Ruben Pater

¡"Las políticas del diseño” de Ruben Pater ya en español! El libro combina diseño, periodismo y activismo e invita a diseñadores, comunicadores y estudiantes a repensar la responsabilidad del diseño en un mundo globalizado. Tal como recuerda Pater “las herramientas de comunicación nunca son neutrales. El diseño no solo comunica, también construye realidades”. #editorialcietochentagrados #cietochentagrados #diseño #design #designer #diseñografico #diseñointeriores #diseñoeditorial #rubenpater #comunicacionvisual #barcelona #madrid #libro #bookstagram

The Politics of Design is finally available in Spanish translation! I am very proud. Las Politics del diseño está disponible en traducción Español por fin! Estoy muy orgulloso. Hecho por @editorial_cientochentagrados

Tomorrow I will be speaking in the wonderful festival @latinograficas  on ‘Popular Journalism’. I will be showing some of my projects and stories from my books. Access is free but please do sign up! See you there. To participate you just have to access the link and sign up  👉 https://grafic.as/charla-ruben-pater 📆 See you tomorrow Thursday 09/29 2:00 p.m. (GMT-4) Asuncion and Santiago 3:00 p.m. (GMT-3) Buenos Aires and São Paulo 1:00 p.m. (GMT-5) Cali, Quito and Mexico City 12:00 p.m. (GMT-6) Guatemala City

Big brother is out @capitalslock

Visually communicating Covid-19 prevention measures requires clear and inclusive language. In the Netherlands the Dutch government’s communication department designed an expansive list of icons for Corona measures. Last week the Dutch NGO @women_inc pointed out many icons still portray traditional and sexist gender roles. Even though the Dutch government invokes gender equality, and prides itself on progressive politics towards gender. Icons for police, advisors, doctors, and authority figures are recognizably male, while nurses, hairdressers and handicapped assistants are depicted as female. Even though the majority of GPs in the Netherlands are female, and institutions like the police are actively looking to become more inclusive. Not only the icons used for corona measures, also other applications like the Dutch military in the Carribean, shows military personnel as male, while the only female icon is a nurse, even though 10 percent of Dutch military personnel is female. What’s dissappointing is that the abstract nature of the icons could very well have resulted in gender neutral icons which could be interpreted as non-binary, male, female, or other forms of gender, such as #facebook has done with their friends icon in 2015. Support the call by @women_inc to demand more inclusive iconography from the Rijksoverheid communication department. All images Rijksoverheid #thepoliticsofdesign #politicsofdesign #visualcommunication #covid19 #rijksoverheid #womeninc #gender #inclusive #icons #symbols

Shlyokavitsa’ is a way to write out Cyrillic languages with Latin characters. The Latin alphabet has only 26 characters so digits and symbols (4, 6, @, 1) are also used. Many people had no choice but to spell their native language this way in order to communicate with this technology. In the 90s and early 2000s, Eastern Europe caught up with innovations like the internet and mobile phones, but the technology wasn’t ready for non-Latin scripts. Translit (in Russia), Greeklish (in Greece) and others were a way to circumvent the hindrance of communication protocols at the time, by filling in the gaps. There is no conspiracy behind this technical limitation, as some might think. The West didn’t want to eliminate Eastern scripts. Computers see ‘letters’ as a string of bytes (ref. Unicode). Latin letters were first to be encoded, so they had shorter representations and took less space in computer memory. That’s why you could technically write longer SMS messages if you used Latin characters. Similarly, phone keypads didn’t have space for more than the Latin letters. As time passed, ways to switch to your native script appeared, but people were used to this ‘new’ way of writing so they didn’t bother to change again. In 2003 it went so far as some school children used digits instead of Cyrillic letters on their writing exam. In Bulgaria, shlyokavitsa is rarely used nowadays as phones and computers can change language input very easily. Long gone are the days of forums and chats that cannot render Cyrillic. That’s why, it slowly became a political issue so people who are still using shlyokavitsa are considered lazy, stupid or even worse—unpatriotic. In 2017, a classic Bulgarian novel was republished in shlyokavitsa to ridicule the use of this ‘impure’ system. It sparked all kinds of reactions from intellectuals, laymen and politicians. No matter its status today, this unusual writing system is a valuable piece of communication history and it should not be condemned but commemorated as an achievement of human resourcefulness. Guest post by @nedkamburov #thepoliticsofdesign #graphicdesign #typography #bulgaria #bulgarian #shlyokavitsa #cyrillic #eastern #unicode

Now that facemasks have become mandatory in many places worldwide, it has become a way to silently communicate personal interests and opinions. @hellocvh pointed out the popularity of ‘protest masks’, facemasks with messages that protest the obligatory wearing of masks by governments. This follows the growing sentiment of conspiracists that don’t believe Corona exists, or that the measurements to curb it are unjustified. The irony and contradictory use of these anti-corona corona masks does not hide the fact that 1,3 million people have died from this horrible pandemic, and 54 million have been infected, with no sign of this slowing down. If you don’t want more people to die from this disease, wear a mask, stay at home, practice social distancing and support those who need help. #thepoliticsofdesign #politicsofdesign #facemask #mondkapje #covid19 #corona #covid #visualcommunication #protest #graphicdesign

During every US election, the media produces a barrage of blue and red coloured maps. Most of them look similar: each state is colored red or blue, based on the majority of votes. The problem is that this form of mapping is easy to read but also hides the actual election results. For example many red (Republican) state are large in size but not in population, which means a state election map looks more red than the actual amount of Republican voters. The election results might be almost split evenly (49 % - 51 %) and still the entire state would have the color of the winner (red or blue). Empty areas of land are also colored, ignoring the way population is not evenly spread but densely packed in cities and towns. The first map is from cartographer Kenneth Field, who made this map after the 2016 elections. Rather than painting an entire district red or blue, he created a dot density map where each dot represents every vote casts by location. By using spatial GIS data, areas that are uninhabited remain uncoloured, therefore showing voter density. Mark Newman from the University of Michigan wrote an article in 2008 about the way election maps always appear to be a sea of red, and skew the perception of actual results. He argues that Rhode Island looks tiny on the map with its 1,1 million people, while Wyoming is 60 times larger but has a population of only half a million. Based on the 2008 election results he created three maps, which all look very different. #thepoliticsofdesign #politicsofdesign #maps #mapping #cartography #USelection #USelections #vote2020 #USelections2020 #graphicdesign #visualcommunication

Gerrymandering is another graphic testimony of how graphic design can undermine democracy: the practice of redrawing electoral districts to influence election outcomes. In the US every ten years a new census count leads to redistricting, to ensure every electoral district has the same amount of voters. That form of Gerrymandering does not necessarily influence elections. However as Gerrymandering is done by the governor and state legislators, it is possible to redraw districts in such a way that the exact same voting behavior can result in a different election outcome, called partisan Gerrymandering. Because the US political process has the ‘winner takes all’ principle, where the entire district goes to the candidate with the majority of votes. Digital mapping technologies have made more precise redistricting possible to influence election results. The Republican party launched REDMAP in 2010, an effort to use partisan Gerrymandering to gain electoral advantage. REDMAP was very succesful in the state of Wisconsin, which led to Republicans winning 60 of the 99 seats in the 2012 elections, even though the Democrats received the majority of votes. The redrawing of electoral districts with the purpose of swaying elections leads to strange looking electoral maps, resembling salamanders, hence the name Gerry-mandering, after the 1812 governor Gerry. A strange form of maps drawn with the sole purpose to suppress people’s democratic rights. #thepoliticsofdesign #politicsofdesign #maps #mapping #cartography #gerrymandering #USelection #USelections #USelections2020 #graphicdesign #visualcommunication #vote

Today’s US elections are a reminder how flawed graphic design can contribute to undermining democracy. Some of the complexity of US ballot design comes from the lack of centralised ballot design regulations, or even voting methods. On the other hand the lack of regulations allow for deliberate confusion of voters, for purposes of voter suppression. It is no coincidence that confusing ballot designs have been found in swing states, or democratic districts within republican states. The first example is the famous Palm Beach County Florida ballot from 2000, when many voters accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore. To choose Gore, voters had to punch the third hole, even though Gore was listed second on the left side of the form. That year George W. Bush won the elections based on 537 votes in the state of Florida, where his brother was also governor. The second image is the East St.Louis ballot from 2008, a predominantly African American city. The ballot was missing header that specified ‘congressional’. One in ten votes did not count for the US senate as that section was not specified on the ballot. Third is the Arizona ballot from 2004, and used in other states as well, where the voter has to draw a line between the arrow. It is mainly confusing because the right side of the arrow is closer to other unrelated names in the other columns, which could imply that candidates are paired. The 2016 senate election for the state of California had 34 candidates, which were spread out over two pages. User experience design Whitney Quesenbery commented that voters could wrongly mark one candidate per page, assuming each page corresponds to a different election. That’s why the @aigadesign has published a series of guidelines for the design of election ballots with the initiative #aigadesignfordemocracy. A lot of attention has been spent on better ballot design, but the question is whether ballot designs are confusing by accident or on purpose. Images from ProPublica.com and KCRW.com #thepoliticsofdesign #politicsofdesign #forms #USelection #USelections #USelections2020 #ballot #form #graphicdesign #visualcommunication

If the Earth is a sphere, why do many maps adopt the same orientation, with North at the top and the West at the left? Inventor and designer Buckminster Fuller argued that there is no scientific correct way, and these practices came from cultural bias by the mapmakers. Indeed, one of the most used map in the world is the Mercator projection, drawn in 1569 so serve colonial navigation. It has been criticized for it’s colonial perspective and size distortions. In 1943 Buckminster Fuller created the Dymaxion map in an attempt to create a map without cultural bias. Fuller’s map shows a new projection (a method to flatten the globe’s surface on a flat plane to make a map) that allows the user to fold the map any way they want. The Dymaxion map does not have any right way up. Fuller intended the map to be unfolded in different ways to emphasize different aspects of the world. It does show all continents interconnected and offers a vision for a post-nationalist world. The ‘one island earth’, as Fuller called it. #thepoliticsofdesign #politicsofdesign #visualcommunication #graphicdesign #maps #mapping #cartography #buckminsterfuller #dymaxion #dymaxionmap

How do Surinamese women represent themselves on Instagram? Which hashtags do they use? By comparing keywords from National Archive NL to a database of self-made Instagram hashtags, @yessica.deira explores the biased representation of Surinamese women in institutional archives in contrast to self-made Instagram posts. By giving giving the viewer the opportunity to interact with the website, the medium becomes a narrative device as well as an alternative tool. For example many of the images from the Dutch National Archive about Suriname were made during the visit of Queen Juliana and Prins Bernhard in 1955. And only 184 of these images use the keyword 'women’. But this makes it even more clear how problematic this is. Surinamese women are culture carriers, so how come there's so little to find on the surface? Graphic designer, DJ, and producer Yessica Deira graduated recently from @kabkdesign with her work MOKSI: Negotiated Memory. A website that critically engages with how knowledge is produced and shared in (post)colonial relations. Text and images by Yessica Deira #thepoliticsofdesign #politicsofdesign #moksi #visualcommunication #graphicdesign #colonialism #archives #blackarchives #nationaalarchief