Tentativa, experimentação, risco e erro (Test, trial, risk and failure) aims to contribute to the exploration of the current circumstances in which the image resides, in an attempt to understand the influence of the image crisis on design practices. It thus aims to be a contribution to the theoretical and practical exploration of the converging relationships between Communication Design and the image. The image is the preferential object of analysis and exploration in this thesis, not only because we try to understand the functional unemployment attributed to it, but also because we praise and favour its use in tasks that used to be ontological to design. This project is composed by an interpolated method that works through resonance and interdependence between writing («The image crisis and its implications in Communication Design») and practice («Praising the image in Communication Design»).

Besides trying to understand the influence of the image crisis on design practices, while having the image as the preferential object of analysis and exploration, this master’s thesis departures from the academic practices in Communication Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon [FBAUL], between 2019 and 2024.

The research starts by positioning editorial production in Communication Design as a tool for analysing and exploring the limitations of the relationship between images and Communication Design. It introduces the system behind the model chosen for the articulation between writing and practice, and how this structure becomes relevant to the first instalment of the project.

The first chapter and the first instalment of the project, «Arquivo Documental #1: Entre espaços, tempos e realidades, a imagem» («Documental Archive #1: Between spaces, times and realities, the image»), focuses on establishing the operational motto under which the project will be designed, as well as its editorial programme and the bibliographical, thematic and conceptual affinities that it shares with the premises drawn from the academic practices at FBAUL. The affinities established and assumed throughout this instalment help anticipate the direction of the next chapter of the research and the project itself. In addition, the conditions under which the first instalment is developed are transversal, in an operative and functional panorama, to the entire project.

In each instalment, an editorial and conceptual programme is presented to set out the objectives and premises of the instalment. They are found at the end of each instalment because, first, it is wanted that the reader is confronted with a rhizome of images and only then is given an explanation of what happened there. Basically, the idea is to prioritise the reading of a thought that was conceived with and through images, where the text serves as a final complement, to illustrate it—contrasting it with the current situation, where images illustrate texts and are seen like one more box between the text boxes.

The conclusions drawn from the first instalment allow us to introduce perspectives that situate the image in a time when the classical supports of representation—paintings, engravings, sculptures—gave a testimony that was considered authentic and real. What was represented through these mediums was unique and exclusive, guaranteeing an intrinsic and unique singularity and meaning to these representations.

However, the second moment of the investigation culminates in a point where it is concluded that there is a rupture of these characteristics that were found in the images of other times, due to the emergence of the first photographic and film cameras.

In this way, the second instalment, «Arquivo Documental #2: Dois filmes, dois argumentos, um conjunto de reproduções de imagens e tudo o resto que daí decorre («Documental Archive #2: Two films, two arguments, a collection of reproduced images and everything else that follows from that»), shows how these new tools of reproduction contributed to the destruction of the uniqueness found in images, since they started to be reproduced through the mechanisms that photography and video inaugurated, creating new rubrics of inscription and meaning.

While on one hand the new circumstances that come with the renewed rubrics in which the image is inscribed are recognised, on the other hand these same circumstances contribute to the growth of digital culture, a trend that leads to the final chapter of the investigation.

The digital scenario in which photography began to operate from the second half of the 19th century inaugurated an era in which digitalisation took over images. Digital culture has brought about significant transformations, not only in the fields in which images operate, but also in the way we use them. If in the 19th century photographic and film cameras kept up with technological developments, in the 21st century there is a growing awareness around the image and its place in the contemporary matrix. The reproduction of images, through new media, has brought a distancing from the original idea of image, creating a discrepancy in the way we talk about them.

In a context where reality and fiction are becoming more and more diluted, the last instalment of the project, «Arquivo Documental #3: Antes, várias imagens para um único mundo. Agora, várias imagens para vários mundos — e um cenário de indistinção entre o real e o ficcional («Documental Archive #3: Before, several images for a single world. Now, several images for several worlds—and a scenario of indistinction between reality and fiction»), suggests a path that Communication Design can choose to take in order to try to confront the tendency to distance itself from the image, by exploring the contemporary properties of images and applying them to fictitious territories in which the discipline of design operates.