 |
 |
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 [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]