• Matt Kirschenbaum, from , "A White Paper on Information" (1998):
  
  Here I want to argue that graphic design is actually possessed of a deeper and much more specific import for critical observers of the new media: that it is in fact the single most important arena in which the public learns to recognize the look and feel of information qua information. . . . So electronic media, I am arguing, assume material form through the models and renderings and visualizations that we create to interact with it in various information states. This interaction occurs at the immediate phenomenological level of the user interface, and it is here that the visual materiality of information has the potential to become aestheticized–even radically aestheticized. . . .
  
  
• Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, from Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 14-15:
  
  Our primary concern will be with visual technologies, such as computer graphics and the World Wide Web. We will argue that these new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media.
  
  
• Martin Heidegger (from Druckrey), p. 56:
  
       With the word "picture" we think first of all of a copy of something. Accordingly, the world picture would be a painting, so to speak, of what is as a whole. But "world picture" means more than this. We mean by it the world itself, the world as such, what is, in its entirety, just as it is normative and binding for us. "Picture" here does not mean some imitation, but rather what sounds forth in the colloquial expression, "We get the picture" [literally, we are in the picture] concerning something. This means the matter stands before us exactly as it stands with it for us. "To get into the picture" [literally, to put oneself into the picture] with respect to something means to set whatever it is, itself, in place before, oneself just in the way that it stands with it, and to have it fixedly before oneself as set up in this way. But a decisive determinant in the essence of the picture is still missing. "We get the picture" concerning something does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us -- iin all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it -- as a system. "To get the picture" throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it. Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself. Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.
  
  
• Shoshana Zuboff's interviews with managers and employees in companies with mainframe computers.

Question Set (1):

• Why is "picture" the obvious way to interface with information in the computer age?
  
  
• Why did "picture" -- visualization, graphic design -- step to the fore specifically in this period of the 60's onward?

Thought Materials (2):

• Mystery Picture A
• Identity of Mystery Picture
• Mystery Picture B
• Mystery Picture C
• Jan Tschichold, poster and book cover, 1924-25 (from Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, 2nd ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), p. 298
• Paul Rand, title pages, 1948-49 (from Paul Rand, A Designer's Art (New Haven: y=Yale Univ. Press, 1985), p. 178
• Paul Rand, package designs for IBM, 1973-84 (ibid., pp. 220-21)
• Jan Tschichold, from The New Typography, pp. 64, 68, 92:
  
  Modern man has to absorb every day a mass of printed matter which, whether he has asked for it or not, is delivered through his letter-box or confronts him everywhere out of doors. . . . the speed with which the modern consumer of printing has to absorb it means that the form of printing also must adapt itself to the conditions of modern life. As a rule we no longer read quietly line by line, but glance quickly over the whole. . . .
  
  Assymetry is the rhythmic expression of functional design. In addition to being more logical, asymmetry has the advantage that its complete appearance is far more optically effective than symmetry. Henche the predominance of asymmetry in the New Typography. Not least, the liveliness of asymmetry is also an expression of our own movement and that of modern life; it is a symbol of the changing forms of life in general when asymmetrical movement in typography takes the place of symmetrical repose.
  
  . . . there is only one objective type form -- sanserif -- and only one objective representation of our times: photography. Hence typo-photo, as the collective form of graphic art, has today taken over from the individualistic form of handwriting-drawing.

Question Set (2):

• What are these pictures of?
  
  
• What is the role of text in the age of the "world picture"?

Thought Materials (3):

• More of Shoshana Zuboff's interviews with managers and employees in companies with mainframe computers.
• Example of database.

Question Set (3):

• What, actually, did information "look" like in the mainframe age?
  
  
• Why?
  
  
• Meanwhile, what did mainstream, print-based graphic design art (the "Swiss" or "International" Style) look like at in the mainframe age? (Review the Tschichold and Rand designs in Thought Materials 3)?
  
  
• What are the implications for the contemporary age of networked/personal computing?