Abstract
What is the place of graphic representation in transferring, structuring, and systematising knowledge practices? In terms of my enquiry, graphic representation in particular refers to the rendering of knowledge through diagrams. Through my work I consider diagrammatic practice as an exercise in both archiving and publishing; where illustrated figures trace gesture and learning in order that complex information can be widely accessed. I also, however, posit the diagram as a live site; a line on a walk, an open invitation, a path to follow. Through writing, publishing, documenting, and practicing diagramming itself, I challenge the significance of diagrams as educational authorities. Acts of collecting and dispersing, contextualising and decontextualising, picking and unpicking call into question the capability for diagrams to sustain communities of practitioners, and preserve knowledge practices.
This enquiry has revolved around — and evolved from — a diagrammatic attention to research practice. What does this mean? To diagram is to “mark out through lines” (OED, 2026). This could be said in other ways; to diagram is to clarify, to establish and define, to uncover through “writing and imaging craftsmanship” (Latour, 1985, pp. 3). In my enquiry, the diagram becomes a live documentation of an ongoing research practice.
Through essaying, I constellated the notion of diagramming and explored the nebulae of matter related to it. How to Diagram redefines diagrams as agents that record, instruct and potentiate. Putting this text alongside diagrams collected from instructional manuals, textbooks and reference guides allowed me to decontextualise and subsequently re-contextualise them. Thus they became functional for their image first and instruction second; their authority as diagrams is queried. The text acts as both an archive of schematic archetypes and a diagrammatic exploration of semantics through deliberate attention to pacing and poetics.
From here publication and print become a key methods of exploration, enquiry and enactment. Where my first publication, How to Diagram zooms out, theorises and speculates, A Diagram Sourcebook accesses and condenses the original provenance of the collected diagrams into a new volume. The figures are presented in situ as facsimiles that are reproduced at a scale of 1:1; thus reinstating their context(s) while also still being used only for the purposes of my enquiry; in this way they are still not restored their perceived objectivity. Reading this new research document situates the reader directly in the context underpinning How to Diagram. The sourcebook explores the relationship of diagrams to archiving, research and publication; but also to established models of education.
The next chapter in my enquiry looks to these pedagogical models and asks how the performance of diagrammatic gesture can challenge them. My first two publications look inward — using my essay as a framework — to project outward as discussions around graphic representation. The next fragment, however, operates in reverse; asking audience members to first prove the function of diagrammatic instruction so that it can be understood as a part of my enquiry. By asking an audience to complete, create or figure out a diagram through controlled prompts on cards, I can measure and explore the “cognitive power” (Krämer, 2015, pp.13) of gesture, and by extension, graphic line. By doing so, my enquiry projects that the diagram is part of an incomplete circuit that can only be rendered complete through actioning its instruction.
As a designer and educator myself, I find significance in this investigation into the diagrammatic as a probe into educational models, norms and byproducts of pedagogy. The diagram is created with both permanence and brevity in mind. It is a fleeting and often forgotten moment of learning and yet it persists past the completion of a project.
Think of a diagram showing you how to knit. Where did you find this diagram? What is included in it, and what isn’t? What does the weight of the line tell you? Is it hand drawn, or machine made — can you tell? Is there a hand in the diagram, and if there is, whose hand is it? Is it yours, or the author’s? Is it a composite representation of a hand considered ‘neutral’? Think again about this diagram. Zoom in, move closer to it. Is it static, or moving? If you were to follow the line, where would it take you?
These questions arise from a close, active reading of these visual figures, and yet most of the time, in truth, they are difficult to decipher. They are scale-less miniatures of movement — keyframes of a practice. Often, we view them passively. Why have they been deemed as a universal educational tool, and who has decided this?
This project is a meditation on the potential(s) of diagrammatic language how we can engage with archives — of gesture, of practice, of mark-making — in a non-linear way. It positions the diagram as an object that is up for contemplation; a tangible figure that both observes and is observed [in] the act of making, learning and creating.
Contextual framework
The theories and questions I position around my enquiry are borne from an ongoing engagement with a handful of key texts and practices.
Central to my exploration is the idea that diagrams have been hailed as reliable sources of information, able to be endlessly transferred across dimensions with their perceived authority intact. Diagrammatic inscription is a method of graphic synthesis, which collects experiences and learnings; it is a simplification of thought and action through line. According to Bruno Latour, the enactment of a diagram, which could also be thought of as its replication, is largely responsible for this reputation. (1985) A diagram can become a scarf, a thesis or stay an idle doodle depending on its enactment (or lack thereof). He theorises that inscriptions are only so valuable as far as they are published and spread; thus a diagram becomes an “immutable mobile”(pp. 7) through print. The publication, reproduction and demonstration of diagrams “conserves and spreads [them] no matter how wrong, strange or wild” (pp. 12) their information is. Through different methods of print and circulation, my project subverts the notion that printed diagrams are reliable. In How to Diagram I strip them of their functionality through decontextualisation, reducing them just to their image created via lines. I rely on the pre-existing cultural and visual connotations of the reader to inform how the diagrams are understood as purely poetic companions to my text. In Manual I ask the reader to [re]interpret different modes of diagrammatic language — arrows, figure numbers, labels — and create new or imagined diagrams from these visual cues. In doing this, and allowing the results to circulate outside freely, the diagram becomes a networked, democratic figure. The learning is experienced in the act of decoding the diagrammatic language, rather than following a pre-defined set of information.
Creating a participatory approach to diagramming recalls Umberto Eco’s text The Open Work (1989). In it, he speaks to the “potentiality of ‘openness’” (pp. 10) in works, which directly relates to my [re]definition of diagrams as figures that “potentiate,” as “map[s] of and instruction[s] to gesture,”(Pilkington, 2026). Eco’s notion that open works “consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units” (pp. 12) as it relates to my enquiry, can come to mean that a diagram is incomplete until enacted by a participating agent. What does this mean, in real terms? Consider again the diagram showing you how to knit. It could be said that it does not serve its purpose until you follow its directions to create something knitted; meaning the audience is actively collaborating with the text to realise, or release, the potential of a single figure.
As diagrams are enmeshed with “pedagogical pursuit[s]” (Pilkington, 2026) and teaching; the importance of citation, archiving and visualising my research journey has arisen through my enquiry. A Diagram Sourcebook aims to trace a part of this journey by cataloguing the texts and books I have used, and compiling them into one volume. By reproducing the books as facsimiles at a scale of 1:1, the diagrams are re-situated in their original context, while still being repurposed specifically for my enquiry. A Diagram Sourcebook becomes a compound version of my bedroom floor, where the books have been stacked for weeks now. As an attempt to visualise the lineage of my research, the book becomes a catalogued “learning trail,” as coined by adrienne maree brown and discussed in Multidimensional Citation by Laura Coombs, Laurel Schwulst & Mindy Seu (2022). The obvious link between trails, paths and contours are that they are lines that can be followed to reach a point — as are the lines of a diagram. Surrounding A Diagram Sourcebook is a graphic interpretation, or path, that can be followed to read and decode my enquiry. The book itself aims to illustrate and contextualise a stretch of that path in order make public, and make tangible, my sources.
The project engages with the archive (as an idea, notion or concept), by exploiting and subverting an archive (of sources, of diagrams), through publishing and documentation practices that [re]catalogue, [re]define and [re/de]contextualise. Just as I consider the diagram as a live site for interpretation, so too I consider the archive as a modality for convening with, re-organising, and interpreting materials that are otherwise inaccessible or obscured by institutions — particularly in Western academic practice. Fabricating an archive-like approach to the presentation and systematisation of my work creates a relationship between reader, diagram and material (meaning, for example, a book). This dynamic allows the audience to access the conceptual material of my project both tangibly and theoretically through different modes of reading. These modes are not designed to define, establish or state conclusive ideas; more, they are formed as, and provoke questions. Thus the document — the archive, the diagram — becomes “an evolving ongoing braid” (Nelson, 1987, pp. 94) of networked ideas and practices.
Projected Contribution
Considering my project in the wider context of graphic communication design, I see significance in the methods of questioning, unpicking and repositioning diagrams as acts that aim to challenge established knowledge structures. Interventions into the diagrammatic — as a method of communication so intertwined with traditional educational models — are ways of treating the archive as a live site for experimentation and reinterpretation. As someone who works closely with traditional machinery and systems, like letterpress and bookbinding equipment, I think finding new ways to approach (seemingly) benign graphic conventions is a way of maintaining a critical approach to design education. The diagram allows access to, makes public, and simplifies complex written information, but it also sets and perpetuates Western pedagogical practices. By constellating the diagram; by networking and repurposing it according to my own and others’ needs through publishing, I create a dossier of methods that aim to subvert diagrammatic information. By building a body of work through printed material, my enquiry establishes what Latour might call an active “two-way connection” (pp. 13) between diagram and reader, but what I might call a triangulated connection. Where a two-way connection between reader and material is inevitable, it also feels closed — recalling Eco’s theory around closed and open works — a triangulated connection comes as a result of the material (diagrams) being live, mobile and constantly reinterpreted.
Bibliography
Coombs, L., Schwulst, L., and Seu, M. (2022) ‘Multidimensional Citation’, The Serving Library. Available at: https://www.servinglibrary.org/journal/17/multidimensional-citation (Accessed: 20 May 2026).
Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work. Translated by A. Cancogni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Krämer, S. (2015) ‘Graphism and Flatness: The Line as Mediator between Time and Space, Intuition and Concept’, in M. Faietti and G. Wolf (eds) The Power of Line, Hirma, pp. 10–17.
Latour, B. (1986) ‘Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together’, in Kuklick, H. (ed.) Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. Vol. 6. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, pp. 1–40.
Nelson, T. (1981) Literary Machines: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito, CA: Mindful Press.
Oxford University Press (no date) diagram, n. In: Oxford English Dictionary. Available at: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/diagram_n?tl=true (Accessed: 20 May 2026).
Pilkington, C. (2026) How to Diagram.
“‘You doubt of what I say ? I’ll show you.’ And, without moving more than a few inches, I unfold in front of your eyes figures, diagrams, plates, texts, silhouettes, and then and there present things that are far away and with which some sort of two-way connection has now been established.” (p.13)
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