Mead realized that creating a universal visual language would require more than anthropologists.
As long as anyone believes that human beings naturally “follow the arrow,” treat red as a signal of danger, think a skull and crossbones means poison, or express negation by a head shake, we will be seriously prevented from accomplishing an urgent international enterprise. It is important to insist that there are no universal symbols, although there are many widely distributed symbols which are based on widely distributed artifacts (like the arrow) and widely distributed forms of representation (like the sun).
In her foundational 1969 article “Anthropology and Glyphs,” she argued that there are no naturally universal symbols: Mead saw a critical role for anthropologists in ensuring that the design of glyphs acknowledged and incorporated diverse cultural references and styles. She proposed the development of a new, universal second language alongside an international system of visual communication to be learned by every child: “What is needed, internationally, is a set of glyphs which does not refer to any single phonological system or to any specific cultural system of images but will, instead, form a system of visual signs with universally recognized referents.” What was needed, she believed, was a “new, shared culture,” a common ground that would align and synchronize humankind in order to achieve worldwide intelligibility. Mead pointed to the tremendous “social and economic fragmentation” and the lamentable “state of communication” of the world and the urgency to save humankind from nuclear annihilation. She is credited with coining the term semiotics in 1962 to denote the study of “patterned communication in all modalities.” In 1964 she called upon the United Nations Committee for the International Cooperation Year to create a system of universally recognized graphic symbols. Her writings on cross-cultural communication and visual anthropology-most notably her 1947 article “The Application of Anthropological Techniques to Cross-National Communication”-laid the philosophical groundwork for Glyphs Inc.
Mead’s growing fascination with signs and symbols was evident as early as the 1930s and 1940s, during and after World War II. They were allied in the belief that communication was at the heart of the problem in national and ideological conflicts (the Cold War, the Vietnam War, environmental degradation) and in cross-cultural relations (international trade, travel, cross-disciplinary scientific research). Together Mead and Modley founded a nonprofit, Glyphs Inc., and endeavored for over a decade, until 1976, to build it into an international, coordinated movement to promote and develop a universal system of graphic symbols. This rather utopian idea might have been dismissed as fantastical had its principal author not been Mead, a renowned cultural anthropologist and international peace advocate. contribute to the situation and hostility in which many human communities live today.” Universal, unambiguous symbols, they believed, would immediately provoke “visual thinking” and help overcome the current “chaos” of communication in international travel, trade, health and safety, scientific research, and intercultural relations. The need for such glyphs was so urgent, they argued, that without them “hungry, frightened, confused people will continue to. In the summer of 1968, American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901–1978) and Austrian-American graphic designer Rudolf Modley (1906–1976) called for a system of universally understood pictographic symbols, or “glyphs,” with the goal of facilitating worldwide communication. With increasing globalization, new channels and methods of communication were necessary if cross-cultural communication, international cooperation, mutual understanding, and peace were to be achieved. The decades following World War II were years of growing international cooperation, telecommunication, trade, and air travel, but they were also an era of heightened conflict, nuclear proliferation, political division, racial inequity, and environmental degradation.
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