Between text and place: positioning the designer in the liminal
Dr Jeff Leek (awarded 2020)
Supervisors; Dr Caroline Archer-Parré, Dr Jonathan Day
External Examiner: Dr Catherine Dixon
There has been much debate and discussion around the definition of what a graphic designer is. This research seeks to position the designer as an active participant in the urban: engaged, present and situated, no longer temporally and physically distanced from the outcomes of their communication.
The research evidences that graphic design understanding and practice can contribute to debates around the representations of, and interrelationships of, text and place, and become part of the narrative of text and place.
The practice used projection to overlay city surfaces with text, creating a situated dialogue between text and place. However, the practice looked beyond using the urban as an arbitrary or passive ‘screen’, instead using projection to mediate a tension between projection and site; exploring notions, considered by Walter Benjamin, of allegory, montage and the dialectical image. The research uses the graphic designers understanding of typography to actively reinstate text into place as a temporal, interventionist and critical element. The projected typographic messages that resulted were ‘in the moment’; temporally and visually engaging text and place in a synchronous event; a montage, a constellation.
The research concludes with the development of a transferrable framework and methodology for designing, creating and implementing projected graphic interventions that is practical and adaptable for use in various locations and other contexts.
