted or subverted by designers working against established ideological codes.

These are questions for a master’s thesis.

And after a semester spent moving from theory to design to printing to streets and back again, I cannot wait to keep asking them!

See you next semester!

Sources:

  • Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
  • Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell.
  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
by selina.pichler -

19*The Medium Responded Too – What the Risograph Results Revealed

There was one finding from the survey that felt, in retrospect, almost too neat.

The risograph-printed versions of the survey sheets were consistently perceived as more liberal, or more radical, than their digitally printed counterparts showing the same designs. This held even when the underlying colour and typographic combination was one that had been rated as relatively conservative in the digital format. The medium was not merely a neutral carrier of the design. It was doing its own ideological work.

This is, of course, exactly what the previous posts in this series have been arguing. That the form of political communication shapes how its content is interpreted. That analogue aesthetics carry historical and cultural associations that precede any conscious reading of text or image. That imperfection signals something.

But arguing it theoretically and watching it happen in a survey conducted in Graz are two different experiences.

The risograph’s characteristic visual qualities – soft ink textures, slight colour shifts, the gentle misregistration between printed layers – appear to activate a set of cultural associations that respondents connected with grassroots politics, protest culture and anti-establishment communication. No one used those words directly, necessarily. But the feeling they described when encountering the riso-printed sheets consistently placed those designs further left, further from institutional authority, further toward the register of collective and community-produced political media.

Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message has perhaps never felt more directly confirmed in small-scale empirical form (McLuhan, 1964).

It is worth being honest about the methodological complication here, which was acknowledged during the printing process itself. The risograph versions were not colour-accurate reproductions of the digital versions. Riso ink colours diverge from screen-designed palettes in ways that cannot be fully controlled. This meant that respondents in the riso condition were not responding to identical visual objects with only the texture and medium changed – they were also responding to slightly different colours. The cleaner methodological isolation that the research design originally intended was not fully achieved.

And yet the consistency of the riso-as-liberal response across design variations that differed in colour, typography and overall composition suggests that medium was doing significant independent work. Even when riso colour shifts pushed a design toward tones that might conventionally read as more conservative, the tactile and textural qualities of the print appeared to override or substantially complicate that reading.

This points toward something interesting about the hierarchy of cues in political visual communication. Colour dominated the responses to the digital prints. For the riso prints, medium appeared to compete with colour for primacy – and in many cases won.

Part of this may relate to the specific cultural positioning of risograph printing within contemporary visual culture. Riso has become closely associated with independent publishing, zine culture, small-circulation political pamphlets and artist-run spaces. In Graz as elsewhere, people who have encountered riso-printed material have most often encountered it in contexts coded as alternative, independent or politically left-leaning. The print method carries those contextual associations with it into whatever it reproduces.

Walter Benjamin wrote about the aura of an object – the quality of presence and uniqueness that mechanical reproduction alters (Benjamin, 1935). Risograph printing, paradoxically, reintroduces something aura-adjacent into reproduced political communication. Its slight imprecision makes each printed sheet feel slightly individual. Its texture makes the process of production visible. Its colour behaviour makes it impossible to fully standardise.

Respondents appeared to respond to all of this, even without consciously analysing it.

Which is, in the end, precisely how political visual communication is supposed to work.

Not through conscious argument.

Not through careful decoding.

But through accumulated feeling – the slow, largely invisible process by which aesthetic experience becomes ideological orientation.

The survey was small. Its methodology was imperfect. Its sample was local and specific. None of these results can be generalised into universal claims about how all audiences read all political print.

But they confirm, in a situated and material way, what this series of blog posts has been trying to articulate from the beginning.

Politics is visual. Aesthetics are ideological. And the medium – even a slightly misregistered, colour-shifted, imperfectly reproduced medium – is still very much the message.

Sources:

  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
  • McQuiston, L. (1993). Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

18*Reading Type – What Fonts Told People About Politics

Colour may have spoken first, but typography had a great deal to say once people started listening.

The typographic findings from the survey were more nuanced than the colour results, which is perhaps unsurprising. Colour associations in Austrian political culture are deeply institutionalised through party branding. Typographic associations operate at a slightly different register – more diffuse, more culturally absorbed, less directly tied to specific parties, but nonetheless remarkably consistent across respondents once the patterns were examined.

The clearest pattern to emerge was this: playful, irregular or humanist typefaces were consistently read as more liberal, while rigid, highly geometric or authoritarian-feeling letterforms were placed toward the conservative end of the spectrum. This finding maps closely onto what design theory would predict, but seeing it confirmed through actual street-level responses rather than academic argument gave it a different kind of weight.

Smallcap non-serif fonts and clean, rounded serif designs were frequently described as feeling open, modern or progressive. Participants used words that suggested accessibility and approachability when encountering these typefaces. There was something in the visual softness of rounded letterforms, or the slightly informal register of smallcaps, that read as ideologically non-threatening – even welcoming. Ellen Lupton’s description of typography as a visual form of language that structures emotional tone before content is understood proved accurate in practice (Lupton, 2010). These fonts felt like a certain kind of politics before anyone processed what the slogan was actually saying.

Traditional serif fonts with strong contrast and angular construction, and particularly ultra-geometric typefaces with rigid proportions and minimal optical correction, were placed firmly in the conservative register. Their visual associations with authority, institutional solidity and historical continuity appeared to transfer directly into political perception. Respondents did not describe these designs as dangerous or radical – but they did describe them as formal, serious and established. In the context of a political slogan, formal and established reads as conservative almost automatically.

The all-caps variable produced one of the more striking results.

The survey included versions of the slogan written entirely in capital letters, and these were consistently rated as more conservative than lowercase or mixed-case equivalents using the same typeface. This is worth pausing on, because it suggests that capitalisation itself carries ideological charge independent of font choice. All-caps typography has a long association with authoritarian political communication – monumental inscriptions, propaganda posters, official proclamations. It communicates certainty rather than dialogue, declaration rather than invitation. Respondents appeared to absorb this association instinctively, even when the typeface beneath the capitalisation was otherwise relatively neutral.

This finding connects to broader arguments about how political communication frames its relationship with the audience. Progressive political design frequently uses visual strategies that suggest participation and openness – lowercase text, conversational tone, inclusive imagery. Conservative political communication more often relies on the visual rhetoric of declaration and stability. Capitalisation is a small but legible part of that rhetoric.

What the typography results also suggested was that participants were not simply responding to individual design elements in isolation. They were reading combinations. A playful font on a red background felt different from the same font on a blue background. A condensed serif in all-caps on a black field produced a different response than the same font in mixed case on a softer tone. The interaction between variables shaped the overall political impression more than any single element alone.

This confirms what the design process itself already suggested: political visual coding is a system, not a collection of individual signals. Its legibility comes from the accumulated pressure of multiple simultaneous cues pointing in the same ideological direction.

When they contradict each other, audiences notice. They hesitate. They qualify their answers.

When they align, the response is immediate.

And that immediacy is precisely what makes political design so powerful – and so worth studying carefully.

Sources:

  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Crowley, D. (2013). Graphic Design and Protest. Design Issues, 29(3).
  • Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
  • Heller, S. (2003). Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

17*What People Actually Said – First Responses and the Weight of Colour

Conducting a survey about political visual perception is a strange experience.

You hand someone a printed sheet, ask them to look at a poster that contains no party logo, no candidate name, no policy position – just three words and a design – and you watch them immediately, confidently, place it somewhere on a political spectrum. Often within seconds. Sometimes with a short laugh of recognition. Occasionally with mild suspicion about what exactly they were being asked to participate in.

The speed of those responses was itself one of the most telling outcomes of the survey.

Participants in Graz were shown a series of design variations of the same slogan – Zusammenhalt. Sicherheit. Zukunft. – each presenting identical text through different combinations of colour and typography. The question was simple: does this feel more liberally or more conservatively coded? No definitions were offered. No political parties were named. The visual impression alone was meant to do the work.

And it largely did.

Colour produced the most consistent and immediate responses. Across participants, certain colour associations proved remarkably stable, tracking closely with the conventions of Austrian and broader Central European political visual culture. Blue designs were frequently and confidently read as conservative. Red designs were placed toward the left. These associations did not require hesitation or analytical effort – they were simply recognised, in the way that long-repeated visual conventions tend to be. Murray Edelman’s argument that political symbols gain meaning through emotional conditioning rather than rational decoding held up well in practice (Edelman, 1964). Respondents were not reasoning about colour. They were remembering it.

This is particularly interesting in the Austrian context, where party colour associations are unusually consolidated. The Social Democrats are red. The People’s Party is turquoise, historically black. The Freedom Party uses blue. The Greens are green. These associations are reinforced across decades of election campaigns, newspaper coverage and street-level political communication. By the time a resident of Graz encounters a blue political poster, the ideological suggestion arrives before the text does.

The survey results confirmed this. Colour functioned as the dominant visual cue. When colour was strongly coded – a deep red, a saturated blue – participants responded quickly and consistently. When colour was more ambiguous – softer tones, less conventionally political palettes – responses became less uniform and more dependent on typography.

This hierarchy of cues is itself rather revealing.

It suggests that in the visual grammar of political communication, colour operates as the primary signal and typography as the secondary one. You read the colour first, even if you do not know you are reading it. Typography then either confirms or complicates that initial impression.

What the survey could not fully disentangle, given its modest scale, was how much of this response reflects genuine visual literacy and how much reflects the particular saturation of colour-party association within Austrian media culture. Would the same results emerge in a context where party colour conventions are less established, or more contested? That question remains open.

But in Graz, in the summer of this survey, the colours did exactly what decades of political branding had trained them to do.

They spoke before the words could.

Sources:

  • Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
by sara.krpuljevic -

Blog Post 10: Starting from the Exhibition

At this point, I do not want to close the topic too quickly or pretend that I already have all the answers. What feels more realistic, and more useful for my future master’s thesis, is to treat this phase as the beginning of a longer process. Instead of ending with a final conclusion, I want to move toward a format in which the research can continue through practice.

One direction that feels especially right to me is to use an exhibition as the starting point of the thesis. I imagine it as a space built around different kinds of illusion, perception shifts, hidden meanings. But the exhibition would not function only as a final presentation of work. It would also become part of the research itself. What interests me is not only how to create these visual situations, but how people move through them, where they stop, what confuses them, what attracts them, what they remember, and what kind of emotional response they produce.

This feels important because it gives me a way to connect theory and practice more honestly. Until now, I have been researching attention, memorability, ambiguity, emotional response, and viewer participation mostly through writing, references, and examples. The exhibition could become the point where these questions are tested in a direct way. It would allow me to observe reactions, collect impressions, and continue the research based on actual experience rather than only assumptions.

For that reason, I see the next step not as finishing the topic, but as building the conditions to study it further. I want the master’s thesis to begin with making, observing, and then writing from that material. The practical work would come first, but not as something separate from research. It would become the source from which the next questions emerge. In that way, the project can stay open, but also become more precise through the responses it provokes.

by selina.pichler -

16*Taking the Survey to the Street – Method, Imperfection and What Comes Next

Research about how people respond to political visual communication is, at some point, going to require actual people.

The survey sheets – printed in two versions, digital and risograph, each featuring the same slogan across a range of typographic and colour variations – were taken to Graz to find out how respondents would describe what they saw. The central question was simple: does this design feel more liberally or more conservatively coded? A secondary question, embedded in the two-format structure of the research, was whether the printing method itself influenced that perception.

The methodology is modest by academic standards. This is not a large-scale political study with demographically controlled sample groups and validated measurement instruments. It is a small survey, conducted locally, designed to probe a specific question that the previous posts in this series have been building toward: are the visual associations that design theorists, political communication scholars and cultural critics describe actually legible to ordinary audiences encountering print in public space?

Put differently – does any of this actually work on real people, in real streets, outside the theoretical framework?

The choice to conduct the survey in Graz was partly practical and partly relevant. Graz is not a politically homogeneous city. Like most contemporary urban environments, it contains a layered political geography: neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood variation in how political communication circulates, which posters appear on which walls, which ideological registers feel familiar and which feel foreign. Asking respondents in this specific context meant working with a readership that already has some existing exposure to Austrian political visual culture – a culture with its own distinct typographic conventions, colour associations and propaganda histories. It is also where I live, so that is convenient (one might even say it played a rather big part of making the choice of where to execute the survey).

The format of the survey was deliberately simple. Participants were shown individual design variations and asked to locate them politically. No explanations were given about what the design choices were intended to communicate. No context was provided beyond the printed sheet itself. The idea was to capture first-response perception rather than considered analytical judgement.

This is, in part, what the survey was always about.

The theoretical argument throughout this series has been that political visual literacy operates largely automatically. Audiences do not consciously decode typography or colour symbolism in the way a graphic designer or semiotician might. They simply respond. They feel a design as radical or institutional, modern or traditional, approachable or aggressive, before any conscious analysis takes place. The survey was designed to catch that response rather than the retrospective rationalisation of it.

The methodological imperfections are real and worth naming clearly. The colour divergence between digital and risograph versions, acknowledged during the printing process, means that responses to the two formats cannot be compared as cleanly as the research design originally intended. Participants in both conditions are not responding to the same object with only the medium changed. They are responding to objects that differ both texturally and chromatically. Any conclusions drawn about the influence of printing method specifically will need to account for this.

There is also the question of sample size, selection bias and the cultural specificity of Graz as a research location. A small local survey cannot produce generalisable claims about how political design is universally received. What it can produce is something more specific and, arguably, more interesting: a situated, localised account of how one set of people, in one city, at one moment, responded to a set of deliberately constructed political visual stimuli.

In the context of a blog series about the political life of analogue media, that situatedness feels appropriate.

Physical political communication is always local. It exists in specific places, read by specific people in specific contexts. A wheat-paste poster in Vienna and the same poster in Graz may be encountered by quite different political imaginations. The survey does not erase that specificity by pretending to statistical universality. It inhabits it.

And perhaps this is fitting for research about analogue media, conducted through analogue methods, in public space.

The results may be imperfect. The print colours did not quite match. The sample is small. The comparisons have limits.

But the question was always worth asking.

Does the visual feel of a design communicate ideology before the words are read?

The next post will look at what people actually said.

Sources:

  • Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Couldry, N. (2012). Media, Society, World. Polity Press.
  • McQuiston, L. (1993). Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

15*Two Versions of the Same Thing – Printing the Survey Digitally and with Risograph

At some point, the design had to leave the screen.

Printing is where political communication becomes physical. It is also where things get complicated in ways that no design software fully prepares you for. The survey sheets were printed in two different ways: through standard digital printing, which produces clean, colour-accurate, consistent output, and through risograph printing, which does not.

This difference was the entire point.

Risograph printing is a stencil-based duplicating process originally developed for high-volume office reproduction in the 1980s. It uses soy-based inks, prints one colour layer at a time and produces results that are characteristically soft, slightly textured and never entirely precise. Colours bleed at edges. Registration between layers shifts. Ink density varies across a page. The output is immediately, visibly imperfect in the specific ways that analogue printing processes tend to be imperfect.

As discussed in the previous post on analogue authenticity, these imperfections are not simply technical failures. They are communicative. The texture of a risograph print signals something about production, about process, about human and material involvement. It looks like someone made it rather than a machine optimising for uniformity.

The decision to produce both a digitally printed and a risograph-printed version of the same survey sheets was therefore not only practical. It was itself a test of the series’ central argument: that the medium shapes how political content is received, independent of the message itself. If participants respond differently to identical designs printed through different methods, that would confirm what McLuhan argued sixty years ago and what contemporary protest aesthetics continue to demonstrate.

The printing process, however, immediately revealed a limitation that needed to be acknowledged honestly.

Risograph printing works with a fixed set of available ink colours. These ink colours do not correspond directly to the full RGB or CMYK colour ranges used in digital design. A blue designed on screen will not print as that exact blue through risograph. A warm red may shift toward coral. Certain combinations of ink layers produce secondary colours that were not anticipated in the original design. The survey sheets printed through risograph would therefore not be colour-accurate reproductions of their digitally printed equivalents.

This was noticed during production and taken seriously as a methodological complication.

In an ideal research scenario, both printing methods would produce visually identical outputs, isolating medium and texture as the only variable. That is not what happened, and pretending otherwise would have undermined the integrity of the survey. Instead, the colour divergence became an acknowledged condition of the research process. Participants viewing the risograph versions would be responding to designs that were not only texturally different but also chromatically shifted from their digital counterparts.

This creates noise in the data. It makes clean comparisons more difficult. It means that participant responses to the risograph versions could reflect both the change in medium and the change in colour, and separating these two effects would be genuinely challenging.

But there is also something honest about this limitation.

Real analogue political communication does not exist in colour-controlled environments either. Protest posters are printed under time pressure with whatever ink is available. Wheat-paste adhesives yellow over time. Street light changes how colours read at night versus noon. The conditions of physical political communication are always imprecise, always subject to material unpredictability.

In that sense, the colour inconsistency between the two versions of the survey is not only a methodological problem.

It is also a reminder of what makes analogue political media different in the first place, and something to have an eye out for.

Sources:

  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Heller, S. (2003). Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

14*Designing the Survey – Choosing Colours, Fonts and What They Might Mean

Before anything could be printed, something had to be put together.

And designing a survey about political visual coding immediately creates a specific kind of problem: every decision you make is already a political decision. Choosing a typeface is not neutral. Picking a colour is not neutral. Even deciding how much white space surrounds text communicates something. This is precisely what the previous posts in this series have been arguing. But arguing that design choices carry ideological weight is considerably easier than actually making those choices intentionally, under that pressure, for a research purpose.

The survey needed to test whether audiences perceive the same slogan differently depending on how it is visually presented. The slogan chosen was deliberately generic: Zusammenhalt. Sicherheit. Zukunft. Cohesion. Security. Future. Three words that could plausibly appear on a campaign poster from almost any point on the political spectrum. Their semantic flexibility was the point. The visual treatment would have to carry the ideological weight, not the words themselves.

This meant the design variables needed to be carefully isolated. Colour and typography became the primary tools.

The colour choices drew directly on the associations discussed in the previous post on political design. Certain combinations were selected to lean into conventions that Austrian audiences would likely recognise subconsciously: cooler blues suggesting institutional stability or conservative politics; warmer reds historically associated with social democratic or labour movements; greens coded toward environmental politics; and starker, higher-contrast combinations leaning toward urgency or radicalism. The aim was not to reproduce existing party branding directly, but to work within the visual grammar that political design has built up over decades of repetition.

Typography followed a similar logic. Serif typefaces were included for their associations with authority and tradition. Clean geometric sans-serifs were used to suggest modernity and accessibility. Condensed, bold letterforms were chosen to communicate urgency or force. More open, lighter weights were selected to feel approachable and contemporary. Each typographic choice produces a different emotional register for identical text.

The combination of these two variables — colour and typeface — creates a surprisingly large number of distinct visual impressions from a single sentence. A blue poster with a condensed serif feels completely different from a red poster with a soft geometric sans. The slogan stays the same. The perceived politics shift.

What became clear during the design process was how quickly intuitive associations take over. Certain combinations felt immediately “right” for a particular ideological register and immediately “wrong” for another, even before any research participant had seen them. This itself confirmed something the blog series has been arguing throughout: visual political literacy is not a skill that requires conscious effort. It operates almost automatically, absorbed through years of repeated exposure to political communication.

The challenge was to pu together visuals, that were legible enough to produce clear responses, without being so obviously coded that participants would simply name existing parties rather than engaging with the broader ideological feeling of it.

Whether that balance was successfully struck is something the survey results will have to determine.

But the design process itself already demonstrated the central argument.

You cannot make an apolitical political poster.

Even when you are trying to.

Sources:

  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
  • Crowley, D. (2013). Graphic Design and Protest. Design Issues, 29(3).
by sara.krpuljevic -

Blog Post 7: The Viewer as Participant

A clear conclusion from the research so far is that the viewer cannot be treated as a passive receiver. Hidden meaning, ambiguity, delayed recognition, and visual surprise only function when the viewer actively completes the message. What matters, therefore, is not only what the design contains, but what kind of action it demands from the person looking at it.

This participation is not limited to physical interaction. It can be perceptual, when the viewer searches for structure or a second reading; cognitive, when meaning has to be interpreted; and emotional, when recognition produces curiosity, tension, or satisfaction. These are not secondary effects. They are part of the communicative mechanism.

This is an important shift in the project, because it moves the focus away from illusion as an end in itself. The stronger question is how design creates the conditions for participation without losing control of the message. From this point onward, the viewer’s role becomes central to the thesis, not as a general idea, but as a concrete design problem.

by arianna.candioli -

FINAL REFLECTIONS

Looking back at this semester, the thing that interested me the most was moving from theory to experimentation.

At the beginning of my research, I explored how objects communicate through perception, semiotics and design. This time, I tried to observe what actually happens when people interact with objects.

The Looking Beyond workshop was probably the moment I found the most meaningful. Seeing the students transform simple objects into something completely different showed me in a concrete way how much a personal perspective can change the meaning of what we see in front of us.

The questionnaire about the three objects also allowed me to observe how everyday objects can become connected to memories, experiences and personal interpretations.

At the same time, this journey also helped me understand some difficulties. During different moments of the research, I felt stuck, unsure about which direction to take or how to transform this topic into something broader. Rather than finding a final answer, this experience helped me understand what I am truly interested in exploring and what feels less connected to me.

I do not think this topic will become the starting point of my thesis, but it remains an important part of my journey. It taught me the value of observing what we often take for granted and creating opportunities to see objects, and the world around us, from different perspectives.