FRANKFURT.- Graphic design is everywhere, from the packaging on supermarket shelves and the interfaces on our phones to advertising, signage and the systems that help us navigate public space. Yet much of its influence goes unnoticed. A new exhibition at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt sets out to make that influence visible.

Opening August 20, On Display. How Graphic Design Shapes Us looks at the ways graphic design affects how people perceive information, understand the world and make decisions. Bringing together work by Robin Coenen and Danielle Rosales, Aline Bavier and Sophia Becker, and Anja Kaiser and Rebecca Stephany, the exhibition considers the social and political power of design at a moment of rapid technological and cultural change.

At the heart of the exhibition is a deceptively simple idea: information is never presented neutrally. Numbers, facts and data always reach us through choices about typography, color, layout, hierarchy and presentation. Those choices can influence what attracts our attention, what appears authoritative and even what we believe to be true.

Robin Coenen and Danielle Rosales explore this relationship in Design Macht Wissen, a project examining how graphic design shapes and communicates knowledge. Their work asks visitors to consider the power structures that can emerge when information is organized, framed and made visible in particular ways.

Technology provides another major focus of the exhibition. Graphic design has always evolved alongside new tools, but the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence is creating questions that reach well beyond new techniques or visual styles.

Aline Bavier and Sophia Becker confront those questions directly in their video installation re constructed. Using generative image models, the artists revisit shared memories from childhood and adolescence, transforming personal recollections through technologies capable of generating entirely new visual material.

Their work blurs conventional ideas of authorship. Rather than treating digital tools simply as instruments in the hands of designers, the installation suggests that media, methods and technologies increasingly participate in shaping the realities designers create.

The exhibition also challenges some of the principles that have traditionally defined the profession. During much of the 20th century, graphic design was strongly influenced by the search for universal systems and rules that could produce clear and effective visual communication.

In the Glossary of Undisciplined Design, Anja Kaiser, Rebecca Stephany and other contributors propose a very different understanding of the field. They present design as an open, collaborative and sometimes contradictory practice—one that gains strength from multiple perspectives and from questioning conventions rather than simply following them.

Together, the works in On Display expand the discussion beyond what graphic design looks like to examine what it does. The exhibition asks how design influences knowledge, how new technologies are changing creative authorship and what responsibilities designers carry when their work plays such a pervasive role in everyday life.

Curated by Dr. Jonas Deuter, On Display. How Graphic Design Shapes Us opens Thursday, August 20, at 7 p.m. at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt.