Issue Three Models

A model is never only a method. It is a memory of form that has forgotten its history. It appears instructional, procedural, pragmatic—but it is also ideological. A model distills prior conditions into something that can be transferred, repeated, and applied. Yet in doing so, it risks detaching form from its conditions, converting it into a kind of floating logic. In this sense, every model is a residue of form that has been made to stand in for thinking—a fetish of structure, animated by use, yet hollowed of origin.

 Design models—whether pedagogical templates, workflow diagrams, typographic systems, or layout conventions—rarely present themselves as historical. They offer themselves as tools, not as traces. But these tools carry the sediment of past social arrangements: the division of labour, the institutionalisation of design, the economisation of attention. What persists is not just method, but the ideological remnant of fetishised form—a form that has come to appear autonomous, necessary, even efficient, precisely because its origins have been obscured.

 This issue of Dialogues takes the model not as a solution to be adopted nor a constraint to be resisted, but as a site of dialectical engagement. That is, a site where contradiction is not resolved but revealed—where the inherited, the habitual, and the contingent are brought into conversation with new demands, new questions, new formations of practice.

 Across typography, publishing, image-making, and social design, the contributions here approach modelling not as a means of simplification, but as a way of organising attention. Some interrogate existing structures; others construct new ones. Some remain within received systems, working slowly through their frictions. Others break open forms to see what they conceal. In each case, the model becomes a mode of reflection—not an answer, but a question formed in practice.

 This is not the subversion of models for the sake of difference. It is something slower and more exacting: a pedagogy that holds inherited forms in view, traces their construction, and works within them long enough to transform them. In this light, practice is not framed as innovation, but as fidelity to process—to the conditions of making, the demands of form, and the relations through which design becomes possible.

 To model, in this expanded sense, is not merely to (re)produce structure, but to participate in a dialectic of constraint and transformation. Every model is a fragment of a longer process. It carries the weight of its emergence, and the possibility of its revision. If the fetish of form closes history into appearance, then the task of education is not to dismiss the model, but to rework it—consciously, collectively, and critically.

 This issue offers such reworkings. Not as finished frameworks, but as material attempts to think, teach, and make.