Conspiratorial Design: Information Design for the Bigger Picture traces the unsettling proximity between information design and conspiracy thinking, arguing that data visualisation is never neutral — it is always an argument about how the world is structured.
About This Book
Data are not facts — they are arguments. This is the foundational provocation of Carlo Bramanti's investigation into information design and its conspiratorial undercurrents. Bramanti contends that the impulse driving conspiracy theories — the urgent need to see the bigger picture, to impose coherent narrative on overwhelming complexity — is structurally identical to the impulse driving data visualisation. The conspiratorial, he argues, haunts design at the level of its core paradigms. For practitioners working in information design, graphic communication, and data visualisation, this book reframes familiar tools as epistemological claims, demanding a more honest reckoning with what it means to represent the world.
Key Features
- 192 pages of critical theory and analytical writing on information design and data visualisation
- Written by Carlo Bramanti
- Published by Set Margins, 2024
What You'll Discover
- Why data visualisations function as representations of arguments rather than neutral renderings of fact
- How the conspiratorial impulse — the drive to synthesise a coherent worldview from fragmented information — is embedded in the paradigms of information design
- The relationship between community sense-making, narrative construction, and the vertigo of complexity in contemporary data culture
- How design practice participates in shaping — and distorting — collective understanding of reality
About the Author
Carlo Bramanti is the author of Conspiratorial Design, published by Set Margins. His work examines the philosophical and political dimensions of information design, with particular attention to how designers construct and legitimise particular visions of the world.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 192
- Dimensions: 11 x 17.5 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789083449876
- Publisher: Set Margins
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Information designers, graphic communication practitioners, design theorists, and anyone who works with data visualisation and wants to interrogate the assumptions built into their practice.