The Discreet Charm of a Short-Term Rental Agreement

Foreword of Designing History: Documents and the Design Imperative to Immutability by Chris Lee, published by Set Margins’ in 2025.

Dear designer, design researcher, design freak: I ask you to forget, for the time being, magazines, logos, and fancy typefaces. Instead, think of bills, coins, spreadsheets, passports, even cuneiform tablets and cryptographic ledgers. Think of documents. I get it, that 1969 Milton Glaser poster changed your life, but what about that misleading short-term rental agreement that kept you up at night for weeks?

Banal artifacts like the latter can hardly be called design, you might object. They’re often dull, if not just plain bad. Is there anything to say about them, design-wise? Anthropologist David Graeber, author of a clever study on bureaucracy, understood this clearly:

Paperwork is boring. One can describe the ritual surrounding it. One can observe how people talk about or react to it. But when it comes to the paperwork itself, there just aren’t that many interesting things one can say about it. How is the form laid out? What about the color scheme? Why did they choose to ask for certain bits of information and not others? Why place of birth and not, say, place where you went to grade school? What’s so important about the signature? But even so, even the most imaginative commentator pretty quickly runs out of questions.¹

Not only is paperwork boring, he adds, it is also “supposed to be boring.”² We could say that it is designed that way. Still, why bother? The thing is, my fellow friend, sometimes the most unappealing things, the ones without symbolic depth, are also the most important. In this case, “important” means that they are worryingly close to force, to legitimized violence. Try not to comply with some shady conditions of the aforementioned agreement to see what I mean.

Designing History brightly confutes Graeber’s point: Chris Lee makes the important, even when it’s dull, interesting. He manages to write a deep, imaginative, and compelling essay on these seemingly transparent artifacts that are, in appearance, purely operational. This book shows us that documents do possess an aura—the palpable Sauron’s gaze of authority, dominion, herrschaft. Here, the transparency and uniformity of the document reflects the opacity and intricacy of power; the merely operational runs on the symbolic structure of the sovereign institution. And, needless to say, this institution not only wants to be in charge, it wants to remain so. That’s why the imperative that drives the design of documents is, as Lee clearly points out, that of immutability.

In recent decades, it has become commonplace to extend the concept of design indiscriminately across time and space, as if Chauvet’s cave paintings or the Inca quipu could be held up as examples of what is understood today, in the modernized West, as design. According to Giovanni Anceschi, in this way design becomes a Hegelian category of spirit, rather than a historically situated idea.³ This unwarranted extension can only yield valid results if a specific, solid angle is chosen—one that genuinely transforms our understanding of design here and now, instead of clouding our historical awareness with the fog of the present. Chris Lee’s perspective, which traces back to Sumer civilization, does exactly this because it lets us rethink design history as a whole as a history of documents. And it works: we see the past as present, and the present as past. From this point of view, it is not absurd to speak of micromanagement in the period from 3600 to 3100 BCE.

The author’s personal history led him to rethink historiography. He insists that history is not an arid sequence of facts, but a story, a narrative based on the interpretation of evidence. For once, it makes sense to speak of storytelling in design. This is where things get challenging, because this book is about the matter of evidence, that is, documents. And documents are not simply historical—they want to be so. Lee’s theoretical journey is vertiginous, as he tries to rethink design history through documents while historicizing them, such that we are urged to see the document as both form and content, structure and thing, sign and symbol. When we think we have finally landed on an “historiography of the design of history,” Lee warns us that the ride is not over yet: there are other forms of history-making, fully legitimate, that eschew documentary evidence and archives, dealing instead with repertoires and performative rehearsals, where illiteracy can be feigned deliberately. And the conflict between these two different mythologies, that of the evidence and that of the repertoire, is true not only for design history, but for history at large.

Let’s stay within the design field, though. While the most cutting-edge design historians are busy today with the task of breaking the design canon through the additive, somewhat liberal approach that priorities inclusivity, Lee explains that “it is ultimately impossible to produce an absolutely inclusive canon.” So, he transcends these efforts, shaking the very foundation of the history palace. Instead of breaking canonical history, he proposes to rethink canonical historiography: don’t focus on the petty bourgeois, now post-Fordist design author with their publicity artifacts, but look at the documental debris that surrounds you. Ironically, documents are a much broader “gap in the record” within design history than any poster designed by whoever.

A Reddit user had an idea: “We should put Comic Sans on legal documents, not to legitimize Comic Sans, but to delegitimize law.”⁴ Reading this book, one risks starting to believe that designers are capable of legitimizing authority through their craft: the carefully designed banknote, the calligraphy of old contracts, and so on. Thanks to design, these documents appear more official, more convincing. But, in fact, it is the other way around: it is the narcissism of power that embellishes its immutable claims. It is power that legitimizes design, and not vice versa. Evidence for this lies in the poor and, at times silly, design of documents that still wield significant impact over people’s lives. Institutional authority can make even Comic Sans look serious—just think of the CERN Higgs boson announcement in 2012.

So, what’s left for designers? With a touch of melancholy, Lee concedes that no design student dreams of designing tax forms—and yet, there is, in style, a fascination, even a fetish, with standards and grids, from Josef Müller-Brockmann to Carsten Nicolai. Not many students go to design school to anonymously contribute to anti-imperial struggle—not many, but surely some, especially since politics have become a token of professionalization. Nobody goes to design school to become a saboteur—and yet, the creative industries have eulogized the cheerful hacker, the troublemaker, even the rogue. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but this book might be more directly relevant than what our humble author thinks.

There is also another path for designers: some of them can provisionally impersonate power by means of forgery. From Lee’s perspective, counterfeiting emerges as a design practice in its own right, grounded in a theoretical framework which goes beyond the occasional anecdotal account of heroic endeavors, such as the illegal activities of Willem Sandberg during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. With these ideas in mind, the more we look, the more we find graphic design. We find forgery “from above” in Orwell’s novel 1984, where Winston Smith amends historical records, and counterfeiting “from below” in Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite, where Ki-jung forges a university diploma to make his brother look qualified (while he comments “with skills like this, why can’t you get into art school?”). So, here comes the oxymoron: Designing History makes forgery legit.

In Lee’s hands, design is neither just a technical nor just an expressive practice, but a political one, or more precisely, it is pre-political. It acts on the surface where politics takes place. Lee makes us see the proscenium, not just the stage. This book is ultimately political because it understands that power floats above the murky waters of politics, with documents serving as power’s seemingly neutral interface. Its focus on immutability is also a not-so-subtle critique of the imperative to publicity and its highfalutin career aspirations, where the designer becomes “ontologically indistinguishable from their clients.”

An underlying thread running through Designing History is its anarchist leaning, with anarchy understood as freedom from external authority. Without giving too much away, I believe the central scene of this essay is the one that takes place on a soccer field, where the refusal to acknowledge an official document is dismissed as illiteracy. Fundamentally, the scene has to do with organization and the extent to which we want to formalize, with a Leviathan-like system, something that could be easily managed informally and horizontally. This is crucial to keep in mind, since designers are often managers by vocation, if not outright bureaucrats.

So, beware. Reading this book, the bureaucrat in you might lose interest in colorful posters and magazines, only to be captivated by the ominous charm of bills and spreadsheets. By contesting the immutability of these artifacts, you might change your perception of design—and, consequently, the design you produce.

– Silvio Lorusso, Lisbon, November 2024