Carl Dair, Disrupting Design
A early published article that was a personal touchstone for me: still a grad student just finding my voice, I set out to explore both cybernetics and post-structuralism through design studies.
This article was published in the journal Devil’s Artisan (devilsartisan.ca), edited by the tireless and remarkable librarian and historian Don McLeod. I began by putting Carl Dair into context—his work with professional associations, his international reputation—to offer a summary of his overall project: “Dair attempted to provide a comprehensive definition of design, a solid analysis of its unique formal properties, and a firm standard by which to judge professional design.” I focused on Dair’s key writings, the classic Typographic Quest series for Westvaco Paper (1964–68), and the second edition of his book, Design with Type (University of Toronto Press, 1967). The latter text in particular no doubt has been the foundation of many a designer’s education and library.
But my graduate education in art history in the 1990s gave me, among may other things, a critical approach towards visual culture, and gave me license to not take designs, or designers, at face value. Dair was looking for the inherent rules of visual culture, a structuralist device or some master blueprint from which to cement the foundations of a stable and reliable visual grammar. My interest lay in arguing that his project was impossible by definition, and that the visual design of things tends towards variety; it disrupts the redundancy and motivation necessary for communication, and disseminates rather than fixes readings and meanings.
I took my Master’s of Canadian Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa, and my Doctorate, also in art history, from Queen’s University in Kingston. Art History is no longer (or is no longer solely) the hidebound, stifling, and exclusive club that I first encountered in my undergraduate years. The collegiality and energy of those years, and of my teachers and advisors, was both challenging and liberating. I’m trying to pay them back, or at least do them justice, or at the very least to thank them, with this little online publishing project.
And here’s a nice example of how that can work: a former student of mine, Valery Marier, has put an accumulator website together with links to good scans of Dair’s Typographic Quest pamphlets, and Design with Type, at https://archives.design/. Search for “Dair”. Hopefully, I can contact her and ask to publish, on this blog, the essay on early printing in Canada that she did as an independent study with me.
Meanwhile, here’s a link to download my scan of my article—my former students will all roll their eyes in recognizing it.
“Disrupting Design: A Debate with the Later Writings of Carl Dair.” DA, A Journal of the Printing Arts 48 (Spring/Summer 2001): 31 – 40.