Abstract
The ability to produce and decode dense, multilayered graphic–visual signs determines the capacity to create representations and self-representations, as well as to influence responses and behaviours. Such an ability is not an exclusive prerogative of professional designers. Since the 1960s, numerous studies in the fields of communication design, product design, and architecture have emphasised the value of anonymous design and amateur production. These studies have advocated the recovery of such experiences within professional practice, opening a critical discourse that the phenomena and accelerations of contemporaneity make more relevant than ever.
Today, we are witnessing a reversal of perspective that questions what design can actually do—an underlying scepticism that particularly concerns those situations in which design claims a social function, whether by providing technical and informational tools to improve living conditions or by producing cultural and political change.
This scepticism implies a fundamental questioning of functionalist design, which can be summarised in the paradigm of problem-solving. This paradigm is now being replaced either by a view of design as a tool for problem-setting—capable of revealing and structuring complex problems—or by an understanding of design as a mere cultural manifestation, where project planning gives way to inevitability and inertia.
This text seeks to start again from the scriptural nature of graphic design, to consider its social and political significance while acknowledging the impossibility of both a functionalist–universalist approach and a purely ideological critical stance. The aim is to reconsider how the sign generates meaning in relation to identity, context, and imagination.