David Oswald On Naming the Information Department
Max Bense was the first head of the Information Department from 1955 to 1958, and had a formative influence on its content. The assumption that the name of the department goes back to Bense is obvious, but not correct. The concept of information did not play a dominant role in Bense's work until 1954. It was not until 1954 that he began to study the information theory of Shannon/Weaver, from which he developed his information aesthetics.1 However, the term "information" already appeared in 1949 in a typescript of the later HfG founders 2 – long before Bense met Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher and Max Bill at his first lecture at the Ulm Adult Education Centre in 1952.3 The list of departments planned in 1949 shows the initial political-publicistic orientation of the "Geschwister Scholl Hochschule" ["Scholl siblings school"]: Political Methodology, Press/Broadcasting, Advertising/Information, Photography/Film, Product Form, Architecture, Urban Planning – in that order. The later Information Department is still referred to alternately as "Advertising/Instruction" and "Advertising/Information" within the document. From 1949/50, the school's conception shifted more and more towards the "New Bauhaus" due to the influence of Max Bill, and the political and journalistic part became increasingly smaller. In the end, the two departments "Press/Broadcasting" and "Advertising/Information" were merged into a single "Information" department – the "Political Methodology" department disappeared completely.
Today, this remaining department would probably be called "Verbal Communication" – so why "Information"? There are some reasons to believe that the name of the department originates from Max Bill. Bill argued in favour of this name in a letter to Inge Scholl, partly in order to get rid of "Political Method", which he disliked:
"journalism is also politics. it is equally information." and "advertising should largely be information. be it to gain public opinion about things that are in everyone's interest or to provide information about products" and further: "hence, the three things [politics, journalism, advertising] are closely connected and could actually bear the overarching title 'information and public education service'. (this is more of a direction than a title.)" 4
An anti-fascist magazine may have served as an inspiration and model: 5 The magazine entitled "information" was published from 1932 by Ignazio Silone 6 in his exile in Zurich. He had fled from the Italian fascists. The then 24-year-old Max Bill was responsible for the graphic design of the "information" magazine. The authors of this magazine wrote against the rise of German fascism and the threat of a "fascisation" of Switzerland. This journalistic leitmotif was later also to be found in Ulm: fighting propaganda and seduction with enlightenment and information. This meant that two concepts of "information" met in Ulm: information as political enlightenment and information as the technically measurable content of a message. For Bense, who had written a pamphlet against Hitler in 1944,7 this was by no means incompatible – on the contrary.
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