Design amongst the Ruins

Hi. I'm what I think is called an early-stage academic and have been trying to work out what Calls for Papers are all about and why I need to be interested in this. Anyhoo, I've been applying for some and this is some text from my latest rejected proposal...

Design amongst the Ruins (Draft v1)

▒ made their way through what was once the market square, in the direction of the Undercroft School. A dusty path had been kicked into a shape by local inhabitants who regularly wove their way through randomly strewn chunks of building that now rested where they had been thrown.

Clearing sites of remaining debris had been deemed too epic-a-task considering the drastically reduced population (and therefore labor force) as well as a lack of intact and available equipment, so central areas were largely left as they were once the dust literally settled. Inhabitants now lived around outskirts of previously bustling city centres in slick, modern, modular housing—initially considered emergency shelter— made cosy and frictionless. With the added bonus of facing lush borderlands where flora and fauna had exploded with a renewed vigour, mending the broken ground as fields and parklands grew wilder and wilder.

Younger citizens, curious but still cautious, picked their way through broken city streets, finding additional utility in those places deemed sound enough to traverse. The Undercroft School was one such place. Situated in a former underground car park, it now featured an array of architectural interventions in the form of light wells and apertures of various sizes, and unpredictable shapes and forms between which cosy, insulated glass-walled class rooms and meeting places were installed. Maintenance centred around sweeping out any dust or scraps of debris that blew or were trodden in to keep paths between these class rooms clear.

▒ meandered through the streets, from square to square. At one point they froze on the spot as a three-story former apartment block gave out a loud creak before the upper floors toppled into an adjacent, unused, street. ▒’s ever present dust-mask—adorned with glittery, metallic stickers—coming in handy, yet again.

▒ looked from the collapse to across the square and saw their friend ▟, also heading towards the School. Rushing over to say Hello, ▒ grabbed ▟’s arm and dragged them away from the square chatting excitedly about recent events, ignoring the newly scrambled ruins whilst running from the ensuing dust cloud. ▟ had been stopping to collect odd shaped chunks of stone as you would pebbles or shells on a beach and shared these with ▒ as they walked and talked.

▒ asks what ▟ was studying this week. ‘AI Aesthetics of the Ancients’ and ‘Wayfound Practicalities’ replied ▟. ‘Farm in a Bucket’ and ‘Graphic Design Legacies’ ▒ countered. They agreed that they were happy they were studying different topics this season so they could compare notes. “Double the subjects, double the knowledges”, ▒ said.

As they approached the Undercroft, a vast clearing devoid of debris, buildings and plant-life opened up. Other students of an array of ages could be seen descending steps into—what looked like solid ground but on closer inspection were open-air portals into the Undercroft.

The Undercroft School

The Undercroft School represented the central educational body in the area. It did not discriminate between ages, education levels and subjects. It operated more akin to the Antiuniversity of London, founded in 1968. The programme even included some of the same subjects from the Anti-University’s initial programme such as Typography and Poetry, Dialogues About Relevant and Irrelevant Matters, Dragons and Underground Communications Theory (these were all actual courses on offer as part of the Antiuniversity’s initial offering).

The Undercroft School did not issue any recognisable accreditation. Records of each student's chosen subjects were kept by the Records & Archives Research team as a seasonal class exercise. But anyone could study anything for however long it maintained their interest (although it was generally considered bad form to leave any programme of study incomplete). Courses tended to be a mixture of the practical and the idiosyncratic—the main proviso for joining any programme was that it must be something you would enjoy.

Programmes were overseen by a collective body of local community members, most of whom were invited to join the committee once they had facilitated a full season of at least one programme of study. Some sticking around or many years, others for a couple of seasons before moving on.

For this reason, programmes were written to be as self-guided as possible. Students came from far-and-wide to visit the school to form a commons and find their specific communities of practice. Studying together, no matter the subject or focus of interests, was how we ‘lived together’.

Previously people formed governing bodies, or companies and organisations or state-sanctioned institutions or online social sites or churches and religions. Nowadays—with all these capitalist and societal infrastructures in tatters—walking across a rubble-worn city to congregate around various programmes of study was the equivalent. That and tending to the land and supporting Country in order to keep ourselves fed.

Graphic Design Legacy Studies

Discussion rooms at the Undercroft were used for lectures and presentations and were linked to a central directory by different coloured strings. To find your room you could start at any entrance way or head into the central atria where a list of sessions were posted to a board next to their corresponding string colour. Sessions were held in the Morning (10am), Midday (1pm), afternoon (4pm) and occasionally in the evening (7pm). There were also an equal number of rooms set aside for group study which were not allocated to any particular subject and where students would excitedly share notes on their various programmes.

It was ▒’s first time studying Graphic Design Legacy studies so they headed to the central atrium, checking the board before tracing the gold thread which would take them to their appropriate room. When they arrived the room was already reasonably full. The facilitator had a laptop connected to a wide screen. Theirs was the only computing device in the room almost everyone else had sharpened sticks for making notes on digital paper devices. The facilitator’s laptop would be plugged into the Undercroft’s digital archive, buried deep below the basement level of the school and connected by cables to other distant schools.

It was rare that anyone wanted personal network access and digital paper was the most common means of memorising information. The sharing of collected information mostly happened verbally, in conversation.

“Welcome. Before we start I like to acknowledge the past with a view to the future and inhabitants of this place through the ages. This programme is called Graphic Design Legacies and we’ll be sifting through an archive of instances—in no particular order—together over the course of the next few hours and the seasonal duration of this programme.”

“We’ll start with this chunk of Ochre.” An image of a lumpen rock flashed up on the screen. “This chunk of rock is thought to be 80,000 years old.” Silent gasps.

Later, that night ▒ would fall asleep contemplating
the role of the ‘Graphic Designer’…
Tomorrow they would be back to more ‘Bucket Farming’…

---

Associated reading:

• Twemlow, Alice. ‘Sifting the trash: A history of design criticism’. MIT Press, 2017. [mitpress.mit.edu]

• Le Guin, Ursula K. ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’. Cosmogenesis (previously Ignota), 2019. [cosmogenesis.world]

• Morris, William. ‘News From Nowhere’ [serial], The Commonweal, 1890. [marxists.org]

• Chancogne, Thierry. ’Graphic Designers as Iconographers’, Revue Faire No.53, 2025. [revue-faire.eu]

• Langdon, James. ‘typohypergraphicobject’. Self-published, 2025. [typohypergraphicobject.page]

• Lee, Chris. ‘Designing History: Documents and the Design Imperative to Immutability’. SetMargins No.37, 2024. [setmargins.press]

• Weber, Lena. ‘Life in boxes’. TypeOne No.7, 2023. [type-01.com]

• Marangoni, Mariana. ‘Programming at the end of the world.’ Content-Form, 2024. [transmediale.de]