A year and a half ago, I found myself in the parking lot of Long John Silver’s with a bucket of chalk.My goal was to re-examine a personal experience through typography. With chalk and a camera,I recorded the event on the impartial pavement of the lot and photographed as a disinterestedworker followed the order to wash it away. What I didn’t know then is that I was entering a world ofchanged graphic design based on complexity, uncertainty and interference. My thoughts on complexityarise from the tension between redundancy in the advertising industry and the strategies ofFriedrich Nietzche and the Dada movement. I engage these historically grounded tensions throughdesign interventions in public faces, critiquing the cultural dialogue between accepted norms andthe economic potency that our society has found comfort and complacency in. Using HaridimousTsoukas’s research on organizational epistemology and integrating Tsoukas’s theory of complexsystems, I will build from my own history in the advertising industry a theory of complex graphicdesign that in my opinion will slow societal speed, enabling viewers to engage visual culture on adeeper and more meaningful level. this thesis is divided into sections in order to provide backgroundinformation and a framework for my creative work which will supplement my theories andideas on complexity and interference in contemporary visual culture. I will draw from past digitalprojects as well as performed public experiments that have led me to define the role of complexityin my studio practice as well as the dynamic role it has in my professional design practice.
