ABSTRACT
Text has become animate: it is seen to do things to people as if they are an active agent. As a consequence we have developed a very peculiar conception of the role of the human reader: the text-reader relation is seen as a one-way process in which the text, or table, or graph, transmits its meaning to the reader. It is the text that contains the meaning, the text tells us what to do and we, the readers, have little or no say in it. The ideas or meanings are in the words written. It follows from this view that all the designers have to do to make the meaning ‘clear’ is just fix up the words of a graphic display.
