There is a reason, why the recently-finished festival is held in Breda and not in more central, bigger cities of the Netherlands, such as Amsterdam, Utrecht or Rotterdam. Breda is known for its Graphic Design course at the St. Joost Art Academy and is the proud owner of the Graphic Design Museum. The festival also included a seminar presentation by seven national and international designers and scientists on the theme of decoding and graphic design, showing how the increasing digitalization influences and changes the field of the graphic designer.
Infodecodata logo; Animals, Jack van Wijk
‘By the ever expanding accessibility of information and the increasing communication possibilities, the media landscape changes fast. What is the effect on the craft of designing? How can we handle that in an innovative and at the same time socially responsible way?’
Speakers at the event included Hans Bouwknegt, lecturer and reader in Digital Media Concepts at the Academy for the Digital Entertainment faculty at Breda University of Applied Sciences, London-based computer programmer and designer Kartsen Schmidt, multidisciplinary design studio, LUST from The Hague, artist-typographer Michiel Schuurman, Sven Ehmann, creative director at Gestalten Verlag, Luna Maurer and Roel Wouter, authors of the Conditional Design Manifesto and Dr. Oliver Vodeb, a sociologist, communication and design theorist from Slovenia.
The speakers gave insights on recent developments on open source software and DIY hardware; sharing knowledge and cooperating with other professionals is now mandatory. Designers are now more often directors in a process instead of producers of a result.
Timeline, Gerlinde Schuller; Legenda SequoiaView, Jack van Wijk
When you enter the exhibition InfoDecoData at the Graphic Design Museum, a huge screen tells you it’s not words, but images that count. True, the weatherman on TV has been replaced by the shower radar; you can check whether your train is delayed with your iPhone App. We consume information at the time and within the format we choose. That’s what InfoDecoData is about. It presents an overview of information design with image icons, scientific data visualizations, info graphics and experimental computer animations.
Knowledge Trees, Gerlinde Schuller
The most impressive is the massive wall, a 26-meter long time line, in the beginning of the exhibition designed by Gerlinde Schuller. While researching for her book Designing universal knowledge (2009), Gerlinde asked people what they considered the most universal images, events and people in world history. As a visitor you can add your own highlight to this wall with historical data and milestones in the history of information design.
Visualisatie harde schijf notebook, Jack van Wijk
Almost strapped to the back of InfoDecoData is Letterlab; a cute exhibition for kids (and people with enough fantasy). Separate spaces are turned into colourful playgrounds, or as the museum calls them laboratorys, where kids of various ages learn about letters with sounds, shape, composition and meaning. For example, on a big wall a computer screen is imitated, where kids can spell and edit words using soft black square blocks.
100 years of Dutch Graphic Design is a semi-permanent exhibition. It’s the core of the museum, with three rooms that lead the visitor past famous and not-so-famous highlights of a century of (Dutch) graphic design. It explores how graphic designers influenced Dutch society with various styles of typography, imagery and design used for its newspapers, government leaflets or even the police motorcycles.
Infodecodata continues at the Graphic Design Museum until September 02 2010.
