Funding: AHRC DTP
Project Title: Design, Information Disorder and the American Mediasphere
Supervisors:
Prof Craig Martin (Edinburgh College of Art)
Dr Oliver Escobar (University of Edinburgh)
What was your research about?
In the last decade, one of the most popular news topics has been the news itself. The terms ‘fake news’, ‘mis/disinformation’, ‘post-truth politics’ and ‘information disorder’ are often used to characterise our fractured, largely digital, media ecosystem where false and misrepresented information circulates alongside factual information. Of particular concern are the effects of this disorder on democratic systems of governance. In an American context, this ‘truth decay’ impacts the ability to have reasoned debates, contributes to political polarisation and can create feelings of anxiety, isolation and socio-political vitriol in the populace (Kavanagh and Rich, 2018, p. 6). However, studies about information disorder from academics, research institutes, non-profits, policymakers and media organisations do not consider the role of design. Rather, existing research focuses on media studies, political historiography and socio-economic drivers. The present thesis contributes new knowledge to the topic of information disorder from the perspective of design scholarship. It considers the production, distribution and mediation of news information, as well as the visual rhetoric of information disorder, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between design and (mis/dis)information. In doing so, it addresses research gaps identified in the three main disciplines of concern in the thesis, including design, media and journalism studies and political philosophy.
This thesis is a contemporary design history of communication design in two eras of ‘information disorder’ in American media, the late 1890s and years surrounding the 2016 election (Wardle and Derakhshan, 2017). The thesis actions this history by applying its learnings to current design practice. The aim is twofold: first, to unpack the relationship between communication design and information disorder by analysing how design, influenced by ideological constructs in design, methods of practice, technological restrictions and developments, and economic pressures, affects the way political news is produced, mediated and distributed. Having demonstrated the socio-political valence of design and establishing a visual rhetoric of political aesthetics through this analysis, the thesis turns towards its second aim: examining the ethical responsibilities of communication designers given design’s effects on political information. Taking a normative stance, the thesis argues that necessary is both ‘paradigm repair’, the re-examination of pedagogies and ethical codes internal to design practice, as well as ‘boundary work’, collaboration between designers, policymakers and researchers to incorporate design into solutions to information disorder (Berkowitz and Schwartz, 2020).