Immutable: Designing History is a new book that outlines a thematic genealogy of the document – graphic design’s most banal genre – 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, homicidal, administrative) against the entropy of a document’s movement through space, time and dispute.

Chris Lee will present the research that led to the book, inviting to a discussion on the implications of centering the document in the narration of graphic design history, on how we might think about who the designer is and what the designer does – as practitioners, researchers, educators, and students.

Immutable: Designing History is published by Onomatopee, 2022