Poster World is a research project carried out for more than two years by a team of designers, engineers and psychologists from the EPFL+ECAL Lab, the EPFL Design Research Centre, in collaboration with several scientific laboratories. It explores how emerging technologies and interaction design can enhance general interest in digitised cultural heritage. The resulting installation reveals to the public the main elements of the world–renowned Swiss graphic design.

The poster is a fascinating graphic object because of its role in society and the complexity of its composition. Ubiquitous in our daily lives, it must catch our attention and deliver its message in a matter of seconds. It also combines many visual components where text and image are closely intertwined. A poster’s dominant colours, main composition lines, objects, typography, text positions and contrasts, are just some of the elements that influence its visual impact. With the use of different algorithms, and in particular artificial intelligence, Poster World reveals these dimensions to the public, allowing them to understand the poster’s graphical richness. The installation analyses the posters, extracts data and generates a new representation of the poster that visualizes a particular feature.

Going even further, Poster World brings together similar posters on the basis of a chosen criterion. To confer cultural relevance on these connections, the EPFL teams trained artificial intelligence on associations produced by the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, especially its books, rather than using the standard data and tools. They then tested the results with both designers and the general public.