Practice-led Iconic Research: Towards a Research Methodology for Visual Communication

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of 'practice led-iconic research.' It provides a brief philosophical background on the relation between 'text and image,' and a theoretical frame to investigate how images generate meaning. The article introduces practice-led iconic research as an approach starting from the making of images, which consists of two trajectories. The first trajectory focuses on the design process, especially on looking at the various conditions that guide decision-making in the becoming of unseen images. The second one examines the characteristics of an image category, i.e. it concentrates on the generation of a specific category of images from a field of variations. Both trajectories of iconic research aim to provide evidence perceived by the visual sense that augments the evidence provided by language.