Otto Neurath, designer and sociologist, made beautiful pictograms that invoked the data he displayed. If his units represented unemployed people, they might take the form of hunched, depressed silhouettes, hands in pockets. Days of travel across the ocean might be expressed as jagged ocean waves.

We often forget that information graphics need not be cold and clinical.  The book “Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis” serves as a tonic to that tendency.

The blurb for the book: “Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath was a seminal Modernist figure. Much attention has been given to his achievements in the fields of graphic design and philosophy (Neurath was a member of the Vienna Circle, founder of the Museum of Society and Economy, inventor of the ISOTYPE pictorial system and champion of the Unity of Science movement), yet his involvement with urbanism and architecture has been all but ignored. From 1931 onwards, Neurath collaborated with the International Congress of Modern Architecture and its chief exponents–Cornelis van Eesteren, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy–to develop an international language of urban planning and design. More experimentally, throughout the 1930s a fascination with visual media led to an attempt to franchise the Museum of Society and Economy by establishing international satellite museums. This volume contains a text by curator and writer Nader Vossoughian, which offers a fresh perspective on one of the most versatile intellectuals of the twentieth century.”

In the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the BABEL FISH is something you stick in your ear so you instantly understand any language. Everyone should have one.

In Tokyo a hotel clerk gave me meticulous instructions and drew ideograms on a scrap of paper before I set off to visit a friend who lives on the outskirts of the city. Shinjuko station has a throughput of nine million commuters everyday, it is very large, very crowded, and has lots of signs and pictograms to help passengers find their way. Failing to relate the marks on my paper to any of the graphics in the station, I cautiously approached a sympathetic couple. After a lot of bowing and nodding, I discovered I’d badly miscalculated – they were deaf and dumb. Recognizing the problem, a passerby joined in, he said he spoke some English. Maybe he did, but he also had an amazing stutter. Somehow I found my way.

Three hundred years ago Leibnitz recognized the same problem and attempted to encapsulate all human knowledge into symbols so that anyone, anywhere, could understand everything, and everybody understand anybody. He called his system CHARACTERISCA. His symbols were also to be used like numerals in that they could calculate solutions for every conceivable problem. It proved to be rather more complex than he though so it never got sorted out. Other moves towards this lingua francainclude a suggestion by the American Tourist Association to introduce Red Indian HANDAGE, invented languages like ESPERANTO, systems of symbols and pictograms like SEMANTOGRAPHY, invented by Charles Bliss, which comprise a hundred signs, and ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education), invented by Otto Neurath. There are countless other systems, and as the proliferated Henry Dreyfuss (visual lexicographer) compiles a data bank. This he published as Symbol Sourcebook.

Forwarded by Buckminster Fuller gloriously demonstrated the problem: ‘Henry Dreyfuss’s contribution to a new world technique of communication will catalyze a world preoccupation with its progressive evolution into a worldian language so powerfully generalized as to swiftly throw into obsolescence the almost fatally lethal trends of humanity’s age-long entrapment in specialization and the limitations that specialization imposes on human thinking….’

Paradoxically the acceleration towards mass communication has revived the need for pictograms and in the small change of international discourse  the printed word has been forced to retreat. Stick figures on public bathrooms, icons on computers, and traffic signs. Life would seize up without them. Most are crude in conception, ambiguous in signal, parochial in meaning and variable in dialect. One exception was the graphic language for the Munich Olympic Games designed in 1972 (Googled) A matrix of shapes, an alphabet of components, a pictorial vocabulary . A TRULY VISUAL ESPERANTO.

You! Yes, you; also known as the ‘reader,’ play an important role in today’s context so you better pay attention. Or else I may release Shizuru upon you.

-Did you ask for me Natsuki-chan???

-Not now woman, I’m in the middle of something!

-Ara…

First of all let’s get things straight; if you haven’t read the introductions of this blog do so!! I’m Natsuki and what I’ll talk about today is basically an introduction to iconic language that you yourself are very familiar with. Red Bananas! You as the reader may think you grasp whatever I say right now such as my peculiar comment on a colorful fruit. I, the author am communicating with you to the extend that you also have what I have in mind. As I put pen to paper I was thinking about red bananas, and a certain image that instant came to your mind. You were too to think about weird red bananas, a similar if not the same image flashing before you. Therefore communication, it seems is most usefully seen as the transferring of a picture from one mind to another. But! Aside from Shizuru, no ordinary human being is telepathic, and because they are not, some physical intermediary must be used to effect such transfers. If you accept this suggestion, which I know you do, then iconic communication becomes something quite precise. Simply put; the use of icons in transferring pictures from one mind to another. I know you’re getting all cocky inside for the air of obviousness of my statement but this is something that must be cleared before we go on.

There once lived a man named Otto Neurath. He was, after WW1, responsible for the inauguration of the Museum for Housing and Town planning, which later on developed a wider function as it adopted the title Social and Economic Museum of Vienna. He later married his first employee at the museum, and the names Otto & Marie Neurath became inseparable from then on… I did not tell you this story for you to start daydreaming about you prince charming, no. This couple played the parental role in the evolution of what became known as the Isotype Movement. Isotype. Don’t just memorize the word Shizuru always scolds- so what does isotype mean? International System of TYpographic Picture Education. There by from the full name you can clearly understand it was a method showing various contexts in pictorial form such as social, economical, technological,historical … etc and understanding of these connections globally. A characteristic of the Isotype system is that it permits symbols to be ‘compounded’. Obviously, the individual symbols are designed in such a way that they may be used in association with others, to produce more complex designs. But they were also conceived with a view to it being necessary both to qualify a symbol, by the addition of supplementary detail, or to combine two or more symbols (e.g. ‘man’ + ‘mining’ = mine worker). Another rule of Isotype is that greater quantities are not represented by an enlarged pictograms but rather in greater quantity of the same-sized pictogram. In Neurath’s view, variation in size does not allow accurate comparison – and he is right! What are we going to compare height, length or the area?  On the other hand, repeated pictograms, which always represent a fixed value within it’s chart, can be counted if necessary. Isotype pictograms almost never depicted things in perspective in order to preserve the clarity, and there were other guidelines for graphic configuration and use of colour. As the name Isotype suggests the visual education was always the prime motive behind Isotype, which was worked out in exhibitions and books designed to inform ordinary citizens (including schoolchildren) about their place in the world. It was never intended to replace verbal language; it was a “helping language” always accompanied by verbal elements.

And then there was Otl Aicher or Otto Aicher whichever fancies your taste. Like the previous Otto, this man plays the uttermost significance in our context today. Walk down any city street or road reagrdless of it’s geography and you’ll find yourself surrounded with the thoughts, therois and designs of Otl Aicher. And the reason why I, Natsuki, you’re favorite lecturer like this man can be summarized in his quote in 1991; ” Design must surrender to practical criteria.”

For you Shizuru, the sappy romantic, learn that this man was against Nazi movements, fell in love with his close friend’s sister Sophie Sholl (founder of White Rose resistance movement), married her and also lost her to the executions held for their resistance movements. Romeo and Juliet stands like a comic relief next to this.

Anyways back to our topic, Otl Aicher was the principal figure behind the establishment of visual identity of the Olympic Games in Munich (1972), he was invited to undertake other significant assignments simultaneously, one of which was for Frankfurt Airport. For both of these he developed and extended the system of symbols proposed originally for the Tokyo Olympics. With Gerhard Jocksh’s assistance, Aicher developed the Tokyo symbol set on a more ‘geometric’ basis. He extended significantly the range of symbols to form a comprehensive and coherent set. The geometry of Aicher’s symbols was derived in part by initially using articulated manikins made of cutout cardboard with jointed limbs. The design of individual characters was systematised and geometricised and therefore assumes a somewhat more rigid appearance than that employed by the Neuraths. The set developed for the Olympics amounted to approximately 180 symbols, of which 21 were for the Olympic sports at that time (more sports in time have been given Olympic status). During the Munich Olympics these were applied to over 2,600 signs required for the Olympic sites; the majority of these signs included the pictograms. The number of applications in printed matter must have exceeded this by at least a factor of ten and the symbols were also applied as comparatively decorative elements in buildings, to produce an appropriate ‘ambience’. Subsequently, ERCO Lighting of Lüdenscheid, Germany, worked with Aicher to produce a set of nearly 900 symbols. These are available in different sizes and as adhesive and illuminated signs. Aicher referred to his symbols as a ‘Ziechensprache’. (Interestingly the German word ‘Zeichen’ can mean both ‘symbol’ and ‘drawing’, and ‘character’ – as in font, ‘reference’, etc. Basically this can translate as ‘symbollanguage’ or ‘drawn language’). As a consequence of ERCO’s effective international marketing, Aicher’s ‘drawn language’ has been applied worldwide. It has also been adopted by and adapted unofficially-and clumsily, to an even greater number of sports-related buildings and organisations. Regarding his design for the Olympic games “think of matchstick men,” the artist once said.. Those men and women on restroom signs, the knives and forks for restaurants, the stripe that denotes everything from no dogs to no smoking, as well as the short-hand runners, fencers and swimmers are all part of the lexicon of our times: design in the service of pragmatics.
In short, Aicher was a generous, innovative designer who thought about more than design and also taught more than design. As in any design movement, Aicher, who worked for many corporate clients with great effect. (Did you know he also designed the logo for Lufthansa airlines? Well the food may suck but the logo is good.)

Well thats it from me today! You’re all released. And a certain person named Ice can eat dirt- think twice before saying I wouldn’t be able to handle a blog! Ha!

]]> http://scienceandvalues.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/pragmatism-positivism-science-and-values-in-the-1930s/ Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:53:36 +0000 Matthew J. Brown http://scienceandvalues.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/pragmatism-positivism-science-and-values-in-the-1930s/

This week, we’re discussing the first four chapters of George Reisch’s book, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, Don Howard’s “Two Left Turns Make a Right” (from Logical Empiricism in North America, which also has several other great essays), and Alan Richardson’s “Engineering Philosophy of Science: American Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism in the 1930s”

In the Introduction to Science, Truth, and Democracy, Philip Kitcher begins,

From time to time, when I explain to a new acquaintance that I’m a philosopher of science, my interlocutor will nod agreeably and remark that that surely means I’m interested in the ethical status of various kinds of scientific research, the impact that science has had on our values, or the role that the sciences play in contemporary democracies. Although this common response hardly corresponds to what professional philosophers of science have done for the past decades, or even centuries, it is perfectly comprehensible. (xi, emphasis added)

And later, he describes his book “as an attempt to venture into areas that philosophers of science have neglected“(xiii, likewise).

One of the goals of this week’s readings is to call into question the historical claim that the sort of topics discussed by Kitcher (and likewise, by Longino, Kourany, etc.) have been generally neglected by philosophers of science.

In this history, three figures loom large in my mind:

1. Otto Neurath—Key player in the Vienna Circle and the Unity of Science movement
2. John Dewey—America’s foremost philosopher and intellectual in the 1930’s, leader of Pragmatism.
3. William Malisoff—Russian-born American biochemist and founding editor of the journal Philosophy of Science

These three philosophers, their associates, followers, and students bear the bulk of the responsibility for the creation of philosophy of science as an area of focus in philosophy. Coming from different traditions, with somewhat different agendas, and sometimes at odds, these philosophers had several things in common. One of the shared links is a strong interest in the relationship between science, values, and politics. Expressed differently in the work of each, all showed a deep interest in the power of science for social liberation, the morally and politically responsible practice of science, science policy, and science planning.

One could argue, on this basis, that the questions that Kitcher assumes have been neglected by philosophers of science for decades or centuries are precisely the questions at the core, at least from a historical point of view, of the discipline.

Thoughts?

A young Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)

*Apologies for late submission!

The “Austrian School” in economics traces its tradition to the work of Carl Menger (1840-1921).  Menger’s theoretical development of the origins of price has grouped him with the contemporary “Lausanne School” (identified with the axiomatic mathematical economics of Leon Walras) and the work of British economist William Stanley Jevons, all as part of the “marginalist revolution” in economics, which grounded the mechanism of price-setting in the value attributed to various quantities of goods by their buyers and sellers—a keystone of neoclassical economic theory and a critical element in the argument against the control of the economy by the state.

Menger developed his theories in opposition to the “German Historical School” headed by Gustav Schmoller (1838-1917), which gave Menger and his followers the label “Austrian”, intending the label as derogatory.  Schmoller insisted that theoretical economics disregarded essential differences in national traditions, and that only detailed historical investigations could arrive at a firm understanding of political and economic activity. The opening of the conflict between Menger and Schmoller occurred following the publication of Menger’s Principles of Economics (1871), a mere four years after Menger had received his law degree.  An anonymous review signed “G. Sch.” in a literary journal criticized the text’s scientific pretensions.  When Schmoller dismissed Menger’s Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics (1883) in the Historical School’s house journal, it provoked what became known as the Methodenstreit (“battle over methods”).

To summarize with brutal brevity, the Methodenstreit revolved around whether or not the abstract principles of economic theory could be said to have any sort of epistemological validity.  While not denying the possibility of theory, Schmoller argued that any meaningful social and political theory was necessarily a project for the distant future (which could only be accomplished through detailed historical study), and that theoretical economics was nothing but an apologetic for advancing the dogma of the self-interested economic actor.  In what would remain a stock argument of economic theorists, Menger observed the inevitability of theoretical presupposition in political and historical explanation and defended his practice of abstracting the regularities of a side of human life that was of special importance in establishing and analyzing economic policy.

In any event, Schmoller was an influential figure within the German state university system, and the conservative statist policies his school endorsed were amenable to the policies of the unified German state under the chancellorship of Bismarck.  The School would only decline in importance with the failure of economists trained in the Historical School to offer useful policy recommendations during World War I (prompting the state to turn to the industrialist Walther Rathenau).  This failure followed the influential methodological critique that Max Weber (1864-1920), a disillusioned product of the Historical School, initiated in his landmark 1904 essay “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy”, which (among other things) criticized any approach that denigrated theory but still claimed relevance for policy.

Meanwhile, the economics of the Austrian school was carried into the twentieth century by Menger’s students Friedrich von Wieser (1851-1926) and his brother-in-law, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), through whom Austrian economics would enter the English-speaking world.  Following World War I, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), who had studied at the University of Vienna and was a friend of Weber, became the principal proponent of Austrian economics.  Mises was confronted with a socialist government (“Red Vienna”) and the new “logical positivist” epistemology of the Vienna Circle, and set himself up as an eager opponent of both.

Mises, like his forebears, had deep methodological concerns, which he exercised in his criticisms of logical positivism’s philosophical attempt to provide knowledge (and thus governance) with certain foundations.    He spelled out his own notions in the 1933 work Epistemological Problems of Economics, which again offered a justification for abstract economic theory based on a priori principles, and the idea that “All human action is rational”, i.e. goal-seeking.  He also carried the anti-socialist side against Vienna Circle mainstay Otto Neurath and allies in the “socialist calculation debate” of this era, arguing that a state with ownership of all property had no viable mechanism to replace money and the market as a means for allocating goods efficiently.  The debate would become a major cultural reference point in later political battles within economics.

In the 1930s, the Austrian school was uprooted.  Mises accepted a position in Geneva before moving on to the United States in 1940.  Another key standard-bearer of the Austrian School, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), who was a student of Wieser and a member of Mises’ circle in the 1920s, moved to the London School of Economics in 1931, where he would become a critic of the influential John Maynard Keynes, and where he would remain until 1950.

The early history of the Austrian School played out in the perpetual shadow of other economic programs, whether Schmoller’s Historical School, British Keynesian economics, or the more axiomatic formulations of neoclassical theory.  Nevertheless, the School’s work has had enduring influence in economic discourse.  Its opposition to socialist planning and New Deal and countercyclical fiscal policies, and Friedrich Hayek’s popular anti-socialism tract Road to Serfdom (1944) and his central role with Milton Friedman in the Mont Pèlerin Society have served to link the School to more recent conservative political and economic thought (though School members such as Hayek were more amenable to certain kinds of targeted state intervention).  Further, the School’s advocacy of transcendental theory and its role in battles against the German Historical School, as well as (with Karl Popper) its later protest against the “scientism” of the logical positivists, place its participants in a decidedly complex position within 20th-century debates concerning the relationship between epistemology, science, economics, political freedom, and public policy.

This post is undertaken safe in the knowledge that there is an enormous literature—as well as landmine-filled debate—surrounding the validity of various programs in economics and their influential political legacies.  Thus the historiography is, to this day, firmly encased in the hermeneutics accompanying disciplinary jockeying.  Rather than attempt to sort out this literature (to which I am a neophyte), I’ll simply note that I have generally relied here on historian of economic thought Bruce Caldwell’s very useful, and I think measured, introduction to the subject in the first part of his generally laudatory intellectual biography, Hayek’s Challenge (2002).

Information graphics rank pretty high on the list of preferred graphic design porn. They don’t even have to convey any relevant information and I still love them (see my post on the Puma tag from a few days ago). So of course I couldn’t help but salivate a bit over a review of a book about Otto Neurath in the latest issue of Art in America. During the 1920s Neurath championed the idea of using pictures to represent complicated statistics and information, not just because they look cool, but as a genuine force of social good: reasoning that the easier these complex ideas are to understand, the easier it is for people to make informed political and social decisions. And let’s just all agree, they look cool too.

See lots more examples at the Isotype Institute.

Estamos en los primeros momentos de una gran crisis económica, como ya es totalmente patente. Los medios de comunicación y los gobiernos han intentado ocultarlo el mayor tiempo posible, en parte para permitir que la clase poderosa de este planeta siguiera enriqueciéndose unos años más a costa de los de siempre, en parte porque comunicar a la opinión pública lo que estaba a punto de pasar, hubiera precipitado los acontecimientos, y tal vez hubiera empeorado la situación a corto plazo. Pero ya es demasiado tarde, los ciudadanos ya están comprobando en propias carnes lo que se avecina, y la mayoría ya intuimos que lo peor está todavía por llegar. El problema de fondo no han sido las hipotecas subprime, como nos han querido vender. El problema REAL de la Economía mundial, a mi entender, es que existe una “clase” (en el sentido tradicional de clase social), un conjunto de la población de este planeta, digamos un 1%, que saca provecho del trabajo del 99% restante de la población para enriquecerse y conseguir más poder. Los demás problemas, yo creo que son consecuencia de este problema principal. Estamos en una crisis de crédito, en una crisis financiera que inevitablemente se ha trasladado a la economía real de las familias españolas. Vamos a ver tasas de paro alrededor del 25% en los próximos 3 años. Parón del consumo, menor demanda de bienes y servicios, posiblemente deflación (caida de los precios), retroceso en el crecimiento del PIB, sectores enteros de la economía (construcción, automóvil y todos sus colaterales) en grandes problemas para sobrevivir. Y esto se traducirá en despidos, en paro, en un gran malestar social, al que se le unirá una gran dificultad por parte de los Gobiernos en financiar los sistemas de ayuda social. No se puede explicar en un solo post la naturaleza de esta crisis, pero resumiendo, en mi opinión es una crisis de crédito, y sobre todo, una crisis que se ha gestado como consecuencia de un desfase enorme entre la economía virtual que ha creado este 1% del que hablo para enriquecerse, y la economía real del 99% restante. Seguiremos ahondando en la explicación de esta depresión económica que ya estamos viviendo, que en mi opinión tiene una explicación filosófica, de crisis de las ideas y el sistema de valores de la actual sociedad.

El caso de Jesús Zamora Bonilla es bastante habitual por nuestras tierras. Es un profesional que parece gozar de cierta reputación, labrada con la motivación de satisfacer un ego que debe ser bastante grande. Este hombre se vanagloria de ser el capitán de un barco virtual llamado “Otto Neurath” (¿?). Se le ha visto aparecer por ciertos programas de TelePSOE rematando las intervenciones de algunos científicos brillantes que, sinceramente no sé que hacen metiéndose en ese tinglado (supongo que intentar promocionar sus libros). En el enlace que les facilitamos, pueden ver alguna de estas intervenciones, y empaparse de esa filosofía barata que afortunadamente ya huele a cadáver. No se lo pierdan, merece la pena.

http://abordodelottoneurath.blogspot.com/

¡Última hora, atención!: ahora este hombre se dedica a…¡la promoción de la divulgación científica!…¡Que Dios nos pille confesados!…madre mia…¡si es que así nos va!

Yo tonteando y al final va a ser verdad.  Bueno, no exactamente como yo pensaba.

Si algo compartimos con los italianos, además de nuestro descarado encanto, es la sensación de ser países con fuerte tradición  católica.  Y es que tener a la sede de San Pedro a dos pasos del Palazzo Quirinale conlleva lo que conlleva.  Con todo, como en España, hay una asociación de ateos/agnósticos/humanistas/librepensadores.  Que por cierto, según tengo comprobado, idolatran a Zapatero.  Y es que en Italia puede que lo único que conozcan de nuestra política sea a nuestro presidente, pero éste no les es indifirente.  Para un italiano progresista es el nuevo mesías laico, para uno conservador es el anticristo o un pariente cercano.  No hay punto medio.

El caso es que aquí también quisieron apuntarse a la ya famosa campaña del bus ateo empezada en Londres.  Su mensaje inicial “La mala noticia es que Dios no existe; la buena, que no era necesario”, fue vetado por un órgano de control de la publicidad.  Parece ser que su nuevo mensaje, “La buena noticia es que en Italia somos millones de ateos, la mejor es que creemos en la libertad de expresión”, ha sido ya autorizada.  Al final solo circulará un bus y no dos como estaba previsto, y en Génova, al parecer.  A pesar de que el lema inicial era más cortante que el de la campaña original, que  deja lo de la existencia divina en un sutil probablemente, resulta un poco triste que una religión, por mayoritaria que sea, pueda ejercer tal presión que obligue a modificar el discurso de otro grupo de creyentes.  Bueno, de no-creyentes, de a-creyentes, de…

Para saber más:

• A bordo del Otto Neurath: El bus ateo en Italia
• Il Secolo XIX: Modificato il messaggio, l’ateo-bus può circulare

J’ai trouvé sur le blog Six Pixel of Separation une histoire brève mais précise d’Internet.

Je la partage avec vous car je crois qu’elle vaut la peine d’être vue.

08m:10s en anglais. Bon visionnement.

Quelques articles sur le sujet

Comment ça marche

Wikipédia

L’Internaute

Laurent Chemla

Source originale: LONJA Visual Communication Die Geschichte des Internet

Video of my talk, “a history of the stick figure” at Ignite Portland 2, February 5, 2008 at the Bagdad theatre.

Here are a few resources from the talk:

ISOTYPE charts by Otto Neurath
Stick figures as numbers. Three ISOTYPE charts shown as examples.

AIGA Symbol Signs
The complete set of 50 passenger/pedestrian symbols developed by AIGA, available in EPS and GIF formats. Download your own bathroom guy!

Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices
Every road sign imaginable is here. The manual defines the standards used by road managers to install and maintain traffic control devices on all streets and highways. Available for download as PDF.

Stick Figures in Peril
Flickr group of warning signs showing stick figures in dangerous, often life-threatening, situations. A must see.

A Year in Iraq
New York Times article and chart in ISOTYPE style by Alicia Cheng.

Many thanks to linuxaid for shooting and posting all of the presentations.

Gerd Arntz, Dec 11, 1900 – 1988, was the lead designer of Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE Institute (the International System of Typographic Picture Education, 1936-1945). The Institute used “speaking signs” to visually convey complex statistical information, and made it accessible to the general public through museum installations and printed publications.

It would be fair to credit Neurath with the invention of the modern “stick figure” as seen in today’s street crossings, rest rooms and construction signs, as he was the first to develop a method of using the human form as a surrogate representation for statistical information. But if Neurath was indeed the father, Arntz was the stick man’s tailor. Under Arntz’s influence, early naturalistic representations gave way to flat, less individual and more abstract designs, eventually becoming the elements of a visual dictionary.