Looking at The Design Society Journal: Attempts of design authorship in graphic design from Singapore, 2009 – 2013

Abstract

The Design Society (TDS) was recently established in Singapore and runs 'The Design Society Journal' (TDSJ), a self-published design magazine documenting Singapore's visual culture. As designer-editors, they aim to cultivate graphic design discourse in Singapore through critical journalism. This posits their practice as design authorship and TDSJ as 'designer-authored' history. This paper presents a brief study on the first eight issues of TDSJ (2009 to 2013) using an analytical framework mainly from the ideas of Michael Rock, Steven McCarthy and Teal Triggs. An investigation into three areas-editorial structure, textual content, and designed form-reveals that TDSJ is still a work-in-progress while unravelling the publisher's ideology. It suggests the expansion and refinement of theories on design authorship by addressing the complications involved when discussed transnationally against other distinguished Euro-American examples. With the increasing interest in studying these graphic artefacts, this provisional reading presents another perspective to the current discourse on design authorship.