order for the invisible

One idea that interested me in the reading and lecture this week is the attempt to make the invisible visible, even ordered, and how this attempt relates to concepts of cosmopolitanism.

I recently had the chance to hear a lecture by Hugh Dubberly, RISD graduate in Graphic Design and founder of the Dubberly Design Office. Throughout his career, he made innovative visual models of such concepts as “understanding internet search,” “java technology,” “how organizations track their customers,” and “the creative process.” In his lecture, Dubberly stressed the increasingly important role of the graphic designer. He noted that, for example, with over 500,000 cameras watching the city of London or countless heat and humidity sensors on the grape vines of Southern California, data is produced at a exponentially faster pace. Such data becomes useful when it is made coherent and, in many cases, organized enough to be visualized.

While in August of 2009 the New York Times wrote the article, “For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html?scp=1&sq=statistics&st=cse), as such studies could lead to a career that profits from the increasing quantities and sources of data, one could argue that graphic design and visual communication are equally vital counterparts in order to imagine whatever such data represents. The Dubberly Design Office’s services render products and information “more useful, more usable, more delightful” – in this way, paralleling “traditional formulations of the uses of the work of art,” as cited by Jameson, “’to teach, to move, to delight’” (pg 347). The importance in this parallel is the relationship between imagining, seeing, and knowing, and this relationship resonates with Robbin’s concept of Cosmopolitanism.

Robbins states that one perception of cosmopolitanism is a “luxuriously free-floating view from above” - or the Donna Haraway’s idea off the “conquering gaze from nowhere […] the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation” (Robbins 247) - which can perhaps be compared to such luxuries as Google Earth or, in Dubberly’s field of work, the visualization of the “desktop” and the vast information it represents. Another more provocative take on cosmopolitanism, however, is an interconnectedness on earth between “habitants of a vast universe,” whose “cosmopolitanism is a reality of [re]attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance” (Robbins, 3). As was outlined in lecture, cosmopolitics thus become rooted, ordered, and conceivable, all in a similar fashion to the way in which one can make order of new data. In this way, the concept comes full circle and is once again aligned with “cosmos,” or “a harmonious system, the opposite of chaos” (OED).