Fig 1: Mug

to drink, to scoop, to serve.

Fig 2: Pail

to scoop, to serve, to drink.

Fig 3: Bowl

to serve, to drink to scoop.

Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

A found object, renamed and repositioned, becomes something else. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) relocates a urinal within a different system of conventions and allows that relocation to do the work of designation. The object remains identical, but its context reframes what it is, what it refers to, and how it is to be read. Exhibited again, the gesture repeats: designation designates designation. The act of designation is the act of transformation.
🖼 Stiefligtz Alfred, 1917. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_%28Duchamp%29 (Accessed 03 Apr. 2026)

An observation of a man observing a plant, drawn by someone observing him. Three moments, separated by time and distance. The scale changes, the operation does not.
🖼 Windelband, Wilhelm; Günther, Siegmund: Geschichte der antiken Naturwissenschaft und Philosophie. Nördlingen: C.H. Beck, 1888.

Colour & Grey Control Chart. Part Code BSTI, Batch #RANR2001

A gray card reflects eighteen percent of the light that falls on it, a value calibrated to approximate the middle of what human perception can distinguish. It functions as a reference point, a sign whose only content is neutrality, the attempt to observe without producing meaning. But neutrality is also a convention, established by agreement and legible only within the system it belongs to. Even the absence of meaning has to be encoded.

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Different font sizes based on traditional Didot metal type point sizes computed into pixel values, rendered live from code running on a server near Dresden.

Rosetta Stone

The same decree inscribed on a stone in hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek. The rosetta stone became the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, whose meaning had been lost for nearly fourteen centuries. Each sign system shapes the visible differently and organizes space, direction, and abstraction according to its own internal logic and conventions. What the stone makes legible is not only its message, but the condition under which any message becomes legible at all, that the same content, encoded in a different system, constitutes a different act of signification. Height: 1123 mm, Width: 757 mm, Depth: 284 mm.
🖼 Jeff Dahl, 2009, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rosetta_Stone_BW.jpeg

Not red, not blue

From the principle of difference and the lack of linguistic expressions the work »not red / not blue« was developed. A written function displays green tones (448.000) in a defined part of the RGB color space. In each second a green appears in distinction to a past and a future green and defines itself only in its mathematical, but not perceptible, otherness. The monitor dissolves the source code into electrical light pulses and liberates the language from its referring sign function and lets it disappear from the world of concepts and ideas, so that the language can become completely pictorial.

Picture of an ancient statue, cropped to an eye close-up.

In classic spaghetti westerns, the eye close-up is used to transport the audience into a character's inner world. It creates intimacy and reveals emotions that words can't express.
🖼 John, Karl; Dörig, José; Fuchs, Werner; Hirmer, Max: Die griechische Kunst. München: Hirmer Verlag, 1966.

Beim Doppelspaltexperiment treten kohärente Wellen, zum Beispiel Licht- oder Materiewellen, durch zwei schmale, parallele Spalte und werden auf einem Beobachtungsschirm aufgefangen, dessen Distanz zum Doppelspalt sehr viel größer ist als der Abstand der beiden Spalte. Durch Beugung der Wellenausbreitung am Doppelspalt entsteht ein Interferenzmuster. Bei Wellen mit einheitlicher Wellenlänge, z. B. beim monochromatischen Licht eines Lasers, besteht das Muster auf dem Schirm aus abwechselnd hellen und dunklen Streifen (Maxima bzw. Minima), wenn der Abstand der beiden Spalte nicht kleiner ist als die Wellenlänge. Das Experiment gehört zu den Schlüsselexperimenten der Physik. Thomas Young führte es als erster mit Licht durch und publizierte seine Ergebnisse 1803.
🖼 Hawking, Stephen W.: Eine kurze Geschichte der Zeit. Die Suche nach der Urkraft des Universums. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1988
✉ »Doppelspaltexperiment.« Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 July 2025, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelspaltexperiment. (Accessed 11 Nov. 2025)

In modern physics, the double-slit experiment demonstrates that light and matter can exhibit behavior associated with both classical particles and classical waves. This type of experiment was first described by Thomas Young in 1801 when making his case for the wave behavior of visible light. In 1927, Davisson and Germer and, independently, George Paget Thomson and his research student Alexander Reid demonstrated that electrons show the same behavior, which was later extended to atoms and molecules. The experiment belongs to a general class of "double path" experiments, in which a wave is split into two separate waves that later combine into a single wave.
🖼 Hawking, Stephen W.: Eine kurze Geschichte der Zeit. Die Suche nach der Urkraft des Universums. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1988
✉ “Doppelspaltexperiment.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 July 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment. (Accessed 11 Nov. 2025)

Source Material: DM Ancients

Each order of columns is a system, a coherent whole composed of proportions, aesthetic conventions, and structural relationships that form a recognizable type. The Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders differ not only in their appearance but also in the logic governing how the individual parts relate to the whole, from the spacing of the shaft sections to the arrangement of the entablature. Typeface design operates under the same conditions, whereby every decision regarding stroke weight, proportions, and spacing is made within a system of relationships, and the individual form is only legible in relation to the whole.
🖼 Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon. Fünfte, umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage. Bd. 1.: Rio bis Schönebeck. Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig und Wien 1892.

Like language, letterforms are not fixed, but subject to convention rather than natural law. They are symbols, open to reinterpretation, redirection, reinvention. We give them form. We assign them meaning. And we decide where the negotiation between function and aesthetics ends.

Before the letter becomes a letter, it is a stroke, a circle, a directed line. These are preliminary exercises: form before convention, mark before meaning. The same gestures that produce an A or an O here exist prior to the agreement that makes them readable, at the threshold where a mark has not yet been assigned its role in the system.
🖼 Kuhn, Robert: Schriftgestaltung. Schriften zur Kunsterziehung Band 22. Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag, Berlin 1980

In Use: Starter

Jonas Brüggemann – MOBILEE: Designgenossenschaften als Organisationsform für […] Zusammenarbeit
MOBILEE explores how design cooperatives can expand their scope of action in both economic and socio-political terms. The project invites participation in a discussion about how work is organized, for whom, and with whom. Starter enters that discussion as a structural actor, built for legibility at any size and open to whatever is expressed through it.
🖼 Julian Barth, 2025

In Use: Starter

Maryna Zevako, links gehen
Essays and interviews on the topic of spatial orientation, accompanied by a visual documentation of existing wayfinding signs at the ABK Stuttgart.
🖼 Maryna Zevako, 2025