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In 2018, a key year for data privacy and data protection in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became applicable. With it came a series of new duties and rights destined to revolutionize the ecosystem of personal data gathering and processing. The GDPR introduced a number of significant provisions that potentially produce far-reaching effects because its obligations apply to any organization offering services or goods to individuals on European soil. As a general aim, the GDPR is intended to re-establish a balance between those entities collecting and processing personal data (i.e., the data controllers) and individuals to whom that personal data belong (i.e., the data subjects), who often are unaware of the extent of the processing.To reach this goal, the GDPR put a priority on design. The regulators assigned unprecedented relevance to the design quality of the information describing both the processing practices for personal data and the rights of the concerned data subjects. This information is commonly communicated in privacy notices. Under the GDPR, the nature, accessibility, and comprehensibility of the information describing data privacy practices must demonstrate compliance with the transparency obligations laid down in Article 12. The research and the open problems described in the following sections aim to contribute to the emerging debate on evidence-based design standards for data protection icons in the EU. Section 2 discusses possible explanations for the use of icons in the data protection domain by listing some advantages and disadvantages. Section 3 introduces the methodological choices for the design of DaPIS, the icon set created as a means to fulfill the GDPR’s requirements. Section 4 addresses some major challenges that surfaced while designing DaPIS and advances some potential answers for further research. We focus on the object of representation of the icons, their function, the methods for their evaluation, and their interpretation. This article also contributes to the broader discussions of design’s role in effective regulation and public access to rights and laws.

This essay presents “surreptitious communication design” (SCD), a framework for design in contentious political contexts. SCD is concerned with crafting messages that are meaningful for intended recipients, but illegible and/or inaccessible for adversaries who seek to undermine communications or harm participants. Borrowing concepts from cryptography and information theory, SCD's key theoretical concerns are described, as are several of the strategies and tactics through which it is operationalized. Two recent anti-human trafficking projects are compared, one developed from an SCD perspective, the other from a traditional mass communications approach. Finally, SCD is considered in relation to the burgeoning “Design for Good” movement.

Teal Triggs was guest editor and wrote an article for this journal issue. Graphic design, it seems, is still searching for its past. Other design disciplines, such as fashion and industrial design, have an established tradition of archiving, documenting, critically writing, and publishing history, as well as engaging with social, cultural, and political contexts. Such histories have, for example, focused on the study of designed objects as well as design movements; celebrated “named” designers and the profession’s history; and explored design in relationship to other areas, such as material culture. This is not to say that graphic design has not had its share of commentators who have been defining approaches to studying its own history. However, there remains a sense that graphic design history is less established as a discipline, and perhaps less exploratory in terms of defining new ways of writing about this history. The intent of this collection is to look again at the issues surrounding how we might define graphic design history, as well as to propose new ways forward.

Invited to speak at the Icograda world design congress in Bejing, in October 2009, I realized that this would be an opportunity to focus on communication design’s blind spots, on the one hand because the organizers of the event considered the unity of typography with new life “as a burning issue in media and communication design,” saying that “we, in the face of a worldwide economic depression, now have a chance to look back at the energy of design, to share experiences, and restore our confidence in overcoming the challenges of this difficult period”1 and on the other hand because their well articulated invitation showed how much we as designers struggle with the manifold and extended notions of communication today, and how difficult it is—when it comes to restoring the social, cultural, and democratic ambitions of the profession—to move from our desire for a “radical criticality” to its attainment in the real.

Overview This paper redefines design based on the realization that communication design, first and foremost, concerns meaning. It distinguishes between intended, constructed, and received or re-constructed meaning. Design is the activity that directs the process, and enables the correspondence between the three. By focusing on received meaning, it shifts design paradigm, from a preoccupation with designing objects for certain uses to focusing on the cognitive processes that underlie the reception of those designs. It defines designs as cognitive interfaces that enable reconstruction of intended meanings. Its approach stresses the semiotic relations between perception and meaning construction to explain the perceptual and cultural codes involved in communication. The position presented here redirects the perceived ground for design away from objects themselves, as independent from mind, toward the conceptual characteristics these objects embody as a means of communication. It redefines designs from finite, fixed objects of aesthetic and practical consideration to semiotic interfaces enabling the reconstruction of meaning by receivers. It challenges the fixation of designs on aesthetic justification by shifting attention to the semiotic functions of cognitive interfaces. Thus, design is approached as a semiotic phenomenon, which is dependent on cognitive and developmental processes, and which coexists with cultural codifications comprising collective and individual environments. Design draws upon the concept of diagrammatic reasoning, and proposes that all designs be regarded as diagrams of mental maps of individual and collective cultures. Its focus on the diagrammatic nature of knowledge presentation necessitates the emergence of intelligent design as informed by a rational selection and a combining of visual syntax to induce specific inferences followed by subsequent behaviors. Communication designers historically have not had adequate rational tools to bridge the gap between meaning and design decisions at the level of design form manipulation. The reliance on aesthetics and style is symptomatic of this gap. This paper demonstrates the possibility of bridging that gap.

The graphic media have, for some time now, been constructors of the social imagination, structures of thought, and devices for discussion in public forums. Their visual nature does nothing to lessen their cultural importance. On the contrary, the image is a powerful way of bringing home a point, both logically and emotionally. As David Olson1 has pointed out, the way information is presented in the graphic media has helped to position us in the world, at least in those cultures such as ours where the use of the symbolism of visual communication is predominantly social. In the world of writing and the editorial media, design objects have allowed the construction of a particular type of discourse and the highly developed use of verbal and visual communication. In the conscious articulation of syntax and punctuation, in the organization of paragraphs, pauses, silences, and digressions, visual signs and their history play a considerable part. Different typefaces, grids, and graphic signs in a text are not only important for their perceptual or formal qualities, they also play a cognitive and symbolic role, and regulate our interpretation as we read. In Western tradition, this matrix has facilitated the generation of numerous devices from books to encyclopedias, magazines, and journals. More recently, with the development of design, the regulation of graphic-linguistic reading can be seen on television screens, in corporate images, and on posters. The technology of reading in our culture is quite sophisticated, as it has been built up over centuries of tradition. Nonetheless, the contemporary era has provided it with new devices and the advent of electronic microsystems has brought the most recent of technological transformations in graphic discourse: the digital revolution. Impetus has been given by the constant search for the expansion of textual and graphic code, the production of knowledge, the storing and exchange of information, and the expansive development of the global marketplace and of telecommunications to a technological synthesis. The set of mechanisms for graphic expression developed to date can be administered in the unique medium of the computer screen; the digital media has become foremost among production processes, allowing for a greater and faster flow of information. Translation by Helen Hodgkinson.

Introduction At the heart of design is the goal of communication, and instilling a belief in the audience about the past, present, or future.' Historically, graphic and advertising design, fields within communication design, have oriented around clients and deliverables, and have maintained a focus on translating written or spoken messages into visual communication. Designers of visual communicationsgraphic design and the related areas of advertising: brand and identities, Web sites, and posters and photomontages-have largely relied on the designer's intuition and training to create appropriate visual messages. However, communication designers have begun to encounter a more difficult task in negotiating the client's vision and the viewer's response to the designed message. This is partly due to the fact that viewers of advertising messages differ from those of past decades. Consumers today are exceedingly diverse in age, income, and ability, and have a wider variety of expectations, influences, and education. Additionally, they have much more exposure to the constant stream of visual stimuli that today's media offer, and more diverse experiences responding to a world of designed messages. For these reasons, relying solely on the designer's intuition no longer may be the most effective approach for creating communications that resonate with a particular audience. Instead, designers must create empathy with the audiences for which they are designing. While product designers traditionally have made greater use of data about the people who their products are designed for, communication designers more often have relied on inference and personal insight when designing communicative artifacts. The result is that these artifacts may fail to inspire the audience they were designed for, or more critically, fail to change behavior in the way that was intended. Recently, the inclusion of user-centered, interdisciplinary methodologies in communication design processes has helped to find appropriate ways to reach today's viewers. Usercentered methods allow communication designers to create the opportunity for a shared dialogue with their viewers, and more important, to create the opportunity for behavioral and social 1 Richard Buchanan, "Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument and Demonstration in Design Practice" in Design Discourse. History Theory Criticism, Victor Margolin, ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 92.

There is little doubt that, in the last twenty years' discussion, the historical culture of industrial design has made a significant contribution to put important theoretical issues into focus; first of all, that of the definition of the discipline and its field of action. I am thinking of, for example, the debate conducted in publications and periodicals,2 the birth of associations, the multiplication of opportunities for international encounters,3 exhibitions, and events in museums. These phenomena are familiar to all, so there is no reason to discuss them at length here. As often has been the case for other areas of study, historical research has turned out to be a preliminary, basic condition for the very nature of industrial design as a culture, a context, and a discipline. Without attempting to retrace the fertile discussion that has taken place on an international level, we should at least mention that the results achieved have been very useful in a wide range of directions, especially for the identification of prevailing historiographic models, the identification of new ones, the expansion of the area of investigation,4 and the refinement of research methods. And while many, perhaps a great many, fields have yet to be explored or have been overlooked, many new perspectives have appeared. I would like to briefly indicate at least three points I feel emerge more than others, and that, in my opinion, are crucial: the relationship between historical research and design research; innovation as a key of interpretation both for history and for design activity; and the role of historical research for design. As we can see, these are wide-ranging arguments. What prompts me to discuss such themes is not the pretense of providing in-depth insight each of them. The fact of the matter is that they are closely interconnected; only their mutual interrelations can give a complete sense to my line of reasoning. Therefore, all I can do is to develop, for each of them, a few lines of working investigation (which have emerged in my work first in the doctoral program, then in teaching and research activities in the Industrial Design course of the Politecnico of Milan), illustrating their points of contact and cross-fertilization. 1 Raymond Queneau, Una storia modello (1966) (Torino: Einaudi, 1988), 6-7. 2 Although it is familiar ground, I would like to recall the important role in the design history debate played, in the past and present, by magazines such as Industrial Design, Stile Industria, Design Issues, Design Studies, Joumal of Design History, and Culture Technique. (some of which still exist, fortunately). Here, I would like to call the reader's attention above all to Design Issues of Spring 1995, entirely devoted to the question of the history of industrial design. In my opinion, it represents an indispensable turning point for the theme discussed here. 3 After the first Convegno internazionale di studi storici sul design held at the Politecnico of Milan, 1991, we can mention the first International Conference on Design History and Design Studies, "Design History Seen From Abroad: History and Histories of Design," Barcelona, 5th Spring of Design, 1999 April 26-28. and the Second Scientific Meeting of Design Historians and Scholars, Havana, June 2000. 4 1 am thinking of the fundamental area of the history of visual design, connected in an increasingly aware manner to the history of products, companies, and institutions; autonomous co-protagonist of a design situation in which certain sectors are encountering a blurring of the boundaries between product design and graphic design. But I am also thinking about the emergence of the historiography of "peripheral countries" and the questions it raises concerning the dominant, AngloSaxon approach to historiography. ? Copyright 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 24 Design Issues: Volume 17, Number 4 Autumn 2001

In response to the social and technical dislocations of the second half of the twentieth century, the conceptualization of function in communications design has broadened from the formalist concerns of modernism. The trend has been towards an integrated, usercentered approach, based on collaborative research within related scientific disciplines. Performance-based criteria, derived from the study of user perception and behavior, have been emerging, redefining assumptions about audience, function, and purpose. The career of Paul Arthur, a Canadian designer who has worked extensively in Europe and the United States, spans the last fifty years and offers a useful paradigm for the growing sophistication and maturity of the discipline of communications design. He has devoted much of his career to issues of wayfinding in threedimensional space, including navigation, legibility, and readability, which have been highlighted in Web design in recent years, but play an important role in all media. Using taped interviews with the designer, I trace Arthur’s development from his discovery of the international style to his reevaluation of its lessons as he tackled major environmental graphics projects, and his development of standards for graphic systems (figure 1).

At a time when public access to visual information is greater than ever before (via compelling print, broadcast, digital, and Internet delivery), it is appropriate that research exploring the influence of visual communication design on people who use, interact with, and depend on it for information is evolving within higher education. In the past decade, the number of individuals engaging in historical design research and critical-theoretical writing about the social impact of design has grown to such an extent that calls for the formalization of design studies as a liberal art1 are gradually being translated into action by individuals within forward thinking institutions. Less developed in academe are investigations of design as a social science.2 This paper discusses the value of undertaking interdisciplinary research involving direct contact with members of prospective audiences as a means of building a knowledge base about user interaction with communication design, with the goal of strengthening both design theory and practice. Recent conceptions of design research as a liberal art and as a social science 3 are not contradictory or competing ideas, but rather two aspects of the same system-the theoretical and experimental branches of visual communication design research, respectively. Just as experimental physicists provoke, test, and challenge the work of theoretical physicists, and vice versa, so should theoretical and experimental efforts mutually inform and stimulate research in design.4 Historically, the dominant conception of our field has been one of a theory/practice dichotomy that has left theorists and practitioners largely uninvolved with the concerns of the other. But commercial design practice more properly could be understood as the applied branch of the field, with experimental research balancing theoretical investigation in graduate programs. The origins of the theory/practice dichotomy in design (with theory being strongly subordinated to practice) are rooted in the pedagogy of the Bauhaus which has, for most of this century, served as the predominant model for both undergraduate and graduate design education in North America. According to Dietmar Winkler,5 the limitations of Bauhaus pedagogy with its primary emphasis on formal resolution of visual elements and intuitive problem-solving, derive from its status as: ... a typical German Fachschule, a school preparing students for vocational practice-no more, no less. The student's 1 See Richard Buchanan's discussion of design studies in, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking," Design Issues 8:2, (Spring 1992); 5-22. See also Gunnar Swanson, "Graphic Design Education as a Liberal Art: Design and Knowledge in the University and the 'Real World,"' Design Issues 10:1 (1994). 2 Establishment of the Ph.D. program at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, represents an important step toward the development of an experimental branch of visual communication design. The program at IIT primarily is concerned with information theory, advanced communication technology, and human factors issues in the human/ computer interface, thereby finding a closer alliance with engineering, computer science, and ergonomics than with the social sciences which are the topic of this paper. The Illinois group has for years been a leading voice for the development of more rigorous testing methods in design. Creation of the Ph.D. program sets a precedent in North America that other top programs should pursue in interdisciplinary areas most appropriate for their programs. 3 See Jorge Frascara, "Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science?" Design Issues 5:1 (1998): 18-29. 4 Experimental research in the strictest "laboratory" sense involving hypothesis testing, and the control and manipulation of variables, still is relatively uncommon in social scientific research. Shanto lyengar and Donald Kinder have conducted mass media research in what are essentially laboratory environments, with the intention of controlling environmental interference to an exceptional degree. See News that Matters: Television and Public Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). In a more general sense, the term "experimental" applies to any form of original social research in which data are gathered through direct contact with persons identified as representative members of a study population. 5 D. Winkler, "Design Practice and Education: Moving Beyond the Bauhaus Model," in Jorge Frascara, User-Centered Design: Mass Communications and Social Change, (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997), 129-135. ? Copyright 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Design Issues: Volume 15, Number 2 Summer 1999 27

My theme is "visibility," a topic that happens to be close to the professional activity of visual design and the disciplinary field of visual communications. I intend to develop this theme in two stages: first, I'll try to consider how far visibility is present all over the world nowadays; then, I'll try to analyze how visibility is produced. The period we live in sometimes has been defined as a "civilization of the image;" and at other times as a "civilization of the written word." Some have spoken of a return to "the global village," a return to a civilization of a "second degree orality"I promoted by electronic technologies. In any case, a very visual civilization, even if it is now also audio-visual, or more precisely multisensoreal, as is promised by so-called virtual reality. The general tendency is to emphasize the importance of the visual in our daily lives and in the scenario of our technological future. In opposition to this kind of interpretation, some speak of the visual in a very critical way; they talk about a civilization of blindness, a "blackout" civilization. Paul Virilio, for instance; a French urbanist who defines himself as a "dromologist," which means a student of velocity; has become one of those critical voices by offering closeup observations of a series of phenomena in our society and technology.2 According to Virilio, the dissemination of technological innovations into our culture has prompted an acceleration of every single process and of all processes at the same time. This speeding up process alters the normal process of communication, which has a relatively slow rhythm, with an instantaneous kind of process that is called "switching" or "transducing." The time of transducing is governed by electronic devices; while the still, relatively slow, rhythm of communications is defined by the human organs and mind. Heavy stimulation can pass through the body of a person invaded by transducing processes, but it does not really interfere with the mind. The surrounding world is then seen as a world of dysphoriathe contrary of euphoria-which means essentially the experience of a world of depression caused by a substantial impoverishment of communication and, even more, by a substantial deprivation of sensory pleasure. I recall, for instance, a very harsh indictment of the air travel industry by Virilio: velocity is achieved at the expense of treating passengers as bodies on stretchers, or even as corpses in the storage drawers of a morgue. This article was originally presented as the ICOGRADA inaugural lecture at the PIRA/RSA Design Conference, London, April 1, 1992

When you boil things down in business, wrote Beatrice Warde of the British Monotype Corporation nearly fifty years ago, good management is no more or less than "the art and science of getting things done efficiently, to the ultimate profit of all concerned." I For Warde, and for the sculptor and typographer, Eric Gill; along with other industrial designers prominent during the Anglo-American printing renaissance of the thirties; what considerably muddied the waters was making the case for rationalism in language designed for the mass market. Motivated by an idealistic belief about the power of aesthetics in print communication design to shape public culture, professional designers scrutinized every detail of letter shape and the language used to advertise printed products; including typography, news and fiction. Along with Eric Gill, Stanley Morrison and other printers and typographers prominent in the movement for good design in Anglo-American commercial printing during the 1920s and 1930s, Beatrice Warde asserted that they intended to "debunk the commonly held concept" that an artist took on commercial work "because he was really a creative failure."2 When the notion of scientific management was still in its infancy (1910-1930), the creative artist who engaged in commercial work struck many as anachronistic because artists were perceived as taking too long to make too few things which appealed only to the idiosyncratic tastes of those who cared about mass-produced designer goods bearing a signature. Warde predicted in the early thirties that modern management principles would grow to include the idea of "integrated" communication management in production, product design and marketing; and that rational design would become "more important than the self-expression of any single artist, or the wonders of new machinery."3 Two instruments of production defined modernism in the factory: the machine and its operator. Considered diametrically opposed in the decades of the arts and crafts movement, John Ruskin once worried about what he called modern "Michael Angelos" forced to pour their best talents into commercial ephemera. He also asked about how business might identify those with "special genius," and how a company could preserve and disseminate such work "to the best national advantage."4 William Morris; who reacted against the "visual depravity of the Industrial Revolution" by promoting the arts and crafts movement and its 1 Beatrice Warde, "Design and Management" (Lecture given to the London Centre of the Printers' Managers

The following considerations are suggested by an excellent essay of Gabriela Goldschmidt, "The Dialectics of Sketching" (1991), for whose publication anybody interested in visual design should be most grateful. The author, an Israeli architect, undertakes to answer the question, "What kind of reasoning does sketching represent?" The question arises because sketching does not consist simply of representing on paper the images held in the designer's mind; it consists rather in a dialectic process, "the oscillation of arguments which brings about gradual transformation of images ending when the designer judges that sufficient coherence has been achieved."' This most relevant question points to psychological issues that aroused my interest. It reminded me of one of the classics on the subject of visual perception, Ernst Mach's treatise The Analysis of Sensations, first published in 1886.2 Mach, a physicist, realized that scientists have no other access to the material world than what is transmitted to them by the senses, particularly the sense of vision. Therefore, the physicist must know what exactly the information generated by vision is and by what rules perception operates. The physicist's vital concern with perception parallels that of architects, who are also dealing with the world of physical matter. They, too, have no other access to what they want to achieve or the means by which to achieve it than what their senses make available to them. In what follows, I am relying on Goldschmidt's essay and on Mach's treatise. Goldschmidt describes the process of creative design as an interaction of arguments and moves. Arguments are the labors of the designer's mind, the explorations of the task and the reasoning about it. Moves are the physical motions engendered by the arguments. Moves are what psychologists call the behavioral aspects of human activity. The architect's moves produce the drawings and they supply essential new food for the arguments. The drawings are tangible visual percepts, and it is their relation to the arguments that is the principle concern of the present discussion. Mental images derive from optical percepts, but they are not identical copies of them. Mach describes them as necessary completions and elaborations of percepts. They differ from the optical 1) Gabriela Goldschmidt, "The Dialectics of Sketching," Creativity Research Journal 4: 123-43. See also, Gabriela Goldschmidt, "Criteria for design evaluation: a process-oriented paradigm," in Y. E. Kalay, ed., Evaluating and Predicting Design Performance (New York: Wiley, 1992). In this article I have not referred to this second paper.

The CBS "eye" is an icon of the television age and one of the most successful American logos of the modern era (Figure 1). This simple strong design, centered within the box-like frame of a television screen, is successful because it is instantly recognizable; _ _ Agll^ _ it conveys quickly and unambiguously the information that one is watching the CBS television network. The flexibility of William Fig. 1) William Golden, CBS Eye, Golden's original design for the CBS eye is another factor in the *~1951. ~success of this corporate coat-of-arms. Since its introduction in 1951, the eye has appeared in black and white and in color, by itself and as part of a sequence of images, in print ads and in animation (Figure 2). The CBS eye is a powerful example of the ability of designers graphic artists, industrial designers, and architects to provide a distinctive visual identity for a corporation. The eye is not an isolated instance of graphic achievement at CBS; it is, rather, part of a long-established tradition of memorable design produced by talented designers working under the aegis of the Columbia Broadcasting System. The tradition and the history of sensitivity to the role of visual design at CBS comprise the subject of this case study. The graphic designer Paul Rand describes corporate logos and trademarks as symbols, and he notes that