Information Design Journal - Volume 30, Issue 3, 2025

This article reactivates the interrupted legacy of Project Cybersyn by reconfiguring Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model as a participatory infrastructure for information design. Through workshops with twelve Latin American diaspora participants in the UK, we demonstrate three methodological innovations: (1) cultural citation, which reactivates 1970s visual materials alongside contemporary institutional documents; (2) an approach that privileges affective and relational engagement over data extraction; and (3) the workshop-as-deliverable, which reconceptualizes participatory encounters as legitimate design outputs. Counter-visualizations produced through collage and collective annotation challenge universalist conventions while remaining accountable to situated knowledge. This work positions information design as a cultural practice grounded in specific trajectories, offering methodological alternatives to extractive research patterns.

The cultural turn exposes the limitations of code-based models that treat communication as the encoding and decoding of fixed symbols. This article advances Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory as a framework for understanding culturally situated communication. Rather than treating communication as the transmission of codes, Relevance Theory conceptualizes human interaction as an ostensive-inferential process, in which communicators make their intentions manifest and audiences infer meaning guided by expectations of relevance. Within this framework, designed artifacts can function as ostensive stimuli when their features signal communicative intent and invite interpretation. Drawing on an Indigenous Māori case study, we demonstrate how this approach enables culturally responsive information design by reconciling universal cognitive architecture with cultural variability to foster mutual manifestness across diverse contexts.

This article demonstrates the value of positioning theory as a lens for localizing information design in culturally resonant ways. Drawing on 40+ interviews with residents in a Southwestern U.S. community experiencing water scarcity, we develop a positioning theory–based codebook to analyze self-, other-, and collective positionings around responsibility, power, and inaction. This method reveals relational patterns that thematic coding alone might overlook, offering information designers a methodological approach for clarifying how people in communities express and negotiate responsibility and capacity to act. Positioning theory thereby expands the field’s methodological toolkit and introduces localized perspectives that can help information designers create interactions that can foster participation and collective environmental action.

In 1968, Margaret Mead said that the most significant component of a system is the person who creates the model of that system. When we take data, and translate it into form, how do we insert ourselves — our cultural perceptions and biases — into that process? This paper presents informational graphics created by the first author during an 18-month long study of civic crowdfunding, a process whereby activists use digitally driven fundraising to develop value for their communities (Light & Briggs, 2017). These diagrams were created using varied co-creative methods that sought to be inclusive, localized, and critically reflexive.

This paper examines the epistemological development of modern Chinese pattern design. Through an analysis of historical literature, it argues that the formation of early Chinese design knowledge was not merely an extension of technical rationality, but was rooted in a broader epistemological framework shaped by ethical cultivation and social instruction. This framework is characterized by two localized features: idea preceding form and form shaped according to material conditions. It emphasizes not only the application of natural principles but also humanistic concern and ethical responsibility. This perspective offers new epistemological insights and methodological inspiration for contemporary information design.