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Dear colleagues, I have a tiny, yet disturbing “research” dilemma that bothers me at the moment and would be very glad to hear your thoughts. I am writing a paper focusing on a particular poster from a recent past with a fascinating story of its own development. For starters I’ll just briefly outline the story. The poster was initially designed and applied as a strong political/propaganda poster. Shortly after, a cultural institution on the suggestion of the designer, adapted the same motive (they were aware of the political story behind the poster) for their promotion. Consequently, the meaning of the poster changed accordingly. By now, you might have guessed that I am very much interested in this particular “shift”/”turn”/”change”. Following the contemporary iconography, which is both a method and an approach to studying the content and meanings of visuals, I think this might be the right path to follow in order to analyze the visual content of the poster and to further connect it with the written words, a slogan actually that locks the meaning of the poster in a specific way. At least on the first level of the analysis iconography proves to be of a certain value. Erwin Panofsky identified three levels of meaning in images: 1) pre-iconographical description, which identifies objects and events; 2) analysis in the strict sense, which identifies the conventional meaning, and 3) iconological interpretation, which gets at the “intrinsic meaning” of an image. Moving to another level, I would like to show the shift of meaning which happens from the first application of the poster to the second and the consequences of such a “shift”. Panofsky’s method proves to be inefficient at this point. I could follow the W. J. T. Mitchell’s centered iconology on the relationship between the visual and the verbal as well as ideology. Nevertheless, it does not sufficiently explain this particular “turn”. The theory of Thomas Kuhn came to my mind. He used the duck-rabbit optical illusion to demonstrate the way in which a paradigm shift could cause one to see the same information in an entirely different way. It would be very interesting to hear you comments and suggestions, especially if you came across some similar examples. You can contact me off the list if you like and thank you all for reading. Ksenija -- Ksenija Berk, PhD precarious design theorist/critic, Ljubljana ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------