DHUB

  • logo concept
  • 2010 

We were invited to create a conceptual logo for a future design museum to open in Barcelona. As a way of explaining our ideas, we provided three quotations:

What kind of information? For whom? With what intentions? And, subsequently, designed in what way? (Jean Leering and Jan van Toorn, “Voormgeving in functie van museale overdracht” [Design as a means of museological communication], Documentaires, no.7 [1978]: 1; quoted in Rick Poynor, Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice [010 Publishers, 2008], 103)

The designed products as a visual image or message have no single referent. Instead it is an organic structure, a connection relative to changing consumer positions, values and expect­ations, constantly shifting and in flux. Therefore, the conventions of the traditional museum with a tendency toward the static and isolated presentation are antithetical to the reality of the design process as it exists in society. If early concepts of the museum worked on making the private public, what can be done with objects which are, from their inception, public speech? (Michael Rock and Susan Sellers, “The Museum of the Ordinary,” in: Jan van Toorn, ed., design beyond Design [Jan van Eyck Academie, 1998], 139)

The inverted question mark (¿) is a punctuation mark indicating a question that is written before the first letter of an interrogative sentence or clause. It is an inverted form of the standard symbol “?,” recognized by speakers of languages written with the Latin alphabet. In most languages, a single question mark is used, and only at the end of an interrogative sentence: “How old are you?” This once was true of the Spanish language. The inverted question mark was adopted long after the Real Academia’s decision, published in the second edition of La ortografía de la Real Academia [The orthography of the Royal Academy] (1754) recommending it as the symbol indicating the beginning of a question in written Spanish — ¿Cuántos años tienes? (“How old are you?”). … An alternative usage, narrowly adopted, was using the inverted question mark only when the question was long or when there was much risk of ambiguity; but not for short sentences or those that clearly are questions, such as: Quién viene? (“Who goes there?”). (Wikipedia)

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