Tai Cossich / Kollontai Cossich Diniz

Tai Cossich is a designer and researcher.

Doctoral research

Currently Tai is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, in London, under the supervision of Professor Teal Triggs and Dr Mark Sebba. She discusses, through graphic design practice and grounded in visual epistemologies, the socio-technical conditions for printing texts in minoritised languages (particularly indigenous languages of Central and South America, in the 18th Century). Tai uses text markup techniques in a quasi-forensic manner to interrogate her primary sources and to present her findings visually, whilst also engaging in a wider conversation about language rights, decoloniality, and pluriversalities.

Decolonising graphic design history

Tai Cossich is interested in decolonial approaches to graphic design history. Research projects in this area include Guarani Typography — The printing press of the Guarani-Jesuit Reductions (17–18th century) and Typography and Indigenous Languages in Brazil (1998–2007).

As the student representative of the Design History Society, Tai oversees the DHS Virtual Student Forum. She is also responsible for promoting and supporting the Virtual Event Award and the Research Access Award for students.

Communication and information technologies for autonomy and social change

Tai dedicated most of her professional life to projects that aimed to democratise access to information and communications technologies: She was a graphic designer at the editorial division of Funai, the National Indigenous Peoples Foundation (Brazil), where she worked on editorial projects in various indigenous languages and in colaboration with indigenous educators; at the Paulo Freire Institute (Brazil) she was responsible for implementing the use of open source software in community-based educational programmes; and at Brasiliana USP she worked on community-based archive digitisation projects and on public policy making for the digitisation of archival collections.

Comics and psychoanalysis

Tai is also a comics enthusiast. ☺ She explores themes ranging from love to set theory in her own drawings. Her strips have been published by The Lacanian Review, and her minimalist graphic novel Original Case was published by Lote 42.

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