Our thirty-seventh Standing-Room Only Lecture will have Hannah Pivo coming from the place where eendraght maeckt maght to talk about dramatic curves. In the late 1910s and 1920s, the professional practice of “graphic design” emerged in the United States as a new mode of creating printed matter. At the same time, corporations came to rely on data visualizations, especially line graphs, as tools to help guide their business decisions. Graphs began to appear in advertisements aimed at business professionals as a result, and before long those ads were “dramatizing the curve” in ways that largely disregarded data itself. By examining this early encounter between graphic design and data visualization, Hannah considers how we came to recognize certain kinds of lines as “graphs” even when they don’t represent a single data point.
Our speaker, Hannah Pivo, is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia specializing in 19th- and 20th-century design history, with a focus on the history of graphic design and information visualization in the United States. Her work has appeared in Design Issues, Public Art Dialogue, and Journal of Design History (and is available for download here).
Thirty tickets are available for $10 each.
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Date and Time
Thursday, April 17 at 7p
Doors open at 6p for mingling.
Place
Katherine Small Gallery
108 Beacon Street
Somerville, MA 02143 [map]
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Standing-Room Only Lectures aim to present short talks about graphic design, typography, and collecting. The lectures are kept to about twenty minutes because—true to its name—the series takes place in our standing-room only gallery. So, wear comfortable shoes and bring a short attention span.