Dear List,
Recently I said that my basic approach to academic teaching was to look at four features:
the historical
the analytical
the critical
and the theoretical
When design teaching inside academia does not include these four basic aspects in all its teaching then there would seem to be a need for history and criticism and theory courses.
Yesterday I gave a lecture in which I mentioned Claude Shannon's Transmission Model of Communication.
I historically located this model in terms of the functional issues that Shannon was attempting to address:
Signal to noise ratio, re-transmission degrading the information in the signal, and level of actual information received.
I then looked at his various analytical approaches including a determination that 70+% of the English in any transmission is redundant.
We could call this the telegram or texting view of sending information - reduce the quantity and thereby do what?
In the case of telegrams it reduced the cost of sending - in the case of texting it reduces the time involved with encoding.
If we critique the redundancy findings we come to question the actual function of redundancy in human languages.
Why do we have such extraordinarily high levels of redundancy? One of the useful hypotheses is that redundancy increases the level of accuracy in terms of the message received.
We can call this understanding the lawyer's method: make everything explicit and remove all ambiguities etc.
What did Shannon do with this critical view of redundancy? He folded redundancy into the transmission at its core.
That is, he theorized that if you were able to include an error checking redundant stream into a communication signal,
then you could guarantee that 100% of the message was being re-transmitted and ultimately 100% of the message was being received.
We see the practical outcome of this theory in computers and digital communication. In the old 8 bit transmissions 7 of the bits were information and the 8th bit was a checksum stream.
If the checksum didn't match the 7 bits of information then the message was re-sent until the matching happened.
The theme, at that point in the lecture, was Redundancy
The topic was information
The subject was media, law, ethics.
Many practical morals, for designers, could be taken from this story.
keith
PS I wait for those who know much more than me about Shannon and the history of this matter to correct my errors - to do a checksum on me.
Next year, my transmission of this theme will get closer to being accurate.
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