The Third Space:
Astha Thakkar
This graduate thesis is a collection of smaller projects that use graphic design as a platform for coding and decoding core arguments in post-colonial studies. Graduate student Astha Thakkar chose to focus on this field because her interest lies in understanding cultural and literary production in the global south as well as its current political culture and evolution.
Astha grew up in a city that has witnessed at least seven rounds of complete destruction and reconstruction at the hands of the British and afterward in the economic and social chaos that was unleashed when they attained independence. As a transnational living between New Delhi, London, and now Chicago, Astha uses her design practice to negotiate, reconcile, and inform a cultural identity defined through an equation of different cultures. She applies design methodologies to understand what post-colonial scholarship has to say about the culture, social framework, and political and historical evolution of the global south.
Astha’s project revolves around her thesis book. In her opinion, designing a book is the closest a graphic designer can come to industrial design. She wanted to carefully consider how someone will hold and interact with the book, while ensuring that its format do justice to its content.
Divided into three sections, the book examines the claims of well-known post-colonial scholar Edward Said as expressed in his publication “Orientalism.” The first section highlights Said’s key propositions. The second section contains Astha’s thesis essay. In the third section, she compards and contrasts Said’s arguments with those of acclaimed twenty-first century scholar Vivek Chibber. While both authors incorporate theories from the field, they present opposing views on the evolution of the global south. By examining these scholars’ divergent perspectives, she tried to expose contradictions in their arguments and bring to light each perspective’s strengths and weaknesses. Such conflicts, in her opinion, are ripe for a design intervention. Through designed prompts, invitations, and scripts she has established typographic systems and means of production that restrict language and interrupt or alter existing design systems to foreground key aspects of my research.
The idea of practice-led research has been debated for several decades. How can researchers — who are also artists and designers — reflect on and document their creative processes in relation to their research topic? The process of creation has always been more important than final outcomes to me, and she wanted to preserve and document this sense of process with a series of broadsheets. While they’re messy, each broadsheet contains a strict typographic and visual logic. The challenge here was to generate a publication format that she could populate over time — a “live document” that documents conscious reflection on and in action.
Astha’s thesis installation showcases a collection of printed materials that includes her thesis book, the series of broadsheets, and a booklet on “the Desi Identity.” These materials are an attempt to acknowledge the subtleties, ambiguities, politics, and power structures that lie within language. The projects in the installation pay special attention to language as a significant tool for graphic design. Working in publications and installation, she engages with the inherited meanings of visual language (form, typography, color, material, format) to open up well-worn narratives and craft new interpretations.
Typeforce, 2020
One Club’s International Portfolio Night, 2019
TypeCon Conference, 2019
Dutch Design Week, 2019
AIGA Chicago What’s Next Grant, 2019