Terry, Lubomir and all,

I had hoped to get back to this issue earlier, but I am under pressure of various deadlines and was diverted yesterday into far less interesting matters.

What follows is largely speculative because I have never had the pleasure of testing comics and I have not had the time to check the research literature on this. 

In my last post I mentioned Ernst Gombrich. The key idea which he explores in Art and Illusion is what he calls the 'beholder’s share’: what the viewer brings to the act of art appreciation and interpretation and how painters have exploited this to enhance their work. Putting it somewhat poetically, there is a moment of creativity, of invention between a painting and a viewer. 

Douglas Adams, when asked which version the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy he preferred—the radio, book, television or film—said he preferred the radio version because the sets were better. The radio allowed the listener the freedom to invent their own.

It seems to me that the comic strip genre allows this opportunity for creative invention. The minimalist and highly stylised drawing and the gaps between each picture provide readers with the opportunity for multiple inventions at each point. I wonder if some readers who are challenged by reading text might skip through and glean the narrative purely by interpreting the sequence of pictures, enjoying the opportunity to invent their own interpretation of the narrative. This is further enhanced by the informality that is often pervasive in the comic strip: it’s accessible to all because of its informality.

This is exactly the opposite of a legal document where the attempt is made to have no informality and no multiple interpretations subject to the whim of the reader. Both Lubomir and Terry both give some insight into this in the questions they raise.

Early on in my own exploration of legal documents I met Brian Lewis at the Open University in the UK. I was struck by his and his colleagues work on the reduction of legal documents and regulations to algorithms.
> Brian N Lewis; Ivan S Horabin; Chris Gane, Flow charts, logical trees and algorithms for rules and regulations, London, H.M.S.O., 1967.
What struck me about it was the idea of reducing the verbal complexity of multiple clauses and conditions to a visual system that made the logic of the clauses manifest on the page. It is this process of making the logic visible on the page that drew my attention. Not only did this provide a clear rout through for the reader (providing they understood algorithms), but it also made possible a visual editing of clauses to avoid ambiguity.

If you look at some of our work on forms design and legal documents, you can see how we have attempted, sometimes successfully, to implement this in actual document design. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872618300194 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872618300194>
https://communication.org.au/designing-forms-large-organisations/ <https://communication.org.au/designing-forms-large-organisations/>

I notice that many others are following this trajectory in their own work: http://www.legaltechdesign.com <http://www.legaltechdesign.com/>
https://www.simplificationcentre.org.uk/ <https://www.simplificationcentre.org.uk/>

So, this is a rich area of document design practice, careful design research, and testing which has already achieved much.

Just to end on a note of caution. The claim that a document ‘works’ because there were no complaints may well be due to the many rich and satisfying interpretations that people make when reading comics. But I speculate.

David



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