So how can thinking about Lego, as well as theories about parts, wholes, and structures, help us to make designs that communicate an intended meaning?
The fact that the Lego model of the Willis Tower is made out of Lego bricks is hardly surprising. But in graphic communication we don’t have to be so literal. As we have seen in the last section, an individual brick can stand for many things. It might stand for other bricks of the same kind, for the metal and glass of the actual Willis Tower, or for something else. Something that is not architectural at all. What if we made the model of the building from Dollar bills? Or from statues of property tycoons, or a human tower of construction workers? Choosing what we can use as a building block for a representation of something is a powerful tool for suggesting a relationship between the something, and the thing/s from which the something is made. The relationship could be causal, that the parts caused the whole to be realised; deterministic, where the parts determined the nature of the whole; value-based, where the parts accumulate to the value of the whole; and many more.
What is important here is that—just like with gestalt principles—the whole is more than the sum of its parts. A human tower of construction workers that represents the Willis Tower is more than the combination of construction workers and the Willis Tower alone, because as viewers we make inferences based on this juxtaposition of workers and architecture. That ‘towers are built on skilled labour’ perhaps, or that ‘this many workers are needed to produce this tower’. This is emergent meaning—meaning that arises from the inferences, reasoning, blending of concepts depicted pictorially and/or verbally. This emergent meaning is not to be found in a literal interpretation of the parts that make up a representation alone—a tower and workers—it requires work on the part of the viewer to impose a relationship between these parts.
To explore these themes, in this section of the essay I will reflect on a few examples of this part/whole strategy, produced by staff and students linked to the MA Graphic Design course at the Arts University Bournemouth.
The first of these examples is a 2018 project by Harriet Mummery entitled Siphonophore Zeitgeist. It comprised a number of artefacts including the poster below.
Marine biologists will undoubtedly recognise this image as a Portuguese man o war (Physalia physalis). They would also know that this is a species of siphonophore; an interesting group of animals in that each is in fact a colony of individual zooids, which are genetically identical clones that work together as parts of the siphonophore to perform different functions. Mummery recognised the potential that siphonophores provide being, as they are, a colony of individuals adrift on the high seas that are connected by a nerve net, but with no central brain to guide the animal’s behaviour. The sophistication of Mummery’s poster, however, can be seen when we look closely at the individual ‘cells’ that make up the image of the Portuguese man o war. For these individuals are not zooids as one might expect, but social media profile pictures and avatars of the people in her social network. What we have then is a siphonophore made out of members of a social network. This clash of seemingly incongruous things, is attention grabbing and makes one question why this association has been made.
There are two parallel types of part/whole relationships involved: individual people who are parts of a social network; and, individual zooids that are parts of a siphonophore. The strangeness of making a siphonophore out of individual people triggers possibilities for a huge amount of reasoning and inference. There are metaphors such as social network is siphonophore where we understand social networks by finding associations with siphonophores, such as: that members of a social network are linked by the internet in a similar way to which zooids are linked by a nerve net. In addition we might associate the lack of a central leader or governing committee in a social network, with the lack of a central brain in a siphonophore. Such associations, and there are many, many more possibilities, in turn trigger further reasoning.
The project was produced towards the end of the political, and social tumult of the mid-2010’s, when our understanding of the power of social networking wasn’t quite as much resolved as it is today. So thinking of a group of friends on a network as a siphonophore—friends who we might expect to share the same ‘DNA’ in terms of values, culture, and politics—highlights their disconnection from other groups, other ideas. Furthermore, it foregrounds their vulnerability in terms of understanding the social forces acting on them, in a similar way to which non-comprehending siphonophores are made vulnerable by the tides and currents that act upon them. With the result that they may find themselves washed up on some beach.
One of the challenges Mummery faced, was that to be able to make such inferences, from the poster, viewers would need a level of understanding about siphonophores that she could not assume that they would possess. This poster is therefore only a part of a larger campaign that included a video based on archival footage that explained (among other things) the nature of siphonophores and some basic facts about them.
The success of the poster is grounded on the simple strategy of making one thing, out of a very different kind of thing. The siphonophore is made out of parts that have nothing to do with siphonophores. Each building block of the siphonophore image represents a user on a social network but altogether these building blocks make an image of a siphonophore (which are made from zooid building blocks). And this counter-intuitive inconsistency drives our desire to make sense out of this seemingly illogical juxtaposition. The role of metaphor is central here and I plan to explore metaphor more deeply in other essays (see also, Jones, 2024).
In the next example while there are part/whole relationships (below left), there is not the same clash between dissimilar entities, or the same levels of metaphoric projection. And because of this, as viewers, we are not as driven to make similar creative, imaginative inferences to those evoked by the enigma at the heart of Mummery’s siphonophore. However, though not as sophisticated as the example above, it does show how part/whole relationships can play out in a more straightforward way.
The image (above left), is a page from the AUB Strategy 2030, and the ‘6’ in the centre of the image relates to the six operational plans that form part of this strategy. The assortment of various glyphs from which the ‘6’ is made indicate little more than points in space. The dots, asterisks, or whatever, draw our attention to the spatial location at which the dot or asterisk appears. They do not seem representative of much to do with operational plans or even the number ‘6’. In this sense they are comparable to thinking about a Lego brick as a neutral component that basically stands for itself. These glyphs may be separated, but because the spacing of the glyphs is structured and coordinated according to a predetermined framework it is relatively easy to pick out the ‘6’ (above right). This could be interpreted as a simple decorative way of presenting the number 6—numbers were, after all, something of a theme that ran through the document. But there was an intention at least, to suggest a level of correspondence with respect to planning. A plan requires different actions (parts of the plan) to be synchronised and aligned to achieve a greater outcome. The depiction of the ‘6’ requires users to recognise how different elements combine to form a greater whole. And the placement of each of these contributing elements is also part of a plan (in the sense of an architectural plan) or grid that determines their positioning. It is easy to over-think this of course, and I suspect that this design would not motivate most users to invest the attention and effort necessary to see meaning potential beyond the slightly unusual depiction of a six. Furthermore, even if users recognise the correspondence between different stages of a plan and different parts of a letterform, this does not provide us with the same rich possibilities in terms of new emergent meaning, that, for example, Mummery’s project evokes. In other words, the building blocks of the ‘6’, because they represent very little, do not challenge us to make creative associations with the ways that different action points come together to make a larger plan.
Of course it is not always necessary, or even desirable, to make graphic designs that evoke rich emergent meaning. To escape a burning building, we probably need signs that ‘say’ one or two things very clearly.
The schematic version, showing the layout of the page from the AUB Strategy 2030 (above right) shows only the boundaries and placement of the various elements that combine to make the complete page. Each of the rectangles in this version is a placeholder or slot that can be filled in with any number of different things, colours, images, or, in the option that was finally adopted, different asterisks, dots, and so forth (the terminology of slots and fillers I am using here is borrowed from Frame Theory). But even though the slots are not filled with images, text, or whatever, it is interesting to see how much information is still present in just the arrangement, or structure, of the slots. The ‘6’ is instantly recognisable, so in this case, knowing about the substance of the elements that make the individual parts of the ‘6’ is not necessary for us to be able to perceive the whole. In one sense this is not surprising; we do not expect a number to be made out of something in the same way that we expect a building to be made out of bricks. But these square slots could easily be reconfigured to make a picture of a something that is made of a particular material or sub-part. The square slots could be arranged in the form of a house, or a tree, for instance. And this would still be recognisable despite not depicting bricks or wood .
Another interesting thing arises from thinking about the page rather than the ‘6’ as the whole. The ‘6’ is now a part of the page with its own sub-parts. When we see the ‘6’ it feels like we see it all at once as one thing. We do not have to look sequentially through all the elements that make-up the ‘6’ in order to recognise it, there is no correct order that I need to follow if I start investigating each dot or asterisk—it feels more like perception than conception. When I look at the page there is a similar moment where I see it as a whole and recognise it as a page, but then there is an order in which I might to start to investigate each element of the page. There is the foreground ‘6’ in a central position, there are its sub-parts, the individual dots and asterisks that I might sample, there is the background image, and there is the running head ‘AUB Strategy 2030’, that I might not attend to at all. This is a major difference between the parts that make up our Lego model, and the parts that make up a page layout. There are probably eye tracking experiments that would show that we look at a representation of the Lego model in certain ways, but there is not, to the same degree, a reading path of the kind we find in many page layouts where there is an order, that if we follow, allows us to reason about the importance or role that certain elements play. I say ‘to the same degree’ here because of course we might photograph the Lego model so that we notice one part of the tower first (the mast perhaps), then another part second (the mid-section) and another third (the base). The point here is that there are some structures in which it is more important to attend to the parts that make up the whole in sequence, so that we can build meaning by thinking about how one part follows on from the next. Then there are other structures in which the parts and the whole are perceived, in our conscious experience at least, more or less instantaneously. This is not a binary—an ‘either or’ situation—but one in which there is a spectrum of difference between things we understand sequentially and things we perceive instantaneously.
The schematic version of the page (above right) in which each rectangle is a slot for another visual element (filler) introduces a further possibility: what if the filler in each rectangle were to change? Now there is a dynamic, time-based representation where each slot can switch from one filler to another, or morph in a smoother way from one to another. Such possibilities have been explored by designers such as Oded Ezer in his We Are Family project.
When we think about the slot/filler relationship it is also possible to imagine a cascading/hierarchical arrangement where a filler becomes a slot for a filler at a lower level. Accordingly, Mummery’s siphonophore is made up of social profile pictures, these profile pictures are slots for headshots of individual people (which could be a portrait of any number of images of that person), and so on, until ultimately these headshots are made of pixels each of which can be filled with one out of millions of different colour possibilities.
The point of this discussion is to suggest therefore, that there are a range of ways that the relationships between parts and wholes can be utilised.
• A whole thing can be made of parts that are consistent with the whole—e.g. a representation of a siphonophore made from representations of zooids.
• A whole thing can be made of parts that are inconsistent with the whole—e.g. a representation of a siphonophore made from representations of social network members.
• We have focused on just a couple of examples here but there are many ways artists and designers have used the strategy of making associations by making one thing out of another different thing. In typography, for example, there is a rich tradition of making letters from the human body going way back into history, some interesting recent manifestations include:
Naked Silhouette Alphabet, Anastasia Mastrakouli, 2012
Typeface in Skin, Thijs Verbeek, 2008
Images from top to bottom.
Detail of Siphonophore Zeitgeist, a poster by Harriet Mummery, 2018. Digital print.
Siphonophore Zeitgeist, a poster by Harriet Mummery, 2018. Digital print.
Page from the AUB Strategy 2030 (left), and schematic version of the same page (right).