174 | thinking with type
William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer envisions cyberspace as a vast
ethereal grid. Gibson’s data cowboy leaves behind the “meat” of his
body and drifts off into a “transparent 3d chessboard extending to infinity.”
In Gibson’s novel, this chessboard grid is projected on an internal surface of
the mind, bound by no screen or window.
The grid as infinite space—defying edges and dominated by the mind
rather than the body—is a powerful instrument within modernist theory,
where it is a form both rational and sublime. In the early twentieth century,
avant-garde designers exposed the grid in order to dramatize the mechanical
conditions of print. After World War II, Swiss designers built a total design
methodology around the grid, infusing it with ideological intentions. The
grid was their key to a universal language. With the postmodern turn toward
historical, vernacular, and popular sources in the 1970s and 1980s, many
designers rejected the rationalist grid as a quaint artifact of Switzerland’s
own orderly society.
The rise of the Internet has rekindled interest in universal design
thinking. The web was invented in the early 1990s (in Switzerland) to let
scientists and researchers share documents created with different software
applications. Its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, never guessed that the web
would become a design-driven medium connecting vast numbers of
differently abled and divergently motivated people around the globe.
Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant
musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has
emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked
the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.
Against the opacity and singularity of unique visual expressions—grounded
in regional preferences and private obsessions—ideas of commonality,
transparency, and openness are being reborn as information seeks once
again to shed its physical body.On the invention of the
web, see Tim Berners-Lee,
Weaving the Web (New York:
HarperCollins, 1999). For a
contemporary account of
universal design thinking,
see William Lidwell, Kritina
Holden, and Jill Butler,
Universal Principles of Design
(Gloucester, Mass.: Rockport
Publishers, 2003). See also
William Gibson, Neuromancer
(New York: Ace Books, 1984).To produce designs that are objectively informative is primarily
a socio-cultural task. —josef müller-brockmann, 1961return to universals