Wibo Bakker
Bakker’s research examines the origins, emergence, and development of public-sector graphic design in Hong Kong from the 1920s to the 1980s. Hong Kong graphic design histories often foreground leading practitioners and the professionalisation of the field. This project also takes a visual culture and archival approach to everyday public communications. It investigates how public bodies used visual identity, advertising, and information design to organise services and shape urban life across areas such as transport, health, housing, education, and governance. By tracing how graphic forms were adapted, standardised, and circulated through printed matter and environmental graphics, the research also considers the longer afterlives of colonial administrative design and its continuing traces in contemporary Hong Kong.
Bakker’s research examines the origins, emergence, and development of public-sector graphic design in Hong Kong from the 1920s to the 1980s. Hong Kong graphic design histories often foreground leading practitioners and the professionalisation of the field. This project also takes a visual culture and archival approach to everyday public communications. It investigates how public bodies used visual identity, advertising, and information design to organise services and shape urban life across areas such as transport, health, housing, education, and governance. By tracing how graphic forms were adapted, standardised, and circulated through printed matter and environmental graphics, the research also considers the longer afterlives of colonial administrative design and its continuing traces in contemporary Hong Kong.
- 2026
- Fellow: Wibo Bakker
Dr. Wibo Bakker is a Dutch design researcher and educator specialising in design history and visual communication, with a particular interest in icons and visual identity. Trained as a graphic designer at ArtEZ University of the Arts (Arnhem), he earned a PhD in Art History at Utrecht University (2009). He has held academic posts in Europe and mainland China, including Associate Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University and Visiting Associate Professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). In 2022 he founded the Symbol Group, which organises an international biennial conference on symbols and visual communication.