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Archive as Method

How can book design be used to reframe archives into
responsive, user-led experiences?

[Graduate Showcase..]

Screw-post Binding

Paper
Colourplan in Real Grey 270gsm
Colourplan in Limestone 270gsm
Colourplan in Azure Blue 270gsm
Colourplan in Bright Red 270gsm
Colourplan in Candy Pink 270gsm

Dimensions
17.6 W, 24.6cm H

Archive Publication
2025

The archive recognises intersectionality within the suffragette movement, highlighting how women’s lived experiences differed based on factors. Traditional archives on this topic have often been exclusionary, overlooking these layered perspectives. In response, the archive material is organised into five colour-coded themes: race, class, geography, sexuality, and disability, to facilitate thematic browsing and encourage a more pluralistic reading of feminist history.

The ‘final’ outcome is a screwpost-bound archive-as-book, structured using coloured fore-edge indexing to support non-linear navigation. My project recognises the tangent as a legitimate and often necessary part of how knowledge is encountered and created. Drawing from models such as William Leighton’s 16th-century polyphonic choir books, modular zines from the 1990s Riot Grrrl movement, and centrally-bound reading systems from 7th-century Tibet, the project invites users to read associatively rather than sequentially. Its structure encourages open-ended engagement, which mirrors the layered nature of archival research.
The project is informed by poststructuralist theory (Barthes, Hall), archival critique (Trouillot), and feminist publishing practices (Lorde, Scotford). It also critically engages with the ideological legacies of design movements like Swiss modernism, acknowledging its influence while challenging its claims to universality and neutrality. Design features such as screwpost binding, typographic rotation, and undefined sequencing reflect a commitment to resisting linearity and hierarchy. Fore-edge indexing provides both visual orientation and thematic navigation to facilitate alternative readings, foregrounding the structure of the book as a site of meaning rather than a neutral frame. A pivotal shift occurred when I abandoned an early prototype based on a vintage Rolodex address-book format. While rooted in childhood memory, the object’s fixed structure conflicted with the flexibility the project required. Letting go of replication in favour of functional translation reframed my understanding of form as something provisional and always in conversation with content.
As a neurodivergent designer-researcher, my approach is shaped by a need for both structural clarity and conceptual fluidity. I spoke with the UAL Archives and Special Collections team, whose insights into user access informed conceptual and structural decisions, and I worked in dialogue with the communities represented to ensure cultural sensitivity and contextual accuracy through shared authorship. To extend this approach beyond the book’s initial production, I released the indexing system as an open-source framework, allowing future contributors to print and expand the archive. This reflects a commitment to collective authorship and an understanding that knowledge structures are continuously shaped through community use.
This project does not claim to redesign institutional systems of classification or publishing. Instead, intervenes at the level of reader experience. Drawing inspiration from Mendeleev’s periodic table, which left intentional gaps for undiscovered elements, I sought to hold space for partiality. In an age defined by metadata, algorithmic sorting, and inherited design defaults, this project critiques dominant systems that marginalise non-Western, disabled, and non-linear epistemologies and argues for more pluralistic approaches to both design and archiving.
This work has re-situated my practice as not rooted in resolution, but in designing for multiplicity and negotiation. I reject design as a method of total authorship, and while authorship is decentralised, I acknowledge my responsibility as a designer is to build systems which honour nuance and avoid flattening complexities.