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PHD-DESIGN  2003

PHD-DESIGN 2003

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Subject:

On-line conference-session 1

From:

peter storkerson <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

peter storkerson <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 12:38:52 -0600

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (90 lines)

Dear all,

I would like to weigh in on the study off communication and its place 
in the context of a design school.

First to introduce myself, I am teaching communication design at 
southern Illinois University. I have M.F.A. and Ph.D. in design. My 
backgrounds are in Sociology, and sound recording and broadcasting. My 
research has been in cross-mode cognition (interpretation of combined 
text and sensory communications). Thus, my I think I have feet in at 
least several camps.

I would encourage Professor Taylor and the others involved in the 
design of this school to think very seriously about the study of 
communication as an essential core component. Karel van der Waarde and 
Rune Petersson have already ably discussed this in terms of visual 
communication and information design. I would like to stress a more 
generral context for the consideration of information and communication 
in general.

At least in my field of communication design, there is a strategic 
lacuna at the central point of production, the lack of an operational 
way to relate the specific characteristics of a communicative object to 
its interpretation. We want and need to be able to communicate 
reliably, and to be interpreted in specific ways, but we lack theories 
and metrics to relate design decisions on the level of the formation of 
objects to their results, or to even properly specify the results. The 
point of view of communication and of the human social world as 
constructed through communicative processes, is the only way I have 
found to address this lacuna. In particular, it opens and fundamental 
questions of communicative competence: “how we mean”, “how we make 
sense of” and “how we collaborate to create.”

1.      Communication underlies visual design and information design, and it 
is increasingly recognized as having a central role in product design. 
Particularly as technologies increase the freedom to give form and as 
the functions of products are increasingly “language like”, product 
form features and functions are increasingly matters of communicating 
meanings to users.
2.      Design is a method of adaptation. Communication is adaptation. It is 
cognitive transmission and adaptation. Cognitive assimilation and 
adaptation is the fastest and most versatile mode of adaptation 
presently available to human beings. How many forms of human adaptation 
that designers are involved in are not driven and mediated by 
communication?
3.      From the point of view of communication, knowledge, belief, and the 
understanding of “reality” are events, the results of processes that 
take place in time and space, both physical and social.
a.      This point of view is essentially compatible with design, and its 
study illuminates the function of designs. Both are about change, and 
the study of communication is the study of the methods that make human 
change possible.
b.      It comports well with the broad set of well founded positions in 
philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and even in “science” 
as John Broadbent reminds us. They provide bases for understanding and 
modeling the systematic construction and revision of what we know. It 
sees us from the standpoint of being embedded within the world we are 
trying to understand as we are reconstructing it, rather than as 
isolated observers. It shows that you can be systematic without being 
scientistic.
4.      Communication, the construction of knowing and meaning and the 
relationship between what is sent and what is received cannot be taken 
for granted, as seems implicitly to be done here—anything but. Modes of 
presentation (visual, aural, textual, etc) and corresponding modes of 
reception actively mediate to construct the result. At the same time, 
there is useful knowledge about communication, and design can develop 
its own kind of knowledge about communication that will serve its 
needs.
5.      It is very unlikely that such communication studies will be 
undertaken within art and design departments. It has been my experience 
that the culture of such departments actively opposes such systematic 
studies. It is repeatedly the case that communication design accounts 
for a majority of students but a minority of faculty in such 
departments, and it is the fine art culture that calls the tune. This 
is not a rejection of “art” as a category of endeavor, but it is a 
general characteristic of academic fine (i.e. visual) art departments 
as I find them in the United States at the present time.

In short, I think that if this program does not confront communication 
and the construction of meaning as a central theme in its work at the 
outset, it will soon find that it needs to.


Peter K. Storkerson
M.F.A. Ph.D.
Co-chair IIID Expert Group for Knowledge Presentation
Southern Illinois University
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