Schaubilder. Strategies of Visual Efficiency

At the center of this study is the visual representation of knowledge in the United States between 1920 and 1950. Based on three hitherto under-researched case studies – the exhibition displays of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the graphic system of the Sweet’s Catalogue Design, and the operative visualizations of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – topics of visual pedagogy and information design are interwoven with theories of Management Studies and examined within their cultural and intellectual-historical contexts.

The aim is to develop an exemplary cultural history of charts (Schaubilder), encompassing those visual media that presented instructions or overviews on display boards. These media did not merely serve as tools of communication but established new forms of knowledge. The central thesis is that visual working methods of Management Studies – among them the flow chart – were transferred into other disciplinary fields such as graphic design. In doing so, operative visualization tools emerged that organized the pictorial surface according to standardized principles and fulfilled the demand for "visual efficiency".

At the same time, the study demonstrates that these visual practices rested on normative assumptions: standardization and efficiency enabled the enforcement of specific categories of order that privileged certain bodies, their ascribed abilities and origins, while systematically excluding others. Here, the project connects to perspectives from Disability and Gender Studies, asking how visual normativities mark difference and reproduce processes of othering. At the same time, these practices translated complex operations into standardized signs and thereby enabled a rationalization that was both visually and actively controllable – anticipating the cybernetic key concept of regulation through feedback. In this sense, charts function as visual bridges between Management Studies, Operations Research, and the early theories of cybernetics.