Immutable: Designing History is a new book published by Onomatopee and authored by graphic designer and educator Chris Lee. It traces a thematic genealogy of the document—graphic design’s most banal genre—and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity), prompting the question: What if, instead of logos, websites, books, and apps, design education was to centre the document itself, exemplified by things like money, passports, property deeds, birth certificates, and so on, in its pedagogy? However, such speculation is not oriented towards formulating a new, prescriptive curriculum of “best practices” but rather indicts graphic design’s entanglement with the quasi-apocalyptic consequence of the colonial state and the capitalist enterprise—bureaucratic regimes whose documental artefacts actuate an onto-epistemic imposition, flattening thick and plural worlds as a matter of course in the administration of their own concerns. This is traced across a roughly 5,000-year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed blockchain ledgers. Immutability thus figures as a design imperative and a hermeneutic for considering securitisation techniques (material, technological, homicidal, administrative) against the document’s entropy as it moves through space, time, and dispute. Immutable sets a ground against which to speculate on the role design may or may not have in undoing, resisting, and perhaps even obliterating1 colonial and capitalist ways of knowing and remembering. Furthermore, the book seeks to recognise and highlight the contingency and mutability of the latter (colonial and capitalist ways of knowing and remembering) by studying counterpositional practices and lifeways.

Originally published online by transmediale in January 2023 in both German and English as part of the transmediale journal. Edited by Elise Misao Hunchuck.