“Words Divide, Pictures Unite” – Otto Neurath

 

Isotype – (International System of Typographic Picture Education)

Week Fours required reading is “Isotype representing social facts pictorially” by Christopher Burk. The reading explains how Isotype was developed by theorist Otto Neurath and his colleagues (as seen to the right: the man, the myth the legend). Isotype was first developed at the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna in the 1920s and was first known at the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics. Neurath and his colleagues were the first to explore a consistent visual language as an approach to representing all aspects of the physical world, where the aim of the museum was to ‘represent social facts pictorially’ and to bring ‘dead statistics’ to life by making them visually attractive and memorable (Neurath, 1925, p.5).

Isotype was designed to communicate social facts memorably to less educated groups, including schoolchildren and workers. To achieve this the museum innovated with interactive models and other attention grabbing devices, for example: metal maps covered with magnetic symbols. From the reading it is evident that Neurath saw the potential in using simplified pictures for informing less educated adults and school children – but also for international communication, where the Isotype pictograms were intended to be signs that spoke for themselves and bypassed verbal language. In ways, Isotype offered an alternative to verbal language, where Neurath had the catch phrase ‘Words divide, pictures unite’.

Figure 1 shows two reference sheets from the Isotype ‘Picture Dictionary’. Both reference sheets show how pictograms could be combined in a similar way that an adjective qualifies a noun. However, some objects resisted typification. For example, is seems impossible to design a recognisable pictogram for potato (which is shown on the second reference sheet inside the middle sacks of the first two rows).

 

This development is has now seen the mass production of pictograms and isotypes, where people see them on nearly a daily basis. An example of this (to name a few) would be: stop and give-way signs for vehicles, pedestrian crossing signs, toilet gender signs, disabled toilet signs, as well as hospital signs