Lecture1

Structuralism was a philosophy movement from the 1800s to the 1960s, it is looking at society as a system and asks the questions: How does society organize itself? At the same time differential relations are the key to understand culture and society in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure.
Structuralist theorists concentrated on culture, society and language and the way these work.

Well-known structuralists were for example:
Ferdinand de Saussure (Looked at the structure of language semiotics, every word is a sign and consists of a signifier and a signified)
Claude Levi-Strauss (Anthropology-Kinship structures)
Vladimir Propp (Structures in stores by finding similarities and differences, 31 functions in Russian folk stories: narrative forms, genre, etc.)

Post-structuralism developed after structuralism in the 1960s. It is dealing with the audience and the user of a system in order to understand the system as a whole.

Well-known post-structuralists were for example:
Roland Barthes (Semiotics,visual and linguistic signs combine to direct meaning, signifier and signified come only together in mind of reader)
Jacques Derrida (One of the founders of deconstruction, Spaces between letters, difference between speech and writing)
Wolfgang Weingart (typographic experiments)

Relation to graphic design at the example of designers that rely on the work of structuralist work:
Joseph Muller Brockmann: Design should be rational, functional, mathematical and objective
Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz: „Words divide, images unite“, Simplicity, no ambiguity in design
Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus, „The mental eye focusses through type and not upon it“, Typography has to be functional, understandable and completely invisible.

In this workshop we were working with the program „Processing“ (Webpage: https://processing.org).
Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts. It is created to give designers a better way to learn how to code to create data visualizations.
First we learned how to use processing, we typed some simple codes and started to understand their meaning. After that we built our own house with the knowledge that we achieved before.
It was very interesting to see how you can design forms, draw lines and choose colors by typing a code.

The second exercise was to visualize our own graph with processing. First we created a table for the frequency of the use of special things, I took my shoes. Then we transferred the content of the table to processing and our very own visualized graph popped up. We were also able to change colors and sizes of it to make it look better.

It was my first time to use a program such as progressing and at first it was strange because it was all about coding, but when I saw the outcome I was really amazed. I think it is important to understand the codes that are behind a simple line or a form, because they are everywhere around us.
Also the field of data visualization and visual design with open data is growing really fast, so it is important to be familiar with it.