Poster, The - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010

What is dissent in the case of the image? What are the politics implicit in the critical use of configuration? Design has a general difficulty with being critical. Though less so in the graphic arts, where a tradition of picture-as-commentary is (just) maintained, the technological instrumentality to which design is always prone let alone its obeisance to money means that design generally prefers not to think that it can think. But design is perfectly capable of thinking. Or, to put it another way, configuration is a thought-act. Politically speaking therefore the politics of the image happens when by design (by choreography, by reconfiguration, by (re-) working of the given conditions of representation) the graphic figure is transformed, through re-configuration, into a proposition. It is as a proposition, i.e., as a contribution to thought, that the image undertakes political work.

This article examines representations of the female and male bodies in the Acid Survivors Foundation's (ASF) campaign materials and the assumptions of femininity, masculinity, violence and vulnerability underpinning these representations, in relation to the issue campaign strategies. It finds that women survivors are represented in ASF's campaign materials as victimized, discriminated and vulnerable in every aspect of their life. Women survivors' bodies are represented as defaced, helpless mothers and marked women. Thus women's identity is constructed in the framework of victimhood and disfigurement, helplessness and motherhood, further normalizing female victimization. Active women involved in life struggle and exercising agency are also represented, but not in the posters the most public campaign material. In contrast, men are presented as actors be it as perpetrators of violence, as law-enforcement agents or as activists against violence. Thereby, women are mainly represented as objects of violence, and only secondarily as agents, while men are portrayed as subjects be it violent or protective. ASF's materials show how painfully women are affected by acid throwing. However, lack of gender sensitivity reinforces dominant gender stereotypes, undermining feminist transformative politics and reinforcing patriarchal focus on the body of the women as the body of the disfigured, victimized Other.

Based on some of the current proposals interpreting users as the centre of creation in design (Norman, Jordan or Krippendorff), this article raises the question as to what the author defines as the conceptual possibilities and impossibilities (ponderables and imponderables) of industrial design. It explores possible interpretations between the rhetoric world of increasingly competitive and economy-oriented markets and the rhetorical artifices that can be used by the industrial designer in order to accomplish the functional and emotional requirements of products (transformed into a dream come true for the user). In this approach (and through the visitation of some rhetorical phenomena of consumerism underlying the current social, economical and behavioural context of developed countries) the author underlines the intention behind actions of marketing, design, management and mainly economy-oriented policies that guide those countries responsible for the cyclical creation, in the user, of self-identification with a new necessity: attaining a greater happiness through the consumption of a given product. Linked to this phenomenon, there is the framing of several possible balance strategies, for example: the satisfaction of needs of companies/markets and the careful and sensitive suppression or super-suppression of user-consumer needs.

Within this issue, and by resorting to the general notion of rhetoric in design and specifically to the notion of biomorphological rhetoric applied to design, emphasis is drawn to the importance nature may have to industrial design as an inspiring entity of project methodological praxes, which are both efficient from a commercial standpoint and from a functional-emotional standpoint for the user.

In short, considering the above mentioned scope of limitation of different contexts where the new rhetorical-semantic dimension of design is established, this article proposes that the functional-emotional humanization of solutions developed by designers are a result of the harmonization between the subjectivity inherent to professional ethical deontological values, considering the human-user being, and the intrinsic objectivity of strategic-profitable values supporting producing companies, considering the human-user being. This is because (in the author's perspective), today, more than in the past, both actions must always function as a whole.

We live in a society surrounded by texts where the visual dominates. Moreover, images reflect and influence the expression of social life, culture and the values of a community. The discourse of covers is multimodal by nature and emphasizes modes of communication that are not written. The visual mode is the most important in order to catch readers' attention. In this article I analyse two covers of the magazine Antena Misionera in which a woman from a different culture is represented. I have selected these texts because, in general, the images selected by the media represent certain attitudes of people towards immigrants. The selection of the covers is motivated by my interest on immigration, in other cultures and in the image of women represented in the press. The different visual elements that are found in these covers provide a basis for describing the meanings embedded within the images of immigrant women and provide examples of the portrayal of a non-stereotypical view of this group of immigrants.

China's family planning slogans and posters, looked at over time, reflect an evolution in the communication approach used by the message senders. This article employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches to record family planning slogans and posters throughout China. It finds that changes in the political, economic, technological and population environments in China have been accompanied by significant transitions in China's family planning slogans and posters. Message senders have re-conceptualized their orientation from control to service. While new commercial slogans and posters have come on the scene, there are still many family planning slogans and posters in cities and villages. The forms of slogans and posters have become more colourful and advanced, and the contents have become more elaborated: more humanistic contemporary ones have replaced the intimidating and forceful slogans and posters of the past. The old propaganda model of family planning slogans and posters is undergoing transformation in China to the persuasion model.

Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination, Karen Engle (2009) McGill-Queen's University Press, 183 pp., ISBN: 0773535411, Paperback, 16.99, ISBN: 0773535403, Hardback, 64.00

Exhibition: Revolution on Paper: Mexican Prints 19101950