Roger Conscience

Here: Diagrams, Maps and Tables → How to visualise non-static borders was one of the challenges the graphic designer Roger Conscience enjoyed while working with the ETH Zurich on the project Cartographies of Planetary Urbanization, presented at the Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture Shenzhen in 2015.
Discussing data visualisation, the graphic designer first remembers a political propaganda leaflet making its argument through diagrams. It is this tension between fact-based information — the data — and its inevitable manipulation for the purposes of visualisation that interests Conscience. Inspired by Jacques Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics, he developed a practice that is at once playful and deeply committed, exploring the visual power of diagrams. Presenting a fictional study programme through diagrams for his diploma, he also designed posters for events and concerts as maps and schemata, as well as for the archive of independent publications K-set Archive, which he co-founded in 2004. When designing the annual report of the Kulturbüro Zürich from 2014 to 2018, he pushed diagram-making to the edge of the absurd, playing with bureaucracy’s convoluted processes. Navigating between established formats and formal experiments, Conscience is constantly searching for new patterns of meaning-creation and alternative visual orders.

There: Working with the context → For each work, the nature of the data and the context of presentation determine the design and techniques. Conscience, who set up the metal font workshop K18 (2004–2007) and later the silkscreen workshop Citro-Druck, today Zitropress in Zurich, moves between digital and analogue design and printing processes. His diagrams are created either on commission or on an independent basis, but always in collaboration, like the murals produced together with Carolina Cerbaro for the show #urbancitizenship. Stadt und Demokratie at the Shedhalle, Zurich, in 2016 as part of the Die ganze Welt in Zürich project. The all-over colourful murals represented data on the topics of migration, urban citizenship and democracy. Their function was both to present background data for the show and to serve as background for the events within the show. Another collaboration was a series of statistical diagrams for the book Die Schweiz in Bild und Zahl with graphic designer Simone Farner, published 2018 by Hier und Jetzt, in which the diagrams had to be intuitively easily understandable, to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Everywhere: Visualising data → While deepening his interest in the information economy and data capitalism, Roger Conscience collaborates on the presentation of the history of the oldest food coop in Zurich, Tor 14. Another project on a major graphic work collection presents the challenge of visualising all the missing data. For the data visualiser, this is of course an inspiring situation, given a world that is constantly producing more information and more data.

Roger Conscience → (*1974), based in Zurich, www.rogerconscience.com

Education → Visual Design (2002), HGKZ, Zurich

Project(s) → Diagrams, Maps and Tables, 2010–2019