We see them in airports, hospitals and government buildings, in waiting rooms and bathrooms, on exits and entrances: schematic silhouettes of men, women and children. The graphic icons are characterized by a no-frills, geometric style that is immediately recognizable and decipherable wherever they’re found. But while the symbols are ubiquitous, few people know where they had their origins.

The prototypes for this pictorial language were developed in the 1930s at the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna by Otto Neurath (1882-1945), a left-leaning Viennese social scientist who specialized in political economy. His system of sign symbols, which became known as the International System of Typographic Picture Education (Isotype), grew out of his calling to revolutionize understanding among peoples and institutions.

That graphic design history was made by a political economist was no accident. Neurath “wanted to familiarize and educate the working class about the broader systems of order at work in the contemporary city,” Nader Vossoughian, a curator and critic, writes in OTTO NEURATH: The Language of the Global Polis (NAi Publishers, paper, $35), a compact, exhaustively researched biography that explains Neurath’s visual philosophy in the context of his social and environmental concerns. Neurath sought to develop “a system of graphic representation that made statistical data legible and accessible to nonspecialized mass audiences,” to “bridge the gap between reading and seeing in an effort to accelerate the transmission of information.” His system of reductive images, which portrayed people through the use of clichéd characteristics (laborers holding hammers, office workers at typewriters, farmers with hoes), were so easy to recognize that words were superfluous. Indeed, the range of Isotype imagery was so broad, and the anatomical, building and machine diagrams so varied, virtually any idea could be expressed by one or more combined images.

Neurath may not be a household name, but he is a major figure in the world of visual statistics. Other books on his life and work have been published over the past decade. But Vossoughian’s, originally written to accompany an exhibition of Neurath’s work in the Netherlands, is particularly useful, providing a generous number of never-before-seen illustrations (including proposals and sketches) and thematically breaking down Neurath’s primary concerns: community, democracy and globalism. Each of these contributed to a narrative that Neurath believed could be made more transparent by the application of his pictures. Man “receives his education in the most comfortable of means, partly during his periods of rest, through optical impressions,” he wrote. According to Vossoughian, he believed that “the dissemination of images or pictures could foster Bildung, that is, education and self-actualization.”