Identity-Simplified
Visual language appears universal at first glance, but its interpretation is deeply rooted in cultural contexts and changes over time. Signs that once seemed neutral need to be continually rethought to reflect today's standards and cultural realities.
Symbols and pictograms are intended to create clarity through simplification. However, it is precisely this reduction that reinforces existing cultural categories, for example with regard to gender and disability. Changing room symbols showing women with children, for example, suggest that men or other parents have no place there. The wheelchair symbol, on the other hand, reduces disability to a specific visible physical limitation and thus excludes people with other or invisible impairments. Similarly, binary gender representations in pictograms reach their limits for all those who do not correspond to the clear, stereotypical gender representations.
Even with supposedly neutral symbols, a male-connoted body often dominates as the “default”. Other bodies are characterized by additional features, which implicitly signals a deviation from the norm.
The deconstruction and redesign of classic symbols offers the opportunity to question these cultural meanings and stereotypical assumptions. At the same time, it calls for a balance between comprehensibility, simplification and inclusion in order to create a visual language that represents all people equally without excluding them.
“Identity-simplified” focuses on the deconstruction of existing pictograms in Linz. These are broken down into their components. People now have the opportunity to put together and design their own representation of identity. The design is based on cubes, which illustrates the arbitrariness of symbols: Why do women wear dresses and men wear pants? Why is disability represented by a wheelchair, even though only around 7% of people with disabilities use one?
