Lydia Chodosh probes design rules through archiving and cataloguing

“For me, design is about interrogating the process by which knowledge is acquired and transmitted across time,” says the designer Lydia Chodosh. Exploring our use of language, her work is all about uncovering how we accumulate information, a point of interest the designer has developed over her varied interdisciplinary career. Lydia began her journey studying English Literature and Creative Writing as an undergraduate student athlete in Minnesota, before playing football in Sweden, pursuing a publishing career in New York and gaining a graduate design degree at RISD. These overlapping journeys have one thing at heart: a desire to understand. “My practice is buoyed by an archive of encounters – with people, strange and familiar to me, with objects and ephemera, old and new, with words, accumulated and catalogued,” Lydia shares.

Lydia’s 480-page MFA thesis On the Impulse to Notate is a collection of notes, art historical research and conversations presented through a design system of asymmetrical grids, a duo-tone of subdued brown and blue, and a bookish serif and scientific sans. This printed catalogue is visually industrial, showcasing the importance of clarity to archiving; it’s a demonstration of way-finding through knowledge systems informed by her literary background. The web version, notations.xyz, goes further. Here, Lydia’s growing obsession with the colour blue is catalogued in an archive of cyanotype images, which reveals citations when hovered over.

The designer’s work has also been included in the 2023 RISD Biennial, Highlights from the Impermanent Collection, a celebration of its graphic design graduate cohort. It’s jelly-like identity was designed in collaboration with Kaela Kennedy, Sun Ho Lee and Ingrid Schmaedecke and involved both physical and digital work. “We like the squishy stuff, the relics of the past prone to degradation, the hidden layers of pixelation that make up a screen,” says Lydia. From literary tradition to the cross-disciplinary, Lydia’s influences span across poets, novelists, and translators. There’s the modernist writer Virginia Woolf, contemporary thinkers Christina Sharpe and Kate Briggs, and formalists like Renee Gladman and Etel Adnan. At its core, Lydia’s work pursues one idea: “The point is to discover in otherwise fleeting encounters an indelible, collective rhythm, or what I like to call ‘versions of poetics’.”