William Drenttel, "The Other Side of Literacy."
The AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 15:2 (Spring 1997) 8-10.

"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than to push it." --Ludwig Wittgenstein

Literacy is hot the way highway beautification was hot in the mid-60s under the moral leadership of Lady Bird Johnson. The difference this time is that it's the President himself leading the charge, with literacy and education hoisted as the banner of his second administration, and as the presumed keys to his rightful place in political history. Hollywood, too, has recognized the power of this issue: our favorite movie stars, books firmly in hand, are earnestly making Read™ posters for the American Library Association. Ironically, even William Wegman's dogs, Chip and Batty, have embraced the literacy platform, and can be found most mornings performing letterform-inspired canine choreography for pre-literate audiences on Sesame Street. This interest in literacy, one hopes, is not just a fashionable trend--there are deep societal reasons to worry about the state of the Word.

And if literacy is about words, and designers are in the business of shaping words, then designers, by association and by their very definition, should be literacy experts. But why should this surprise us? Designers--going all the way back to Gutenberg and Aldus--have always cared about literacy: they are, after all, key players in the creation of the so-called "visual culture" and are, consequently, great advocates for advancing the cause, if not the understanding, of precisely this "visual literacy." In this era of horrifyingly-rampant-self-expression, however, visual culture itself is part of a more serious phenomenon that I call the pop-culture visual vacuum. The idea of a pop-culture visual vacuum suggests an implicit contradiction: how can a vacuum, itself a void, actually be full of something? This may be true, but can't we be surrounded by so much visual culture that we experience it all as a cultural vacuum? Can't we be inundated by such a barrage of new information, and by an equally overwhelming barrage of alternatives for accessing that information, that we find, to quote Sara Mosle, that "universal literacy remains a surprisingly and frustratingly elusive goal?"

The distinction between information (which is the great casualty of this barrage) and knowledge (which is the great promise of learning and, it might be argued, of literacy itself) lies at the very center of this controversy. The frustration is often played out in educational circles: a seasoned design educator recently lamented her struggle to teach design history, recounting an experience in which she showed her students a poster by A.M. Cassandre and realized that she was, in fact, teaching her students for the very first time about the years between the wars. Alarmingly, she realized that these college-level were receiving perhaps their first lesson in modern European history through this design history course.

Shocking though it may have been, studies have shown that a surprising high percentage of the students graduating from American high schools don't know where America sits on the globe relative to Asia or Europe. By conjecture then, wouldn't such statistics include first-year students in American universities? And wouldn't some of these students be design students? This schism between information and knowledge in general, and between design history and History in particular raises potentially serious concerns regarding the design profession's often narrow perspective where literacy is concerned. I would argue that Literacy, contrary to popular belief, is not equivalent to (or a subset of) Visual Literacy. While it is true that designers today are actively engaged in considering the multiple modes of expression that collectively define visual literacy--formally as well as through historical, cultural and political research--this definition is narrow and insufficient. The reason it is insufficient is that that language is, has always been and continues to be the basis of thought, our most precious resource and our most creative form of expression. It lies at the heart of ideas, which are fundamental to good thinking and, I would argue, good design. "The meaning of a word," wrote Wittgenstein, "is its use in language."

Not long ago, MIT Chair of Epistemology Seymour Papert wrote of the critical distinction between "letteracy" and "literacy", noting the cognitive differences between learning made possible by the alphabet, and learning made meaningful by a host of other cultural, social, intellectual and environmental factors. In this view, both models have value and purpose, and neither exists to the exclusion of the other. As an analogous model, we might say that Visual Literacy is still important, but it does not replace the function of language or the importance of acquiring the other literacy--let's call it "Word Literacy."

That Visual Literacy is a hot cultural phenomenon says a lot about why graphic design is a hot profession. In a visual culture, however, Visual Literacy is easy: it comes naturally, especially to those learning it, and to those growing up "reading" it. This special issue of the AIGA Journal assumes that Visual Literacy is only one side of the literacy equation--and only one aspect of the daily job of being a graphic designer. Most important, it assumes that there is a critical need for graphic designers to pay more attention to the other kind of literacy, Word Literacy. The reasons go beyond political and social posturing, and suggest large and complex challenges.

These issues merit our attention and the attention of our profession because they are complex challenges, affecting multiple aspects of our daily lives. It would be impossible to try to answer the question of how designers can help achieve greater societal literacy. But it is essential to define the broader definitions of literacy, and to illuminate and articulate, for a design audience, some of the basic questions we must ask: How do we teach reading? What is the future of the book? And what is the role of libraries? These are not original questions: on the contrary, they are important precisely because they are so universal.

The role of designers here is not an abstract one. Designers with more knowledge of how children learn to read would, one hopes, design children's books and textbooks differently, just as ADA accessibility issues cease to be theoretical when we see a seriously vision-impaired person struggling to read a text in public. Libraries are also undergoing a transformation not seen since Andrew Carnegie sponsored the building of thousands of public libraries in this country in the 1890s: this time, though, the spaces being built offer entertainment centers and virtual stacks. If the new "library science" extends the capacity of the classic card catalogue through sophisticated navigational options, one can imagine the tremendous challenges ahead for information architects.

Not addressed here, but lurking behind every question, is the role and impact of technology. The reader may read the questions above adding the suffix "in a digital age," or its equivalent, to infer the following: How does one teach reading in a media environment? What is the future of the book in a digital age? Or, what is the role of libraries in an information society? It is my belief that adding such descriptive language does little but skew the discussion towards the inevitability of technological determinism. The presence of technology should not frame what we want: it should help us get there.

Thus, perhaps, the real issues are simpler and the answers less determined. Learning to read is about hard work, patience and good teachers. Books are about translating values and experience into language. Libraries are communal repositories for these values and these experiences--physical spaces to store information and symbolic spaces to represent the idea of knowledge.

Technology will play an increasing role in how and where we learn and read; it will even affect what we read and how it is designed. What's important, though, is whether parents take the time to read to their children; whether teaching is comprehensive enough to ensure that students can manage difficult texts and complex ideas without assistance; and whether libraries can preserve the seemingly incongruous qualities of sanctuary and network. These are choices we will make daily at home, occasionally when we vote, and implicitly every time we turn a knob or click a mouse to bring more media into our lives.

Designers, of course, touch a surprising number of the vehicles by which these choices are made every day. Their role as active, vested participants in our complex literate culture is not only their opportunity, it is their undeniable obligation.

Back to top