Universality through Visual Symbols
Book essay
Designing Peace: Building a Better Future Now (Cynthia E. Smith, editor) offers perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, project profiles, and art, focused on the role that design can play in effecting a peace-filled future. The book aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace.
My essay, “Universality through Visual Symbols,” explores the unique collaboration between American anthropologist Margaret Mead and Austrian-American graphic designer Rudolf Modley, who called for a system of universally understood pictographic symbols, or “glyphs,” with the goal of facilitating worldwide communication and cross-cultural understanding.
Publisher
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Funding Support
My research on Mead and Modley was supported thanks to a research fellowship from the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC). Read my full RAC Research Report: “Designing a Pictorial Language.”
Year
2022
“This rather utopian idea might have been dismissed as fantastical had its principal author not been Mead, a renowned cultural anthropologist and international peace advocate.”
— Lee Davis, Universality through Visual Symbols
