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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