I. SITUATION
WHAT IS CIRCULATION?
Circulation is not a new concept. It describes the movement of blood through the body, money through an economy, news through a city. At its most basic, circulation is the process by which something moves through a system and returns changed.
SAGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JOURNALISM: CIRCULATION |
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism defines circulation as a process shaped by dissemination, engagement, and recontextualisation, where meaning is produced through movement rather than fixed output (Borchard, 2022). For this project, that is the definition that matters. Not circulation as distribution.
CIRCULATION IN THIS PROJECT
Circulation, as this project defines it, is the process by which textual meaning is reconfigured through changing contexts of mediation.
II. PROBLEM
Now the next part.
Graphic design has always focused on the human side. The designer, the author, the reader, but I want to shift that focus to the system itself.
In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan, Agel and Fiore (1967) said the medium shapes how we think more than the actual content it carries. Because media doesn’t just carry information, it actively works us over. It conditions us and our societies more profoundly than whatever content is being shared.
And it is an invisible system. We don’t notice it happening, we think we’re just sending an email or posting a story but the platform has already decided how we write, what tone we use, how long it should be, who we’re speaking to. The system is doing all of that before we’ve typed a single word.
And all media are extensions of us. The book extends the eye, electronic media extends the nervous system. These technologies create environments that condition how we think, communicate, and organise our lives without us even realising. The invisible system isn’t something outside of us. It’s become part of how we function.
In Fuck Content, Rock (2009) took that idea into design specifically and said form isn’t just carrying information, it’s where meaning is actually made.
So platforms aren’t just channels. They are conditions that actively shape what gets communicated before anyone has a chance to change it.
That’s the question my project is built around: how do you make something invisible, visible?
III. RESPONSE
The starting point was a typeface based on an Emigre publication (Licko and VanderLans, 1990). Extrapolated through Steyerl’s (2012) concept of the poor image: images gain significance through circulation rather than clarity.
Each copy carries traces of its previous forms. I compressed the publication over and over, and took the degraded result and converted it into a typeface.
The typeface carries its history of circulation in its form. This is where the project began.
The Conditional Design Manifesto (Maurer et al., 2013) gave me a framework: the process becomes the product. Each iteration informs the next. Difference should have a reason. Rather than designing fixed outcomes, I established conditions that allowed text to transform.
I iterated the letter ‘a’ across five directions: legibility, freehand transition, pixel by pixel transition, movement through colour, life cycle.
Then I expanded into a sentence. Typographically through tracking, leading, scale. Individually through rewriting from memory. Socially through the telephone game (Wikipedia, 2024).
Each experiment showed that meaning shifts through circulation. But the question remained: is it people doing the shifting, or something else?
To explore this, I sent the same text to people and asked them to rewrite it as if they were sending it through a specific platform.
WhatsApp became abbreviated and casual. Gmail became formal and structured. Instagram became a single compressed sentence.
The letter became personal and expressive. The post-it became fragmented and incomplete. And most strikingly, people automatically handwrote the letter and the post-it without being asked. Nobody decided that. The platform decided it for them.
Rather than manually rewriting content across platforms, I wanted a single space where that process could happen, be tracked, and be made visible. The content is fixed. Not because it is unimportant, but because fixing it isolates the variable that does matter: the platform.
The transformation does not happen through human transmission. It happens through the machine. No one is misreading, misremembering, or reinterpreting. The drift is purely systemic. That makes it a more direct test of what the platform itself does to language.
The circulation log was directly inspired by Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index (Seu, n.d.). In most design practice, a project is finished when it is released. Seu’s index refuses that. It is always incomplete, always in progress. The longer it runs, the more it reveals. Incompleteness is not a failure. It is the argument.
Every row in the log is not documentation. It is evidence. The accumulation is the work. And crucially, where Seu’s archive is built by people, mine is built by platforms. That distinction is what this project is trying to make visible.
IV. REALIZATION
The simulation revealed a question McLuhan never asked (McLuhan, Agel and Fiore, 1967). Not just what the medium does to content, but what it discards. The website makes that visible. What each platform keeps. What it throws away.
This project is not finished. It cannot be. The longer it runs, the more it reveals. It is circulating within itself.
References
Borchard, G.A. (ed.) (2022) ‘Circulation’, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism. 2nd edn. Sage Publications.
Licko, Z. and VanderLans, R. (1990) Emigre #15: Do You Read Me? Emigre.
Maurer, L., Paulus, E., Puckey, J. and Wouters, R. (2013) Conditional Design Workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz.
McLuhan, M., Agel, J. and Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage. Penguin.
Rock, M. (2009) ‘Fuck Content’, 2×4. Available at: 2×4.org/ideas/2009/fuck-content/
Seu, M. (n.d.) Cyberfeminism Index. Available at: cyberfeminismindex.com
Steyerl, H. (2012) The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Wikipedia (2024) ‘Telephone game’. Available at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game