ABSTRACT
The two histories I had in mind as I planned this sketch shared a common starting point. Information design had barely been named before Robin Kinross explained its genesis. In his argument of 1984,1
this plus this equals this
In short: Bauhaus2 plus Bell Labs equals HfG Ulm.3 (You may hear a distant echo of Lenin’s ‘electrication plus the soviets equals communism’.) David Sless’s account also starts with what he calls the Bauhaus tradition, seeing in a statement of Moholy-Nagy from the late 1930s an interdisciplinary vision of design.4
