Visual communication design as discursive language: Examining semiotic spaces through new-materialism

This research begins by recognising that the stories we humans tell ourselves about our relationship with the world have become increasingly individualised, abstracted, and extractive, thus reinforcing a worldview in which humans are seemingly independent from the very systems on which we depend and contributing to the climate and biodiversity crises. Historically, visual communication design as a discipline has played a powerful and problematic role in creating just such stories. To make change, and create different narratives, this research examines ways in which visual communication design can act as a relational epistemology that ‘does’ in the world. It shows how to generate practices, stories and knowledges that are contingent, reciprocal, and affectively attuned to the world of which we are part. This study develops a hybrid methodology for ontological visual communication design, building on the work of designers and design collectives whose practices attend to human and more-than-human complexity. Design is brought into dialogue with feminist new materialist and critical transsemiotic theory, and transdisciplinary alliances are forged with anthropology, archaeology and ethnography in developing ‘designerly’ practices through walking, drawing, diagramming, photographing, counter-mapping, writing and storytelling. Through bringing into relation these specific theoretical alliances and ‘designerly’ practices, this unfolding research creates and tests the ways in which designers can work through a mode of knowing that is immersive, affective, and co-constitutive. The resulting practice acknowledges its entanglement with the world it seeks to engage and understand. Indigenous forms of knowledge, alternative epistemologies and modes of attunement and listening-in make possible the collaboration with more-than-human sensing and knowing whilst active, performative language-ing acknowledges the animated active partnerships in worlding ways of knowing. This project moves visual communication design to become a relational worlding practice that listens with and can be in correspondence between human and more-than-human partners. It proposes that an ontological visual communication design is uniquely positioned to act not on but with and in the world as relational and implicated partner, and that this work is essential if we are to tell different stories in this time of climate and biodiversity crises.